March 24th, 2024 - Last Week of Class & My Dissertation
- asimon2015
- Mar 24, 2024
- 3 min read
To be honest, I had no clue that this week was going to be the LAST week of classes. This only occurred to me when one of my professors mentioned it during Thursday's seminar. I feel like I blinked and the Candlemas semester is now coming to a close. Not to say that I am done with school, as I still have the entire summer to work on my dissertation, but there is something a bit sad about saying goodbye to weekly discussions with classmates/professors. If you know me, you know I operate best when on a tight schedule and pressed with work and deadlines, so I am concerned about what I am going to do with myself for three months with my sole obligation being to write and write and write... I have a feeling that I am going to be suddenly developing a lot of new hobbies, booking last minute Ryanair flights, and perhaps having a J.K. Rowling moment and finding inspiration for a fantasy novel in Edinburgh.
For those of you who have been waiting to hear what my official thesis is, this post is for you. If not, I apologize because this is probably going to be quite boring. But alas! Our cohort was required to submit our dissertation proposals for approval last week, and I have now determined which author I will know like the back of my hand by the end of the summer. Drumroll please...
The one and only William Dunbar!
Mr. Dunbar is a crass, bawdy, skilled, sarcastic, and sassy late medieval Scottish poet. Does it make sense why I picked him? ;) If you want a more sophisticated reason, Dunbar has basically been neglected from scholarly discourse over the past two decades. Though there was brief boom of interest in his poetic and personal life towards the latter half of the twentieth century, his literary fame was relatively short-lived. Scholars don't really like him, and rightfully so; his work is often coined as sexist, racist, misogynistic, chauvinistic and a bunch of other punchy adjectives - you get the point. He is a hard dude to deal with. Not only from a stylistic standpoint does he perplex scholars (he writes in perfect rhyme royal in Old Scots and with a technical skill that, dare I say, rivals Chaucer), but also from a chronological perspective - he literally disappeared for two years & no one knows what he was doing. He also was a student at St Andrews. All of these factors led to me deciding to take on his case. Or I guess cases if we are talking about the grammatical variety he just loves to boast in his poetry.
I'm going to throw some technical terms at you, which I know is annoying, but bear with me. My thesis is interested in exploring how Dunbar’s poetic form responds to ideas of convention, sexuality, and gender. Specifically, I aim to demonstrate how Dunbar’s interaction with the love debát and pastourelle traditions reflects a deeper commentary on the notion of courtly love. In exploring how Dunbar subverts and inverts these traditions within the broader love poetry genre, I will show how experimentation with form allows Dunbar to interrogate sixteenth-century perceptions of desire and intimacy. "In a Secret Place”, “The Golden Targe”, and “Sweet Rose of Virtue” are examples of poems I will be working with. I will be using Priscilla Bawcutt’s Dunbar the Makar as my main source as this is the most authoritative and comprehensive edition of Dunbar’s poetry. I will also be referring to primary sources such as the Maitland, Bannatyne, Reidpeth, and Asloan manuscripts, all of which contain fragments of Dunbar’s original work. Throughout my dissertation, I hope to show how Dunbar mediates the relationship between form and content and why love poetry is a particular space for his invention.
Well folks, that about sums it up. I am looking forward to starting my literary investigation and sleuthing around for some clues that will give me more insight into just what Dunbar was trying to accomplish during his time. I'm also ready to launch into a spring/summer filled with Scottish language, provocative poetry, and perhaps some plunging into the North Sea. Au revoir!
留言