what comes next?

Final marks - released today - for posterity’s sake, as they’re likely the final marks I’m ever going to get in my life (unless I decide to take up Japanese again, which I’m considering, and do the JLPT):

71, 73, 78, 70.

It is ironic that the module I did best at ultimately was Romantic, not Victorian - and a part of me can’t help but feel mildly annoyed that my dissertation literally just hit the mark I needed for a distinction grade - but… I made it! After all this time. Unreal.

end of the road

19,791 words, 61 pages and about 5 months after all this started… I dropped two copies of my dissertation off at my department yesterday. And I’m done. Done and dusted. Done. Done. This is beyond surreal. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who supported me along the way - i am right out of words at the moment, and my brain and energies are spent, but - thank you! ♥

stuck in a trough

It just dawned on me that I have precisely two weeks left to my dissertation deadline and I am still writing at a crawl instead of revising this patchworked monster - and writing badly, too! I have slightly over 16K and much of it repeats itself, and I still have a point and the conclusion to go, and I cringe at the thought of having to cull, rearrange, and rewrite large chunks of it.

Qué horror! Where did August go?

hush

On Tuesday, one of my sister’s friends rang for her while she was out. I asked if I could take a message, and after giving me a name, she hesitated briefly and asked if I was Cuilan’s older sister.

“Yup, that’s me.”
“Oh! You probably don’t remember me, but - ”
“I do actually, we met last year at my sister’s graduation dinner, right?”
“Yeah! She told me you were coming back! So what are you doing now? Are you on holiday?”

Surprised - pleasantly so, though slightly disoriented - to find myself in an actual phone conversation with a non-family-member in Sydney, I told my sister’s chatty friend that it was actually still termtime, sorta, for me, and that I was here working on my dissertation. She enthusiastically asked me what it was about (despite the fact that she’s a science student), and listened as I rather self-deprecatingly told her, flaky as it may sound, it was on the Alice books. To my further surprise more questions ensued on what exactly I was doing and what my findings were so far, and so I told her a little about my crazy fantasy/insanity parallel idea, and the tea-party in the books, and madness in the 19th century.

“Hey, it sounds really interesting,” she said. “You shouldn’t laugh at your own thesis, if you don’t believe in it, no one else will!”

It was like a shot right to the heart. In that instant, memories of all these people who had been like, the Alice books? Really? (especially my mom’s well-meaning but rather deflating how do you write 20,000 words on Alice in Wonderland?) flashed rapidly through my mind, and I realised this girl, whom I’d only spoken to once before in my entire life and who didn’t even know me, had put her finger bang on the thing that has been bugging me the most - do I really buy my own hypothesis? It’s been an uphill climb partly because of the paucity of criticism relating to Carroll, and partly because, as I only came to realise that evening, I have been far too timid to believe that I can assert something no critic has ever said before.

Matt spoke to me about this way back in one of our earlier meetings. “I think there’s a link there,” he said, of my harebrained, spur-of-the-moment notion, “and I think it’s good that it hasn’t really been explored.” Slavish reliance on critical opinion belonged, he added, to a lower level of academia, and at this point I really should be way past that.

So I thanked my sister’s friend warmly. We continued to chat a little longer, about random things like the USyd library, and she asked if I could get my sister to ring her back once she’d returned. CALL EMILY, I wrote in caps on my notebook above my list of Alice quotations, and underlined it twice.

I don’t think you’ll ever read this, Emily, but thank you.

hubristic

There really isn’t anything for deflating pride quite like receiving your dissertation draft back from your supervisor, with “rubbish” scrawled in the margin next to one of your paragraphs. It wasn’t all bad; there were some ticks, some “good”s, but still. Even when you know that bit was kind of rubbish, that’s just harsh. And heartbreaking. And shattering. Ah, the time-honoured slap in the face tactic…

Courage, a trawl through JSTOR, a thorough reread of Alice and a visit to the USyd library - all long, long overdue. I really have to get it together.