The Big Picture

I've always been looking at a four-chapter dissertation, but I've alternated between organizing those four chapters around formal binaries (sequential image; image-text) or organizational contrasts on the book history side (printing; engraving). Like Harmon or McLuhan, I'm attracted to tetrads because they emerge from a binary of binaries. In other words, if you have two ways to slice a cake, you have a tetrad. Most of your stakes, then, reflects back to the manner in which you sliced the cake, eg, 'Why organize things around sequential images and image-texts? Are these really essential?' The problem is that nobody else cares about these stakes. Even if the stakes come from theory (eg sequential image; image-text) those stakes only resonate with a specific community organized around that theory.

I think the profession still organizes itself around authors, and so the stakes of a dissertation still have to be communicated to author-specific audiences. In an archive like mine, which has a long horizon, that means I have to snatch up some representative authors from throughout the print industry. It helps to have playwrights and poets from the 16th and 17th C.

Right now, I have plans for chapters on Spenser, Shakespeare, Middleton, and Milton. But this is not ultimately a chronicle of Dead White Men. Each author had major works mediated or re-mediated through image-texts. And each author was immersed in a productive community of publishers, printers, collaborators, etc. So part of the argument of each chapter will dissolve each of the Dead White Men into a set of media and relations.

So far I've described the set of stuff I want to talk about in each chapter. But the real challenge is finding the verb for every thesis, eg, 'This archive shows this' or 'proves that'. I don't think that's something I can find until I start writing.