I sent the diss proposal draft to the Absent Advisor (who will soon be the Present Advisor once again--counting the days!). I am trying not to be nervous about it. My goal right now is to get a draft that is "good enough" to pass prelims and then write a fuller, better draft AFTER the tests are over. The fear of the proposal and the failure of the first draft have paralyzed me for the past few weeks so that not only have I been unable to write the proposal but I have also been unable to get any useful reading done for exams. Maybe now my momentum will pick up again and the feeling of being not-smart-enough will pass for a while.
I do see the "Objective" section of the proposal as the weakest part, I think because it's hard for me to conceptualize a project that is so big. In fact, what got me out of the rut this week was a fellowship application I wrote last week, for which I proposed a much smaller project directly related to my dissertation. When I wrote the "Procedure" section in which I outlined possible chapters, I felt like I was really getting to what I wanted to say. I could work with small pieces of the whole but I still don't think I have adequately expressed the goal of the whole project. I hope that the "State of the Question" section did what I wanted it to do--to communicate the serious lack of and need for major studies on religion in the lives of contemporary Southern women and religion in the works of contemporary Southern women writers--the two are inextricable. And that's what my project is on--so there's the first specific reference to my research to appear on the blog. Exciting.
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Religion in which of its manifestations?
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