literature Review

 

I have spent a big chunk of the last 3 days trying to write my literature review.  I have not got very far and I am feeling somewhere between lazy and distracted. 

I have always had a problem with the lit review for a number of reasons.

1. Whatever I write doesn't really look like a literature review.

2. Whatever I give Kate and Laura to read does not seem to cut the mustard.

3. The literature I have most enjoyed reading does not condense well.

4. The PhD is really about trying to work with a set of ideas and concepts in context.  This is messy and I can't seem to write anything that does not abstract theory from context I'm working in.

5. It is a task that seems a little pointless - technically I think its purpose is to convince the reviewers that I have understood to the extent required the literature's I am drawing on. As I have chosen some difficult texts I am not confident I have done this or demonstrate it within my writing.

In the gap between thinking and writing something has started to emerge but there is a lack of clarity and purpose.  I thought today that I should write as simply as possible what I want to say and hold points or the point of it in short glimpses or flashes of practice.  This may work well if I adopt a slightly more practice orientation and limit the concepts I tackle .  So the point of the literature review is to give some context to the concept.  So it isn't just floating - The key thing to all this work is territory and capture, after a more general introduction that contains the why it is into these two concepts that I will need to dig a bit deeper.