Writing this paper has proved more time consuming than I thought would be. Although I’ve been researching for some time now, it’s challenging, particularly with the literary criticism, to effectively integrate the information into my paper. I’ll admit that I did a somewhat cursory reading of a couple of the papers on my annotated bibliography to judge relevance and gain some notion of what they are about, and now that I have to delve more deeply into it in order to produce my own argument, I’m finding it difficult to appreciate all of what’s there.
Especially with Berlant’s “Fantasies of Utopia in The Blithedale Romance,” I know I’m missing some of the import of the text. I think a large part of the problem is simple unfamiliarity with literary analysis. The language is often different than what I’ve dealt with before, and some of themes it addresses, including the relationship between the collective and the individual, I think may be part of an often used interpretation of the novel which I’m not familiar with, as I’ve only explored a very small fraction of what has been written about the text. Exploring the citations in her paper may be of use, although I’m not sure that would be a worthwhile use of my time given how soon the paper has to be produced. Regardless, I think an argument can be produced from what I’ve read, though I wish I had more time to explore more of what has been written about the novel.
4 comments:
Yeah, I think more time is what all of us wants for this paper. There is too much information out there that we think is important, but I think finding a lot of information about TWO topics is a lot better than little information on a LOT of topics. That's what I've decided to do with my paper: narrowing my research question down even more so I won't have to look at a lot of different information, but a lot of details about the same information. Good luck Matt!
That's a difficult article, Matt, so I can see why you would find it frustrating. Berlant does indeed use some specialized terminology and theoretical frameworks. She's interested in teasing out why Coverdale thinks of utopia in the terms of individual sexual relationships.
Yah, getting hold of a question that you like is definitely necessary. No worries though, a lot of my sources are a little hard to navigate as well.
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