Comps proposal free write

Matt Chandler, a pastor I used to love to listen to when I loved Jesus, said once (and once was enough to sear it into my memory): “I want to chase down all the voices in my head to find out which ones are liars.” Psychoanalysis. The “chasing down” of these voices is a deep, penetrative, intellectual activity that asks much of minds and bodies, bodies and minds. Who’s willing to give enough time and effort? Who’s capable of it? How do we recognize a person who has chased down all the voices in her head to find out which ones are liars?

I study text. I always like to say “I study language,” because since starting this PhD program, I feel like that’s what I’ve done. I’ve been so enamored with and captivated by the ideas I’ve learned that sometimes, I sit in front of my computer for hour on end studying Netflix’s generous offerings, offering them my time in exchange for some culture to analyze. That’s cut it in the past, when, when my mind wasn’t engrossed in a book, I had no one to small talk with (or close to no one, there were phone friends), so the TV became my go-to “small talk.” A way for me to monitor the voices in my head as they come forward to respond to the program I’m watching. A way for me to learn what it is that I’m thinking as I think about what I’m thinking about what I’m thinking about. I somehow need to channel some of that energy into a comprehensive final proposal that explains what I want to study and why I want to study it.

Basically, my field list—the list which creates my primary canon—is all nineteenth-century American Literature. I feel that it’s underdeveloped at this point because I haven’t yet read any of the literary or historical criticism about the literature of the time to know exactly what it is I need to read. I’m thinking of adding some newspapers, magazines, and other periodical literature of the time to the list that I could explore. Asking LDL: Louisville Courier and all the periodical pubs listed near the back of the Bennett C19 poetry anthology. Late C19/C20 critic Fred Lewis Pattee.

The list, as is, is my attempt to do two things: to sample those texts which were popular during the nineteenth century in America as well as those which were written during that period but that which earned a following much later, and to begin to narrow my focus to texts in the mode of life writing composed just before, during, and after the Civil War and through the Reconstruction era. I want to study diaries, journals, correspondences, and periodical literature within their cultural context and with an eye toward close reading them, via psychoanalytic trauma theory (and here’s where my driving thesis falls flat) to, like, you know, see what they say to me. I guess almost everyone is where I am: they have a great idea what they want to read, but unless they’re extremely deductive, they have no idea what they all say when added up. I guess there’s a way they could have been reading all their primary stuff throughout the last 2 years and are now theoretically informed enough to make a pretty good guess what they’re going to find there…

I digress… so I can weigh myself against others. See what writing teaches us?

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I’m reading them to find out what they don’t say. Abraham and Torok’s cryptonomy theory really sets this into motion: they say that there are phantom words which signal to the close reader/analyst the stranger lurking within the Other. The phantom inside the Other that even the Other doesn’t know is there. I’m not claiming to know how to do that exactly, so I will reread (or in most cases, rereread and rerereread) Freud and many who has followed him to see how they conduct the business of reading each other through and into the texts they read. I’ll hope to continue studying the process of how readers are reading one another and the situations around them, intuitively understanding that it is through interacting within this dynamic web of voices that my voices will begin to “make sense.” That’s when I’ll be able to write a dissertation proposal. All this in between is learning to write that diss prop. Srsly.

I also include several texts which I believe will help me situate myself as a twenty-first century reader reading nineteenth-century texts (and bodies) through a primarily twentieth-century lens. The anachrony of simply reading that sentence induces vertigo.

Because much of the popular life writing of the time was written by African American slaves or former slaves, both lists take an active interests in writings from and about both white and black authors without delineating them as such (except in this preface, and then merely to explain what others might call an oversight if I were to leave it out). They were, at that time, seen very differently, and perhaps are still segregated, even if only by one of those voices inside my head. But for my purposes, I want to try, as much as is possible, to read them all as humans writing trauma. Gendered, raced, and classed issues will be situated against trauma rather than against the traditional hierarchies imposed upon them by the era and by so many scholars since then. Slavery was traumatic; still is. But comparing the trauma of slavery to the trauma of restrictive gender controls on a queer person or on the atrocities of war experienced by nurses in Civil War hospitals is like comparing apples to cars. To say one is “worse” than another legitimizes one as justifiably and recognizably traumatic while the other is relegated to less-than. Each are traumatic in their own right, and to the persons experiencing them and reliving them on paper, on a scale from one to ten, were we to ask our witnesses, subjectively they’d report that their trauma was 10/10. Do I need to justify why I’m not necessarily studying “racial trauma” or “queer trauma” or “gender trauma,” or can it suffice to say that many different traumata work in the same way and can therefore be “grouped” for the sake of study under the ideology of trauma rather than the triumvirate race/class/gender ideology critique system?

There are several texts on my list that are simply dead white male canonical, texts I still haven’t studied from Poe, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Alcott that anyone calling themselves an expert in C19 should have under their belt. Ditto with some from the secondary text list, such as the now-classic Imagined Communities by Anderson Benedict, Revolution and the Word by Cathy Davidson, and Sensational Designs by Jane Tompkins, to name a few. Texts I’ve heard quoted and name-dropped in almost every grad lit course I’ve ever taken. You can’t call yourself a serious student of American literature if you haven’t read The Puritan Origins of the American Self, for instance.

Trauma theory is much the same: I have several canonical works that any serious student in trauma theory should have read. I’m reading Freud, LaPlanche, Abraham and Torok, and Deleuze psychoanalytically as a basis for trauma theory. Then reading broadly in trauma theory with the likes of Caruth, LaCapra, Felman, Laub. I stretch the category of “trauma theory” a bit by including within it such authors as Foucault, Barthes, and perhaps Sontag. It feels a bit deficient to me still because it doesn’t yet have any C18 and C19 philosophers that I could read as both primary and secondary text to fill out my knowledge of how the C19 thinkers were thinking. I don’t know a lot about who they might have been influenced by except for maybe German metaphysics, Kant, Hegel. So I’m completely deficient there. I’ll ask Rachman, Watts, and Arch asap.