does not need to tell you that graduate school rarely provides ego boosts: one of its unspoken functions is to make students squirm. Even in his youth, at Johns Hopkins University, Professor Stanley Fish was famous for telling classes that “Studying literature should be painful. If it isn't, you're not doing it right.” His then-colleague, Professor Eugenio Donato, used to accuse the rare smiling student: “You think literature is pretty.”
But Ms. Mentor assumes that you have signed up for the rigors of graduate school, accepting years of poverty, for the best and most valid reason: driving intellectual curiosity. There are things you want to read and know and learn, and as you approach your dissertation, you get to ask yourself:
• What am I really interested in?
• What do I want to do with my life?
The topic you choose will determine which jobs you can aim for, and what you can teach, and what you will be expected to write about for publication. If you select Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for instance, you will be “marketable” in Women's Studies; American literature, nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and possibly nonfiction, autobiography, and cultural studies. You may love Renaissance poetry, but you will have to bid it adieu as a subject for scholarly inquiry.
What not to do. Ms. Mentor shudders at the current proliferation of cross-century dissertations, such as “The Rhetoric of Ignatia Quicksilver as Applied to the Works of Shakespeare, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, and Beavis and Butt-head.” Supposedly the student—should she live to complete such a sweeping, impossible dissertation—will then be deemed qualified for jobs in Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American literature, the novel, modernism, rhetoric, African American literature, cultural studies, postmodernism, gender studies, and Ignatia Quicksilver.
(Ms. Mentor finds it particularly offensive that many a white graduate student who's written one chapter on Toni Morrison—and who hasn't?—purports to be an expert on African American literature. That insults African Americans, who have a distinct, rich culture and literature very different from white folks'.)
In reality, the student with the conglomerate dissertation will come across to hiring committees as a jill-of-all-trades who may be hired for “generalist” positions, but those are usually non-tenure-track instructorships. If she wants a Real Job, she needs a Real Subject for her dissertation: an author, a period, a genre, a critical approach, a community of authors more closely meshed. She needs to demonstrate, through her dissertation, that she knows something well, something that she's passionately interested in pursuing.
Time matters, too. Ms. Mentor advises you to choose a topic that you can complete quickly. No vast syntheses; no biographies (they take too long and require too much money and travel). No need to write the definitive word. Just the completed one.
With well-focused subjects, some highly motivated students can write their dissertations in a year. Ms. Mentor did hers in just under two, she thinks—although they used different calendars then, in the Pleistocene era. It is not uncommon for dissertations to take four years, some of them part-time while the student is teaching, working at another career, or involved with family.
But some students take up to eight years or more—an ominous sign. Often they were never really inspired in the first place, and now they are dithering and procrastinating. Frequently they are people who genuinely do not enjoy writing—or who would rather write lampoons and letters than literary criticism. They prefer real life to lit crit, and that is a perfectly rational choice.
They should stop punishing themselves, Ms. Mentor decrees. There is no shame in not completing a dissertation, for the average person changes careers five to ten times in a lifetime. The shame is to continue in something one does not love, just because one has begun it. Smart folks stop.
Meanwhile other smart folks, the incorrigible literature lovers, try to find subjects that enthrall them. If you're one, what should you write on?
Ms. Mentor suggests that you think about which authors, genres, readings, have kept running around in your mind long after the courses and teachers were forgotten. Which ones did you talk about incessantly with your friends? Which ones are you still quoting? These are the ones you'll enjoy rereading and rereading. What do you not know about these authors and texts? What would you like to know?
Further, are there writers whose papers are in your university library, barely touched by human hands? Does your local historical society have materials you could work on? Is there something genuinely original (and therefore more exciting) that you could do?
You should continue your search until you find something that tickles your fancy, for you will be working with it a long time. This will be your only chance to write a book on a subject dear to your heart and have it critiqued by experts.
Ms. Mentor also recommends that you read some completed dissertations in your field (the university library will have those written locally). Besides seeing how a dissertation is shaped by a thesis (point of view), you will be pleasantly surprised by how awful some of them are. “I can easily write something that mediocre,” many a grad student has told herself, chuckling with pleasure. This is extremely gratifying.
Finally, you should think of choosing to do your dissertation as a gift to yourself and the world, not as a punishment meted out by some horrific schoolteacher martinet in your head. And if the obvious person to direct your dissertation is horrific, you should not work with that person. Life is short. Choose a director who's congenial and helpful, and who's well published in your field: your director's connections may help you get a job.
Ms. Mentor believes that her wise readers should choose pleasure over pain. If living an interesting life inspires them more than the prospect of committing literary criticism, then they should choose life.
Early Publishing = Premature Perishing?
Q: Do I need to publish to get a first job? Should I be sending my seminar papers to academic journals for feedback, or will their manuscript readers get annoyed with me?
A: Ms. Mentor already knows what numerous learned worthies are thinking: there's too much bad stuff published already. You may be right in thinking you're not ready, and that you shouldn't clutter the mails, the Net, the journals with your naive maunderings. You should give your ideas, and your prose style, time to mellow and grow. What you send out should be substantial, long-mulled-over, and gravely wise. That is the only way to make an important mark, rather than selling out to the trendy, or prostituting yourself to the marketplace.
Ms. Mentor characterizes the above sentiments as Senior Scholar Claptrap and Entrenched Pseudo-Wisdom. For you it's also unrealistic, suicidal advice.
Yes, indeed, in an ideal world one would not publish a semicolon before it was ripe. But in the real world, a half-baked, or even raw, book is not uncommon. And a publish-no-thought-before-its-time academic, is an unemployed academic.
You cannot wait to be brilliant. You need to make yourself known as soon as possible.
Luckily for you, the human memory often blurs distinctions: people will remember your name, but not whether your work was splendid or shameful. You should be delivering conference papers, and writing book reviews; you should be volunteering to edit manuscripts, judge contests, arrange conferences, chauffeur visiting scholars and writers. You should be sending stuff around, whether it's published or not; you should list on your vita all the pieces that are “in circulation.” When an article is turned down, you should study the readers' reports, revise, and send it out again within a week.
You must be ambitious; you must aim to
