I can imagine retired profs doing this, or even those on sabbatical who want to get away, teach a course or two while being far from other duties.
I mean, I know faculty who went on sabbatical for a year to Venice. When they came back, yeah, they had the mss they'd been working on, but they'd explored "Venice" from Turin to Naples.
Another went for 6 months to some place on Lake Como to work on her sabbatical ms. Came back and said it was great ... but, sadly, given the absence of a library she really got nowhere except 15 lbs heavier. (Yeah, that was her excuse: The seductive sabbatical grant put her out of reach of the resources she needed, so she asked for a year's extension from her publisher and on tenure review.)
I've also known grad students who were dissertation funded and who just vanished. One, my French teacher, went to St. Mary's Island in MD for a year. She grabbed copies of everything she could lay her hands on locally, arranged for transportation and access to the LoC every couple of weeks, and vanished to nowhere. Then just vanished. She had an impossible diss topic; I think it's a great topic, but still have trouble wrapping my brain around it. And I have absolutely, positively no idea how the hell to even start saying anything useful about it or approaching it analytically. Wound up, I think, getting a PhD in psych. (The topic: Consider a play. It has content, meaning. But the meaning is not just derived from linguistic content and actor gesture, but also form and context. Plays are ritual, not just words and actors. Therefore, the audience necessarily participates in the creation of the play's meaning, in its semiotics. Now, how does that meaning vary for the audience in a theatre, the audience watching the same performance taped and played in a movie theatre, the audience watching the same performance on tv at home, or the audience reading the play? What are the differences? How do you account for them? What are the constants? Would altering the performance space in a theatre change the play's meaning? If so, how? Okay, now my brain hurts again. My inner aspie says the play's meaning should be invariant, but part of me says that that's not true: Listening to Vivaldi's Winter vln concerto =/= listening to it taped =/= playing it. But to characterize, quantify, qualify the differences ... Yoiks.) No wonder she changed from Romance Languages to psychology.)
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