You can't just do a Master's degree. You need to have a focus. When I tell people in the departement of English that I'm pursuing my Master's, they invariably ask: "What's your area?" And I have to say, "Well... I like Medieval Lit, and 15th and 16th century, and some Victorians, and Modern Irish Lit, and Milton and Gerard Manly-Hopkins, and G.K. Chesterton, and I've always been interested in King Arthur, and I like classical mythologies and epic poetry, and I'm a big fan of W.C. Williams, and..."
This is called "lack of focus".
On Wednesday, I have a grant proposal due. Apparently, the chances of my actually receiving the grant are quite slim, but I need to have at least submitted a proposal in order to qualify for a Fellowship next year, and blah blah blah.
I have a deadline. By Wednesday I need to hand in two pages saying what I want to do for the next three years, why I'm a good person to do it, and why it requires money. And if I write it well enough, they will GIVE me the money I ask for.
This is called "strong motivation".
The question is—will strong motivation overcome lack of focus?
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3 comments:
Lol.
Procrastination is the solution.
Hours before the grant is due you will suddenly find yourself overcome by waves of motivation that you never knew you had. You will dash to a computer, type until your fingers are blistered and bleeding, rattle off 100 pages and hand it all in on time but completely unspellchecked.
That's the way it goes...
Have you ever read a book by someone who is NOT a white European man?? (just wondering).
Heh. I'll admit that my formal education has been unfortunately disproportionately heavy on the white European (or North American) male writers.
In my free time I have read and enjoyed a handful of non-Europeans (Shusaku Endo and Nadine Gordimer, the 1001 Arabian Nights to choose three examples that pop into my head), a handful of non-white writers (Nella Larson and Gregory Scofield for example), and definitely more than a handful of woman writers (Connie Willis, J.K. Rowling, The Bronte's, Jane Austin, Mary Shelly, Mary Wolstonecraft, Virginia Wolfe, H.D., Edith Warton being the first few that come to my head).
It's a good point though.
I'm taking a course this year on Hybridity in Literary Imagination designed to partly fill the gaps in my formal education, but it is a pretty thin start.
I would ask for suggestions, but frankly I'm not going to be reading much that isn't assigned for a while now.
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