Shonell in TCR Land

Every once in awhile, I plan to share some thoughts about this Ph.D. process.

The process is made a tad bit different in that as part of the fellowship this year I am required to take four classes. Most students take two or three. It’s been cumbersome, reading enough works just this semester alone to write a master’s thesis.

My mind, to put it bluntly, has been a tag cloud, a cluster of words, phrases, almost-sentences that collectively mean something, that individually mean something, too; however, my mind these days is a swirling tag cloud in which a user has no working mouse or touch pad. She can’t click on a word or phrase and get information; she can’t see how all these parts connect into a whole.

Right now, I’m working on my paper for 20th Century Rhetoric, and my tag cloud is spinning at a clip that’s so fast that all words within it are a blur. I’m hopeful, however, that by due date something relatively cohesive will be developed.

What’s been a saving grace for me this semester has been, what I like to call, divine inspiration. There are those moments, when I am buried eye-high in books, in words, and just when I’m at the moment of No mas, por favor, I “get” something.

Tonight, it had nothing to do with the paper, per se, but bigger ideas I’ve been having lately about interests and dissertation topics.

Up to this point, I know my interests have been varied: race, culture, hypertext, rhetoric, etc., and it’s been hard trying to see how these things might gel together into a project that’s dissertation-worthy.

Though I have not reached that point yet (I feel like I’m close), tonight, I did embrace the fact that I’ve endeared myself to three specific philosophers/theorists: Bakhtin, Burke, and Foucault.

Right now, I have snippets of reasons why they intrigue me, and I do plan to study more on them to firm up my thoughts. What’s been exciting is seeing how just these snippets can be developed into larger ideas for me.

I’m considering this a victory as I go back to my research for rhetoric paper.

I’m seeing, as I’m just a month away from finishing my first semester, that sometimes it’s about the small victories.