The Dissertation Prospectus

 

Assignment #1

Analyzing the Conversation in Your Field

 

Choose a scholarly journal in the field of "English" that has been publishing for at least fifty years; you may select a generalist journal, such as PMLA or Modern Philology, or a specialized journal in a field of interest to you, for example, American Literature or Shakespeare Quarterly.  Trace the history of the way the journal defines its field of knowledge by studying one issue from each decade of the past fifty years plus three issues of the last ten years.  The preferred way to do this is to take, for example, the Winter issue of the journal from 2000, 1990, 1980, 1970, 1960 and 1950, plus two other issues from the period 1993-2003, for example, Winter 1998 and Winter 2002.

 

Read carefully the Table of Contents and any Abstracts in each issue; read fully at least one article and skim the others.  How does the journal define what it studies?  Has that changed over the past fifty years?  Over the past ten?  How?  How has the focus of the articles changed?  Is there any kind of article that appears now and would not have appeared twenty years ago?  Any that appeared earlier that could not appear now? 

 

Then write a brief essay that analyzes the changes in the journal you have chosen: how has its definition of its field of knowledge changed historically?

 

 

Assignment #2

Finding The Major Texts in Your Field 

 

This assignment asks you to begin the process of discovering the major works in your field and to start positioning your Prospectus historically and theoretically.  It asks you to form a preliminary bibliography with which you'll work as you begin writing; an exhaustive bibliographic search on your subject will come later. 

 

Compile a list of at least ten sources that you will cite in your Prospectus, and include a brief annotation on why you have chosen the work.  (Obviously, your Prospectus will change as you work on it; you will be free to alter this list as your project takes shape.)  The list must include two works that are not strictly literary criticism--for instance, works of history, theory, social sci­ence. 

 

Suggestions for determining the major works in your field.

 

1)  Always begin with your question; look for significant texts which will help you in some way to answer this question.

 

2)  Consider beginning with an important article in the field.  Use the MLA Bibliogra­phy (either in bound volumes, on CD-ROM, or on GaleNet), an index such as Contemporary Literary Criticism in the Gale series, or one of the bibliographies in your field described in Harner to generate a list of recent articles in your area.  Select one of these articles, judging by title, author, journal in which it appeared, and follow its references.  The references in this article will lead you to others, which you can then follow in the same way.  (If you don't yet feel you have a sense of which journals and authors are likely to produce important articles, use the Arts and Humanities Citation Index to determine which works are cited most frequently by other critics.)

 

3)  Use the library catalogue (once cards, now the CUNY+ system), or one of the bibliographic sources listed above, to locate a recent book in your field.  Study its bibliography, notes and index.  Which works are central to the author's argument?  Which ones does the author feel she has to take on before she can make her own point?  What histories or theories is she relying on?  Would these be useful for you?  (The reason for stressing recent articles and books, of course, is that they will have the most up-to-date references.  An article from 1949, no matter how good it is, will not have references to works published in the 1990s.)

 

4)  Use your expertise in reading scholarly journals.  Start with a reliable journal in your field, or perhaps with two journals that take different approaches; read through a year of issues; see what theoretical and critical works emerge as signif­icant.  Who are the scholars whose names seem always to be invoked?  What work (if any) have these scholars done in your area?  What works are they citing in their books?

 

5)  Locate yourself theoretically.  Be analytical about the kind of question you are asking in the prospectus, and then work on building up a base of theoretical texts that will underlie your claims or with which you will be in contention.  Start with theoretical works that have been important to you so far, with a good anthology of literary theory such as mine, a good introduction to the subject such as Terry Eagleton's, a good specialized collec­tion of articles such as Henry Louis Gates's "Race," Writ­ing, and Difference, or with one of the reference works on theory listed in Harner.  Make use of the bibliographies in these works to locate texts that will be important in answering your ques­tion.

 

Written work towards the prospectus: Do a progress report on your efforts to define a preliminary bibliography.  List every method you used to identify major works; list in correct MLA form every source you consulted, article you read, leads you pursued even if they turned out not to be helpful.  At the end of the narrative of your search, you should have at least four works for your bibliography.

 

Next, work out the preliminary bibliography in finished form, again with an account, as above, of methods you used to locate sources.  Remember that each entry should be accompanied by a brief annota­tion and that the bibliography must include two works that are not primarily literary criticism.

           

 

 

Assignment #3

Developing a Literary or Cultural Question

 With this assignment, you begin to narrow the focus of your work in the course towards your own topic.  The goal of the assignment is to develop the question at the center of your  prospectus. 

 

Thus the assignment is to submit:

            1) your question or questions;

            2) a paragraph on how you arrived at the question;

            3) a paragraph on where you think the question will lead.

 

Some methods of developing a literary question:

 

            1)  "Look into thy heart and write" (Philip Sidney in Astrophel and Stella).  This is one time-honored method.  This involves examining one's own experiences and the ways those experiences have been shaped by literary and social texts.  But one method is to ask the question that moves you most, that is most important to you, no matter how large it seems.  Then, if can be answered through a study of literary texts, think about how you can narrow it to make it manageable in a thesis.

 

            2) Make connections and explore them.  It is almost always useful to look at literary texts in terms of the historical moment at which they were written and the present historical moment that reads them; to think about how a text works within or against certain literary conventions; to interrogate the critical reception of a text; to explore the connection between the text and others in its literary tradition or in other traditions in which it might be read. 

 

            3)  Define a field and read around in it to discover your question.  If you know you want to write on contemporary African American fiction, steep yourself in it, read as much as you can until certain issues seem to suggest themselves to you.  Then (or even first) get a sense of what other readers are currently asking about the field: read a couple of issues of different related journals; try the on-line bibliography and then browsing in the stacks just to see what other people are writing about; ask a specialist in the field how viable your question seems.  (Visit or phone professors during their office hours.)

 

            4) Don't worry about the field--start instead with current critical questions.  Choose a journal, especially a general one that tries to cover the field of "English" as a whole--PMLA, diacritics, Critical Inquiry, Representations, for example--and study the kind of questions currently animating English studies.  Or try journals with clear critical or ideological positions if you already know what line of inquiry you want to use.  For instance, if you want to write a feminist thesis, read Signs, Women's Studies Quarterly, Feminist Studies and differences; if you are thinking about cultural criticism, try Cultural Critique, Public Culture and Social Text.  (The reference librarian will be able to help you in selecting journals.)  Are any of the current questions interesting to you?  Are there ways you could apply such questions to other texts?  How could you go further, either building on or arguing with current scholarship and criticism?

 

The question you turn in does not have to be the final version of the question for your Prospectus.  Part of the work of the course is to learn how to develop and recognize fruitful literary questions.       

 

 

Assignment #4:

Examining and Developing Critical Voice

 

This assignment is designed to help you in forming your own way of entering the critical conver­sation on your question.

 

Choose two recent articles or chapters of books (by "recent" I mean since 1993) that are relevant to your question.  Be inven­tive: look in the CUNY+ system for titles, comb the relevant periodicals, think about historical or sociological articles that might be important to you.  For instance, if you were working on a question about Shakespeare and magic, why not look for the most up-to-date research on Renaissance witchcraft and magic and its significance within that society?  Then you might combine this with a more straightforwardly liter­ary article on Shakespeare, or on poetical representations of the supernatural in early modern writers.  Or perhaps there is a new critical or biographical book on Shakespeare that looks significant (judge significance by the title, the sound of the Preface or Introduction, the range of references quoted in the notes, even the quality of the press that published it.)

 

Once you have chosen the two articles:

 

1) Repeat the process we have developed for identifying major critical works in your field.  After reading the two articles or chapters, do any critical, theoretical or editorial works emerge as major in the field?  If so, what are they?  List in correct bibliographic form.  (You'll be returning to these works later, when you compile the bibliography.)

 

2) Pinpoint in each article the moment (and there may be more than one) when you feel the author is asserting her or his own critical voice.  Where does the writer's own argument emerge?  Where do you hear the distinctive voice of the writer?  Select one passage from your two articles that you think illustrates most clearly the assertion of an original critical argument.  Be prepared to discuss why you chose the passage.

 

Assignment #5:

Draft of Bibliographical Essay of the Prospectus

 

A prospectus is in three parts: a statement of the question and the methodology you are going to use to answer it, a presentation of the current state of that question, and an annotated working bibliography. This assignment is designed to produce  a draft of section #2.  In the finished prospectus it will come just before the annotated bibliography, introducing the bibliog­raphy and making a connection to your opening discussion of question and methodology.

 

In three or four pages (six would really be a maximum), provide for your readers A SENSE OF THE CURRENT STATE OF SCHOLAR­SHIP AND CRITICISM ON YOUR SUBJECT.  Use your reading of the past weeks to construct an ANALYSIS of the work on your topic.            Outline the major developments or currents of thought in your field: what are the central issues in your field today?  Are those issues relatively new, related to the advent of "theory" in our discipline, a renewed interest in history, the new insurgen­cies of feminism, gay and lesbian studies, multiculturalism, postcolonialism?  Who are the major figures writing on your topic and why are their contributions important?  You won't have room to summarize everything they've said, but a sentence or phrase about each can tell us what positions they take.

 

Finally, you'll want to survey the work on exactly your topic.  For instance, if there is already one book and six articles written on the relation of the plague to the portrayal of death in English tragedy, you should give a full account of each of these works and expla­in what will be original about your thesis.  "Although the works of X, Y and Z  have already shown a relation between the plague and Jacobean drama, I plan to compli­cate their arguments by suggesting that the plague is central to the drama of the period, even though it usually appears in disguised form"--that would be one example of how you might explain your origi­nal­ity.  Or, on another topic, "A, B and C have shown that Bakhtin's concept of `dialogics' is enormously fruit­ful for reading Joyce; D and E have done pioneering work on feminism and Joyce's use of language; my aim is to bring these two topics together in a Bakhtinian analysis of women's discourse in Dubliners."

 

When you are finished, readers both inside and outside the field should be able to pick up your bibliographic essay and come away with a clear sense of the issues in the field and of the specific work that has been done on your question.  You need to demonstrate both that you know the field in general (including relevant literary theory) and that you are in command of the criticism directly addressing your question.

 

Assignment #6

Annotated Bibliography

To repeat: A prospectus is in three parts: a statement of the question and the methodology you are going to use to answer it, a presentation of the current state of that question, and an annotated working bibliography. This assignment is designed to produce a draft of section #3.   Here you will present what you have found so far: some of the sources that will be used in the thesis.  The entries will be in alphabetical order, and the bibliographical form will be, needless to say, impeccable. 

 

The annotations should be as concise and pointed as possible.  Ideally they will be neither purely objective (a mere statement of what the source is about) nor purely subjective (a statement of what value the sources is likely to be for your thesis) but a combination of the two.  For example, if you were writing about the Concubine of Gibeah in Judges 19 (as I have done), an anthropological article on bina (matrilocal) marriage in the ancient near east might be annotated as follows:

 

Grossman suggests on the basis of both Biblical texts and archeological research that two forms of marriage coexisted uneasily in the ancient near east: "normal" patrilocal marriage, where wives joined the husband's family, and bina marriage, where husbands worked for their fathers-in-law.  If true, then the word for "concubine" in some biblical texts, including mine, may actually mean "bina wife," which might help explain the bizarre behavior of the Levite and his father-in-law.

 

Not every annotation would have to be as complicated as that one to make its relevance to your project clear.  If you were writing on Fielding, you might annotate the Martin and Ruthe Battestin biography as

 

Massive, up-to-date biography of Henry Fielding, entirely indispensable on Fielding's life and times.

 

BTW: You annotate what you were able to look at, not what you couldn't find.  So not all works are going to be annotated at this stage. 

 

 

 

Assignment #7: 

Draft of Full Prospectus

This is your first attempt, but not your last, to pull the prospectus together, and it means revising and updating all three parts up to the point you have reached.   Revising means that everything should hang together: if you have shifted your question a bit, that may change the focus of the bibliographical essay and may alter what texts will go into the working bibliography.  Ideally, changes in what you are doing should be kept to a minimum after this stage: it should be improved, and extended if you were unable to look at important sources, but not radically altered unless you (or I) discover some flaw in your plan.  You should be at this stage by the week before Thanksgiving.  A final draft will come in at the end of term.