In Next Month's "Say Anything": Period Panic

Speaking of the "general understanding of your field" we're supposed to be getting out of orals reading (see last post)--after a month of reading, I still feel very conflicted about what "my field" is or should be. I love these novels; they are super delightful and interesting. But I don't feel like I could write an enlightening scholarly book about them. My other field of interest, 20th-century American poetry, might be easier for me to write about. I took two courses in 20th-century American poetry at other universities last year--my program hasn't been able to provide many 20th-century classes for our cohort--and even though I had a lot of issues with those classes, and often railed about them to Paul, I think little seedling ideas from them took root in my brain, and I've been thinking a lot about poetics and genre and women's poetry and modernity and what it means to be a 20th- or 21st-century woman poet, and I think _that's_ where my interest in domesticity and traditional women's roles come in, more than in the 19th century. Like in the 19th century, the issues are more obvious, right? But, I have contended throughout my academic career, super crucial to understanding how 20th- and 21st-century women artists understand themselves. I think we all think back through the Victorians--the Brontes, EBB, and across the Atlantic, Emily Dickinson--whether we want to admit it or not. So 19th-century and 20th-century stuff is important to me, but it's tricky to get those interests to gel into a dissertation.

I think I'm feeling a little at sea now because I'm reading these big huge novels from the first half of the century, and as I said, they're delightful, but not something I feel like I can write about. But what I'm forgetting is that I probably won't be writing about them: my main 19th-century interests lie in women's writing in the second half of the century, in not-quite-canonical poetesses like Augusta Webster and maybe Amy Levy, and also some novelists and short-story writers, maybe some children's writers. But I definitely want that thinking to extend into the 20th century. It's weird, because I write most easily and happily about poetry, but I love reading and thinking about novels. And the poetry I love most is 20th-century poetry, but I find 19th-century poetry fascinating and useful to help me think about issues that really excite me. So it's tricky for me to choose a "period," and I still don't know if I chose the right one! And genre is obviously an issue too: I know people who get away with doing, like, "transhistorical drama," but you can't do transhistorical everything. And mostly people will discourage you from doing "transhistorical poetry." But on the other hand, as I said to Becca this afternoon, if I end up writing a dissertation on something else, and having to read up on, I don't know, modernist drama double-quick, it can't hurt to have read extra stuff. I mean, these books are really good!