Episode 1119: Minor Dissertation Crisis

Minor dissertation crisis before I left for church. Was trying to get on with revising my dissertation proposal, when I happened to come across an article published in PRISM: USP Undergraduate Journal, published by NUS, which basically analyses the intertextual relations in the Firstfruits anthology Reflecting On The Merlion: An Anthology Of Poems, as well as making an attempt to map the transitions between them onto the narrative of the Western literary tradition, and commenting on the implications the poems have for Singaporean national identity. So that's basically my original thesis statement pretty much proven (and then some). Now I'm trying to find a way to take this analysis to the next level, which I think has to involve in some way the argument that the national identity thus constructed has always been provisional and sceptical about itself, fundamentally uneasy about the traditional East/West binary that postcolonialism purports to challenge. This doesn't seem like much though, so I'm thinking of also grounding the discussion of the Merlion and Singaporean national identity within the concept of liminality, and somehow tying that to a postcolonial approach. It's all quite confusing in my head at the moment, and I'm sure as I read more, it'll get clarified more and more, but for now, I just need to get some sort of revised proposal out!