--- layout: post status: publish published: true title: Speaking plainly wordpress_id: 947 wordpress_url: https://www.martineve.com/?p=947 date: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0wOCAxMzoxODo1NSArMDIwMA== date_gmt: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0wOCAxMzoxODo1NSArMDIwMA== categories: - Literature - Thomas Pynchon - Philosophy - Michel Foucault tags: - PhD - Research - Plain English comments: - id: 6275 author: ailsa author_email: ailsa.haxell@aut.ac.nz author_url: http://amusingspace.blogspot.com date: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0wOCAyMjoxMjozMiArMDIwMA== date_gmt: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0wOCAyMjoxMjozMiArMDIwMA== content: ! "Thanks for sharing your research. I can follow it and know nothing about your area, so you have succeeded in your purpose. In the 2nd sentence which 'they' is a tiny bit ambiguous. That books could be subversive threats draws me in.\r\nLanguage level is still deeper than 'plain'- guess this depends on whether you want it plain enough to anyone at a University level of reading, or plainer than that.\r\nIt could be plainer, these are 'big' words to reconsider:\r\n critically acclaimed, provocative, \r\nnotoriously, enabling constraint... esoteric...portable.\r\nSentences could be plainer:\r\n\"They are provocative works in which no obvious interpretation is forthcoming.\"\r\nMight be written as \r\nThey are provocative works with no obvious interpretation.\r\nBut its about writing to an audience, and I'm guessing yours are fellow university level readers.\r\nBest wishes,\r\nailsa." - id: 6276 author: Martin Paul Eve author_email: martin@martineve.com author_url: '' date: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0xMCAxMDo0NjoxMiArMDIwMA== date_gmt: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0xMCAxMDo0NjoxMiArMDIwMA== content: Thanks for this feedback - really helpful. It's so easy to forget and just slip into phrases such as portable methodology, which require explanation. On the other hand, is esoteric really a word which requires simplification? There's definitely a murky area between discipline specific phrases and offbeat but valid vocabulary... - id: 6278 author: lizit author_email: e.thackray@sussex.ac.uk author_url: '' date: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0xMCAxNTowMTo0MSArMDIwMA== date_gmt: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0xMCAxNTowMTo0MSArMDIwMA== content: ! "I think most of us are finding this a much more challenging exercise than we anticipated. I know I did. \r\nI must admit to struggling with this Martin, but I think I understood it in the end, but am still not quite sure. I looked up 'tropes' in the dictionary and that helped somewhat.\r\nWhat I would love to know is whether Pynchon is a good read..." - id: 6279 author: Carly Tetley author_email: carly.tetley@btinternet.com author_url: http://virtualdoc.salford.ac.uk/cheetahphd date: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0xMCAyMDoyMjowNiArMDIwMA== date_gmt: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0xMCAyMDoyMjowNiArMDIwMA== content: ! "Hi Martin,\r\n\r\nThanks for sharing your research. You are in a completely different field to mine and whilst I did have to go back over certain sentences, I feel I have a pretty good understanding of your research. Since I deal exclusively with quantitative data, I'm interested to know what form your thesis will take - how you will present your findings?\r\n\r\nThis exercise has been great for learning about people's PhD research in more than 140 characters!" - id: 6280 author: Martin Paul Eve author_email: martin@martineve.com author_url: '' date: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0xMSAxMDoyMzoyMCArMDIwMA== date_gmt: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0xMSAxMDoyMzoyMCArMDIwMA== content: ! 'Thanks for the feedback, Liz. It''s really fascinating to see how people outside the discipline respond and it shows me that I''ve still got a way to go towards accessibility. I intend to read yours as some point in the near future. Hmmm, is Pynchon a good read. Well, I''m fairly keen, as you can probably tell, but if you want gripping fiction with a clear engrossing narrative, it''s probably not for you. It''s extremely strange fiction designed to make you think. That said, give it a go!' - id: 6281 author: Martin Paul Eve author_email: martin@martineve.com author_url: '' date: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0xMSAxMDozMDoxOSArMDIwMA== date_gmt: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0xMSAxMDozMDoxOSArMDIwMA== content: ! 'Thanks for the feedback, Carly; much appreciated. My thesis takes the form of an 80,000 word argumentative dissertation. As in the sciences, I have to conduct a review of the (extensive) existing critical literature on the topic and cite the most appropriate selections from these pieces. I have opted for three chapters, each containing multiple sections, corresponding to the historical phase of the philosopher to which that chapter is devoted. A friend of mine once put this to me well: "so what you do isn''t finding something new, it''s finding and testing the validity of new ways of thinking about things". In essence, it''s an exercise in assessing the limits of hypothetical thinking. The "evidence" I marshal is selected and never concrete and yet it is extremely clear in the discipline when a fallacious argument emerges. I well appreciate that this seems strange to those in the sciences, but I assure you that it is by thinking through these issues that we achieve the mission statement of the humanities: "to create and constantly renew interest in the arts".' - id: 6283 author: Sam Knowles author_email: sam.b.knowles@gmail.com author_url: '' date: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0xNSAxNDozNzoxMiArMDIwMA== date_gmt: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0xNSAxNDozNzoxMiArMDIwMA== content: ! "Hi Martin,\r\n\r\nI feel I should thank you: not for explaining your own research, necessarily, although that is in itself interesting, but for both doing exactly what your title says -- 'speaking plainly' -- and highlighting the importance of doing just that. So thanks!\r\n\r\nAs a PhD literature candidate myself, these latter points are what I've found most difficult over the past three-and-a-half years -- much more so, in fact, than actually writing the d@mn thing..." - id: 6284 author: Sarah-Louise Quinnell author_email: sarah.louq@gmail.com author_url: http://www.sarahlouq.wordpress.com date: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0xOCAxODo0NjozMyArMDIwMA== date_gmt: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0xOCAxODo0NjozMyArMDIwMA== content: My question is about how you have chosen to structure your thesis you have 3 chapters, are you going to call them chapters or sections or themes? I completely understand how you are structuring it. i just wondered as i was told that if i had bigger chapters than 10'000 words i should think about themes or sections as a descriptive way of talking about the presentation. its interesting to see how different disciplines present their work. - id: 6285 author: Martin Paul Eve author_email: martin@martineve.com author_url: '' date: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0xOSAwOTowNjoxMSArMDIwMA== date_gmt: !binary |- MjAxMS0wNC0xOSAwOTowNjoxMSArMDIwMA== content: ! 'Hi Sarah, My chapters are approximately 25,000 words each as it simply becomes impossible to cover the material, which is on a unified subject, in a smaller space. That said, each chapter is then subdivided into three sections of approximately 8,000 words. I suppose that these correspond to digestible size chunks and the criteria is that they should be discrete for a reader. I should probably point out that this is not usual in my discipline and most have shorter chapters.' ---

Following on from posts by @lizith and @ORGMotivation, this is a brief post to explain my current research in plain English.

A quick precursor. In many research projects, communicating what you are doing involves making a justification for the research. If that is not immediately obvious, then often the explanation in "plain English" involves making that rationale perspicuous. I'd just like to make it clear that I do not intend to attempt to justify esoteric literature studies in this post. I have done so elsewhere and truly believe that better understanding of cultural artefacts contributes a great deal to our society, but there are people who think otherwise. It would be too distracting to table this topic here.

Explain

Thomas Pynchon and Philosophy

Why have governments feared fiction to the point of burning books? Is it because they are powerless and shallow, or can the novel conceal subversive depths? How would we find such depths? My research addresses these questions in fiction through side-by-side readings of the fiction of Thomas Pynchon and various schools of philosophy, and how the two interact.

Thomas Pynchon is the "reclusive" author (no photos of him for almost 50 years) of several critically acclaimed masterpieces, from V. through The Crying of Lot 49, to Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. These are not works of fiction which merely tell stories. They are provocative works in which no obvious interpretation is forthcoming. In short: they require a great deal of thought to appreciate.

They are also notoriously wide-ranging. Gravity's Rainbow, for instance, has over 400 characters and spans so many topics that a totalising interpretation would be impossible. It seems, therefore, that we need some manner of "enabling constraint" -- meaning: a rationale that limits, but therefore allows us to say something limited, as opposed to nothing -- to get anywhere.

Taking my cue from the presence of Ludwig Wittgenstein in Pynchon's V., I propose philosophical readings as such an enabling constraint. There is, however, a certain resistance to such an approach in many institutions who prefer the other pole of literary studies, history (ie. studying the interaction, and place, of works with, and in, history). I attempt to reconcile these poles of philosophy and history through readings of philosophers at each stage in their career, so for Wittgenstein, there are three distinct phases and I am reading each one alongside Pynchon for differences and similarities. To be clear: I am not looking to work out whether Pynchon had read these philosophers; that would be historical. I am also not looking for explicit engagement with surface imagery; that would be a crude "application" eg. "Wittgenstein talks about ways of seeing, and SO DOES PYNCHON!!" Instead, I attempt to look at the context in which Pynchon embeds philosophical tropes and work from this.

While this may appear highly esoteric, it yields stunning political and ethical insights into Pynchon's works and also provides, I feel, a new more rigorous and (dare I say) portable methodology for philosophical readings of literary works.

Featured image by mafleen under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.