Moving right along...virtually, figuratively, and literally!

I don't really think anyone reads this blog, but if for some strange reason you do, and would like to keep continuing to do so, as of today I have moved all the content over to a new blog on Wordpress. I will continue to update my scintillating research progress there. So as of today, this forum is dormant. I'll keep it up for a while, but will eventually delete it. Consider yourself warned!

The URL for my new site is:

http://ellenrees.wordpress.com/ 

Do please come check it out, o reader (if you exist) and better yet leave a comment telling me what you think about the new format.

Flighty

Losing focus, and forgetting to post! I went back to chapter three and discovered that I'd been a little over eager in my cutting and pasting. Cleaning it up brought be down to 17 pages, and when I took stock it sure didn't seem very inspired. I decided to put it into time out and take a look at chapter 4 instead. I re-read Gunnar Larsen's Weekend i evigheten and wrote a page of introduction. Not quite sure why I'm so fragmented and unfocused right now. I guess there's just too many other things going on...

WORDS WRITTEN: a few

Whirlwind

I forgot to post on Monday. I did some work on the book, but it was pretty minor and scattered, and now a day later I can't even remember what it was specifically. Today I didn't do any writing, but I was very privileged to get to have a discussion with a colleague in another department that was super helpful in relation to the Wergeland section of chapter two. So there's things happening, but not really enough to report on in the usual way...

Exponential

Some days I really feel like I'm cheating. I sat down with my book outline this morning, and realized that I have published articles on every one of the texts that will make up chapter three. That means, of course, that I was able to copy large sections from those articles and paste them right into chapter three. Not everything will stay, quite a bit will be altered, and quite a bit more will be added, but still, I added over twenty pages in the course of ten minutes - that has to be cheating, right? At this rate, I have every hope of being done with the nineteenth century by the end of June. Suddenly the whole book seems do-able in a way that it never has before.

Numerically speaking, I've got over 29,000 words total for the whole project, which is pretty astounding. Whether they're good words or not is a completely different matter, of course. In terms of chapter three, I'll have to work really hard to recontextualize the sections that I've pasted in. Basically, in each of the four articles I have discussed the cabins in a particular context, and those don't all relate to the thrust of this chapter at all. The analyses of the cabins themselves are still useful, but I'll be relating them to different questions and to each other in new ways.

Oh, I did add one little piece of original writing to chapter two too, so I'm not totally coasting on my past glory.

WORDS WRITTEN: about 50

WORDS CANNIBALIZED: 7170

Myriad

I just googled "10,000" to see whether there were any cool names for that number, and learned that "myriad" actually means 10,000. I thought it just meant "lots." The whole point is that I passed the important myriad threshold on chapter 2 this morning, as I finished off the Wergeland section.

Even though I'm eight pages short of the 40-page goal, I think I'm going to call it finished, at least temporarily so. I doubt I'm going to be able to go any further with it unless I add another text, which I don't have. At this point, it will probably be more productive to move onto the next chapter, where I have a lot of material to work with, than to get bogged down in this one, which is probably always going to be the weakest of the project, no matter what. It's been so long since I looked at my full book outline that I can't even really remember what the focus of chapter 3 is, so it will take some time to reorient myself in the material.

ETA: I think I'm going to drop the Biedermeier raptus from last week, or at least put it in indefinite time out. It turns out to be a bigger problem than I thought, and though I'd still like to tackle it, it's going to have to wait until I'm further along with the cabin book.

WORDS WRITTEN: 383 for a grand total of 10,051

EATA: I really wanted to get at least a symbolic start on chapter 3 today, rather than putting it off until tomorrow. So, even though it's meager and weak, and will probably be jettisoned, I've now got 243 words down. Yay!

Squeeze

Things are really heating up at work, with grading and interviewing candidates for a position in my department all coming to a head this week and next. Today I barely had time to work on chapter two, but I forced myself to squeeze a tiny bit in any way, just to keep the momentum going, even if it turns out that what I wrote was crap. I read Wergeland's "Skildringer fra Hytterne" and added a little section on it. It still needs to be expanded and better integrated into the section on Wergeland, but at least it's there now as a place holder...

WORDS WRITTEN: 447

Back to the grind

I forced myself to take a break from the Romanticism/Biedermeier thing this weekend. I had some reading to do for something entirely unrelated, which I got through, and then this afternoon I took a little window of time  while the family was away to reconnect with chapter 2 of the cabin book. I reoriented myself in the chapter, and added a few little bits here and there. Most of the bulk came from adding what I had on Scribe the section on Collett's Amtmandens Døttre. I've made it onto the top of page 29, and I now know specifically what I need to do to finish out the analysis bits: I need to get Wergeland's article on the homes of the working class, which he published in his journal For Arbeiderklassen sometime in the early 1840s. To be honest, I didn't know that the phrase "working class" was in use in Norway in the 1840s, so it will be interesting to read his "edifying" writings for the workers. Seems pretty darned patronizing if you ask me...

WORDS WRITTEN: 440

On a tear

I started the day with a library run. On more or less a whim I picked up a recent collection of articles on Welhaven, and I found the perfect jumping off point for my little polemic on Norwegian Romanticism, an article by Eirik Vassenden called something like "Welhaven og den andre romantikken." He does a great job of presenting the perfect evidence for my claim, and then turns around and essentially argues the exact opposite. So strange!

At any rate, it really got me going, and I wrote quite a bit in response, and also did some digging in the literary histories. I checked out Edda's editorial policies, and noticed that they also have a shorter category of article that the publish that the designate as debate contributions. I'm wondering if I perhaps should aim for that format?

WORDS WRITTEN: 923

Progress, of sorts

I finished off reading the introductory chapters to the books by Nemoianu and Aarseth that more or less form the core of the analysis I'm trying to make of Norwegian literature 1814-1848 in relation to Biedermeier. I still feel on very shaky ground, but a few things fell into place while writing today, and a rudimentary article form is starting to materialize in the roughly five pages I have now. Did I mention that I'm writing it in Norwegian? Always a challenge, though easier and easier the more I live and work here. I was not as convinced today that I really have something to say about this "problem," which yesterday seemed so blindingly important, obvious, and overlooked. I had a critical voice droning on in my head almost the whole time I wrote today. I hate that, but sometimes it does keep one from making really big bloopers.

WORDS WRITTEN: 1226

Raptus

Today was a weird day. After critiquing a colleague's article draft I settled down to reading background material for chapter two. I had a total aha experience from reading the introductory chapter to Virgil Nemoianu's  The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier (1984). The book presents a two-stage understanding of romanticism that the author divides into high romanticism (roughly 1790-1815) and the watered-down (or more rational, depending on your point of view) Biedermeier (roughly 1815-1848). This makes total sense to me, and I am really enjoying reading his comparative study, which argues that the specifically German term "Biedermeier" makes sense in other literary contexts as well. He doesn't mention Scandinavia (at least not as far as I can tell so far), but much of what he says applies directly to what I'm working on.  


It struck me that Biedermeier really is a term that could shed new light on that backwater in Norwegian literature. I'm really stoked about pursuing this further, and banged out a little over a page that I think may turn into a new article. The current working title is "Romantikk, poetisk realisme, Biedermeier: 1814-1848 som norsk litteraturhistorisk problem." I'm really excited about this! At first I was thinking that I could some how integrate it into chapter two, but it really is a different (though tangentially related) subject.


So no writing on the chapter, but I got a lot of relevant reading done and apparently have started a new project...


WORDS WRITTEN: 625

Romantic

This morning I was able to wallow in potential texts for inclusion in chapter two. Which is to say I downloaded searchable  PDFs of first editions of important early nineteenth-century poetry collections and other works, and poked around for references to cabins. Rather unexpectedly, I was reminded of a Wergeland text that I taught last year, "Endelig slaaer ogsaa min Klokke" from Hassel-Nødder, which gives a wonderful account of Wergeland's search for a cabin to buy. It fits perfectly with his play Fjeldstuen, which is the key Wergeland text in this chapter. I added a section on that, and I also added a little bit to the section on Herre. During a break with a colleague I was able to talk the Wergeland bit over, and was reminded of the term Biedermeier, which is big in Danish romanticism but not Norwegian. I'm now wondering if it applies to Wergeland in any meaningful way.

Finally, I also made a library run and got a bunch of articles on Romanticism and the authors I'm working on. I read an article by Henning Wærp on ruins, an article on Scandinavian romantic drama, an article on the nineteenth-century critical reception of Maurits Hansen, and an article on Bernhard Herre's position in the Norwegian canon. Next up is what I think will be a very important secondary source, namely Odd Arvid Storsveen's article on Wergeland's views on class: "Håpet om folkets oppvåkning: Fra For Almuen til For Arbeiderklassen." I'm particularly excited to read that one.

After today's session, I'm thinking that I may actually have enough primary texts, now that I've added Hassel-Nødder. My guess is that all the contextualization that I'm getting from the secondary sources will easily fill the rest of the chapter.

WORDS WRITTEN: 680

Yes!

I'm in shock! I woke up this morning early feeling obligated to push a little further on the Herre section of chapter two. I started working my way through the last of the three narratives I'm going to discuss, "Skogene," and as I started writing about it things quickly started to fall into place. I took a break and took a shower, and as so often happens I had a moment of clarity where I was suddenly able to see the conceptual differences between the shielings I wrote about in chapter one and the cabins I'm writing about in chapter two. Suddenly it all makes sense. I sat back down and wrote out the beginnings of a conclusion to chapter two where I try to sum up these important conceptual differences. I'm so excited! I'm also excited about the fact that through the course of all this I produced a bunch more text, and am now on page 25.

Next up is to read the scant secondary literature on Herre and look at the poetry that I mentioned in my previous post. That can wait until Monday. For now my work here is done, and it's only 9am!

WORDS WRITTEN: 1076

Friday the 13th

Today I had about six hours of work time to divide between some administrative work, a job application letter, and chapter two. Contrary to my usual practice of doing research first, I did the administrative stuff first, then the job letter, and left the writing to last. It worked out okay, though I was pretty uninspired about writing initially. Or rather, it's not so much that I was uninspired as out of practice. Once I got going it went okay, though nothing stellar. I started filling out the section on Bernhard Herre's En Jægers Erindringer, which turns out to be a little pearl of a book. Three of the stories directly link class and cabins. The secondary literature says that they were pretty heavily redacted by Welhaven and Asbjørnsen before publication, which really makes me want to go to the National Library and take a look at the original manuscripts, if they're there. I'll try to do that Thursday or Friday next week.

I still feel like I'm missing a text for the chapter. I'm thinking that there are two areas I can look: one is more of the early material to fill in around Storm. My old master list of cabin texts includes a Poul Juel book from 1721 (already in the introductory section of this chapter), two poems by Johan Nordahl Brun ("Den norske Agerdyrkning" and "Den gamle Nordmand eller Gjenlyd fra Norge &c."), and a poem by Claus Frimann called "Jetersang" (1790). The other option is the poetry and travel writing of J.S. Welhaven.

WORDS WRITTEN: 717

Burst

My son wet the bed at 4am, which turned out to be a great thing. I spent last night reading articles, and so when I was jolted out of sleep at dawn my head was filled with my chapter, and I started fretting over what's wrong with chapter two. Rather than toss and turn, I got up and decided to start writing. Two hours later I have nearly two pages of material that totally clarifies how I need to focus this chapter. I'm thrilled. Thank goodness for bed-wetting episodes, otherwise I'd never be able to write!

WORDS WRITTEN (before 7am): 527

ETA: crazy day. Didn't get much time to work on the article, but I passed the magical half-way point for word count: 6041 words.

Little steps

I'm not quite as down on this chapter as I was yesterday after today's session. It still has some really big holes, and it feels a bit like "å koke suppe på en spiker" but a few things fell into place, at least. Although Vinje doesn't stay at or write about cabins at length, it was worth reading the book for his references to Scribe and to Maurits Hansen's "Luren," a reference I discovered toward the end of the book today. I added a paragraph on each point in the appropriate sub-chapters (didn't keep track of how many words). I may also end up adding a reference or two to Ferdaminni to the seter chapter, since Vinje is all about the seter girls...

I skimmed Bernhard Herre's En Jægers Erindringer today, and found some material that I may be able to use, including the short story "Carl," which has the distinction of taking place here where I live.

Finally, I photocopied nine articles on Hansen and started reading them. A few points are starting to crystalize, and thankfully they relate directly to my theme of class identity and national identity. And I discovered that the book on Hansen that I don't have (the Tysdahl book as opposed to the Øyslebø book) offers a new reading of Hansen's use of class as far more problematic than previous scholars have recognized. That's great for me, as I will then be able to build further on Tysdahl (who is a lovely gentleman, by the way) consciously in my analysis. And finally, I noted in passing a comparative point that I may want to write an article about in the future, especially since it looks like no one has analyzed it thoroughly (hush hush, this one...).    


WORDS WRITTEN: I dunno, maybe 200?

Quick and dirty

I totally didn't expect to get anything done today, since I had to stay home with my son. Surprisingly, he was willing to play on his own in his room for a good long stretch, so I was able to sketch out the section on Asbjørnsen's "Reensdyrjagt ved Ronderne." Still lots to do (everywhere in this chapter, actually), but at this point I'm just desperately filling in the major blanks.

This chapter doesn't feel nearly as strong as the one on the seter, which is kind of a bummer. I really think I need another text or two, and I don't really know what that could be. One idea is Bernhard Herre's En Jægers Erindringer from 1849, but I'm afraid that one actually has more to do with the seter chapter (one of the stories is called "Sæterpigen og Jægeren"...). I'll have to go back to my master list of cabin texts. Or maybe check out some of Welhaven's poetry? Gulp... I'm not even half way through the chapter (only onto page 15 out of a planned 40). Of course I haven't referred at all to secondary literature as yet, so I'll have to go in and insert any relevant analyses I can find.

No writing for a while, as I'm going to have to get through 200 more pages of Vinje's Ferdaminni frå Sumaren 1860 first.

WORDS WRITTEN: 1231

Moving right along

Okay, today I got most of the section on Maurits C. Hansen's "Luren" nailed down. It ain't pretty, but it's there. Tomorrow I have to stay home with E, so I won't get much work done I'm afraid. My next task is reading Ferdaminni frå Sumaren 1860...

WORDS WRITTEN: 1165

Minimal

Really struggling to pick up momentum after a "real" Easter break and then overseas conference attendance. Today I squeezed under an hour of working on chapter two in between teaching and administrative duties. It wasn't even real writing, just cut and paste. I took most of the material on Wergeland's Fjeldstuen from my Peer Gynt book to use as a starting point for the new chapter section on that play. I'll need to rework it quite a bit. For starters I added a few sentences about the play's literary historical significance (it's the last long work Wergeland wrote) and I noticed a strong parallel to the class dynamic in Hansen's "Luren," which is probably the most important text for this chapter. So I managed to confirm that it is indeed appropriate to be using this play in the chapter.

There are two more sections (I think) to add before I can start filling out the entire chapter: one on Asbjørnsen's "Reensdyrjagt ved Ronderne" and one on Vinje's Ferdaminni frå sumaren 1860. The Asbjørnsen section should be pretty straightforward, but the problem with the Vinje section is that I haven't even finished reading the text yet, so I'm not even sure it will work!

I forgot to record how many words I added. The document grew from 7 to 10 pages.

Sunday Scholar

I was lucky enough to have about three hours to myself this morning before the rest of the family made its appearance. For some reason I was really determined to see if I could get some writing done, rather than just surfing the internet as I usually do over my leisurely breakfast, and lo and behold it worked (and really, it was equally entertaining).

I pretty much rounded off my analysis of the cabin scene in Camilla Collett's Amtmandens Døttre. There's some more background information to add, including discussions of the various discourses (Enlightenment, Romantic, Victorian) regarding the cabin, but that will have to wait since I don't have the sources lined up. I did spend some time skimming the parts describing Norway in Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). That's such a fascinating book, and the attitude she has parallels much of what one finds in Amtmandens Døttre. I'm now up to 2067 words for the chapter, so around 10,000 (and a ton more research) to go.

WORDS WRITTEN: 1056

Why, hello

I really didn't think I would be posting anything here for a good long while, as I have had a nasty list of non-research, non-writing tasks to get through before the Easter break. But somehow today I found myself with a two-hour block of time and no desire to work on my taxes or grading, and the only thing else I could possibly justify doing was starting in on chapter two of the cabin book. And so I did.

I typed in the title and the chapter sub-headings, pasted in a section on Hansen's "Luren" and started writing new material on the "fisker Anders hytte" sequence in Collett's Amtmandens Døttre. Boy does it feel good to be underway again!

WORDS WRITTEN: 1011 (only 11,000 or so to go...)

Done as dinner

I spent four hours today working on my conference paper on Trolljegeren, and I think I'm calling it done. I actually spent a lot of time on it yesterday, but that was mostly just reading articles and the Asma book, re-watching the film, and taking careful notes. Today, though, I wrote. I had four pages (1086 words) from my writing session last week, and now I've reached the bottom of page eight, which is pretty much the limit for a 20-minute conference paper for me. I think it came together really well, and I'm looking forward to putting together the slide show to accompany the talk. I have tons of still shots to choose from. The film continues to crack me up, and for me at least it functions very well on a bunch of levels. The comedian Otto Jespersen, who can be a total asshole in his satire, is spot-on brilliant in the roll of Hans the troll hunter. He makes the entire film.

I'm sure I'll do a little more tinkering between now and the conference, but it sure is a relief to have this squared away. My next two tasks are US tax returns and my job application, and then it's back to the cabin book and chapter two.

Words written: 1683

ETA: Yikes, that has to be a record: three days of work for a conference paper?! Surely there's something wrong here.

Reading day

I woke up in the middle of the night with some ideas for my conference paper that I jotted down before going back to sleep. Unfortunately they turned out not to be so good when I woke up in the morning.

Instead of writing, I spent the day reading Stephen T. Asma's On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. It's a good read, but it's not really helping all that much with the Trolljegeren paper. Sigh.

Onward

Today I added one tiny quote from the Hult book, which bumped me onto the fortieth page of chapter 1. I really can't believe it, so I'll let it stew for a while while I move on to other things.

My main task today was to get started on my Trolljegeren paper for the upcoming SASS conference. To be honest, I wasn't expecting to get much done because a good friend who is in town wanted to have a writing boot camp together. I booked a meeting room for the day, and since we get kind of wound up and chatty when we're together I didn't think it would actually be productive. Much to my delight, I did get a good solid start on the paper, and also spent some time going through the film looking for stills to show in the presentation.

I'll be working from home tomorrow for the first time in a long time and I'm really excited to do that. All my commuting has been wearing me out. If I'm lucky I won't be out of my PJs at all. I still think I do my best work that way.

WORDS WRITTEN: 1054 on the conference paper, and maybe 50-75 on the chapter (I forgot to check).

Chapter draft

I'm calling the first full draft of chapter 1 done! I was able to go through and make all the corrections and changes I had scribbled down on my chapter print out a few days ago, and, moreover, was able to add a significant amount to the section on Asbjørnsen. I know I need to add some secondary literature there (specifically Marte Hvam Hult's book, which I'm off to borrow again), but basically the chapter is done. I am ecstatic!

I now have to turn my attention to a conference paper, which I'm giving myself about 10 days to write up, then it's on to chapter two and Maurits Hansen, Henrik Wergeland, Asbjørnsen (again), Collett (again), and possibly Vinje, though I really need to read Ferdaminni fraa Sumaren 1860 first in order to make a decision about whether to include it!! I can already feel that many of those bits are going to fall into place pretty easily, so I'm quite excited about it. My self-imposed deadline for this chapter is 1 June.

WORDS WRITTEN: 1407 for a grand chapter draft total of 11,867 words or 39 pages.

Minimal

I did minimal work on the book today because I was distracted by three other things: a grade complaint, some theory reading for my upcoming conference paper, and my job application cover letter. The latter got me pretty revved up.

I did some minimal editing of chapter 1, printed out the whole chapter, and read it through for flow and transitions and order. There were a lot of things that need changing, but most of what needs to be there is in place, and the rest is pretty cut and dried. It will be fun to sit down tomorrow and start doing the final stage editing.

But even minimal work is better than no work, right?

WORDS WRITTEN: probably about 20, but I didn't check since I was mostly just doing copy editing...

A burst

I had a little burst of work today and came up with the beginnings of a conclusion. I started out really simply with the task of translating the Bjørnson section, and then the summarizing thoughts just kind of appeared. Who knows if it will be worth keeping, but at least it's a start.

WORDS WRITTEN: 1003

Molasses

Working today was like molasses. I had such a hard time getting motivated, but ended up getting in a productive push after all. My problem was that I had a lot of reading to do, which I basically just had to give up on and start writing instead. Once I was writing I could be a little more surgical in my reading, and stopped dozing off.

I started out easy by translating the Asbjørnsen section (which was really short) and ended up deleting a bunch of it, since it didn't really fit. Then once I'd done that I went back to one of the texts I'm working on and then found some really relevant passages that I could analyze. I'm excited about how it's coming together, especially because of how strongly the gender aspect comes through. It finally dawned on me that all the folktales collected in the frame narrative (and the frame narrative itself!) are all about negotiating marriages, which of course is the main point of this chapter on "national romances." It sounds painfully obvious when I write it out here, but really I just hadn't seen the connection previously. D'oh.

I also added a tiny conclusion to the section on Fjeldeventyret which I think sums up that section in a strong way. It was only one or two sentences about the possibilities that the play's open ending suggests, but I think it makes a big difference because it connects the analysis more directly to the rest of the chapter.

The cabin project lecture last night ended up being an amazingly positive experience. I had expected an audience of foreign students, but nearly everyone was Norwegian. There was a group of three graduate students who asked brilliant questions afterward and even invited me along for a beer (I had tea instead, since my throat is still hurting) and a really enthusiastic and enlightening conversation about all kinds of things. It was so much fun, and also a huge relief that the Norwegian lay audience didn't think my theories were full of shit.

WORDS WRITTEN: hard to say since I deleted a bunch, but this draft now has 450 more words than the last one.

Catching up

I've been out of town for a wedding, then sick, then preoccupied with a bunch of other stuff. I did get a tiny bit of work done on chapter one on Tuesday, but I forgot to post about it. I did both some rewriting, adding, and cutting and pasting.

Tonight I'm giving a public lecture on the cabin project, so I spent the entire day putting together my slides for it. I think it was a useful exercise to go through my arguments and try to formulate them for a general audience. I think I was able to articulate one or two of the points I have been trying to make in a useful way, so that's something at least. Also, I realized that the term "epiphanic culture," which I've been throwing around in my film course because of an article by Mette Hjort, actually relates really well to the cabin project.

I pretty much have all of next week to work uninterrupted, so I'm really hopeful about getting the chapter draft done. Here's what I have left to do:

• translate Bjørnson section
• translate Asbjørsen section
• re-read Asbjørsen's Huldreeventyr
• add more material to Asbjørnsen section
• revise full chapter for logic and flow
• consider adding discussions of "Et farligt Frieri" and Daglannet to Bjørnson section

Aside from the book work, I got a really exciting email yesterday morning inviting me to apply for a professor position at a small college within driving distance.

WORDS WRITTEN/ADDED: 721

Cheating?

Today was another day of cutting and pasting, and I feel kind of like I'm cheating when I do it. I jumped from 19 to 28 pages today, partly by writing new material, but also from adding some chunks of writing taken from two other papers. Both of them were written in Norwegian, so they'll have to be reformulated. I started working on that, but I realized that I'm feeling really tired (I was up at 5 this morning), so I think I'm going to call it quits for now. The important thing is that all the major pieces of this chapter are now in place, except for a conclusion. Of course there's a ton of work left to be done beyond the conclusion. Each section needs to be rewritten and expanded, and transitions and linkages need to be strengthened. But at least now I can start to look at it as one cohesive unit. Eventually, I'd like it to come in at around forty pages, so I've still got lots of room to expand. I'm going to print it out now, let it sit for a day or so, and then give it a careful read-through before diving back in to revise. But for now, I'm super happy with how this has progressed, and I feel pretty confident that I'll be able to tell myself I have a complete chapter draft by April first, which has been my goal all along. After that I have to write a quick conference paper, and then my next major milestone is getting a complete draft of chapter two by June first.

WORDS ADDED/WRITTEN: 2734

A good day

Today was another productive day. I woke up with some good ideas that I was able to jot down before the day started, I finished reading Amtmandens Døttre and picked up a bunch of additional secondary literature at the library. And I had a good stretch of uninterrupted writing time to pull things together in.

WORDS WRITTEN: 1490 (darn it, had I known I was only 10 words shy of 1500 I'm sure I could have come up with something else to say...)

A little flurry

I've been reading Amtmandens Døttre in between weekend activities, and I realized that I really needed to gather together my thoughts in some notes, even though I'm not done with the novel (which of course I've read a bunch of times before). I was able to get down almost two pages, and saw some interesting connections.

This week is going to be hectic with all kinds of non-research activities lined up, so I'm glad to be able to squeeze a little flurry of writing in before the storm of other things hits.

WORDS WRITTEN: 652

Gratifying

Today was one of those days that scholars live for. I woke up with some clear ideas for the chapter I'm working on, and got some uninterrupted time before everyone else got up to sketch them out in some notes.  When I got into work I had a three hour stretch of time to work on the chapter before other commitments kicked in.

I did the fun job of cutting and pasting material from other projects (conference papers and an article) into the chapter, instantly increasing my word count by ten fold. Then I started working further on the ideas I had had earlier in the day, which all related to Camilla Collett's Amtmandens Døttre, a novel I haven't written about before, though I've taught it and read it many times. It's all too vague to discuss here, but I started to suspect that my approach might just possibly have the potential to contribute something entirely original to the scholarship on that novel. I'm not quite sure yet, but I'm optimistic.

I also had some ideas relating to the rest of the chapter. Originally I thought that each of the six texts would receive equal weight, but now I'm wondering if I should divide it into four, with the first section devoted to the first three texts (all of which I've published on elsewhere) and then the latter three sections to Huldre-Eventyr og Folkesagn, Amtmandens Døttre and Synnøve Solbakken respectively. I'm thinking of all of the texts as examples (to a greater or lesser extent) of national romances in the sense described by Doris Sommer.

The chapter would break down to something like:

• no more than 5 pages of introduction and theory
• 10 pages of analysis of the seter motif in the early texts (Storm, Bjerregaard, Riis)
• 10 pages of analysis of the seter motif in Huldre-Eventyr og Folkesagn
• 10 pages of analysis of the seter motif in Amtmandens Døttre
• 10 pages of analysis of the seter motif in Synnøve Solbakken

Whoops, that looks kind of boring when I outline it like that. I'll have to think about it. Another idea that came up was to contextualize the budeie or seterjente in relation to theories of the female national icon (like Britannia or Marianne), which I learned about recently from a WIP exchange with a colleague. It strikes me that this is almost the only way to make sense of the budeie, Aagot, in Fjeldeventyret, since she serves no purpose in the dramatic action of the play.

Tomorrow I have to go to an all day seminar, and I feel like I need to re-read the novel and the secondary literature again before I can pick up from here, but at least I got a solid chunk of the chapter worked out conceptually and on the page today.

WORDS ADDED/WRITTEN: a whopping 3,521!

365 pages in 365 days?

And we're off! Today, March 8th, on the International Woman's Day I wrote the first page of my book on literary cabins. I've been thinking and talking about this project since 2006, and I'm finally sitting down to do the writing. Kind of amazing that it has taken me this long to settle down and just do it, but for some reason I've built up a whole bunch of neuroses about it that I have had to work through. But now, officially, the writer's block has been forced, and I'm underway!!!

I just jumped right in at the beginning of chapter one, and will take it from there. The chapter deals with six literary texts, five of which I've already done preliminary work on (conference papers and one published article). Surely I can pull this off, right?

WORDS WRITTEN: 374

Space cadet

Today was supposed to be the day that I completely finished fixing all the quotations and providing translations. I was foiled, in part by a library mystery and in part by my own absentmindedness. The university library didn't have a single English translation of Fruen fra havet, and what I though was my copy of the English translation of Nokon kjem til å komme turned out to be a different Fosse book (d'oh!).

I did go through and add translations of all the quotes from the secondary literature, and converted all the Norwegian quotes from Fruen fra havet from the school edition I'd been working from to the official HIS edition of the play. I also did a little tinkering with what I had written along the way, so it's starting to shape  up a bit. My colleague and I decided that we're both ready to send off our work to each other today, and we'll meet on Monday for a critique session. I'm really jazzed about that! They're always so fun and so incredibly helpful.

The article still doesn't have a decent title, which kind of bothers me. I'm worried that it's an indication that the article doesn't really have a clear point...

Crank

Okay, it took a whole package of Pringles to do it, but I think I finished a decent draft of the article today. My stomach feels gross, but I have 20 pages of text that appears through my saturated fats-induced haze to function as a coherent argument. I can't wait to do the WIP exchange next week to find out how I can make it better.

I'm off to the library to pick up an English translation of Fruen fra Havet and the Henrik Ibsens Skrifter version of the original so that I can spend the day tomorrow on the niggly work of making sure all the quotations are right. This translation-less draft is 6912 words, including the bibliography. That means that I wrote a smidge over 1000 words today. Yay! I'm so relieved, and am anxious to clear the decks and dive into the cabin book, fi-na-lly!

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 1178.

Going somewhere...

Today was a productive day. I read an article on the ferry in to work today that sparked a little idea, and I was able to flesh out one of the languishing sections in the Fosse/Ibsen article. And I was finally able to make a little bit more sense for myself of the whole "unspeakable" issue that I've been grappling with. It's still not worked out enough for me to be able to work on that section, but at least there's a little movement going on.

I also realized this morning that the abstract deadline for a conference on Imagining Spaces/Places (!) in Helsinki (!) in August is coming up really fast. I definitely want to go to it, since this is exactly the main thrust of my research, and since I haven't been in Finland since 1996 (!). Here's what I came up with:

“The Real Norway”: Cabins in Norwegian National Identity Construction

The process of nineteenth-century “nation building” in Norway was a remarkably self conscious and literary endeavor. Subject as it was to the vagaries of continental warfare and politics, Norway appears to have quite literally written itself into existence while under Swedish dominion. Like many peripheral cultures, Norway sought to construct an identity that would distinguish itself from other nations. Quite early on in the process the physical landscape was identified as the primary source for such distinctions, as scholars such as Gudleiv Bø and Nina Witoszek have argued. Without an established urban culture, Norwegian intellectuals turned to the only alternative available and idealized nature, a strategy that continues to resonate even today in Norway’s relations to Europe and the world.

In my reading of nineteenth-century Norwegian literature, however, I find that the “place” of the burgeoning Norwegian nation is not, as others suggest, in the untamed wilderness of fjord and mountain (Bø 2000, for example), but in a far more domesticated and paradoxically transgressive space, namely the hytte (cabin).

It is possible to trace varieties of the cabin motif—the seter (shieling), the hunter’s cabin, the logging hut, etc.—throughout most of the Norwegian literary canon; It appears prominently in the works of Wergeland, Collett, Bjørnson, Ibsen, and Hamsun, among many others. In this paper, however, I examine an early and nearly forgotten national romance, namely Maurits C. Hansen’s short story from 1819, “Luren” (the lur). In it, Hansen employs the space of the cabin overtly as a metaphor for the nation, negotiating class distinctions and creating a new, unifying vision of the not-yet-independent Norway. As I will demonstrate, it is the liminal or transgressive nature of the space of the cabin itself that makes Hansen’s vision of what he un-ironically calls “the real Norway” possible.

The Hansen thing was really the start of the whole cabin book project conceptually, though I have yet to write it all down. It's great to have the opportunity and motivation of a conference to get it pulled together. 

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 1041 on the article, plus 300 on the abstract.

Unspeakable

Argh. I'm trying to write, and I feel like it's mostly just B.S. So frustrating. I can't seem to settle down enough to really grasp the conceptual issues at state in the two plays. This business with the "unspeakable" is, well, really hard to talk about! All I did today was fill in little details here and there.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 629

Ambiguous

I had a little more time to devote to the article today. I've been reading Fosse's essay collection, Gnostiske essay over the past week, and have also read the introduction to Fruen fra Havet in HIS, and a couple of articles on the play, the best of which so far is by Olav Solberg.

Things are starting slowly to fall into place. I got a tiny bit of writing done today, and I can tell that if I get a few uninterrupted days of writing in, things will really start to fill out. I focused mainly on the respective ambiguous endings of the play, and more on the setting.

I also took the (in my view) brave step of composing a letter to Jon Fosse. I'm having a colleague look at it today. I want to ask him whether he sees any similarities between the two plays, or whether he thinks my idea has any merit at all. I'm loathe to send it in one way (I hate the idea of bothering an author at work), but on the other hand I'm really genuinely curious about what he thinks.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 623

Wee work

I had just an hour to devote to the article today. But something is better than nothing. I tried to add to and clarify the paragraph on the unspeakable. Little steps.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 223

Unspeakable

I actually had a full 7-hours today to work on the Ibsen-Fosse article. I spent the first hour in the library locating and copying articles on Fruen fra Havet. The rest of the time I divided between reading articles and adding sections to the article. It came together pretty well, but I still have a long way to go. I kind of rounded off the section on plot and character, and the section on setting, and started in on the section on "the unspeakable." It's all still pretty shaky, but on the way home I think I clarified the "the unspeakable" section a bit more for myself. It will be good to return to it (probably not before Thursday, unfortunately) now that I have a better idea of how to structure my argument.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 917 words

Små skritt

Crazy day today, with all kinds of administrative stuff, but I still managed to get a little work done on the Ibsen/Fosse article. I skimmed five or six articles without really coming up with anything useful. I did, however, find something useful in Helge Rønning's 2006 book, Den umulige friheten: Henrik Ibsen og moderniteten. I also made a list of things I need to pick up at the library, but didn't make it there to get them, so that will have to wait until Monday.

In between meetings I squeezed in a little bit more writing. Not enough, but something is better than nothing.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 683

New Goal!

With the Peer Gynt manuscript sent out into the world to perish or be published, I've been trying to retool my brain and get started on the next project. It's hard. I feel a little like I'm in Peer Gynt withdrawal, and I worry that I may never has as much fun doing research ever again.

 I've decided on a short term tactical project, rather than jumping right back into the cabin book. It's going to be a 20-25 page article comparing Ibsen's Fruen fra Havet with Jon Fosse's Nokon kjem til å komme. I got the idea some time in January, and have been compiling a bibliography and doing some reading and a tiny bit of writing in the background. Today was the first day of looking at the project in earnest.

I had 532 words written as an introduction and outline of the article. After reading about three articles on Fosse this morning, I found something (Rolv Nøtvik Jakobsen's "Vakkert eller boring? Ein resepsjonshistorisk tilgang til Jon Fosses dramatikk") that got my creative juices flowing. I also sat down and wrote out outlines of both plays - act by act.

I have probably spent about three hours today messing around with that initial introduction draft. I almost immediately jettisoned a couple of paragraphs, pushing me back to a meager 315 words. I'm now up to 1582, and much happier with the premise of the article. It actually even started getting a little fun toward the end. I should be able to spend all day tomorrow on it as well, so I'm hopeful that I'll be over the hump and able to be productive again.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 1267

Ta-da!

Today I FINALLY finished all the last details on the book manuscript and printed out two copies to send the potential publisher. I am so proud and happy. I know it faces a very uncertain future, and that I'm not really done, but I really want to savor the moment a bit. Exactly five months ago I woke up early on my birthday with a really clear conceptualization of the book, banged out an outline before the rest of my family woke up, and now less than half a year later there it is. I deviated surprisingly little from the original conceptualization. I added theory along the way, and found many more examples of the phenomenon I set out to explore, but the core of the idea held up, at least through to this stage. It feels GREAT!*

TOTAL PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN (not including the bibliography): 191 pages, or 57,770 words.

*Of course now I'll be desperately anxious about what the peer reviewers are going to say and whether the manuscript will be accepted, but I'm trying to stave off those anxieties for a little while at least and just enjoy being done.

Meme

Academic coach Natalie Houston posted a meme focused on planning for the next eleven months on her blog. I thought it looked like an interesting exercise, so I'm giving it a go here.

What do you want to learn this year?

What do you want to create this year?

What do you want to continue this year?

What do you want to let go of this year?

What do you want to nurture this year?

Who do you want to connect with this year?

How do you want to feel this year?

Where do you want to spend more time this year?

What support do you need this year?

What one change do you want to make this year?

Who do you want to be this year?

1. LEARN: I'd really like to learn the ropes of university administration in general better, and most especially the things that have to do with instruction. Still after two years here there are so many things that are unclear.

2. CREATE: That's easy! A completed cabin book manuscript.

3. CONTINUE: I want to continue the writing intensity and direction from this fall. I got into a really great groove that I'm hoping to recreate asap.

4. RELEASE: Social awkwardness?

5. NURTURE: That's easy too. I want to nurture the scholarly potential of the two MA students whom I'm lucky enough to be advising this term. It's so rare that I get to work with graduate students...

6. CONNECT: I'd like to connect with people in other departments more.

7. FEEL: I want to feel productive and positive.

8. TIME: I want to spend more time working from home. Not sure if that's possible. And I want to spend time in the US with family and friends.

9. SUPPORT: The greatest support I can get is uninterrupted time to write. Even on a postdoc it can be hard to carve it out.

10 WHO: The author of four books and thirty peer-reviewed articles. A good mother. A better spouse than I have been recently. A more attentive (grand)daughter. A strong role model for my MA students. A supportive and trustworthy colleague.

Resurfacing

It feels like forever since I've had anything to report on the book. I haven't heard anything back from the potential publishers yet, and I've been swamped by administrative and teaching tasks since the term started two weeks ago. Last week all I managed to do was fill out the bibliography more. It's very close to complete now. I haven't yet decided whether I'm actually going to go to the trouble to do translations of everything yet. Each publisher does it in a different way, and I would hate to go to all the trouble only to have to change everything one or more times. I think at this point I'm just going to submit the manuscript without translations.

Today, I decided I just needed to stay home so I could make at least a little progress on the final polishing of the book manuscript before January ends. I realized quite a few weeks ago that I had missed a major early national drama in my review of the light musical comedies that Ibsen wrote "against" in Peer Gynt, namely Peter Andreas Jensen's Huldrens Hjem from 1852. I found out about it when reading my colleague's article on Ibsen's journalistic writing from the early 1850s. Apparently Ibsen butchered the play in a review from 1852. I haven't actually read the review yet (I'll be able to do that on Wednesday, I hope), but I did find a copy of the play. I finished reading it today, and it fit really well thematically with the other four I've been looking at in comparison to Peer Gynt. It (like most of the others) is a dreadful play, but it's a hoot to see how Ibsen turns the interlinking set of themes and images that they all use upside down.

I was able to insert short discussions of Huldrens Hjem into the chapter without too much difficulty. I'm going to take a little break now and see if I can't put the finishing touches on chapter five too. I've not quite yet resolved what to do about the the Peer Gynt at Giza production from 2006. I need to do a better job of fitting it into chapter five somehow. Maybe just reading through the chapter will help.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 1207

Details, details...

Today I finally managed to arrange a trip to the National Library to revisit the Opøien/Øverland comic strip version of Peer Gynt. I was able to compare both versions, and thus figured out what was in the missing strips (sexual content! Anitra naked!), and also copy two articles about the comic strip from 1969 and 1970 that I needed to look at. It was then pretty easy to integrate that material into chapter three, which I'm now declaring totally done.

I can't remember if I mentioned that I skimmed all the older studies on Christianity in Peer Gynt earlier this week. It was good to get all that material in place conceptually, though it didn't add much new material or perspectives to my book. It was mostly just background material for the footnotes.

I also started reading Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Adaptation from 2006, which I should really have read before I started the project. I added a short paragraph on it to the introduction, and now I feel I have all my bases covered.

My friend L just gave me feedback on my conclusion, and had two good suggestions for revision, so I'll be thinking about those over the weekend.

Finally, I was lucky enough to have been given a collection of Ibsen articles that was just published. There are five or six articles that touch upon Peer Gynt that I'll try to get through this weekend.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN:  about 800

Switch-a-roo

Yay, today was another really useful day of revising. I stayed at home so that I could really concentrate on re-reading Skagestad's Peer Gynt parody, Det stig av hav. It took me a long time to make sense of the play, but I now feel I've got a good grasp of it.

My main revising task was figuring out how to improve the discussion of Det stig av hav into chapter three (what I had from before was really just a placeholder), which was already growing too long and cumbersome. In the back of my head all morning as I read I was mulling over what if anything I could cut from the chapter to alleviate the situation, but I didn't have any ideas until the moment I opened up the document on my computer. Rather magically, what I needed to do became instantly obvious to me, and I can't even believe I didn't think of it before.

I have two chapters in the book on literary parody: chapter 2 deals with Peer Gynt and the earlier plays that Ibsen himself parodies, while chapter three deals with late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century parodies of Peer Gynt. Back in December when I added the theoretical section on parody to the manuscript, I decided it had to be in chapter 3. This was a purely pragmatic decision: at the time, chapter 2 was long enough, and chapter 3 was way too short. But now that I've filled out chapter 3 in terms of analysis, it is actually way longer than chapter 2. It makes much more sense from a potential reader's perspective for the theory to come at the beginning of chapter 2, since it relates to both chapters.

It was pretty painless to extract the theory section from 3. I now have a separate document with that material read to insert into 2 when I get to work on Monday. And with those three pages gone, there was plenty of room to do a decent job analyzing Det stig av hav. Calculating words written today becomes a little tricky for my math-o-phobic self but here goes. I started with 10,523 words in chapter 3 and cut 754 for use in chapter 2. That left me with 9,769 words. I then worked like crazy on the new section and cut out nearly everything I had written previously, knocking me down to about 9,460 words. In the end, I came in at 10,185, with a vastly improved chapter and a net increase for the whole manuscript of...

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 725 words

Serendipity

Today was an almost uninterrupted day of work on the book. I added a bunch of citations to the bibliography and worked on chapters three and four. I've now passed 54,000 words and 180 pages, and there are still quite a few bits and pieces to add here and there.

Another book I had requested from ILL finally arrived, Robert Millar's Norges tredje turist attraksjon from 1945. It is freaking hilarious. I'm so glad it arrived, and I've already processed it (it's only 44 pages) and added a section to chapter four. 

Serendipitously, a colleague who has written an article that I didn't know about on Ivo de Figueiredo's Slipp meg happened to see it on my desk. She told me about her article, and I promptly read it. It's quite good, and is actually one of the few scholarly analyses that I've found that supports my argument about the ways that PG is used to produce meaning. I'm so glad she happened to stop by my office today!

Oh, I almost forgot to add that I made a kind of snap decision today while walking back from the library: I had been thinking that I would just send the manuscript directly to number one publisher as soon as it was done, but today I decided I really should follow protocol and send an inquiry first. I sent it both by email and regular mail. I think it was a good idea to get the idea of the book planted in their heads asap, while I continue to polish the manuscript for a few weeks more.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 706 or thereabouts

Harried

I got everything that was in my binders entered into my bibliography today. There are still many sources to add, especially newspaper articles. I'm going to have to go through the whole manuscript along with the bibliography and add the missing sources as I read along. Oh well, serves me right for writing in such a whirlwind of enthusiasm.

I added a tiny bit to chapter 3, but got distracted by administrative duties. I also read Tormod Skagestad's program commentary for his 1962 production of Peer Gynt  at Det Norske Teatret, which I didn't know about, and I sent out an inquiry to my colleagues asking for help identifying the figures in a satirical Peer Gynt comic strip by Steffen Kverneland. If you have a Norwegian IP-address you can see it here (go to page 30). I also saw in Store norske leksikon that Skagestad intended Det stig av hav as his contribution to the EF-debates of 1972, but it doesn't indicate exactly where he stood. I need to read the text more closely!

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: I don't know, maybe 50?

New Years Update

I actually did a little work between Christmas and New Years, but it hardly seemed enough to report. I wrote a draft of the cover letter I'll be sending to my first choice in publisher, along with a draft of the book prospectus.

Today was my first day back at work after the holidays, and I actually got a lot done.

• Got started on the bibliography, which has been nagging at me.
• Revised chapter 3, cutting a lot of material (forgot to check how much) and adding a new section on Skagestad's Det stig av hav for an increase of 366 words
• Revised the section on Peer Gynt, Inc. in chapter 4 for an increase of 144 words
• Added a new section to the conclusion on Peer Gynt-koden and "Peer, astroversjon" for an increase of 658 words
• Read Peter T. Newby's "Literature and the Fashioning of Tourist Taste," which finally arrived by ILL

I'm pretty happy with today's productivity, and feel pretty confident I'll be able to tie up all the loose ends over the next two weeks or so. It will be a great feeling to get the manuscript out and under consideration with a publisher.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 1,168 words