It's been a tough day, and I've been home from work for about two hours now, and I feel I want to put some of my thoughts about the last couple of days down 'on paper', as it were.
This week has seen major changes in my thinking about my dissertation. It was last March when the original forms had to be in confirming a provisional title, a short summary of intentions and aims and a signature from the tutor responsible for supervising the work. I think, first off, that a March deadline is ridiculous, especially in light of the fact that this is generally the time when the greatest number of essays are due to be handed in. In the Autumn 2005 term I had one piece of written assessed work and a presentation to complete. The essay itself was 1500 words. In the spring I was expected to hand in two essays, both 3000 words, in during the first week of January, another by the 23rd, and then a further five of varying length, plus another presentation by the return after the Easter holidays on April 24th. This seems completely unbalanced. In addition to that, I was expected to decide upon a suitable topic for my dissertation find a supervisor to oversee my studies. Why was this not left until after the exam period at the end of May? Why did it have to be completed by March, the busiest time of the year for me, and I'm sure many other students?

I originally elected to write on the topic of Philip Roth's milenial novels, but I've since had some real difficulties locating myself within the tradition of American fiction. My course is almost exclusively made up on English writing, and follows a roughly linear chronological path, eg Renaissance and early English novel in the first year, then options of enlightenment British writing, Romanticism, Nineteenth century literature and culture in the second. This year I will be looking at modern English Fiction, poststucturalism, 20th century British drama and British literary culture 1970-2000. There isn't really, within the course units that I've chosen, anything that would give me the proper preparation for a dissertation on a contemporary American writer.
This wouldn't necessarily be a major problem, if I didn't feel almost no enthusiasm for the task either.

Put simply, I think I was backed into a corner by the universities requirement to choose a topic and supervisor so early, that I panicked and jumped into any boat that I could, so to speak. I didn't clearly consider what my chosen topic would entail.

Over the summer I read the two novels American Pastoral and The Human Stain. I had already read the other book in the 'trilogy' (I don't know if there is any real authority for referring to them as a trilogy, as they seem so loosely connected, another potential problem with choosing them as a topic) I Married a Communist. But I didn't find anything that I could link them together with to look at them as a whole. I really wasted a lot of time, and that has to be due to my indecisiveness rather than an intrinsic problem with my dissertation. But I have felt trapped over the summer, and I am concerned that I am leaving it too late without producing anything meaningful. Worse, I am showing no sign of any enthusiasm for the topic, which is worrying when the deadline is getting closer and reading needs to really be done now, not next March/April.

So over this past week I have been looking at changing my topic. I don't know, as yet, whether this is possible. I need to know that for sure as soon as possible, so that I can get the wheels in motion, so to speak.

My new proposal would be to look at something like the 'experience of the urban in modernist literature 1910-1940'-certainly something about the idea of the city which emerges during this time. It's a topic that I think I have been reasonably interested in for quite a while; I can see traces of it in my thinking and writing at least as far back as last summer. I haven't necessarily thought about it in relation to modernist literature or that period before, but I think that my interest in the period would be an asset too. Maybe one of the first places to look would be Raymond Williams' essay 'The Country and the city'. I also read Mrs Dalloway earlier this year, and was fascinated by the whole tapestry it seemed to weave. It was an introduction to modernism, I suppose, and I certainly found that it showed me something that previous books, certainly those I'd studied, perhaps didn't.

I'm going to have to find out if this is possible first: when I know that, then I can decide what to do next...