Aiming Low

From Scott Eric Kaufman's "Unpublished Dissertation Chapter on Silas Weir Mitchell":

This corresponds to Mitchell's larger theory of moral and intellectual development, such that the proper way to write a poem corresponds to the proper way to raise a child and both entail a particular theory of historical and social development. (138)

Before you ask, that sentence is dreadful and I can cite the one hundred thirty-eighth page of this chapter.  Shouting "power extreme," I combined four substantially different drafts of my Mitchell chapter into a single monstrosity.  Unwieldy as it is, with a little editing it could outstrip the sum of its parts.  If all else fails, I can turn in a 182-page "chapter" into a reasonable facsimile of a manuscript and hit the market next year ...

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

So, Scott ... how many chapters do you have left, anyway?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Do you want to make me cry? I still have a ways to go. I've turned in two chapters, but both need major revisions (which have been put on hold until I finish the others). So I have, I don't know, two or three more chapters, depending.

[N. Pepperell]

You're doing better than I am (not that this should necessarily be a consolation): I have an enormous mass of material sort of sitting around in fragments - some of which I've grouped into something that might become a couple a chapters (some of which I've promised *will* become at least one chapter my mid-December). On the one hand, I'm writing a lot. On the other, I'm not completely sure what it is that I'm writing, exactly... Since much of it relates to my field material, it bears a striking similarity to primary school presentations on 'What I Did Last Summer'... Do they actually award doctorates for stories about what I did last summer? It doesn't take a terribly dark moment for me to suspect that the answer will be no... ;-P

[Alex Leibowitz]

Nothing Mr. Colon can't fix.

[Mike S]

My God, Kaufman. 100 + pages now constitutes a chapter?! My M.A. director's entire dissertation weighed in at a slender 190 pages, with 5 variously sized chapters.

Let's say you don't turn a 182-page chapter into a facsimile of a complete manuscript. What is there to be gained from instead venturing ever onward into all things Silas Mitchell and finishing with an unslender 400 or 500-page beast of a terminal project?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Mike, no, it certainly shouldn't. A chapter should check in, max, at 45 pages. I've just produced way to much prose and am having problems organizing it.

Alex, I think a semi-colon would be more appropriate, no?

N.P., I wish "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" was acceptable. I mean, they can just read the blog!

[Alex Leibowitz]

This corresponds to Mitchell's larger theory of moral and intellectual development: writing a poem is like raising a child...(138)

I'm not sure what I would do with the rest -- does "both" refer to "writing..." or does it refer to "moral and intellectual development"? Furthermore, is "entail" really the word you want? And finally, I would cut the word 'particular' -- unless you're contrasting this "particular" theory with another or others.

Mr. 2c

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Actually, that mostly works. You're a doll, Alex. The "particular" needs to stay because in the parts I didn't quote, it's obvious which of the candidates I've forwarded Mitchell particularly favors. (Although, given all the philosophical talk about the general and particular, you may be onto something. "Specific" may be even better.) As for "entails," well, I want the strength of logical entailment, even if it isn't, you know, as strong a connection as "entail" entails. Basically, when trying to intuit an argument from a mass of thought as sloppy as Mitchell's, you have to connect his dots...because the connections are there, and certain commitments do entail others in ways that work across his corpus. He just wasn't aware of this, so I have to press the issue in his stead.*

*Yes, very annoying.

[Alex Leibowitz]

Ah, Ok. I just think of "entails" as having a very specific technical sense (what sense that is I think still may be a subject of debate in the philosophy of language, I'm not sure).

Alex

[Karl Steel]

A chapter should check in, max, at 45 pages.

Really? With or w/out notes?* With notes, my first chapter was 55 pages, next one, 75, the one I'm finishing in the next week or so, 65-70, and the last one will be, I think, 45-55. I think an Eng and Comp Lit diss should clock in around 250 pages, although I imagine people tend towards 5 chapters more than they do 4.

Too late to correct me, anyhow.

* Speaking here as a medievalist: we're note happy.

[N. Pepperell]

As a matter of principle, I don't count the footnotes toward the word count - they're my free pass to infinite self-expression... ;-P (They also tend to be longer than my text, so I suspect I won't get away with this idiosyncratic word counting notion... I seem to have picked up the mammoth footnote habit when I originally trained as a medievalist, and have now dragged it into a field where - **shudder** - footnotes are so unusual that one of my supervisors actually asked me whether I were sure it would be okay to include footnotes in a thesis!!!)

[Alex Leibowitz]

Classicists insist on a 1:3 text to foot-note ratio.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Karl, without. Historicists, like medievalists and classicists, are note-happy fools. If I included notes...this thing would be even larger. Which is why I don't. (Plus, like N.P. I do a lot of thinking in mammoth footnotes, some of which graduate to the body of the text.)

[[swift delurk]]

is that "pages" double-spaced or one-and-a-half?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

That would be double-spaced. Even I couldn't produce that much (single-spaced) prose...

[dominic]

"Unwieldy as it is, with a little editing it could outstrip the sum of its parts. If all else fails, I can turn in a 182-page "chapter" into a reasonable facsimile of a manuscript and hit the market next year ..."

Seriously, why don't you? After all, the most important property that a dissertation can have is the property of being finished.