apocalyptics: Method

Friday, 08 October 2004

Method

Trying to think more clearly about method and structure.

Although I was pleased with the cold war/war on terror comparative structure that Liz and I came up with at our last meeting, there have been a nagging set of doubts in the back of my mind. Partly I think that is because the focus might then become a history focus, and would involve a whole other set of historiography issues that I am not familiar with.

One of the advantages that it gives is that it provides a very clear structure and narrows the field of enquiry to a more specific set of questions. But I think that is also part of my problem with it.

I have been thinking about my evolving model of myth and going back to the MA thesis proposition that the concepts of narrative identity and intertexuality can help us to develop a better model of myth for working with journalism texts. Part of the notion of intertextuality is about the multiplicity of interpretation and reference. Certainly this could work in terms of an intertextual relationship between the two texts, or rhetorical structures "cold war" and "war on terror". This shift the focus to texts rather than eras, which is helpful.

However I have a range of other questions that I also want to address.

First I have been thinking about what I am calling "the personal apocalypse" as opposed to the "communal apocalypse". How do we think about apocalypse from the perspective of narratives of personal identity and psychoanalytic ideas such as hysteria and suicide? (Interesting book in terms of this: Knotted Subjects: Hysteria and its discontents)

Second in terms of a historic comparison there is an idea floating around in my head about the rhetoric of presidential images and a comparative look at Kennedy Nixon Reagan and Bush, which would obviously relate to cold war/war on terror but is more specific in terms of how the specific images of these leaders produce particular apocalyptic narrative. But again this takes me back to the domain of history and I think I am better equipped to handle contemporary texts. (Interesting book in terms of this: Nixon's Shadow: History of an image)

Thirdly I am interested - and this is difficult - of finding a way, a form, to write the thesis that is imaginative, discursive and reflective as well as academic. I don't want to come up with a structure that in a sense militates against eclecticism. One of the issues here is that I want the thesis to reflect the multidimensional intertextuality of the contemporary apocalyptic narrative, the broad range of expressions and their intertextual relations is in a sense one of the main reasons that I think apocalyptic narratives are so interesting as cultural phenomena.

Posted by Marcus O'Donnell at 12:57 PM in The Thesis | Permalink

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