Initial basic structure for my dissertation (刘宾雁 and 王蒙)
After another meeting, my supervisor Dr Susan Daruvala helped me settle on a draft structure for my fourth year dissertation on 刘宾雁 (Liu Binyan) and 王蒙 (Wang Meng).
The draft title is Conflicts of Ideals and Practice: Trajectories of Wang Meng and Liu Binyan, and the ‘trajectories’ part of this makes up the bulk of the draft structure.
Currently the basic outline is as follows:
- Introduction
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- Biographical life events
- How their work differs
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- Approach to literature
- Political trajectories
- How Liu always sought to expose truth and ‘serve the people’
- How Wang’s politics seem more fickle
- How they were perceived by their contemporaries
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- Intellectual discourse
- Institution
As you can see this is currently just a skeleton of suggested ideas with some early reasoning behind them. It will almost certainly change and develop as I get further into my reading and research.
At the moment I have three books on my reading list for the dissertation, all by Liu:
- A Higher Kind of Loyalty (Liu’s autobiography)
- People or Monsters?
- China’s Crisis, China’s Hope
I’m hoping these will get me started on understanding Liu’s life and politics, and then I’ll move onto Wang. I’m planning to continually post short progress updates and notes about my dissertation in this way, partly to keep myself motivated and partly to give a little bit of insight into my whole process for anyone else who’s writing an undergraduate dissertation.
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Draft structure for my 王蒙 and 刘宾雁 dissertation[/caption]
