When June flips over to July this weekend, the summer will pretty much be half over. I am appropriately in the middle of revising my book's two middle chapters--I gave myself til mid-July to finish the second middle one--and they're giving me fits. Both chapters are about half the length of my other chapters and have each had different conference-related lives so they feel like they're in arrested development in that sense. And yet I was joking with Katka that I know I sound like one of my students, but both really say all I feel needs to be said about their respective topics. So, are the topics just wispy? Maybe.
The chapters are also similar in that they both deal with history and rhetoric of science: one is on Burke's engagement with endocrinology, and the other is on his interest in constitutional medicine, which is to say one considers internal bodily process, the other external bodily form. Both show Burke trying to use scientific discourse to respond to psychoanalysis. In these senses they can be put together to make one nice-sized chapter--a chiasmus of sorts--and that could work in a number of ways, but every time I try that it feels like each chapter's individual argument gets compromised and that together they become a chapter that tries to do too much.
Katka, in a middle of her own--having ended one project and beginning another--kindly offered to have a look at both mini-chaps. Whatta dear. Meantime, I prefer to come up with lots of ways to describe their leanness and meanness to myself. Like dental floss. Like UT's 1991 championship team that only had 9 scholarship players. Like hand grenades. Like slim jims.
Having reread this bit, I realize that if one of my graduate students was in this situation, I'd be telling him or her to try putting the two together. And then if I were the student, I'd say "I tried that! It didn't really work." I'm starting to think they need to be stitched together again. Maybe I can at least use dental floss.