okay - trying to work some thoughts out so I'm going to type without actually even looking at the screen or anything. Sorry for typos if anyone bothres readign ths.
Things I need to do with this diss project to make this a bit more manageable:
1- stop tyring to deal with eveyrhting in secular/sacred terms, if much of what I'm trying to do is deconstruct those boudnaries. I may need to propose a new terminological set to deal with them, but if nothing else I have to explain why i think that's a false dichotomy and work on how to articulate probelms without miring myself in the either/or thinking that iI'm criticizing. That's difficult. But doable.
2 - I need to figure out exactly who I could really justify as being the audience for this mansucript and what their social conditions were. Am i really dealling wtih knights at all, or am i dealing with people who would more or less aspire to be knights, or are there even knights in london by 1330 that would be recognizably such? probably not when i think about it, because they point out that knights were at least as much engaged in legal and administrative work as they were in any sort of military action - even Edward I dealt with chivalry as nostalgic, so my trying to assert that this is really for real armor wearing knights is a bit naive. however, that doesn't mean that the chivalric ideal is dead or anything, just that i need to reformulate what looking at chivalry would do for someone who's more in upper levels of society in a later sense, rather than in the hard and fast estates model that probably never quite existed anyway.
3 - I need to define how I'm dealing with romance better, and why i think the romantic tone is so important in this ms. Essentially the way I see it, romance is one of those things that breaks down fiction/reality binaries and melds them into each other - one creates the other which in turn reflects an idealized version of the first, or helps to recreate it etc. And if people in medieval times had no problem justifying large scale courses of action on writings that were generally agreed to be a pack of lies, then even the normal boundaries we see between the real and the pretend are liable to be thrown out the window whenever expedient. That said, everythign in this manuscript can be read as a romance which is important and thus necessary to unpack, define, and explain more.
4 - I really need to put my chapters into a non-outline form and figure out what the connections are that Im trying to make between them. I probably need a gender chapter as well as the others because it comes up too much.
5 - deal with social anxieties explored in the text, how these are expressed, whether or not there is some sort of narrative of resistance going on alongside what's held up to be good and fine and all that rot and work that into my overall thought.
Am running into a mental roadblock. Will go drink some water and come back to this in a bit when I've digested a bit more.
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1 comment:
It sounds like you're definitely on the right track in your formulations! It might help to just sit and free associate a bit on tough points, particularly the secular/sacred binary. I think you can take your difficulty in deconstructing this binary as a clue to where your thoughts are leading. That is, perhaps there's something about those boundaries that seems important to maintain? How were they informed by earlier discourses on those boundaries? How did they inspire the later discourses? Were these binaries uniquely undermined by the ms author, or were they (in a bizarrely conspicious way, possibly) uniquely uncritically presented?
Just my few thoughts. Baking cookies. ;P
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