After arriving in Belfast on 13 September, I immediately began the waiting game that is International Orientation at Queen's. It's a great deal of sitting around, listening to the same dribble about acclimating to life in Belfast, life at the University, and so on. It has not changed a great deal since I last went through the same orientation two years ago. But once the two days of actual structured orientation end, you wait. And you wait. You wait while the new first-years go through the same process of orientation and enrollment. Then you wait for another week until lectures actually start. And, as Tom Petty once said, the waiting is indeed the hardest part.
I am not a remarkably patient person. So I emailed my supervisor, Sínead, and we met for about two hours discussing my PhD topic and the course of action. I suppose this is requires a bit of explanation. I am studying Irish women's representation of continental Europe from the Act of Union (1800) through contemporary writers. It's a lot of work, so I was anxious to begin. The writers conveniently break down into four chapters, which will be the four main parts of my PhD. My first chapter will focus on Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan); the second will move to the fin de siecle and Somerville & Ross; the third will cover Elizabeth Bowen and Kate O'Brien, who come to prominence following World War I; lastly, I'll look at Julia O'Faolain.
At the moment, though, it is all Edgeworth all the time. And I really enjoy Edgeworth. She wrote during the Regency period, predating (and indeed influencing) Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott. Her writings are remarkably complex, often focusing on principles of the Enlightenment or on moral questions that she embodies in characters. Writing around and about the Act of Union, her novels both look forward and backward, often juxtaposing a rural and eighteenth-century society with a modernising and nineteenth-century society. Much like Scott, she divides these socio-temporal realities along physical and historical borders.
I'd rather not bore you to tears with these beginnings of my dissertation; besides, what would you then do when I hand it to you three years from now?
Most of my days are spent in the library. I try to be into the library by half nine, which is 9:30 in American English, and tend to finish up between five and six in the evening. Obviously reading consumes the majority of that time, but, to complicate matters even further, I find myself transcribing large sections of each text into a notepad where I add my own criticism and thoughts. Most of my Edgeworths are so marked-up already that it would be difficult to decipher new notes from old. This slows things down drastically. But in the end, the better one's notes are, the easier time it is to begin the writing.
But the School of English has had several events that distract us from the all-important task of reading and taking notes. We've had several social events with lecturers, professors, and research students. Most of which end with someone suggesting another drink at the local pub; of course, another should not connote a single amount. Yesterday, actually, we had our first School of English Research Seminar, at which a professor presented a paper as if he were at a conference. Afterwards, about ten PhD students and two or three lecturers wandered down to the pub for a couple of hours. It's wonderful to be treated as a colleague and to be expected to make an active contribution to the research and intellectual environment of the School.
I'd love to go on and talk about the different PhD students whom I've met and the range of fascinating topics they'll be researching along the way. But I must leave something for the next time, which I promise shouldn't be as belated as this one has been.
"I'd rather not bore you to tears with these beginnings of my dissertation; besides, what would you then do when I hand it to you three years from now?"
ReplyDelete-I fully intend to hold you to that promise! :)