Dissertation Nostalgia - Almost Two Years Later

Today, my "bloggy friend" Jamie wrote this post in which she celebrates sending off her completed PhD dissertation to her advisor (congrats again, Jamie!!). Reading it prompted me to think about and comment on my own dissertation, so I opened the PDF document to write my comment and left it open on the desktop. I read my abstract (found a grammatical error in the last paragraph! oh! the horror!) and the acknowledgments, but I didn't have much time and just left it there open.

It was a strange feeling, that of looking at this document that took me countless hours to produce and which hardly anyone in the world will ever read. I enjoyed reading my very informal acknowledgments and the abstract reminded me of the real value of my contribution and why I should try to get back to this and get more people to learn about it.

After K got home tonight and I could just leave the boys' bedtime routine to him, I came back to the computer and saw the dissertation. My first impulse was to finally send it to a small press in Brazil which would be likely to publish it and I even have the email in draft (attachment and all), but I don't know if that's how it works. I mean, publishing in Brazil is not exactly like here, at least not in these tiny and highly specialized publishers. I think I have to send them a thank you email (their books were very useful for my dissertation) and a query one before I just send them that pdf document.

I closed the draft almost in tears and began to read chapter 2, the most relevant one to the publisher in question. I found it very enjoyable to read it and I was surprised that I can tell which words didn't come from my own brain and were the result of the endless corrections and revisions thanks to two most thorough committee members (how/why did they let the abstract error escape, though? I think only one of them read it).

You know, it's hard to re-read my dissertation. I clearly still care deeply and passionately about its subject and I am convinced that my contribution is an important one. One aspect of the research that I have done (just to contextualize the rest of my data) is just ABSURD in its breadth and originality.

The worst part of it all is that I came up with everything there in the period of ten years that I worked in the project (it originated in a lengthy paper that I wrote back in the Fall of 1998, my first semester in graduate school). What I mean is that there is one previous dissertation on the subject (1994) and a few others (in Brazil, not here) from which I "borrowed" the methodology to analyze one aspect of the books. The rest, the approach, the contrasting between writers of both genders, etc. is something I'd never seen anywhere. Highly original and thus, entirely uncommon and potentially unpublishable (in North America, at least).

A month before my defense I found a scholar that does similar quantitative work in literature, but he doesn't use "raw" counting as his main source as I did. We had a lovely exchange of emails (I couldn't find a post about it, I thought I'd written it), but he's a busy scholar, way out there in the West Coast, so how can we exchange ideas? Nobody has time to read other people's dissertations (unless you're advising one of writing one yourself, right?).

Anyway, I don't think I'm going to send that email right now or do much of anything about my dissertation. I haven't given up on it just yet, but I do feel a bit sad that I feel so discouraged about academia in general that I can't muster the energy to try to keep going without a job and any kind of support.

This is NONSENSE, though, because my dissertation, all of it, had minimum support (in terms of ideas of what to do), I only had feedback on the content from one reader (it was heavy criticism and there were many suggestions). I wasn't doing some kind of "fashionable" research topic, I simply decided to find out what I wanted to find out. So, if I did it on my own, why shouldn't I be able to keep going? I'm entirely capable of presenting at countless conferences if I so desire (I'm going to one in Canada in May) and if could only keep on putting myself out there maybe I'd have a breakthrough. I'm very bad at getting writing submitted, though, so that's a big problem right there.

OK, let me quit all this thinking-aloud-in-writing that must have alienated all but the most academically minded of my readers and go to bed right now. Poor K pulled an all-nighter last night and is already asleep. This job interviewing thing is exhausting and nerve-racking!