Monday, March 11, 2013

frustration and success

Honestly, I'm still trying to figure out what my thesis statement is going to be. Here's a couple of ideas though:
1.my thesis that originally inspired all of this was: Time is a persona that dictates the lives of the characters within The Winters Tale.
Now, I could still write about that, but I'm not liking the "time as a persona" idea as much anymore. With all the research I've found, it just feels like too much of a stretch. So...
2. Time dictates the lives of the characters in The Winter's Tale. Easier to support, definitely plausible, but boring. I'm voting nay.
3. In his play, The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare emphasizes the duality of time as being simultaneously constraining and liberating. Honestly, I like this one and feel like I could legitimately write about it. Does it sound too wishy-washy though, like I just couldn't figure out whether time was constraining or liberating?

Anyways... FAILURE: I attempted in vain to find literary criticism about Shakespeare and time, only to have my hatred of online research re-kindled.
SUCCESS: I was able to find two blogs that concerned my topics! One was about the connections between Shakespeare and popular music (if you haven't read any of my posts, I want to write about the correlation between music and time within The Winter's Tale) and actually the post I read on this blog talked about a book written by a Shakespeare professor. I was able to find the e-mail for this professor that was writing about Shakespeare and time and e-mailed him some questions - fingers crossed he'll respond!
The second blog was about Shakespeare's sonnets and had a lot on time - I'm working on jumping in on that conversation :)

4 comments:

  1. I vote for the third one as well, but you're right about being weary of that. I think if you could spin it in a way that's like, "Hey! This is a different idea!" then you should be okay.

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  2. I agree with Kaylee about putting a new spin on your third idea. I think there will definitely be a lot to write about with Shakespeare and time, and relevant sources. As you look at those sources and the text, I think the "so what?"--the why does it matter that there's this duality of time--of your argument will come kind of naturally.

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  3. I don't know what my thesis is going to be, either. Yet.

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  4. Hey Mikaela, I found a book that might be helpful! Unfortunately, it's not on the ebook website, and it might be at the library, but the search tool isn't working great right now. I think you could probably request it through interlibrary loan on the library website, and it should get here within 5-7 business days.

    The book is called "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," by Mikhail Bakhtin, and it was mentioned as a source in an e-book on the library website called "Spatial Representations and the Jacobean Stage: From Shakespeare to Webster," by Russell West. This second ebook didn't seem to have much on time, but you could check it out and see!

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