Back on 14 November of the Year Eight, the lovely Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo posted her doctoral thesis proposal as an entry at her journal. "Space and Place", she called it. A study of images of "home" in the short fiction of Mavis Gallant and Vladimir Nabokov. I was fascinated by the proposal...and of course intrigued by her bibliography. I hope she'll be finished with it soon--- that she'll be Dr. Ginny soon. I hope she'll have a full abstract that she can post. And I hope that she's looking at thesis chapters as possible Call For Papers submissions at conferences and for comp lit journals. I hope that one day she'll let me read her full manuscript.

For what it's worth--- once, long ago, in an autumn when I was young, I was getting ready to submit my own doctoral thesis. Four hundred eight pages: "Politics, the Nationality Question, and the Armies of the Habsburg Monarchy 1848-1914". I miss that season, miss sitting up writing with one eye on the television, watching tanks in the Moscow streets. I miss the sense of possibility and promise. For whatever it's worth--- an abstract of the thesis:

The army of the Habsburg Monarchy was the central institution of the Habsburg state, and it embodied the ideal of non-national, dynastic rule. The army leadership was aware of the dangers of nationalism, but in the period between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the revolutions of 1848, no institutional attempt was made to overcome the danger of national disaffection within the army, whether by mixing nationalities within regiments or stationing regiments away from their "national homelands". The revolutions of 1848, however, caused the army to remove Hungarian and Italian units, now regarded as suspect, from their homelands and garrison them in "foreign" parts of the Monarchy. However, despite the deep suspicion in which they were held by the army command, Italian and Hungarian troops fought well in the wars of 1859 and 1866.

The financial weakness of the Monarchy and the coming of home rule to Hungary caused the policy of keeping Hungarian troops garrisoned outside Hungary to be gradually abandoned in the years after the Ausgleich of 1867. The worsening of relations with Russian after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 led to a series of reforms within the army designed to reduce the time needed for mobilisation. Central to rapid mobilisation was a "territorial" system wherein the Monarchy's soldiers were trained and garrisoned in their "home" recruiting districts. Despite the growth of nationalist agitation throughout the Monarchy, the army leadership expressed no fear for the loyalty of the now territorialised regiments. Nonetheless, the army became deeply involved in suppressing nationalist unrest, especially in Bohemia and Hungary. This culminated in 1905, during the long constitutional crisis in Hungary, with proposals for full-scale military intervention in Hungary. Such proposals invoked, for the first time since 1867, fear of disloyalty with the ranks.

In the last decade before the outbreak of the Great War the army leadership, aware of the growth of nationalist movements in the political life of the Monarchy and of the growing social isolation of the officer corps, sought to develop its own plans for a "renewal" of the Monarchy. These various plans, which became increasingly pessimistic and desperate, involved two basic remedies: (1)proposed wars with Italy and Serbia, states regarded as sources of nationalist agitation, and (2) support for the plans of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Monarchy's heir-apparent, who intended to begin his reign with a military coup in Hungary that would enable him to reconstruct the Monarchy as a centralised, non-national, dynastic state. By 1914 the army leadership--- though not the soldiers in the ranks ---had come to despair of the Monarchy's future.

I should've turned it into a book. I walked away from so much--- or was too afraid to reach for what I could've had.

Well--- I do want to read Miss Ginny's own doctoral thesis. And I do want her to publish.

I wish...well. I wish I could read her poetry and short stories as well. (And that she'd critique mine) I hope one day to see a full abstract of her thesis--- or even a first chapter ---posted at ginny_mccoo. I want to read her Lists and read her Stories of growing up. I want to read her own Minimalist Life Lists. I just hope she'll write more--- and post more about her Gallant/Nabokov work. I do want to be there to congratulate her as she becomes Dr. Ginny.