#diss tbc

[finnlongman]

Word-vomited 750 words of this article onto the page today. No idea if any of them will stay. Haven’t even opened my dissertation to try and mine it for existing material -- at the moment it’s just me throwing ideas at the page and hoping some of them stick.

Honestly, the premise of this introduction is basically, “Okay, but what if Cú Chulainn being trans and also a monster means he’s EVEN MORE of a hero???” so, y’know, that’s the mood.

The last line I wrote (my favourite one, probably):

Cú Chulainn is not born, but made: renamed and recreated through his own actions, from a child into a hound into a hero.

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

okay so i have read a lot of stuff and been in dissertation hell for a few days now so maybe i’m just a wee bit hysterical but this

this is the best possible quote to start a chapter about cu chulainn

this is just top notch

“cu chulainn: not the messiah, just a very naughty boy”

[finnlongman]

"Finn, when can we read your dissertation?" update 10/05/19

Supervisor's advice is basically to reshape it as an academic article and treat it as a piece of research rather than as an argument (as in a diss), plus following up references I didn't have a chance to do the first time around and developing points I sort of threw in right before the deadline.

So. Okay. That's quite big.

Also hahaha yikes that'll be fun without academic library access. (On the plus side, at least I own the relevant recensions of the Táin, so hey, there's gonna be a lot of intense primary source reading / direct lit crit and minimal dependence on secondary critics since I can't actually rely on them until I have a library again. But still. I spy some trips to Cambridge or at least the British Library in my future. Also some #icanhazpdf requests to The Muddle Ages.)

Anyway, I guess it's time to go scouring Celtic Studies journals to see what kind of length and structure we'd be looking at...

[finnlongman]

In the absence of progress towards making my dissertation available to read, here is an excerpt from the introduction. This is essentially the abstract, before I went into more detail about methodology and scope and whatnot.

aka “behold! an attempt to write in a formal academic style”

[finnlongman]

More dissertation completion photos because honestly, I've put my heart and soul into this thing, I'm going to milk it for all it's worth.

[finnlongman]

a four-second summary of my dissertation

[finnlongman]

Chasing up those last few missing references for my dissertation... (with help from the Clare library -- thanks for getting these for me, Elysia!)

[finnlongman]

Some dissertation progress pics from Instagram, since I forgot to post them here. I am incapable of keeping my desk tidy when I'm working. Also sometimes I can't think on screen and just have to scribble all over something.