thesis topic panic.

Thinking about my thesis makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

I have these random bursts of thought that I always regret later. Here are a few examples so you can see how absurd my thought process is. I think it's kind of funny. Not really, though. Because it's my life I'm dealing with here. It's the cumulation of my undergraduate education, perhaps my formal education in general.

The first day, about three weeks ago at 3pm, rational but uninspired, patient:

The southern writer in the postmodern world
The tragic sense of southernism – made for better literature
I’m more concerned with backwoods, Appalachian writers
Assertion that southern writer doesn’t experiment? Wha? James Agee???
Tradition and modernity – the new south
Self-reflexivity and the failure of language (why there are photos)– representing humans, those who are not traditionally represented? Loss of human connection?
Identification in Southern narratives – feel the pain, feel the consciousness -- an attempt to escape from lack of connection
Writing after Faulkner! What happens?

Two weeks ago, middle of the night, nervous, cold sweat:

Language as a construct of the Southern experience – attempts to Represent a Region
The search for the self – very modernist – through language
Loss of self and connection to industrialization – a uniquely southern problem
The south wrote to work out the conflict between strict regionalism and close community connections with their desire to become part of the modern world.
Some instances: disruptions in: time, narrative voice, consciousness,
James Agee – inability of human connection – industrialization impeding on religious, cultural, and, finally, human connection.
Mark McGurl
"Understanding Iowa: Flannery O'Connor B.A., M.F.A."
Advisor adviser dialogue

Sunday night, 1am

I would like to talk about the disconnect between language and experience in James Agee’s work and this disconnect in photo-texts in general during the Great Depression. This disconnection attempts to signal the death of the written word and it therefore reflects the hopelessness and disconnection of the modern period. However, it is a uniquely southern phenomenon. There is no such thing as a “Northern” literature, yet there is always an attempt to define a “Southern” literature. James Agee’s work addresses the constant need to define the South and the complete absurdity of such a suggestion. From Matthew Brady’s photographs of the Civil War to Evans’ photographs of the poor whites in the Great Depression to Eudora Welty’s photographs of blacks in the South, the region holds fast to the modern idea that region is indefinable, that culture is fragmented, that human experience is impossible to translate clearly from one person to another. Southern writers are constantly burdened with the representation of their region. No Northern writer of this time set out to prove the viability of Boston or New York. But the South had to attempt to define itself – a wholly absurd ritual in Southern writing. Therefore, while these photo-texts seem to attempt to augment the power of the written word with the “realism” of photographs, Agee posits that both of these representations fragment experience and that language – be it written or in images – can never capture human experience. It is a hopeless and cynical perspective, and one that survives in many contemporary novels by writers from the South.

8pm, today, desperate, please someone tell me what to write about, grammar and coherency falling apart:

Agee’s novel is an invasion of the home space, a violation of what so many northerners have called “southern hospitality.” The great southern photo-texts of the documentary era attempt to define home space through words and pictures. But the ultimately exoticize the notions of comfort, making everything about the south wholly foreign. Thus, while Evans’ still-lives of the south attempt to augment the power of Agee’s written word, both distance the reader further from the experience. Agee’s project, in effect, truly is larger than him.

Where does this leave representation of the south? Does it leave any room for understanding a region that has been cast as foreign, out of our world?

Just right now, I really want to go to sleep and wake up and have this all figured out:
Photo-texts as exhibitions of the Platonic idea of pharmakon. Should literature be banished from the republic? From the south? Does it dilute our experience of the world? What about photography? What about my own idiocy?