Friday, December 10, 2004

PhD: Piled High and Deeper

I am discovering a whole new dimension to the world of academic work...really the reading and writing have become the only things I do apart from basic food and hygiene, and some of that is negotiable....
I am currently working on a paper entitled; "The function of Sensibility in negotiating the narrative of Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne." which examins the metatextual component of Sensibility as a reading device in the novel...here's a taste:
"In relation to Tristram Shandy ‘sensibility’ takes on the elements of a domestic or familial setting, professional and leisured new gentry, nostalgic neo-feudalism, rural, masculine, conversational, benevolent, and as a historical work of autobiographical fiction with its own connotations of self and individualist identity. In both structure and content and as being heavily reliant on assumptions and counter assumptions of contempory moral philosophies, (particularly those of John Locke and David Hume), Tristram Shandy is entirely consistent with the general literature of sensibility. As a satirical work the importance of sensibility to narrative is furthermore keeping with Knight’s (2004) analysis of satire whereby “the issue may not be one of shared values but of shared recognitions” (Knight 2004:51). These recognitions assist in the narrative pattern and exploit the ‘imaginative gaps’ so well known in the text of Tristram Shandy as: “The brain, apparently, does not preserve sequences step by step but, instead recognizes overall patterns. Our not necessarily conscious but prior recognition of these patterns enables us to unconsciously synthesize gaps such as missing phonemes without noticeable effort…” (Yellowlees Douglas 1992: 2). Although applied by Yellowlees Douglas to postmodern hypertext narrative structures, this situating of narrative structure codified outside the text is relevant to Tristram Shandy as referring to Sensibility."

Yee hhaaaa

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