Defences: Thesis

It's over. I passed. I kicked its ass. Seriously. I totally rocked it.

Recommend: If you like an hour straight of pure terror where you drank way too much coffee before hand so you couldn't stop jittering in your seat while your enormously sprawling answers both focus in on a single piece of literature while incorporating references to five or six others all the while watching the faces of your committee members to make sure that they weren't wincing and when they were furrowing their brows making sure you made extra careful to explain exactly what it is you were trying to see by using more and more specific examples and quoting lines of text and title after title by author after author until their brows stopped furrowing and you are trying desperately not to look at your watch or the sweet freedom outside the window blinds while you hope you aren't sweating and won't stutter or you won't just stare blankly at the person who asked you THE ONE DAMN QUESTION you couldn't answer as you rack your brains trying to trace back the essential characteristic of the speaker of a sonnet by recalling all the little things Shakespeare made fun of sonnets about in his sonnets and wondering why you hadn't spent more time reading sonnets and hoping that you'd quickly be able to segue to John Donne because his sonnets particularly the HOLY sonnets are the only ones you remember well enough to talk about in detail in fact you can quote five our six of them almost in their entirely but your answers keep leading you more towards Phillip Syndney's Defence of Poesy which you hated but were able to find one redeemable statement in them which segued you into talking about modernist poets while trying to avoid any further questioning into works before 1600 ACH! MEIN LEIBER!