An albatross, of sorts

These are some sources for my essay. I've read them and marked passages (faintly with pencil or - mostly - with post-it notes) and sometimes typed out the notes. Unfortunately, on coming back to the book (or print-out), I've almost completely forgotten what I'd read a few days before! But somehow it will all come together.

The research is the best bit - coming across something interesting and looking deeper into it. Of course you risk losing your grip on where the essay itself is going. Structure, structure, structure...

My case studies may consist of a painter, a calligrapher, a visual poet, a sculptor - though it's hard to choose! There are many others whose work is fascinating (Chris Drury, Tom Phillips, Hanne Darboven, Robert Grenier, Henri Michaux, Christian Dotremont, Brion Gysin - not to mention the drawings-on-writing here, ) but one must be ruthless.... I also have some theoretical underpinnings, and, most important,  the glimmer of a conclusion. Every critical/analytical essay needs a conclusion. After all, "the learning outcomes will be evidenced in the following way:

- Ability to formulate a specific research question. 

- Ability to contextualise that question within a critical framework. 

- Ability to form an independent conclusion.

- Professional presentation of the research paper adhering to the academic structure and the Harvard convention."

My research question goes something like this:

"If writing and drawing inhabit a continuum, when a painting or drawing contains marks that look like letters, are we  reading it or perceiving it?" (The difficulty of formulating this question exactly gives rise to a suspicion that we could be heading for stormy waters....) Maybe it's the wrong question; probably the way forward is to write  the essay and reformulate the question to reflect what's been written. As it stands, does it help structure the rest of the work? What issues does it raise that need to be clarified?

"If..." first catch your rabbit - do drawing and writing inhabit a continuum? I think so: look at how children start by drawing letters, before using letters for writing words.

How do marks come to look like letters? Can we be "fooled" by marks that look like letters in non-roman alphabets?

What do we mean by reading - what sort of information, and what sort of knowledge on the part of the reader, is needed? How does looking (and seeing) work? Are there forms of perception other than the visual that come into play? (Maybe not, but you can't overlook that possibility.)

I'll be using social anthropologist Tim Ingold's conception of writing - what might be called his theory of linearity - to examine this question, and will be considering asemic writing; visual poetry; "life writing"; and gestural painting [though this list might change...]. The analysis will incorporate various theoretical views of drawing and/or writing (Derrida, Barthes, Krauss, Benjamin) and (might) include a short discussion of reading as a cognitive process for deriving meaning. The conclusion involves the role of reading and of "understanding art" in a historical and contemporary context, and draws on Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital.

That precis is a long way from the mind map I drew some weeks ago. Many things on that map won't go into the essay - this topic could be enormous. I'll be keeping away from non-alphabetic writing (though it's tempting to look at work by Xu Bing or Gu Wenda) and from pictograms in general. The interrelation of illustration and text - eg captions to photos - is off the list. As are calligrams and modern musical scores, shorthand and codes. Ditto typography used in a pictorial way (eg in concrete poetry), and "words as art" (eg Laurence Weiner). Perhaps there will be a little section with exact reasons for excluding these - if so, that section will be added right at the end, once I've figured out exactly why...

Bibliography, 300 word abstract, 5 keywords, Harvard style references - such are the hoops we jump through! But we can rejoice that the technical aspects of producing the final copy have come a long way since the pre-tippex, cut-and-paste (literally) days of typewriters, carbon paper, and midnight oil. (I used to type theses before the days of word processing - with footnotes at the bottom of the page, and many pages retyped because the footnotes didn't fit.) Hurrah for the automatic footnote and for Track Changes. Start by getting the bibliography ready, and you're well away.

But the words, the words; oh, the words ....4,000 are needed. I'm using blog posts to trick myself into getting some of them down in sequence. The bare bones at least. (Editing is easier than writing...) Also, writing the posts (succinctly) does rather focus one's thinking ...and reveals gaps in it. 

For many of the full-timers on my course, English is not their first language. Later in the year they too must jump through the essay hoop. Hats off to them.