I am a published scholar! - so to speak
Oh, dear, one finds all kinds of weird stuff on the Internet if one suffers from bouts of insomnia. Out of sheer boredom I googled myself. What popped up on the screen is my blog, of course, a couple of comments under my I left on various personal websites; also, unbeknownst to me I am a perpetual member of The Canadian Association of University German teachers and I am still an M.A. candidate at Queen's, neither of which is valid: I haven't taught any university German in 3 years (as a matter of fact, I've forgotten half of my German) and I defended my M.A. in June 2002.
What almost floored me was seeing on the screen the following title: "Images of the Feminine in Romanticism" , A Study of Friedreich de la Motte Fouque's Undine" by Brankica Turalija. http://collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/MQ59407.pdf. I knew, of course that it was filed like any other M.A. thesis with the Canadian National Library, but it wasn't available on the Internet until now.
Those of you who have been there, who deliciously suffered through the trials and tribulations of 'scholarly' writing would know that once a thousand nights worth of scriblings are bound in maroon leather and the title covered in gilded letters, they are put on the highest shelf and the stuff is barely open ever again.
Frankly, I wouldn't have been able to give you the full title of my thesis. You know when actors say they don't like seeing themselves on the screen because they realize how many things they could have done better - well, something similar happens with writers of M.A. theses, I suppose. Rereading them is quite painful as you see - from a historical perspective - how you could have done things differently. I am still gathering courage to read through it again. The problem is that you spend so much time with your subject and you lose track of what was your original idea and what you possibly read or heard about while talking to someone in the field. As much as I loved pouring over Romanticism and reading all I could find about images of the feminine in different epochs and cultures, at the end I was simply exhausted and I couldn't wait to ditch Undine, my little unfortunate mermaid, and the feminine.
It is, however, quite nice to see something you wrote filed and published by the National Library of Canada -of course, I realize I know every thesis is published regardless of its brilliance or the lack of it. I remember checking out and quoting other "unimportant" people's work after searching the National Lib. of Canada (trus me, you'd quote your local market seller if it contributes to proving what you're trying to prove!): Imagine, someone quoting the little me, "as B. Turalija claims in her "Images of the...." - wow! What a feeling! So, two years at Kingston got me not only a university job in Korea but also the pleasure of saying: Im' a published author - and not only in The Hansung Times, our little school's paper. Vivat Academia! Vivant Professores!
posted by Magistra @ 2:04 PM
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