The Dissertation

The doctoral dissertation may deal with any subject in literary theory, or with the comparison of texts, in the original languages of works from two or more literatures. The dissertation offers sustained inquiry into topics of literary-theoretical, literary-historical, or interdisciplinary importance; it should deal in a substantial way with texts in at least two languages, and, when appropriate, take into consideration diverse cultural and linguistic contexts. A translation dissertation may be proposed, provided that it is prefaced by an extensive introduction, with a level of analysis appropriate to a doctoral dissertation. This introduction should deal with theories and specific problems of the translation. Note that students planning to write a dissertation on translation studies must take Comparative Literature 751 Theory and Practice of Translation.

Selection of the Dissertation Committee

Within 3 months after the student successfully completes the Comprehensive examination, the student selects, in consultation with the Graduate Program Director, a chair of the dissertation committee from among the graduate faculty in Comparative Literature. The Chair of the dissertation committee then assists the student to select the other members of the dissertation committee, which must include at least four members of the graduate faculty (of whom at least one other is from the Program of Comparative Literature and at least one is from another department or program).* In consultation with the chair of the dissertation committee, the student arranges a preliminary meeting of the entire committee.

In the event that the Chair of the dissertation committee leaves the university due to retirement or to take another position, he or she may continue to chair the dissertation. However, whenever he or she is unable or unwilling to continue to serve as chair, the second faculty member from Comparative Literature who has been serving on the committee must be prepared to take on the duties of Chair and work with the student to enlist an additional faculty member from the program to join the committee.

Dissertation Prospectus

The student presents and defends a Ph.D. prospectus with bibliography within 6 months following the successful completion of the Comprehensive examination (no later than April 15 of the G4 year). The prospectus should describe, in 10-15 pages (double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 point type) the aims, method, and scope of the proposed dissertation; the accompanying bibliography should not exceed 10 pages. 

The members of your Dissertation Committee can be the same as the members of your Comprehensive committee, but they need not be. Be careful to choose faculty members with whom you have a good working relationship and who will offer you timely feedback. You may also add a faculty member to your committee at any time in the dissertation prospectus/writing process.

A dissertation prospectus is not an abstract (i.e., a summary of a completed dissertation), nor is it a full-scale introductory chapter; instead, it is an attempt to describe what is planned before it has actually been done. It thus most closely resembles a grant proposal or book proposal (in this case, a proposal for dissertation funding). It should set out the value of the topic and your approach in a compelling and concise manner.

Your prospectus should provide a preliminary description of the proposed dissertation, delineating not only the topic you will discuss but also your primary arguments. You need to explain why this topic merits discussion and the importance of your proposed contributions. In addition, you should indicate your project’s relation to existing scholarship, describing your methodology, and outlining your planned structure of chapters.

Finding, defining, and communicating an argument that is at once significant and of realistic scope are tasks that require discussion and collaboration between yourself and your committee members, who should see and respond to drafts of your prospectus. 

It is crucial for you to consult with faculty members early in the dissertation prospectus process. The prospectus should answer, as best as possible at this early stage of research, certain fundamental questions: 

1. What is the central problem that the dissertation will address, and what will be your major argument? The problem can be theoretical, critical, or historical, but it should, in most cases, be presented as a question or related set of questions to which the dissertation will attempt to offer answers. It is important that this problem and your hypothetical answers (hypotheses) be stated from the outset, so that your research will not risk becoming random and your exposition will not lapse into mere description. 

When writing your prospectus, speak in terms of what you will “argue,” “contend,” or “claim,” rather than simply “explore,” “examine,” and “discuss.” It is fine to speak of “asking” or “inquiring,” but questions should in general be associated with an argument or hypothesis. 

2. Although you are writing a dissertation for a Comparative Literature Ph.D., your project may not be obviously comparative. The comparative nature of the project may lie in the way it interrupts or revises existing narratives of explanation using new materials. If you will be relying on an intellectual framework developed by a particular theorist or theoretical school, you should say something about how the theory will inform or be at issue in your work. What will count for you as evidence? Will your thesis aim at the revision of a paradigm, or the utilization of one? What will you be “reading” and what will you be presupposing? How does your framework fit your problem, and why have you chosen it? Are you testing it or using it? What kind of end point are you after? Do you want to make us understand something about the text(s), the world, the art form, or the analytic enterprise--or about the inextricability of all of these? Here is where you should define clearly any concepts or terms that will carry important analytical energy for you, and perhaps briefly explain their genealogy or provenance, especially when you are using contested, general, or often-misunderstood terms. 

3. To persuade your reader that you are not just restating what has already been said before, you should include a brief review (about a page) outlining the present “state of the field” with respect to your topic and argument. How have previous scholars treated your topic; how have their arguments differed from yours? How does your approach differ from earlier approaches? Has there been new evidence (for example, a new primary source) that has come to light since previous treatments? For the sake of collegiality, it is advisable not to attempt to upstage other scholars, but to bear in mind that your work would not be possible without the work of earlier scholars. 

Additional guidelines for the prospectus and dissertation:

• Your prospectus must include a chapter-by-chapter outline, with a paragraph or so describing each chapter. Naturally, the final arrangement of chapters may look different from the one developed in your prospectus: when new perspectives open up in the course of your work on the dissertation, you are free to revise the organization proposed in the prospectus. Nonetheless, outlining a sequence of potential chapters will help you to clarify your argument and check the balance of its parts in relation to one another. Chapters typically run anywhere between 30 and 60 double-spaced pages. If the major sections of your dissertation seem likely to exceed this span, plan to subdivide them. You might consider organizing your topic in terms of four or five main chapters, unless your topic is better served by a larger number of shorter chapters. The proposed chapters should be presented in your prospectus in a manner that allows your readers to form a clear overview of the project as a whole. You will probably find that developing this outline helps your thinking to move forward substantially, so that the actual writing of the dissertation will be more clearly focused.
• Dissertations vary widely in length, but a good target is around 200-300 pages, consisting of four or five roughly 50-page chapters plus your introduction, conclusion, and bibliography. A dissertation can have more chapters when appropriate, and can run longer than 300 pages if necessary, particularly if substantial archival work is entailed, but longer dissertations often lose more in terms of focus and control of the topic than they gain in terms of amplitude of detail. You should ideally have 2/3 of your dissertation written when you go on the job market. Students planning to write dissertations of under 200 pages are advised that hiring committees are likely to be skeptical about incomplete short dissertations; students writing short dissertations should plan to go on the market with a finished or nearly finished dissertation. 
• Once you have drafted your prospectus under the guidance of your committee, you might want to have it read by someone who knows very little about your topic, to see whether you have clearly set out your problem and defined a workable method. Seeking out a general reader right at the start is a good reminder that though you may be writing on a specialized topic, your thesis should be written in clear, intelligible prose. Make sure you define the theoretical terms and categories you are introducing, and try to avoid technical jargon unless it is necessary to the intricacies of your argument (in which case you should clearly define it). 
• Remember that you are undertaking to write a connected narrative. You ought therefore to think about that narrative as a whole rather than merely as a series of separate chapters. What overall message would you like people to take away from your dissertation? Try to formulate your subject and your intended destination in a simple sentence or two; make sure that you locate this sentence or two in a prominent place in your introduction. 
• In thinking about your project, situate it in the broader field to which it is addressed. By this point in your graduate studies you have developed a strong command of current thinking about your dissertation’s overall field. How will your argument change people's ideas, add to the present picture, or revise commonly held views? Thinking in these terms should help you formulate your project so that it is understandable for someone who is not immersed in its field, as well as showing people in the field why they should be interested in reading your work. 
• The audience for an academic dissertation ranges from members of your own generation, to interested undergraduates, to advanced scholars. It also includes thinkers of the future, since most dissertations are readily accessible online, at least after an initial embargo. Be sure to explain your scope or focus. Describe how your work does or doesn’t fit into, develop from, or in some other manner deal with relevant (or only apparently relevant) work done by others. This will increase the chance of making your thesis the book you are likely to want it to become, as well as aiding you in deriving articles from chapters of the dissertation.
• Prospectuses (and then dissertations) tend either to lose themselves in detail or to be too general. To avoid these extremes, try to do what you would in any paper you write: make sure that your main argument remains clearly above ground and that each paragraph has a clear connection with both the preceding and following ones. Enough care and stylistic grace should be exercised so that the prospectus clearly and concisely articulates the project, its arguments, methods, and special considerations in a manner that anyone in Comparative Literature (or literary studies in general) can grasp. 
• The Prospectus you submit should be a polished and professional document without typos. It becomes part of your scholarly file and is an invaluable tool for securing fellowships and for developing grant applications.
• Prospectuses are expected to include a bibliography, which can vary in length. You do not need to have already read every source listed on your bibliography. However, you should have a sense of the most important works for your topic and have taken the time to become familiar with them. Remember that not every source requires scrupulous reading and note taking. 

Prospectus Defense

Once you have completed your draft prospectus, you are required to have an oral defense of your prospectus in the presence of your full Dissertation Committee. You must send your prospectus to your committee at least 10 days before the defense. This meeting is a one-hour discussion both of the work leading up to your dissertation project and the prospectus itself, with the aim of ensuring that you are well prepared to move forward with the project and have developed both a viable conceptual structure and an appropriate outline of the chapters that will comprise the dissertation.

The Prospectus defense usually begins with students speaking for about 10 minutes on their proposed project. This presentation should not merely reiterate what is laid out in the prospectus; it should expound and amplify the prospectus, for instance, by illustrating the methodologies through a sample close reading.

After a successful prospectus defense (and within the same semester) the student files the approved final version of the prospectus with a cover sheet signed by the Graduate Program Director and the Department Chair, with the Graduate School, and provides a copy to the Graduate Program Director. Graduate School regulations stipulate that a dissertation prospectus be formally filed at least seven months before the dissertation defense.

Working on the Dissertation

The dissertation is the culmination of your graduate studies, and the years you spend on it can be the best of times or the worst of times, if not both. You should have the satisfaction of drawing on much that you have been learning in the past years, and of finding or refining your scholarly voice and entering fully into the debates in your field; at the same time, you face the challenges of managing a scale of work larger than anything you have likely experienced before. How can you best structure your days, weeks, and semesters to keep yourself working productively at a pace suited to the length of the project, neither burning out nor letting the project extend into an indefinite horizon? Individual projects and schedules vary greatly, but a few basic guidelines can help make this the best of times for you, yielding an excellent written product within the time – and the funding – available. 

1. Break it down. The best way to write a dissertation (and, generally, a book as well) is one chapter at a time. You often will write chapters in the order in which they will appear in the finished manuscript, but this is not always the case. Usually the introduction and conclusion are best written at the end.
2. Pace yourself. For a typical four- or five-chapter dissertation, a good output (and the rate of progress expected by the program) is one chapter per semester or summer. This may seem a daunting pace, but you have been writing 50 to 60 pages per semester all through graduate school, which is just the rate you should aim for in the dissertation. True, you are supposed to accomplish more in the dissertation than in a set of seminar papers, but you know more than you did before, and the extended work on your prospectus yielded a viable topic, which you now have the challenge of developing at full length. 
3. Make a plan. Upon approval of your prospectus, you should work out an overall plan for the coming two or so years of dissertation work. Show these plans to your advisers and get their input, then proceed accordingly, modifying the plans from time to time as needed. Many students become consumed by teaching and family and let dissertations fall by the wayside. Do not do this. A heavy teaching commitment is no excuse for not working on your dissertation, nor is a family; you need to be making steady progress on the dissertation even while teaching. Successful academics balance multiple commitments; the sooner one finds this balance, the better.  Dissertations cannot be written in several summers alone. Students having difficulty balancing teaching, life, and research should speak with their advisers or the GPD as soon as possible. Department faculty members and campus resources will help you work out a schedule to better balance your time. Finally, it is important to have the body of the dissertation drafted by the fall of the fifth or sixth year, so that you can make a serious showing on the job market. For most academic jobs, you must be able to demonstrate that you will finish your dissertation by the end of the current academic year, and having the dissertation largely complete will leave you the significant time needed for a thorough job search. The general guideline is that no less than 2/3 of the dissertation should be ready before a student navigates the academic job market.

4. Meet regularly with your committee. Your Chair and other dissertation committee members are there for you, but it is your responsibility to take the initiative to meet with them. If faculty members don’t answer your emails, email them again or go to their office hours. In the rare cases when you cannot reach one of your advisors, speak with the GPD as soon as possible. Much as with comps preparation, you should draw up a schedule to ensure that you see one or more of your advisors every few weeks, first to discuss tentative plans, then to discuss a chapter outline, perhaps again for a general midway conversation on a chapter, then of course to hand in the draft before the committee meeting that is required at minimum once each year, but that occurs preferably once each semester.
5. Learn from meetings with your committee. At least once each year, in order to remain in good standing in the graduate program, you are required to have a meeting with your dissertation committee. Most students use this occasion to discuss a completed draft of a new chapter, although you may occasionally have two chapters to discuss at a time or have a second meeting to discuss a chapter that needed substantial revision after the first chapter meeting. These meetings usually take one hour. They begin with the student speaking for a few minutes on the chapter and where it fits in the dissertation as a whole; the remainder of the hour is spent discussing the chapter with the dissertation committee. The meeting itself gives you the opportunity to receive sustained responses from your committee members, who will be able to hear one another’s advice and your responses and refine their advice in turn. Your committee members may also give you written comments in addition to the discussion at the chapter meeting. A committee member who is out of town may participate via Skype or a conference call; in unusual cases when this is impossible to arrange, written comments may be sent in advance of the meeting. Faculty members are asked to provide written feedback on chapters within four weeks of receiving a chapter draft. 
6. Share your work. Beyond campus, you should plan to present your work at one or two conferences a year. More than that adds little and can slow your dissertation writing; the ACLA annual meeting is particularly recommended. The Program has funding to assist in conference travel (see below). The Program also strongly recommends that while in graduate school you send out two articles for publication, one derived from your dissertation chapters and another drawing from work separate from the dissertation, which can show the breadth of your knowledge.

Completion and Preliminary Approval of the Dissertation

The Dissertation Committee Chair should establish deadlines for the submission of each chapter draft in order to support the writing process. The student submits drafts of each chapter to the Chair and to the members of his or her committee, as agreed upon in prior consultations with them. Faculty members on the committee are expected to respond to each chapter draft within four weeks. Students should not expect a faculty member to be able to read a draft in less than four weeks. Students should contact their Chair and the GPD should their committee members fail to provide timely feedback. The final dissertation defense is scheduled only when the Dissertation Committee Chair (in dialogue with the members of the committee) deems the dissertation acceptable in content, form, and language, and ready to stand for defense.

The Dissertation Defense

The Dissertation Defense is scheduled through the Program Administrator and the GPD no less than thirty days before the defense. The student must prepare a degree eligibility form and provide the full title and committee membership to the Program Administrator. If the committee includes outside members, they will need to be granted Graduate faculty status; this requires their cv and birthdate, and the process takes some time. Please plan accordingly. The degree eligibility form is signed by the GPD and by the Department head, Prof.Jessica Barr.

In accordance with Graduate School regulations, “attendance at the final oral examination is open to all members of the candidate’s major department and any member of the Graduate Faculty. However, only members of the Dissertation Committee may cast votes.” The Graduate School directs that the oral be “primarily upon, but not limited to, the contents of the candidate’s dissertation.” In order to pass the examination, the candidate must receive unanimous approval from the Dissertation Committee. If there is one negative vote, the degree will be held up pending action of the Graduate Council.

The outcome of the examination is to be made known to the candidate immediately after the members of the Dissertation Committee have conferred at the conclusion of the defense.

During the defense, the candidate may be asked to make minor revisions to the dissertation before filing it. Such requests will come primarily from committee members, as the Chair will already have reviewed the dissertation in detail with the student. The Chair and committee will communicate required revisions to the student in writing and set out a clear timeline for their completion. The revised dissertation must be approved and submitted to the Graduate School ideally within two weeks of the defense and no later than the end of the semester following the defense. Thus, a student who defends in the fall semester must file the revised dissertation by the following May; likewise, a student who defends in the spring semester must file by the following December. Note that a student who defends in the summer must file by December; a student who defends in the winter by May. In order to give the Dissertation Committee Chair the requisite four weeks to review the revised thesis, the candidate will submit their revisions to the Chair at least four weeks prior to the end of the semester: by November 15 for a Fall submission or April 15 for Spring.