Research

Obviously those people who associate the start of fall term with brisk air and leaves crunching underfoot have never spent a semester around here. But, muggy or not, your Neomodernist is back in the ‘Burg and just done with midterms.

So: research things. I’ve been playing coy lately, promising to talk about Wordsworth and not delivering to my faithful readership (that is to say, Justine, the ever-amusing Matthew Hodgetts, and my boyfriend). Well, those days are behind us now.

Meet Wordsworth. English poet, born 1770. Close buddy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom he wrote the pivotal volume “Lyrical Ballads,” which included Ww’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” You probably had to read it in high school, and you may not have liked it very much. This is okay. He went on to pen quite a number of significant poetical works, most notably (for my purposes) his ”Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” If you were put through this one in high school, chances are you’ve already stopped reading this post. It’s a tough poem. Ww takes a lot of readings to like, and quite a few more if you want to understand him.

Anyway, he went on to outlive STC by 16 years, as well as Byron (died of fever, in Greece, fighting Turks), Keats (succumbed to tuberculosis in Rome) and Shelley (drowned near Livorno, Italy), all of whom were a generation younger than Ww. One thing I’ll say for the Romantics: they certainly chose beautiful places to meet their horrible ends. Just goes to show you that a devotion to the Classics can be taken to dangerous extremes.

Wordsworth, on the other hand, lived to the ripe old age of eighty and died at home, which is why he’s acquired something of a reputation as the DWEMest of DWEMs. There’s nothing really sexy going for him–no opium addiction, the plague of STC. It was never said of Ww, as it was of Byron, that he was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

So that’s a little background.

But I promised a “Research Update,” didn’t I? Well, it’s pretty much all writing at this point, which is just about the least interesting thing in the world for you guys to read about. So I’ll just stick to the bottom line. On the one hand, that means I’m doing the hard work–isn’t it difficult, wringing words onto the blank page?–but on the other hand, and infinitely more importantly, this means that I’m ahead of schedule. I’ve mostly been grinding out pages and tweaking them the last few weeks, so there’s little to report, really. Well, little to report that’s interesting. The Thing is 26 pages long, though, if you were wondering. It feels fantastic, but telling it to the three readers of my livejournal is a little bit like saying too much about a baby’s bowel movements to one’s single friends. So I’ll try to do the civilized thing and desist.

Last but not least: I promised a plug to Justine for driving me to the OBAMA RALLY two weeks ago–she is lovely, entertaining, Democratic, and owns a car. And a $4 tarp I got pretty fond of between the hours of 4 and 9 a.m.

Well, that’s all for the moment, dudes and dudettes. Signing off.

So, someone commented on my first post that the real solution to my “Odic Tradition” dilemma was to find an ode about Odin, and thereby save myself a lot of time–thus, when someone says, “Oh, is that about odes or Odin?”, I can say, “Why, both!”

Well, that day is here.

Behold the beauty that is Thomas Gray’s “The Descent of Odin. An Ode.” I don’t even know how he could have brought himself to affix such an awkward title to anything.

And so my new goal is to work this thing into my honors thesis somehow.

Next time, a serious post about something research-related. Your Neomodernist is up to the neck in scholarship applications and compiling a thesis excerpt, but she’ll try to get something blog-like together about that soon.

Happy Thursday, folks. (Don’t I wish it were Wednesday, which, in Old Norse, is Oðinsdagr, or Odin’s Day?)

I’d really love to be one of those people who can dream up a snappy title for the first entry in a new ‘blog. Barring sudden inspiration, however, I’ll continue to lean heavily on T.S. Eliot for all things titular. It’s a cheesy, English major-y thing to do, but so be it.

I suppose introductions–to both myself and my work–are in order.

 I’m a rising senior at the College, originally from a tiny pocket of rural Northern Virginia (yes, there is a rural Northern Virginia), educated at boarding school in Connecticut, and currently majoring in English and Classical Studies. Also, I’m just back from W&M’s study abroad program at Oxford, so I’m not a half-bad person to ask about that if you’re a (prospective or otherwise) student with questions.

This summer I’m completing a Dintersmith Fellowship through the Charles Center, which basically means I’m being funded to spend ten weeks of my summer beginning work on my honors thesis. The fellowship is new this year, and as an extension of it and other summer grants, the Charles Center is setting up this pool of blogs by undergraduate researchers. The hope is, I believe, that they will serve as a link between undergraduate researchers and a hodgepodge of other researchers and prospective students. So. Welcome to the blog.

My thesis research, then. It’s mainly about Wordsworth, and specifically Wordsworth and the Odic Tradition (that is, the tradition of odes, not the tradition of the Norse god Odin–I’ve had questions about this, and, much as I’d love to combine both, it’s the poetic form and not the deity that I’m interested in). For this reason, it’s generally “W.w. and the O.T.” to my friends and, probably, to readers of this blog.

This brings me to my first bit of advice about honors theses: please, please, for your own sanity, if at all possible, pick a name for your project that will not require additional clarification to each and every person you speak to about your research. I realise that this may be pretty difficult for those closer to the scientific end of the academic spectrum, but–at least if you’re in the Humanities–save yourself a headache and don’t get into the habit of calling your project something as foreign to the human ear as “Wordsworth and the Odic Tradition.” This requires that, the moment you’ve said “tradition,” you must attempt to relieve the tension in your listener’s face by following up, “that is, uh, the tradition of odes.” If you’re not careful, and you’re anything like me, you will end up rambling about Odin, and how your project has nothing to do with him, to people who have never heard of Odin–or odes, for that matter.

We talk an awful lot about the passion we feel for our research, but an important part of pursuing academic research is realising that not everyone is passionate about, or educated in, the things we are. Learn to tell the difference between someone who wants to hear about the finer points of margin formatting and someone who’s asking you about your thesis out of politeness, and you’ll save yourself (and others!) an awful lot of awkward moments.

Deeper implications of this simple social rule abound. One very important aspect of research is translating it to an audience–whether that audience is a friend, fellow-scholar, college seminar, or grant committee (n.b. especially the latter–more on which later). If you’re talking to someone about what you do, you can make it vastly more interesting and useful for them by figuring out early what level they’re listening at and what perspective they bring to the discussion. Gauge what your listener responds to, look for that slightly tense expression that indicates you’ve gone out of their depth; speak with passion, but don’t be afraid to talk in very general terms; know when to stop talking.

Wait, by all means, for those people whose ready intellect, broad knowledge base, and boundless curiosity will allow them, regardless of their profession and education level, to engage with you at length about your topic, but, in the meantime, settle for pitching your research where (if you’ll permit an aberrant sports metaphor) your listener can catch. We researchers get a bad name, I find, largely from assuming that everyone wants to hear about what we’re doing, all the time, complete with specialist lingo. They don’t. It’s a hard lesson, but learn it early.

With that in mind, let me know who my readers are. I want to pitch this blog to the right level, which is infinitely easier if I know who you are. Also, I pretty much live for reader comments. No point lying about that.

I promise next time I’ll talk a lot more about Ww and odes, so stay tuned.