Hannah Swithinbank

Acknowledgements

So, yesterday I had my viva. I’m still quite out of it, and haven’t processed the fact that it’s done, I’ve fixed my typos and am about to go pick up the bound copy and submit it. Meantime, I wanted to post up my acknowledgements…
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I owe a great deal more than gratitude to the many people who have supported my progress. My first thanks are due to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the University of St Andrews’ School of Classics, the Thomas Wiedemann Fund and the Classical Association for their financial support and to St Andrews’ School of Classics for their administrative support, without which this project could not have been carried out.

Secondly to my supervisor, Jill Harries, who has been a font of wisdom and support, my heartfelt thanks. I owe much to her ability to encourage her students to follow their odder ideas whilst still keeping them on the right track, and to her understanding of when they need to be pushed and when they should be sent home to put their feet up. I am also indebted to Christopher Smith for his years of support, and to Jason König for encouraging me to read Foucault in the first place.

The School of Classics has been my second home over the past four years. It has been a pleasure to be a part of such a convivial postgraduate community; my thanks to Alexandra Albury, Jeremy Armstrong, Adam Bunni, Ralph Covino, Victoria Crook, Carmen Cvetkovic, Katie East, Susanne Gatzemeier, Joe Howley, Sarah Jordan, Trevor Mahy, Gwynaeth McIntyre, Jamie McIntyre, Daniel Mintz, Sam Moss, Andrew Neill, Mark Philippo, Julietta Steinhauer, Estelle Strazdins, Amos van Die, Allison Weir, Paula Whiscombe, Evan Williamson, Katie Wilson, and Laurie Wilson for making it so. I would also like to thank the staff in Classics their part in making the School such a supportive and vibrant environment in which to work, particularly Ralph Anderson, Emma Buckley, Jon Coulston, Adrian Gratwick, Alisdair Gibson, Emily Greenwood, Stephen Halliwell, Jon Hesk, Harry Hine, Dan Hogg, Sian Lewis, Alex Long, Rebecca Sweetman and Greg Woolf. Beyond the School I am grateful for the stimulating conversation and wide range of ideas provided by Michael Bentley and Anthony F. Lang, and by the members of Theoria, notably Sarah Dillon, Bettina Bildhauer, Christina Chandler Andrews, James A. Andrews, Ben Davies and James Stedman. I would also like to express my gratitude to Henriette van der Blom, Alison Rosenblitt, Malcolm Schofield and Kathryn Welch for their ideas about my work, and to my examiners, Roger Rees and Jonathan Prag.

Gratitude, affection, and a lifetime supply of cookies must go to my wonderful friends who have helped to keep me, if not exactly sane at least tolerably well balanced: Jessica Armstrong, Daniel Bigler, Naomi Brown, Fiona Byrne, Jenni Caldwell, Eleanor Carleton, James Davies, Katherine Davis, Emma Dollard, Krisz Echegoyan, Lisa Evans, Katherine Fletcher, Caroline Friggens, Danielle Gera, Laurence Goodwin, Melanie Hartley, Andy J, Robert Lamont, Zoe Lee, Tom Leppard, Naomi and Malcolm McCloud, Claire Newdick, Fiona Raffell, Hannah Stewart, George Swithinbank, Elizabeth Thomas, Pauline Tucknott, and Stacy Whitmore.

Finally, to my second families at Eden Fellowship and Hayle Methodist, and to my parents, for all their love and support, no thanks can ever be enough.

Is Back Home

Sitting in front of the tennis watching Federer and ignoring Robson (who isn’t doing herself any harm with her performance, even if she does go down to Hantuchova). I have seventy thousand photos to process still, but that’ll happen (slowly), and seventy thousand words to edit. I have a print out of the thesis-so-far and am wielding the pink muji pen over it to try and sort out the two problem chapters to the soothing sounds of tennis balls being hit too and fro (and this is why I won’t be watching much women’s tennis – the grunting, it is NOT soothing).

Tanzania ended in a Battle Royale with Kenedy (albeit with less blood) which we finally won. Fortunately, Zanzibar is such that it’s appeal can survive even his awfulness in the memory. Dar not so much – but then there is so little to do, and it’s horribly humid, so it’s not so appealing. We spent our last day on the Msasani Peninsula relaxing at Sea Cliff Village. I got very excited because there was a Spur, which I know from holidays in South Africa, and so we ate amazing steak, and waffles and ice cream, whcih meant there was no room for plane food at all, fortunately.

‘Tis graduation this week, so I’m trying to pack in the work between catching up with the boys who have come back from New Zealand, the US and Cambridge for it. It’s quite like old times, bizarrely, except now Gwyn and I are hard at work in the office (at Jamie and Jeremy’s old desks), and we can make them tea monkey for us. So it’s all go, and I just decided to add to my busy by booking some Edinburgh tickets for the summer. I’m off to see Moon on Tuesday, and Adventureland on Friday at the Film Festival. Now I have tickets for Neil Gaiman and for Gerald Scarfe for the Book Festival, and the Early Edition on the Fringe – that’s my August treat to myself, as I’ll be desperately wrapping up the thesis.

72,125

That is how many words are currently in the “Thesis Text” document on my computer. All the thesis bar the conclusion is now drafted. This is deeply, deeply, exciting to me. Yes, I have to do a good amount of editing on two chapters, and make sure that I my argument says what I want it to say without deviation, repetition or hesitation. And yes, I have to pick up some bibliography and throw it at the footnotes so that I can fill the ‘learned’ criterion, as well as the ‘orginal’ one. But this is all editing. I have very few New Words to write. It’s actually delicious.

And so I have beer. I have Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. And I have about 500 photos from Rome still to edit… But I like this plan for the evening.

help!

I have just written the following sentence: “The form of the Philippics both dictates and encourages the the rhetorical creation of such a semantic vacuum.”

Clearly I need saving from myself.

the circularity of politics

I now have a footnote in my thesis citing Matt Yglesias and George W. Bush’s speech to this year’s Republican Convention.  The footnote lurks in a chapter on the Philippics right now, although it will move, in the final showdown, towards the conclusion as I chat happily and not at all ominously about the problems of the existence of multiple understandings of political concepts in the Late Republic.  Basically my line of argument, at the moment goes something like Cicero says so-and-so is a good citizen because the things that so-and-so has done benefit Rome, which begs the question of who gets to decide what actually benefits the Republic.  Answer, pretty much no-one, they all just fight about it, which is all pretty much fine until someone rocks up with an army to back up their side.    That someone in this case being Mark Antony, whilst Cicero, having attempted to push Antony out of Rome as a non-citizen ended up with his head and hands cut off and nailed up in public.

So this is me on Cicero on good citizenship: ”Nonetheless, this remains Cicero’s own understanding of the good citizen, not a universal one, and his tendency to define other understandings of political concepts, as wrong and dangerous for the Rome, rather than accept the possibility of their validity in a different understanding of the nature of the res publica precludes the opportunity for negotiation and compromise that might have enabled Rome to avoid civil war.”

I wrote that on Tuesday.  Yesterday I was doing my usual trawl of the internet, being thoroughly entertained by the noise and comment coming out of the US election and especially the Republican Convention.  It’s much more fun to watch when it’s not your political system that’s the circus.

This is a line from George W. Bush’s speech on Tuesday night:  ”Fellow citizens: If the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain’s resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry left never will.”
This is Matt Yglesias on that line: “The analogy between American liberals and Vietnamese Communists is extremely offensive. As is the analogy between criticizing McCain’s policy ideas and subjecting him to physical torture and imprisonment. As is the imputation of bad faith — that right and left can’t just disagree about what’s best for the country, but rather in Bush’s view the left is self-consciously pushing a bad-for-America agenda.”

What Bush is doing – and what his government and the Republican hierarchy (hello Karl Rove, especially) – has been doing is to make the left, personified in the Democratic Party into dangerous un-American criminals who have no place in American public life. It’s more than a little terrifying – especially if they win the debate.  Of course if they don’t, they probably won’t end up with their heads on sticks.  I’m not saying that that’s a shame, but I wouldn’t mind people being able to at least throw eggs.

I hate structure

Why can I not just present my ideas in bullet point and let my readers work out the line of argument they want to take through them. That would truly be a postmodern thesis.

Sigh. Supervisor numero due wanted me to put together some rough word count ideas for my thesis plan. Haha. This meant I decided to go through all the sections I have written so far and try and work out what I have, word-count-wise, on each topic. If only it were so easy. I should know by now that things don’t fit into neat little boxes of structure with flowing arguments. Working out whether constitutional structures should be talked about before citizen behaviour is frankly the least of my worries. Oh this year is going to be so much fun. 80,000 words of writing here I come. To think that the easiest bit is going to be explaining Foucault and making him relevant.

Hopefully the fact that I’ve done most of the actual work will help? Hopefully. If only because I procrastinate more when I’m reading than when I’m writing. Eeeeeeeee.