i'm reading poach's thesis introduction while trying to think of something to say about my own stalled essay. i have to say that reading someone else's completed thesis indeed pricks you in your corage and makes you quite eager to work on your own but also partly despairing at how much you haven't done and have to go. addy's thesis is also due on tuesday, so she's hammering away at her keyboard too, while yen is reading her drafts. i'm especially looking forward to reading poach's chapter on pat barker's regeneration, a book i think very highly of. reading her introduction (11 pages! if your intros are 11 pages long, i accused her, no wonder your thesis is already 100 pages and writing!)

i'm also thinking about how poach and i (and everyone else of course) have developed in very different ways as students of literature. poach is also a history minor and has always, even when we were wee tots in school, been brilliant at history, and her literary interests are influenced by this - her love of contemporary british lit (her three focal texts are only written in the last 20 years or so), and her concerns of historical developments and its impacts on society and narration and cultural formations, the relationship between individual and society, memory and time, the adequation, loss and recuperation of the self, are things that i have consciously shied away from. i enjoy the same british novels as she does - byatt, winterson, swift, barnes - as does su-lin, but i don't think the word reality ever appears in my essays - if something is real for me, it's precisely because it's a story (the divine art is the story, the human characters only came later - isak dinesen), and like byatt's eldest princess, we must always believe in a story while it's being told. fairy tales, mythology, the telling of stories and creation of genres, the floating ribbons of spacetime in the universe that can be brought together, finding patterns, the ambiguity and possibilities of words, language and metaphor and the building blocks of literature, those things are what excites me. i don't mean, like robert graves, that there's one story and one story only worth our telling, but that when i read literature it's always under the early swaying influence of the myth critics and from walking around in giant minds like nohrnberg's and that is something i feel sharply missing in the way su-lin or poach or addy reads literature, just as people no doubt are shocked at how my essays completely gloss over or ignore feminist perspectives or social theory or display any sensibility to related concerns. su-lin's a little between us. she's interested in narrative theory and fairy tales and children's literature, but the most likely words you'll encounter in a su-lin essay are also going to be domesticity, the feminine, patriachal design, power and subjection, and those too are ones that almost never turn up in mine.