writing: March 2009 Archives

Steve had a nice comment to my last post:

I would add as a slightly different but related truism: there are a lot of different ways to skin the same cat. I think that everyone working on a diss or a book or major project lives in terror of coming across a title that appears to be about the same topic. But there are a lot of ways to take different angles on something. We did a job search this year, and it was interesting to see how many of our top candidates were doing essentially the same thing but doing them just differently enough to be unique.

Every project is a snowflake, I suppose.

What I didn't say in my last post was that, when that conversation started, my first thought was that I was going to have to offer this advice. It's far more common, I think, for writers to come across an essay or book that feels like it's covered the same ground. I'll never forget reading Mark Taylor's The Moment of Complexity the first time--I had just read, over the course of maybe 5 or 6 months, a bunch of the primary sources that Taylor relied on, and that material was percolating in my head. Then I picked up Taylor and all of a sudden, he was saying all the things that had only formed half-baked in my own head. It made it simultaneously exhilarating, deflating, and easy to read.

When it comes to working on the dissertation, though, I think that the terror that Steve describes above is a biggie. And part of that is our attachment to values like Originality--what seems like an original thought or approach in the context of a graduate program may be old news in another discipline, another program, or wherever. I've seen dissertators overhaul their methods because they found someone who had done something similar, and I think that's almost always a mistake.

First, I think that it's more productive to think of one's project in terms of its contribution rather than in terms of its originality. That's tougher than I make it sound. Part of the problem is that our model for designing projects (the old CARS model from Swales) focuses on distinction in a way that can be misread. The fact is that there are many dimensions along which a project can be distinct from another: method, site, background, genealogy, application, approach, etc. What we forget in the humanities sometimes is that small distinctions (applying a particular method to this site instead of that one) can produce important insights. Perhaps a pedagogical approach or curriculum that's worked well in one context does not in another. Maybe an interpretive attitude suited for certain artifacts is less suited for others. And so on.

My second point is related to yesterday's post, and that's that rather than living in terror of someone having been there before, we should think of those instances as opportunities for conversation. I've never read a book that was the absolute final word on something, my own included. There's always lots of room for additional work. And that's the kind of work that 99% of us actually do, connecting this idea to that one, bridging one tradition with another, building upon what's come before. The fantasy of initiating paradigm shifts is all well and good, but when it hangs up our ability to get work done, it's time to set it aside and focus instead on doing good work, making a strong contribution to the discipline.

I have those fantasies too, but they're best combined with a sense of humor and a commitment to the work itself.

That's all.

I was talking with one of my many dissertators the other day. She was worried because she had read a couple of texts, one article and one book, that purported to do what she herself planned for her dissertation. However, she discovered upon reading them that, in fact, they weren't doing anything like what she wanted to do. I think that she was concerned that she was going to have to conform to their particular approach and that subsequently she'd be doing something that she didn't like.

I relate this little story not to get people guessing about the person in question, although some of you might know who it is, but rather to relay some of the best advice that I received/absorbed whilst in graduate school myself. Namely,

The best thing you can find is someone or something to work against.

I mean "against" here in two different ways, both of which are captured by the supercheesy pick-up line "If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?" I wish I had a better example, but there you go.

One of the things that I've really been emphasizing over the past few years as a graduate instructor is the importance of visualizing (and spatializing) research networks. We speak of the importance of situating one's work, but I've really pushed at that to make it more concrete. In fact, it's been a few years now since I assigned straight-up seminar papers in my graduate courses. Instead I've tried to design courses and assignments that focus on certain elements of the scholarship process. Concept maps are probably my fave, as long-time readers will notice...

Anyhow, against is a word that suggests both opposition/distinction to and contact with someone or something, and for the texts that matter most to the work I do, I work against them in both senses. Most books start out weighted in one direction or the other, and the ones that I value most tend to balance out, as I see the weaknesses of the ones I like and the virtues of the ones I don't.

So yeah, find the stuff that you can work against. If I had rules, that'd be one of em.

That's all.