Doctoral blogging

So hi there, I'm back with a PhD degree! As for blogging all about the event, I'm afraid that I gave up on immediacy on this occasion too. And the defense (including the celebration) seems to have taken place at the expense of my immune defense, but still - it's a thrill.

I used my newly adopted power point skills to show a few pictures, book covers and text examples - no key words or bullet points, but during the reception afterwards, my graphic illustration (see above) of rhetorician Richard Lanham's notion of a toggle switch was classified as "downright consultant chique" (konsulentlækker). There's a blurb for you - and a cliffhanger, since I won't be getting into Lanham and his 'toggling attitude towards utterance' and the 'at/through oscillations' tonight. But it's all about the rhetor's ability to toggle from depth to surface; from serious to playful; from being absorbed to being analytical - a quality and an ability that I argue can be especially well realized in spectacular personal reporting.

None of the three official opponents mounted a wild hobbyhorse of their own (as other opponents on these occasions have been known to do), but discussed my work more or less on the terms laid out in my dissertation. Not that they didn't question everything - the possibility of establishing a stable genre based on two such diverging figures at all, my way of analyzing, my way of interpreting and being sometimes too implicit, my somewhat essayistic writing style, my way of being normative, the immanent ideology of the texts under scrutiny - but it seemed to me that they questioned it for all the right reasons. For clarification or to make me develop a thought that hadn't been presented or treated with proper care. So they didn't just pass judgment, but were all pointing forward. And I really appreciate that.

There may have been about a hundred people there to listen, including my family and otherwise familiar faces, but none of them posed a question ex auditorio when the opportunity was there, so one out of five half hours was left unspent. I had expected to perhaps be confronted by visiting reporters - or readers - with first hand experience and strong opinions of personal and spectacular writing, but that didn't happen on this occasion. Looking in my mailbox though, it seems that there will be other such occasions in the coming months. So see you later, says Dr. I