Continued

I spent this weekend revising my prospectus and compiling research notes for my Shakespeare paper.  Trying to research and write that paper is proving as chaotic as it typically is for me.  After 20 pages of notes, I still don't have a thesis that I am completely happy with.  I plan to get through the rest of the articles I have collected, then review the notes I have and cobble together an argument and structure.  My goal on this paper is to reduce the chaos.  So far this hasn't happened, but I am hoping to spend more time in the planning phase to see if it helps me not write as blindly as I sometimes do.  I have taken more notes than usual.  I hope that I have spent more time up front with the payoff of writing more efficiently at the end.  We will see.

With respect to the prospectus, I feel pretty good about what I have at this point.  As yet, I have not received feedback from my director (he seems swamped); I am in many ways more concerned about his feedback than meeting the standards of the proseminar class.  Said differently, I believe that I have written what is or will be a valid prospectus that adequately meets the various requirements that a prospectus generically should have; I am less confident that the actual merits of my argument will withstand the scrutiny of a scholar whose specialty includes my book and whose approach to Moby-Dick seems to substantially differ from the angle of my analysis.