Shveta read yesterday’s blog entry.  Apart from being amused that I quoted her, she said that the entry sounded a bit homophobic.  I use the words ‘effete’, ‘ponce’, ‘dandy’, etc.  I’ve never thought of myself  as a gay basher, but maybe she has a point.  When I get vitriolic, I tend to satire just about every stereotype.  I don’t know whether Uzo is gay, but I suppose I would have to say that the old gadar did tingle a bit in his presence.  So there you have it--an epilogue to the harangue that I’m afraid might have convinced a few visitors to the site that, though perhaps not a homophobe, I might actually be a raving nutter, as the Brits say.  I’m not, I swear!

Anyways, let’s talk about string theory.  As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site, my PhD thesis topic is ‘the cultural currency of string theory’.  In a nutshell, what this means is that I’m looking at how the imagery of string theory gets adapted by popular and literary culture.  Last year I worked on the first chapter (which, perhaps confusingly, comes second in the thesis, behind the introduction).  The first chapter concerns itself with contextualizing string theory historically, describing its main concepts and images, and doing a close reading of string theory as a ‘physical imaginary’.  This is a term that I’ve adapted from the French philosopher, Michèle Le Doueff.  She published a work in the late eighties entitled The Philosophical Imaginary.  I’ll paste an excerpt from the outline to the introduction of my thesis shortly, in order to, hopefully, better elucidate what I mean by physical imaginary.

First, though, I’ll just summarize the subject matter of the other chapters, for those of you who are curious--those of you who are writing a thesis yourself, or are contemplating a PhD.  One of my intentions with this blog is talk about the whole process of undergoing the PhD gauntlet--its pleasures, pains, complications, milestones, etc.--a kind of insider’s view.  So more to come in that.  The second chapter is going to take a look at string theory popularizations; the third, string theory in pop culture artifacts, such as sci-fi pulp fiction; the fourth with be a more theoretical examination of string theory's implications for narratology; the fifth, a close 'stringy' reading of contemporary literary fiction with the themes of chapter four as its guide.  Now here's that excerpt:

A definition of ‘physical imaginary’: