Well, the cat's out of the bag!  I'm a Master of the Narrative Arts.  (Thankssheepwhatsleeps for the excellent post!)

I'm still pretty dazed by the last few days.  This whole experience has been beyond what I ever expected when I applied for grad school.  I can say with all honesty that my success in the last year or so has come as a surprise to me...albeit a welcome one.  It's strange to find myself blathering things about this subject matter (of which I knew next to nothing two years ago) and to have scholars whose work I greatly admire treat me as a peer...but that is what the defense felt like today.  People would ask questions, and I would talk...and heads would nod up and down (along with a few in the back who nodded down, and then nodded off.  It did go on for a bit) and somewhere in all of this it somehow became evident that I wasn't just spouting rhetorical jibber-jabber but was instead making informed points about my topic of choice.  Overly long points, perhaps, but informed points.

Given that only 24 hours earlier I couldn't string together an extemporaneous sentence to save a drowning puppy this was like some discursive Miracle of Chanukah.  Less than a year ago these ideas didn't exist anywhere except in my head...now they're in a .pdf file on a webserver!  That's huge!  I'm overwhelmed!


For those interested in reading the thesis, it (more)...