As the title implies, I have been busy getting back into the rhythm of things after a delightful few weeks back home. I will try to remember what exactly it is I've been doing.
It has been quite cold since I've gotten back to Durham, and we even got a fair amount of snow over the past week or so, which was very lovely until it all turned to sheets of ice that took up a good quarter of my route into town, making travel somewhat hazardous. Luckily, the majority of it melted today, so I can start wearing things other than boots again. I like being able to walk places without running the risk of going arse over teakettle.
I am sucking it up and buying some itty-bitty bookshelves for my bedroom because I lack shelf space (and just space in general) so I'm compromising by getting shelves that are super shallow and will fit behind my bed against the wall. This has the dual benefit of giving me more places to put books and also getting my bed farther away from the wall that has a tendency to grow mould. Hopefully this will work. Hopefully I will have enough handyman skills to assemble the things by myself. It will be an IKEA adventure!
I've now had both of my novel groups and my combined honours class start up again, and I'm definitely noticing that I'm getting more comfortable leading groups and thinking of good leading questions to ask while going with the flow of conversation. I'm also particularly glad, I think, for the one-on-one meetings I have with my English students at the end of the previous term, as that seems to go a long way towards making my students feel comfortable with me as well. I don't have the luxury of doing the same with the CH group, and I'm bracing myself for the next CH session in a couple weeks time, as that will be all about genocide and various thinkers' reaction to the Holocaust, which will obviously be difficult for everyone including me. I'm thinking I'm going to take a full weekend to read up and prepare.
On my own work, I'm currently assembling a detailed outline for my last chapter, which will diverge from the previous models of my chapters and use a particular critic--F.R. Leavis--as a framework to look at the combined legacies of my central authors. I have high hopes that this will really make the rest of my material gel, though some of the connections between him and Shelley, for example, are going to be somewhat at a remove, seeing as Frankenstein didn't really get any critical reception from anyone until very late in his career. I'm still figuring that part out.
I'm also writing out a less detailed outline for my whole thesis, with an aim towards marking off what specific things I have yet to add and how transitions between chapters are going to happen. This is both more intimidating and more exciting, as I'm stumbling across various points of synergy that I hadn't before considered, which is great but of course requires more writing. My to-do list will probably grow exponentially for a while. But at least it's full of fairly concrete things, like, "You should definitely finally get around to reading that extra book" and "actually go through and make sure all of your spelling is British".
There are other things going on as well, like choir and the AHRC grant getting started, but that can wait for another time. In short, lots of things are happening, but I like being busy.
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