Saturday, December 13, 2003
(12:32 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
I've Got the Bonhoeffer Blues
Don't get me wrong -- I'm excited about my final Bonhoeffer paper. I believe I have adequate secondary support for my thesis, and I'm even going to squeeze in a few quotes from Hegel. I'm fairly sure that my particular topic has not been tried before, and I believe that it might be a genuine, if small, contribution to theology.
The problem is the actual physical writing of the paper: flipping through books to find quotes, forcing myself to sit there and type, watching as the pages don't fill up quite fast enough. As regular readers can tell, writing as such is not difficult for me -- in fact, I really enjoy writing. The problem is writing things when I know in advance what they're going to look like. For instance, even the most innovative academic paper is going to have to contain some workaday, merely functional prose: close textual analysis, dull exposition of past scholarly positions, etc. I tend to view writing as a process of discovery and creation, and if I already have the idea in my head, especially if it's close to being already formulated, it takes me longer to write simply due to my own internal resistance -- I already know this stuff! I don't need to see it written out!
Last night's History of Christian Thought take-home final was truly the worst in that respect. I didn't even need to have taken the class in order to answer her question, not really. I just needed to write out, in a very boring and straightforward way, the facts at hand, with a little perfunctory interpretation. The professor in that class, partially due to the huge size of the class, demands very close adherence to the letter of her assignment and, for the purposes of this class at least, discourages much creative argument or daring interpretation. As such, the easiest assignment in the world took me about four hours to do.
That's about it for now. I need to get back to writing out the paper that I have largely already formulated in my head and that I don't feel like I need to put down on paper (or silicon, I suppose) in order to prove to myself that I know it. Perhaps the academic life isn't for me after all.
Until next time, I'm taking suggestions for a "winter break project." Leafing through Hegel's Phenomenology last night, it occurred to me that I might use this time to Actually Read Phenomenology of Spirit -- for real, complete with underlining and question marks in the margins. at about five hundred pages for the text of the book itself (not including the "analysis of the text" in the Oxford edition), that would be roughly 80-100 pages of pure Hegel each week. Since I'm taking a course on Derrida next semester, as well as a course on globalization that might include Hardt and Negri's Empire, this project might prove to be great preparation. It would also help me to approach that copy of Derrida's Glas that I now, quite mysteriously, somehow own. If I can read the whole Faerie Queene, I can do this.
Before last night, my default option was to spend the break working through my German book, but I don't think that the Hegel option would exclude that. Another possibility was to read Barth's Romans, although I believe Ted might be offering his Romans course next year, in which case I will have to read it anyway. On a completely different track, I could try to read a "Big Thick Novel," probably Don DeLillo's Underworld. Finally, I could just fritter away my time on the Internet and enter my next semester of graduate education full of self-loathing and bitterness. Let me know if you have any thoughts on my existing suggestions or any other ideas.
