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Completion?
I recently had my a review session, combining – due to a bit of disorganisation – feedback on both the second and third years of my PhD. As part of the process, I had to submit a “plan for completion of the thesis”. I thought it would be worth posting it here, if only as…
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Missed Chances
Again, I’m going to start this blog-post with an apology. My latest lack of publications is the result of devoting all my spare time and energy to the writing of a great many applications for post-doctoral positions. Those same applications have, however, inspired this little text, so it’s not all bad news. I want to…
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On having your pencil ready
I have been reading Joseph Roach‘s Cities of the Dead recently. It’s amazing, and I’m learning a great deal. While there will probably be a blog post dedicated to the text in the near(ish) future, I wanted to write today about something else instead. It all begins with an innocuous pair of sentences about halfway…
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Metaphors for writing
I’m busy writing the first draft of chapter one, and so have had neither time nor inclination to write much for this blog of late. That said, all my thesis-scribbling did inspire this post, for it occurred to me, as I sketched the umpteenth plan for spending this section’s allotted word count, that I now…
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The Game
Warning: spoilers I watched Ender’s Game last night, and, with only a vague memory of the novel by Orson Scott Card on which it is based, was newly struck by all the moral questions raised by the story. One or two of them – as with most things these days – seemed to connect with…
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The Doppelganger
I want to tell you today about a fear, common, I suspect, to every PhD student at one time or another. It is the worry that somewhere, out there in another university, another country, another continent, there is someone doing the same research as you. Your doppelganger. It may be even worse than this. It…
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Syncopation
I’ve been meaning to write this post ever since I went to a seminar on Stein’s idea of ‘syncopation’ in her essay ‘Plays’, and have decided to do it now, even if my memory of what happened is fast fading. Actually, the question of the temporality of response is one that fascinates Stein, so perhaps…
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Walking to a chair
Earlier this week, I was lucky enough to participate in a read-through of the text that the RSC will be using for their production of Arden of Faversham later this year. The play, printed in 1592, tells of the various attempts made by Alice to kill her husband Arden so that she can be with…
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Benedict Cumberbatch
I heard the other day that Benedict Cumberbatch (aka. Sherlock Holmes, Julian Assange, and Smaug) is going to be playing Hamlet in London towards the end of 2014. There is much excitement about this, on a par with that surrounding David Tennant’s Hamlet with the RSC in 2009. This way of talking about somebody‘s Hamlet…
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On Death
A cheery subject to start 2014, I know. I’m going to be giving a lecture at the English Faculty in mid-January (which I’ll probably post a recording of here too), entitled ‘The Death of the Actor: Shakespeare and Tragedy in the Eighteenth Century’. Before writing the whole thing, however, I wanted to sketch my ideas…