15k!

May. 2nd, 2024 05:29 pm
anghraine: a piece of paper covered in handwriting and a fountain pen; text: writer (writing)
The 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:

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.)
anghraine: a focused shot of adora from she-ra, a blonde girl with large eyes and a concerned expression (adora [save the cat])
1) This chapter is a monster (~12,000 words at this point with a long way left to go), mostly because I have so much to say about one specific play (one of three that inspired the whole dissertation concept to begin with), but it's only one of many texts under discussion overall. I'm tired, but also too obsessed opinionated interested in my topic and in doing right by my guy a very relevant playwright to cut it short. On one level it's fun and another aghhhhhhhhhhh

2) One of the fun/exhausting aspects of studying early modern literature (mostly plays for me) is that there's typically 400 years of accumulated scholarship to discuss in the course of positioning my argument and, well, actually making my argument. I actually enjoy the 50s-80s early modernist scholars quite a bit because they're less infected by Victorian traditions than the earlier ones, but less entrenched in fixing on One Theoretical Lens To Rule Them All and saccharine semi-corporate bullshitting that infects a lot of modern academia. So if they think someone's argument is bad, they'll just say so. Like, I kind of love this debate over the incestuous subtext (barely subtext) of The Duchess of Malfi where Louis Giannetti snaps out in a footnote, "Finally, he [F. L. Lucas] concedes that incest might be a possibility—'a suggestion, and an inessential one' (p. 34). How Professor Lucas can dismiss incest as 'inessential' staggers the mind" (307n14). Tell us what you really feel, Professor Giannetti!

(F. L. Lucas himself was a truly remarkable figure in Webster studies and also 1930s British anti-appeasement and anti-fascism. His Webster takes are a little wonky but it kind of feels less significant in the grand scheme of things. He didn't have the focus of later Webster scholars but given that his extremely varying interests included raging at the British press and government, helping refugees, putting fascist hate mail from Ezra Pound on display, and ultimately running an intelligence cell to fight Nazis, it's hard to care that much. He also wrote a sci-fi novella about overpopulation and, apparently, global warming in 1937.)

3) Anyway, I was going over The Duchess of Malfi and some of Ferdinand's many creepy, purity-obsessed speeches/threats to his sister, and stumbled over this one:

Your darkest actions: nay, your privat'st thoughts
Will come to light

me, wearily: Okay, Horde Prime.

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anghraine: vader extending his lightsaber; text: and now for the airing of grievances! (Default)
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