With some long-term projects - my MA dissertation on illness and the nineteenth-century short story, for example - you see a clear and small prick of light towards which you are tunnelling, and the task is to fumble around in the dark and dust of the archives and libraries to reach it. With this PhD, however, I feel like I am standing in a large, windowed room like the top of a lighthouse with ideas streaming in like light from all sides, with a full circle of limitless horizons. My first task is to run around and frantically close some blinds, limit the directions in which I could turn, making the brightness that at the moment is swamping me into a smaller, narrower beam of light towards which I can begin to tread.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

It's been over a month since my last post. As I write this, the words of Rochester, opening the second chapter of Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, echo in my head: "So it was all over, the advance and retreat, the doubts and hesitations. Everything finished, for better or for worse." Like Rochester, I am just about to move in to a new house (in fact, I will have done by the time you read this, as I have no means of uploading to the site until then). Like Rochester, I now find myself married - in my case to another three years of study - a marriage which, due to financial reasons, I was never sure I would be able to make.

Without giving away too much detail - and hence losing the anonymity which, to some degree, protects me from accusations of arrogance in publishing my weak works here - I will be effectively paid to explore and write on a literary field of my interest. This is an exciting time. It is also intensely frightening and bewildering: in what other trade is the deadline for completion of a project 3 or 4 years ahead, with little contact time with other experienced colleagues or superiors during that period? Among its other topics of interest, this blog will now become a record of my postgraduate experiences, and my attempts to come to terms with these trepidations; I hope you will join me, and perhaps help me, along the way.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary