Starting up all over again

After a pleasant week of pottering around, enjoying the cold, working out and calorie counting like a teenage girl, testing new recipes, watching many movies and playing around with Facebook, it's time to get going again. Now the immediate objective is to cobble together a dissertation prospectus ("there's a ten page limit but your bibliography isn't a works cited page ... it's meant to be long ..."). Ten pages isn't a lot -- and that's where the challenge lies. I need to lay out where I stand in the scholarship, say something about my original contribution, discuss my theoretical approach and outline my chapters -- all within 10 pages.

Apparently the 10 page proposal is pretty standard for book proposals in the humanities -- so the prospectus is meant to force one to be succinct. I'm planning to work on the Family (of course, this means interrogating and re-thinking what "family" means) in Middle English poetry. My tentative title (I think it's quite a nice one): Familiar Estrangements: The Practice of Family in Middle English Romance. The first task -- to read up on the history of the family in the middle ages -- represented by this stack -- and hopefully obtain some confirmation of my intuitions ...



Here's Sourdough making sure
I have the right books and working
out which ones will be the most tasty ...