Episode 1201: New Day, New Discovery

The more I work on this essay, the more I discover things to write about that I hadn't thought about before. Specifically, while writing out the close reading portion I mentioned yesterday, I started looking into the origins of the character of Ubu. Turns out someone's written an article about Alfred Jarry's cycle of plays from which the character originates, advancing an interpretation that can be adapted to address a niggling gap in my own essay. It does mean having to rejiggle the bit that I'm currently writing, although I think it's for the better this way. The broader picture the essay is trying to paint should eventually be more coherent, emerging naturally from this initial close reading of the opening pages of Eunoia's five chapters. What I've got to do now is figure out exactly what I'm going to say at this point, as I have various ideas that I want to put in and that I know can be made to fit together, just better in some ways than others. It's a question of moving from tiny details in the text to a wider theoretical perspective, but not losing sight of the need to constantly return to those details in order to back up all the theorising. There's so much going on in Eunoia that it's hopeless to try and cover all of it in a 6000-word essay. I mean, Bök took seven years to write it, so I really doubt seven days is going to cover it for an analysis. What I need to do is pick and choose examples that prove my thesis, which shouldn't be that hard. You could literally pick a page at random, and something in that paragraph could be used as an argument in support of my thesis statement.