March 6, 2014
It’s a shame I don’t post more here.
Since my last posting, I began a PhD program at Florida Atlantic University in Comparative Studies (Cultures, Languages, and Literatures). My specific interest, and the focus of my study and eventual dissertation is a mixture of cognitive science, linguistics, and literary theory. Specifically, I want to argue for a more cognitive approach to literary critical practice rather than the post-structuralist assumptions that have guided its theoretical underpinnings for the past several decades. Our minds and hence our subjectivity are inherently pre-discursive, but post-structuralist thought denies this and assumes that subjectivity is constructed by external influences. A great many things fall out of this assumption, and my goal is to build up an alternate foundation for critical theory based on recent findings of cognitive science. This project may be much too large for me, but it’s where my fundamental interests in this domain lie, so forward I must go.
Meanwhile, I have not written any novels. This is wildly dissatisfying and leads to erratic moods as I contemplate further years passing me by without having published my writing. I don’t know how to overcome this, as the PhD program requires almost all of me. Through some naive optimism, I’ve kept a copy of Death and Life in my bag with the hope that I’ll take it out once in a while and write it. I do intend to write more this summer when I will only be adjuncting and planning for the fall semester.
I’ll write here that I intend to update this more often, and perhaps I will restructure the website to include a section for school and things that emerge out of the PhD program, but writing that is mere optimism.
Filed under Life.