Choose a narrowly defined subject where you can control all previous work. The need to do this makes an epigraphical or papyrological subject peculiarly attractive, or a single crux, textual or exegetical, in a literary work. At age 24 you are not experienced enough nor have you read enough to tell the world what Antigone means.Related post: Publish or Perish.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Thursday, June 05, 2014
At Age 24
William M. Calder III, "A Scholar's First Article," Classical World 77.6 (July-August, 1984) 361-366 (at 362):