(dave e)

can procrastination take the form of a speech act?

Revisiting chapters written three years ago makes dissertation fine-tuning a nervewracking business. Honestly.

Fortunately, although the direction and effect of my argument has changed a little, its foundations have been constant. Nevertheless, making these distinct chapters operate as part of a larger position that has progressed has got me frantic. One helpful committee member assures me that I shouldn't sweat it, that books are long-term projects and that this sort of growth is native to the practice. Even still, I find myself making more significant changes than I would have predicted.

The constant part of the dissertation has been my insistence that outlier life writing in which memoirists, biographers, and autobiographers deploy practices that overtly critique the work with which they are complicit (e.g., obvious fictionalization, doubly self-conscious narratives about the relative success or failure of the work's aim to be "honest," mixed genres, and experiments with form) are both pedagogically engaged and symptomatic of all life writing. Pedagogic because they make better readers of nonfiction out of us and symptomatic because they tell on the conditions that inform almost any effort to get between experience, memory, self, and text.

The new direction, latent in the two chapters written before it hit me, notes the fact that my most recent examples (Dave Eggers' memoir, Edmund Morris' Reagan biography, and Maxine Hong Kingston's Fifth Book of Peace) betray a worry about life writing even after they supplement their texts with the sort of knowing critique that ought to purchase them some confidence. They're each anxious for local reasons, but they share real fears about nonfiction's ability to accomplish one of its ostensible aims: reporting what happened. What strikes me about that worry is that it does not exist in three predecessor texts that rely on almost exactly the same principles and practices Eggers, Morris, and Kingston use. Mary McCarthy's Catholic girlhood memoir, Vidal's novel of Abraham Lincoln, and Kingston's own China Men, books to which my contemporary three are very much heirs, enjoy real comfort in their play with representation and in their indeterminate approach to experience and history...

Ooops. I've made this sound like an abstract.

The point is that teasing out an argument so near the surface yet not quite articulated is keeping me up nights.

It is common practice to begin a dissertation defense (mere weeks from now) with a narrative of the project. I'm going to have plenty to say.