by cheri block
The Prospectus (with a capital P) is due on Friday, September 21, 2012. If I cannot make that deadline, then I must wait until January to submit it. The Judge nudges me, interrupting my yoga stretches from the bed. “You are going to make the September deadline, right? Otherwise this thing will go on indefinitely, Cheri. You’ll be graduating in a walker.”
“Yes, your honor, I solemnly swear on a stack of holy Yoga Journals that I will dutifully uphold my commitment to finish my Master’s thesis before we finishing taming our property…” (That silenced him better than my threatening to stag-leap naked through the olive orchard.)
So. Today is Wednesday.
I’ve been reading and reading and reading. Thumbing and thumbing and thumbing through articles, abstracts, dissertations, and some of the most boring academic writing you can imagine. Strike that! Worse than you can imagine and to think that the program director expects my thesis to be 125 pages of that type of writing.
As I used to instruct my writing students, “Your thesis must not be too general, must not be too specific: it must be just right, that way you will actually say something of substance and be able to support your ideas.” Hey, Mrs. Sabraw, that little ditty sounds just like Goldilocks and The Three Bears. Is that where you got that idea? (Oh brother).
So, after all of my reading, I submitted only the first paragraph of my Prospectus to the dear man to whom the Program Director off-loaded me: Dr. William M. Chace (Praise the Lord).
Dr. Chace is doing his best to make sure my thesis experience is as Kafkaseque as it can be and I love him for it. As you may remember, when I met him in the elevator after our seance meeting with the Program Director, and after I had been lost in the building, his last words were: “Cheri, let’s see what you can come up with.”
Here is my first paragraph.
Parablesque: from Rabbi Nachman of Breslov to Franz Kafka to W.G.Sebald.
The modern Hasidic parable, a short moralistic story that often emerged from the type of rabbinic dialectic seen in the Talmud, influenced Franz Kafka’s work, especially in The Trial. Forty years after Kafka’s death in 1923, the German writer W.G. Sebald—deeply troubled by his University of Freiburg professors’ veil of silence regarding the Holocaust—left for England, where he was to live, teach, and write until his untimely death in 2001. That Sebald wrote literary criticism about Kafka’s influence is apparent in Sebald’s experimental, dreamy, paradoxical, and moralistic style, a style that many predicted would make him a Nobel Prize winner. My thesis will first argue that the modern Hasidic parable with its rabbinic dialectic, the type written by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov in 1810, influenced Kafka’s unique 20th-century parables, specifically in Before the Law and in The Trial itself. In the succeeding three chapters, I will argue that recent scholarship supports the notion that three of Sebald’s novels: Vertigo, The Emigrants, and Austerlitz, are parabolic and dialectic, written in the spirit of Franz Kafka.
When Dr. Chace’s reaction to this paragraph came back with a nod, I ran out into the olive orchard and well, watered the trees.
Your reactions and thoughts about this idea are appreciated.
it’s going to be meaty. I think you did a fine job on that first prospectus and i am familiar with the task at hand after hearing about the big meeting. Good job. Kept leaping through that orchard.Good karma for olives. Love Cindy
Cindy Block Usedom Cindy and Partners
Cell: 510-501-4140 Office: 925-426-3760 http://www.cindyandpartners.com
Thanks Cindy!
This souinds just univeritees enough to be a huge academic success. The paperback will need some levity though.
You are so sweet. Ron was asking me when you two were going to come to the Bay Area. We were thinking of your hospitality last September in Montreal.
That meeting left very nice memories. Should we ever go to the Bay area, we will certainly meet again although we have no immediate plans to go down there as of now.
We will tell you in advance so that you will be able to don at least a bikini to run among those olive trees.
Water the trees. A good idea after one had just been born in your first paragraph.
Un abrazo
Oh were I to have your wit, Ana. You must have been sending good vibes from the South.
“……the program director expects my thesis to be 125 pages of that [boring academic] type of writing…….”
Were you to have the temerity to write your 125 page thesis in plain English rather than in obscure Acadamese, could this be reason alone for your examiners to fail you?
I will not go to the dark side, Christopher. I’ve just send my full prospectus to the Program Director about 1 hour ago. I have dared to put some personality in it.
First, you are fortunate to have an olive orchard to run out into. It is a departure from the classical ‘starving artist’ model.
The thesis para is unbelievably ambitious. If you can pull this off, it will be seen as a great scholarship.
I don’t even know how one would go about proving these ‘influences’. One would need to prove, a) that the influencEE read the influencER, b) that he was influencED by the influencER more than by other potential influencERs, since the influencEE probably also read other books. It’s a bit like doing a DNA sample and saying, Hey, I descend from Charlemagne. We need some stretch of nucleotides that were really damn unusual in Charlemagne and thus really damn unlikely to turn up in my chromosome, and yet here they are.
I will be very curious how this goes. I predict there will be ups and downs, so, above all, strap on a pair.
It is ambitious but I am sure I can do it. Thank you for your encouragement. It means a great deal to me. The entire Prospectus is now in the Program Director’s e-mail file…
Yes, since she has a pair strapped on, I’d better get some too. I’m sure THE JUDGE has some advice about that…or did you mean strap on a pair of spurs?
Do you know where Wertach im Allgau in Bavaria is located? That is where W.G. Sebald was born.
I probably speak out of turn and nobody should take any notice of me, Andreas, but aren’t things like style, subject-matter, vocabulary, treatment of material, sentence construction, overall structure (or lack of it) and general literary environment dead giveaways too? Unless this is why you speak of DNA.
And Cheri, he means strap on a pair of sandals and don a tweed jacket and black roll-neck. He is a classical scholar, after all, or so I believe.
Once again I stand in awe of your awesomeness…
Oh come on Brighid. It’s all smoke and mirrors….
I hope you are doing well, my friend.
I’m good…or at least trying to be good…hmmm It’s smokey here too, but no mirrors… feng shui