Story of Nyssa's Paper

When we first started blogging about our final papers, I thought I might look at women in film adaptations of Shakespeare. I had had a lot of success with this line of thought in my midterm paper and on our class forums, so I thought I was good to go on my topic. But I was drawn back to King Lear, and specifically Gloucester, by the macabre portrayal of the blinding scene in the 2008 film adaptation of the play. I started doing tentative Internet searches about blindness in King Lear, and I came across the Kenneth Jernigan speech that I knew I had to respond to somehow. So I threw myself into the unfamiliar world of disability studies. I'm so glad I decided to follow that hunch I had about King Lear, the attraction I had to the torture scene. I could have gone what is a safe route for me and analyzed more about women in Shakespeare, but I'm thankful now that I expanded my scholarly repertoire.

Story time!
Photo Credit: Jody Art

As I started working on the research for this paper, I initially got very excited about the social aspect of the paper. I had found people I could talk to through Facebook, and I was determined to get to know as much about blindness as I could. Overall, the Facebook responses didn't pan out, but I did make a lot of progress by immersing myself in the writings of Georgina Kleege and in the primary text of King Lear. Ultimately, the quest of my paper was figuring out how I could put my close reading skills to good use. I toyed around with a couple of thesis ideas (see posts here and here), but Dr. Burton rightly corrected my course by saying that my claims were almost making themselves trivial. I had to figure out a way to make my research matter to the real world, and I was cloistering my close reading to a self-referential approach--one not useful to anyone but the most insulated of scholars.

After that, I still continued introspecting so that I could clarify my ideas (really to myself) about what I wanted my paper to accomplish. I filmed and posted a video in which I talked about my major claims, and I tried to choose a specific venue and audience for my paper when I clearly was not sure who I was writing to. As I started writing rough drafts (see posts here and here), David helped me sort out the flow of ideas in my paper and the significance they could have. I visited him in the BYU Writing Center to talk about style and communication issues I was having, and he's been encouraging about my paper throughout this process. My paper really started coming together when I did the focused annotated bibliography. At this point, I had all the tools I was going to use, even if the final form of the paper was still a bit nebulous.

Things really turned around, though, when I met with Dr. Burton to talk about my paper. Basically, he told me, I had gone in almost the opposite direction in my paper's insulation. Instead of staying cozy in the primary text, I had written so much about blindness and disability studies that I was kind of ignoring traditional readings of King Lear that have been circulated for centuries. This feedback led me to rework over half may paper (see posts here and here), and I was pleased with the result. Even though I did make other attempts to reach out directly to experts in the field, my paper was developed mostly by situating it correctly on the spectrum of radical and traditional readings, and this process was helped mostly through peer and professor feedback.

Despite this setback, I'm proud of the paper I wrote; proud enough that I submitted it to an actual academic journal in the field of literary disability studies. For me, this paper was something that needed to be molded and polished not just by my own thought but from feedback from the people around me, and I'm proud to say that I learned to write in the discourse of an entirely new field for me this semester.