Spirited: The Craft of Writing

 

I've been putting off working on my writing sample for PhD applications all summer. I have had a lot of other things to do, but I've also just been procrastinating-- doing anything else to avoid it. At first glance it might seem odd that this is the task which I have been avoiding. While I do find writing to be slow and difficult at times, I enjoy writing in general and I really loved writing my undergraduate thesis.

The issue is doing battle with my undergraduate thesis again. While I still believe in most of it, the copy editing is a mess and there are places where the writing is downright unwieldy or the ideas are expressed in an excessively convoluted manner. Yet, even this was not the main turn off. I've been hitting my head against the page restriction on writing samples for a long time. 25 pages is just not much space to express the ideas in an 80 page thesis. I honestly didn't think I could do that. In my head this was just something I couldn't get around.

For my birthday, my parents very smartly bought me a copy of Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success. Avoiding drilling more Latin vocabulary, yesterday, I decided to read the beginning of this wonderful book. While I am not turning this into an article for publication, the book helped me feel that I could probably mine something out of my thesis to make a solid 25 page stand-alone piece.

One of the things that Belcher recommends is to read the paper through twice, once without a pen and once with a pen. Most of the time, I read the binder copy I have of my thesis which already has some notes with typographical errors and snide comments. This time, I borrowed the nice, clean, bound copy I gave to my parents. Looking at it clean and not looking for problems at the level of sentences, I realize that there are at least 10 pages I can cut out of my introduction and first chapter because I wrote my thesis in the hope that someone without expert knowledge of Plato (and particularly someone who had not read the Laws) could read and understand it (as it will reside in the library of my alma mater). My new target audience (1) will mostly be people who have a solid knowledge of Plato and (2) who don't necessarily need to be up on the data because they are more looking for argumentative structure and originality than understanding. I'm sure I will find even more passages that I can cut the further I go.

Beyond this, I noticed that my writing style tends to imitate the authors I have been reading most recently. During my thesis I read a lot of two wonderful scholars: Catherine Zuckert and Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood. While I hope I incorporated some of their flair for analysis my writing definitely picked up some of their faults (Zuckert: over-inclusion of summary in arguments; Sourvinou-Inwood: clunky, overly-complex sentences). Divesting myself of some of this will also make my thesis more cogent and streamlined.

If anyone has any tips for doing similar things, I'd love to hear them. Also, so far, I would highly recommend Belcher's book. In the first 60 pages she tackled so many of my writing excuses and insecurities and made me feel like I should just go for it. I'm hoping it continues to be stellar.

Appeitive/Reasoing: Ancient Greek Death Monuments

I found a website today that I really wish I had discovered while writing my thesis. It's only got basic information, but it shows a nice trajectory of changing death monuments from the Geometric to the Hellenistic period. It is accompanied by a collection of short essays on each period. Check out this piece on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website.

Spirited: Notes on My Thesis #4

I never realized how much work an 80 page document needs. Going back over my thesis, there are so many mistakes that I missed and so many articles that I should have incorporated to back up my conclusions. Anyway, I have decided to spend at least one day a week working on editing my thesis at a coffee shop. I started last weekend (although it was while I was proctoring an exam) reading Ian Morris' "Attitudes Toward Death in Archaic Greece" (JSTOR) and Norman Gulley's "Plato on Poetry" (JSTOR). I am planning on reviewing the articles as I read them.

More soon...

Spirited: Notes on My Thesis #3

I proctored another exam today. I finally managed to read a bit of scholarship today during the exam. I read Ian Morris' "Attitudes Toward Death in Archaic Greece" (JSTOR) and Norman Gulley's "Plato on Poetry" (JSTOR). I will review the articles in more depth tomorrow.

Morris' article is a rebuttle of work done in two articles by Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood. I have not read either of the articles, but I based some of my thesis on Sourvinou-Inwood's book 'Reading' Greek Death and I thought I could use Morris' arguments about the evolution of the city-state demonstrated through burials and Sourvinou-Inwood's contention on the changes in the fear of death and eschatology over time throughout the history of Greece. This article worried me.

The problem that Morris seems to have with Sourvinou-Inwood is not her understanding of the history (although he sees this as simplistic) but more with her use of analogy for the construction of her theory. I find the analogies not to be particularly useful-- they are certainly not evidence-- but just because the analogies might be poor does not make the argument incorrect. More to come...

Spirited: Notes on My Thesis, #2

I was walking through the corridor at the Getty in an attempt to find the stairs, when I found something amazing. This vase may not look striking at first glance-- it has muted colors and much of the paint has worn off the vase-- but to me, it is absolutely incredible. I will explain the reason behind my awe at such an unimposing object.

Like many Geometric vases, this vase displays a burial scene. On one side of the corpse, there are men with one hand on their heads, indicating mourning, and keeping the other hand behind them. On the other side of the corpse, there are women, shown with two hands on the top of their head, indicating mourning, and possibly, pulling of their hair as a sign of grief. A man and a woman head the procession on each side and touch the body. These are presumably relatives of the deceased and the artist indicates both their relationship and potentially elite status because they are larger than the other figures on the vase. There are two striking and exciting aspects of this depiction:

Athenian Vase from the Getty Villa [1]

1. The vase differentiates the mourners by gender, and not only are their gestures are different, but men and women stand on opposite sides of the vase. This is exciting because it shows a marked difference from the undifferentiated mourners in Dipylon Vases in my last blogpost.
2. There are two figures differentiated strongly through gesture from the other figures. I am not an art historian so this may be a little shaky, but I think there is a stronger sense of individualism in these figures than the ones in the Dipylon Vases.

So what does this have to do with either tragedy or Plato, you might ask (since this is called "Notes on My Thesis")? My thesis specifically focused on Plato's criticism of male lament in tragedy and the cultural context for this critique. Although there may be many earlier (I used art history surveys rather than vases  to analyze the trend of representations of mourning), this is the earliest vase that I know of which indicates not only a strict division between the sexes during prothesis [2], but also signals that there was a difference in the ritualized lamentation of women and men. Although the gestures certainly serve as a marker for the genders, the skirted women and the bare legs of the men provides a sufficient  indicator of this difference and it is only reinforced by the differences in the stances of mourning.

Endnote

1. This is "Storage Jar with a Funerary Scene," a terracotta vase made in Athens between 710-700 BCE. Photographed by Sulpicia III.
2. The prothesis was the parading of the body as it was mourned by the family before burial.

Spirited: Notes on My Thesis #1

I have been meaning to put up a summery of my thesis for a very long time. I have not put it up partially because the thesis took up such a part of my life and I just have not been able to look at it again [1]. I practically had to pry it from my hands before going crazy like Dow Mossman with  The Stones of Summer, as was reavealed in the lovely documentary, the Stone Reader.

I have just begun to reread it to see if it needs any editing before I send pieces of it out as a writing sample. I remember thinking, after I wrote it, that it made the ideas that I was elucidating so clear and easy to follow that anyone could read it. I even included a summery of the Republic, the Phaedrus, and the Laws for those who had not read them. However, rereading my abstract, which was essentially a page-and-a-half version of my conclusion, I realized that it actually a lot denser than I remember. This may have been because by the time I wrote my abstract I was working 5-6 hours a day on my thesis and I could no longer think straight about anything else.

My introduction was a summery of the most important parts of the three texts I referenced for my work. My first chapter was a thorough textual analysis of Republic Books 2, 3, and 10 (each of which discusses Plato's critique of tragedy and poetry). I also formulate an understanding of the various jabs at tragedy and poetry in the Laws which are scattered throughout. My analysis focuses on two aspects of the critiques: 1) the way in which Plato's texts violate the critique espoused in them and 2) the differences between the critiques in the Laws and the Republic. For the second point, I relied upon Catherine Zuckert's insightful dating scheme (presented in her excellent 2009 tome Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues) to explain the differences in the critiques by the Athenian Stranger (Laws) and Socrates (Republic).

More to come on my thesis in the next installment...

Translations I recommend:

For the Republic I would recommend either Allan Bloom's translation or the translation in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series, edited by GRF Ferrari. Bloom's Translation is very literal because he believes that Plato's meaning comes from reading in between the lines and that the only way to do that is to have as literal a translation as possible. In some ways, I like this theory of translation and his translation is very good. His essay in the back, however, is awful. Ferrari's edition provides a solid translation-- a little less literal than Bloom's-- but also provides a set of very helpful notes that are not tainted by Bloom's ideology.

For the Phaedrus, the Aris and Phillips Classical Texts edition is fabulous. Rowe, the translator and editor, provides helpful commentary (on the English) and the edition is equipped with facing Greek. Unfortunately, there is not a particularly good grammatical commentary for the Greek in this edition, but there aren't very many commentaries for the grammar of the Phaedrus in general. Both this edition of the Phaedrus and Ferrari's edition of the Republic were recommended to me by a fabulous professor of mine who served on my thesis orals board.

For the Laws, I have only read two translations. However, the one I preferred by a wide margin (and also the one recommended by the afore-mentioned fabulous professor) was the Penguin Edition:

Endnotes

1. My blog was originally titled Fragments from Thesis Hell, after the popular phrase from a number of different universities, Postcards from Thesis Hell. I renamed it Fragments of Sulpicia when I graduated.