My colloquium paper overview is essentially finished. It magically shrunk from 15 pages of convoluted argumentation and allusion to a tightly written 6-page statement of direction for my dissertation. I am pleased with this. I may post it here soon. Meanwhile, my chapter breakdown is a big mess. I have about a million ideas and I don’t know how best to logically order them. Right now, I am conceiving of the dissertation as three long essays–each respectively on the theory, practice, and politics of postirony–the first of which is called “The Malignant Public Sphere of Postmodernity,” the second “Hip Capitalism and Commoditized Irony,” and the third “Serious Politics.” Which is all well and good, but I have to be much more specific in my chapter descriptions and even propose an argument or two. I feel like I’m slogging through the muck right now, and that everything I write is logically predicated on establishing things that I mean to establish in later chapters. Ugh.