Diary of a Viva Ninja: Day 30

PhD Thesis as a Fantasy Map by Kevan Manwaring 2018

As Diane Wynne-Jones says in her witty Tough Guide to Fantasy Land: ‘no Tour is complete without a Map. Further you must not expect to be left off from visiting every damn’ place shown on it.’ (2004: 131)  Because of the cliché of a map in Fantasy I deliberately resisted including one in the novel, but I thought it would be a fun way to summarize my thesis – in a pictographic (or rather cartographic) form. By spending an hour or two doing it I benefitted from the fugue space of drawing – an effective way of preventing the brain from overheating. I spent every day of last month doing a pencil sketch (see Sketchtember) and last year I undertook Inktober, but this year I have to be careful about what I take on. Now is a time for consolidating, not dispersing my energies – but I’ve missed doing my daily sketch. It was an effective counter-balance to the linguistically-intense computer-based work I do on the computer. Undertaking this ‘cartographic thesis’, I amused myself with little jokes, such as the ‘Sea of Citations’ and the ‘Arctic Circle of Criticism’, and yet thinking about these things in a visual way helped to show their influence on my project. As with many Fantasy maps, the Secondary World depicted often bears an uncanny resemblance to this world — the wobbly continental blobs a kind of Mappa Mundi: this Earth transmogrified through the writer’s imagination. And so I consciously riffed on this, finding satisfying ‘rhymes’ between my Thesis-world and Earth-world, such as the ‘subduction zone of published works’ – ever increasing and ever undermining the inevitably limited scope of the project.  To see the creative component as a kind of ‘New World’ and the critical as the ‘Old World’ was also helpful. One optimistically expansive, the other, enmeshed in the complexity of critical discourse, the geopolitics and psychogeography of the academic field and one’s subject specialism. And of course, at the edges of the map dragons lurk – waiting to challenge the more idealistic Shangri-Las of my argument.   I would recommend having a go at this for any large-scale project you happen to be working on. It can be an effective way of summarizing and presenting your research, and anticipating potential ‘conflict zones’. Plus, it was great fun.

Wynne-Jones, D. (2004) The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land. London: Gollancz.