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Wednesday 3 December 2008

Reflective Journal entry: Five

I have a structure but am worried that it’s too traditional, too prescriptive, meaning that it will delimit or too narrowly define my project:

Example –

Chapter One – What is an Outsider?

(1) Some common definitions:

(1.1) The Outsider as X loner not fit to live among their peers - examples
(1.2) The Outsider as the bogeyman – fairytales (Africa – white man come to take you away)
(1.3) The Outsider as X banished/exiled e.g. Socrates – ‘What happens when a person refuses to accept the myth of the citizen, and chooses to act within the context of a different , more personal myth?’ (add more here – taken from ‘Essays from the Edge: Citizenship and the Outsider in Literature ...’)
(1.4) The Outsider as X radicalized – e.g. Dostoevsky has related how the individual is so frustrated with his own helplessness that he has become an outsider in a place where he shares his culture, religion and norms with the majority. Yet, the personal dissatisfaction, his spiritual inconsequence in his own mind creates a boundary between the self and the society isolating him from others." (taken from Papers on "Outsiders" and similar term paper topics http://www.academon.com/lib/paper/16512.html)
(1.5) The Outsider as X
(1.6) The Outsider as X

It made me realise that I needed a far more open ended starting point in which to introduce my research. I knew that if I rigidly began a story with too many predefined limits, I would soon be overwhelmed with problems related to narrowness of vision and a limited parochial overall vision of what was to come. At all costs I realized this now had to be avoided.

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