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anghraineThe title of this post refers not to a fic but to this single, still-unfinished chapter of my dissertation. The 15k does include the citations (which are extremely time-consuming to manage) along with notes for topics/quotes I want to cover and longer passages I have written but not yet integrated into the overall chapter, in fairness. I'm not a very linear writer! The fully integrated and continuous section of the draft that begins at the beginning and flows without gaps to where I am now is a mere *squints* 9k, about 28 pages in my document (the completed citations for this sections are 1.2k words).
On the one hand: I have so much left to write ;_;
On the other: I am having NO difficulty hitting word count goals, lmao. Thank you for being a profoundly interesting playwright, John Webster.
Indirectly, also thanks to 100 years of bad Webster criticism! I spent 2k of those words just getting into the various pitfalls of Webster criticism wrt Ferdinand specifically and many of them are way worse wrt the Duchess. For instance:
(A line literally published in PMLA in the 70s; the article it's from is "The Moral Paradox of Webster's Tragedy" by Robert F. Whitman. The diss is more like "It is not entirely clear how the Duchess pushes Ferdinand's nature, turbulent or otherwise..." but internally I'm just FUCK OFF.)
On the one hand: I have so much left to write ;_;
On the other: I am having NO difficulty hitting word count goals, lmao. Thank you for being a profoundly interesting playwright, John Webster.
Indirectly, also thanks to 100 years of bad Webster criticism! I spent 2k of those words just getting into the various pitfalls of Webster criticism wrt Ferdinand specifically and many of them are way worse wrt the Duchess. For instance:
On the other hand, the twin sister who pushes Ferdinand’s turbulent nature beyond the limits of his restraint is not wholly innocent.
(A line literally published in PMLA in the 70s; the article it's from is "The Moral Paradox of Webster's Tragedy" by Robert F. Whitman. The diss is more like "It is not entirely clear how the Duchess pushes Ferdinand's nature, turbulent or otherwise..." but internally I'm just FUCK OFF.)
no subject
on 2024-05-03 05:48 am (UTC)no subject
on 2024-05-03 11:37 pm (UTC)I do only have four chapters overall, the others shorter than this one, and my research is so broad that there are a lot of texts to focus on and then discuss in historicist terms. Especially the very prominent early modern stuff just because the body of existing literature on each play has had 400 years to accumulate discourse, lol.
(My topic was precipitated by John Webster's plays and so I've done way more research on him than anyone but Austen, so there's just ... so much I have to talk about, and the amount that I've written on him dwarfs every other author but, well, Austen. Terrifying tbh, I've barely even mentioned Shakespeare despite the early modern emphasis. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)