So, I made a resolution to post a blog entry once each
week, and it’s only March and I’ve failed miserably. I blame it on my
dissertation, and for that reason, this post is all about that very special
piece of writing in my life.
The dissertation is a strange thing. For many of us, it
is a mythological beast of sorts—the unicorn of grad school. Just when you think
you see it in its entirety, it dissolves into the forest of commentary,
criticism and revision. In some ways, perhaps a dissertation is more of a
hippogriff. It is an unwieldy fusion of degree requirement and serious research
project; a not-quite-book but more-than-term paper.
Finishing the dissertation and applying to jobs bring a
whole new layer of anxiety to the graduate student. We begin graduate school
happy to have gotten in, privileged to join the ranks, but often also with a
sense of smugness. We were encouraged by someone, by several people, at some
point in our young and impressionable lives, to get a PhD. To go to graduate
school. Because we were smart, maybe even very smart. Unfortunately smartness
is pretty easy to come by in graduate school. By the time you make it into a
PhD program, you are no longer the smartest person among your peers. Everyone
is the smartest person, and there are very few compliments or encouraging
comments to go around, especially once you finish your coursework and start
working on your dissertation project.
Academia is full of egos, so you have to make sure to
stroke your own as often as you can, or find someone who will stroke it for you
on a consistent basis. We also have to delude ourselves a little bit about the
job market—surely, we say to ourselves, we
will get jobs! We will not be
those sad sad phds you hear about who gave up on academia and now drive a truck
for a living, or, god forbid, live off of food stamps while adjuncting somewhere!
We tell ourselves over and over again that what we are doing is worthwhile,
honorable, and maybe even necessary. After all, someone has to educate college students about the beauty of
Shakespeare’s language, the humor of Chaucer’s tales, the beauty and the wit of
Woolf’s prose, and the complex symbolism of the Brontës, Hurston, Morrison,
Faulkner and so many others.
Of course, that’s not really what the dissertation is
about. I remember very clearly attending my own undergraduate English
department graduation ceremony back in the day. The English department ceremony
included the PhDs, MFAs and MAs in addition to the BAs. The PhDs went first. I
remember this one female student particularly because my senior seminar
professor was hooding her. I don’t remember the exact title of this young
scholar’s dissertation, but I know it had something to do with a medieval woman
writer I’d never heard of.
“How lame!” I thought. “Why write a dissertation about
some piece of literature no one has every heard of!?” At some point I’d also heard
jokes about over-specialized dissertation topics, topics so obscure no one had
seemed to have heard of them. It all seemed so…ridiculous! Why bother in that
case? Why not write about all your favorite novels or poems or plays or
authors?
And yet here I am, nine years older and wiser, with the
knowledge that the dissertation, “Why Jane Austen is Amazing,” and
dissertations similar to that, have pretty much already been written. A
dissertation has to make a significant intervention into a complex, some might
say bloated, field of inquiry that is specific enough that you can do the
research on it in 3 years, more or less. Anything bigger, more
all-encompassing, or more complex will take longer than the six long years it
already takes to do a PhD in English “quickly.” (The national average is
somewhere around 9 or 10 years.)
At the same time, people often naively ask me, “What
could possibly be left to say about ________?” (fill in the blank with a
well-known author or work). Theoretical and social ideologies are changing
constantly, meaning that our interpretations are changing constantly as well.
The study of literature is all about looking for patterns of signification and
for new ways to understand ourselves and the world around us as portrayed
through literature. In the past, different literary schools attempted to
justify why some works were “Literature” and others weren’t; others traced the
psychoanalytic resonances in literature; still others inspected works of
literature for signs of class struggle or representations of racial inequality;
others analyzed the structure and narrative of works of literature as well as
the ways in which readers responded to these works; and others search for the
representations of unusual men and women, non-normative sexualities and gender
configurations, and how literature creates a space for understanding these
ideas and developments now and in the past.
Given the ever-changing mindset of literary scholars, as
well as the constant re-evaluation of past works of literature and the
discovery of ever more under- or un-studied works by both canonical authors as
well as newly rediscovered ones, the stream of knowledge to be produced in
literary studies is probably endless.
Just as scientists will keep studying space and sub-atomic structures
and the deepest trenches of the oceans in order to keep searching for what we
still don’t know about the material world, so literary scholars will keep
studying creative works to identify and analyze what we still don’t know about
the human condition.
But I wax poetic. The dissertation is often an un-poetic
creation. It is Frankenstein’s monster, in a way. We piece it together,
learning how it works as we go along. For most of us, this is the longest piece
of analytical writing we have ever done (unless this is your 2nd
PhD, in which case, go away). It’s difficult, at times; at other times, things
seem to go swimmingly. Then you get your committee’s comments, and for a while
you might feel like you are right back where you started. But you have to keep
plugging along, because they aren’t paying you enough to linger (or at least
not where I go to grad school). Plus, somewhere in the future is the end of the
rainbow with the ultimate pot of gold: a job as a real live professor of
English literature where you will get to continue your research (hopefully on a
reasonable salary) while you inspire young minds, engineer new syllabi, and
become the intellectual equal of the people you admire.
The dissertation is not a book; it is not “publishable”
as such. It might have been, in the past, when dissertations were longer,
people spent longer in graduate school, and the state of the academy was quite
different (for ex. you could start a tenure-track job while still working on
your dissertation). Now it is a significant research project that will
eventually become your first book (maybe. It might also just turn into 3-5
articles). How that process works, I’m not quite sure. I imagine it involves
some time in an archive, among other things…
For now, the defense copy of my dissertation is done and
I await my defense date. Then there will be final revisions and the official
submission to the Graduate School. In the meantime, I am thinking a lot about
what it means to have written it. Of course I am proud of it. It’s nearly 250
pages long. It has a 17 page works cited list. I have spent 3 years working on
it, while also teaching, working on scholarly articles, attending conferences,
writing letters of recommendation, attending meetings, and applying for 60+
jobs.
On the other hand, the dissertation still feels
unfinished; maybe it will always be that way. Maybe even once it’s a book, it
will still feel unfinished. Writing, when done well, is a lengthy process. I’ve
missed writing creatively in the last 6 years, but the PhD sucks up nearly all
your time and energy for that. On the other hand, I’ve enjoyed writing my dissertation,
coming up with new ideas and ways of interpreting these works, and discovering
strange and sundry literary marginalia to expose to the world…
I do know, however, I’m ready to be finished with
graduate school and move on.
Stay tuned for Part II, in which I reveal the topic of my
dissertation & revel in the details!
-UK
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