tarquinius delendus est!

I'm quite annoyed with myself that I've let this blog slide recently - many apologies to anyone out there who for some reason enjoys my mad ramblings. My thesis was due in on 13th June, and the severe lack of preparation time has left everyone on my course having a bit of a panic. Last time I wrote a dissertation, I had a final draft in over two weeks before the deadline, and spent a good week editing and tweaking. Two weeks ago, I was feeling like I'd be amazing if I had a final draft five days in advance. As it is, I was editing and tweaking and rewriting basically continuously, and even though I gave it in a day in advance, I spent every moment up to the wire rereading and editing. It wasn't a bad thing, but I'm not used to having so little time to do such important work. I had a fairly substantial panic when I realised that I had less than a week and I still needed to redraft a good chunk of it. Still, the panic was quite instructive, and I ended up with something I was rather happy with. I will permanently hate that stage of final 'housecleaning': that is, making sure my content flows well, making sure the structure is crystal clear and that there are no terrible grammatical or spelling errors (I dread finding that 'public affairs have become 'pubic' affairs, or that I've lost a letter out of 'count'...) One thing I think I'll never learn with academia (but I hope I do!) is that I'm never happy with what I've written: I will inevitably be quite ambivalent about it until enough time is passed for me to look at it objectively. Nonetheless, I'm about as happy with it as I can be, and bearing in mind that a week before the deadline I felt like there was no time and the world was ending as a result, this is a pleasant surprise.

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I feel rather intimately connected with Tarquin now, like he's Galatea to my Pygmalion. (Or the monster to my Frankenstein. Depends on the mark this thesis gets, really.) What I've been working on is the role of the theatre and the theatre as a paradigmatic monument in the novels, since it acts as a symbol of the tensions between literary heritage and contemporary culture. It's been a really thrilling piece to work on, and it's something which has been quite neglected in current scholarship, so I'm really rather pleased to have had the opportunity to write it. The only problem is that it's a topic which feeds heavily into my PhD, so cutting it down to 12,000 words was rather tough!

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My viva was today, which was sort of terrifying and exhilerating all at once. A viva voce is meant to be an opportunity to be grilled on your thesis, and thus an opportunity to clarify any misunderstandings and any questions the examiners might have. It's really rather terrifying, but it's a surprisingly productive experience. I really don't know how it went, but I didn't leave crying my eyes out, so I'll take that as a plus. It's one of those experiences which leaves you rather numb, but the last time this happened, I ended up getting PhD funding out of it, so I'm remaining quietly neutral on the subject until I find out. Nonetheless, there is something hilarious about mentally psyching yourself up for a viva, only to be told that it can't happen because one academic has been lost. This is why I want to work in academia - it is just so wonderfully bizarre and improvisational at times.

The upside of this long, rambling post? I'm now a good deal freer, so hopefully I'll actually be, you know, blogging here rather than being bogged down in work. Expect lots of pretentious Cambridge photos soon!