Funyunization; or, How to Add Bulk to Dissertations

Until last month, my advisor and I thought it best I write taut thirty-page chapters.  Why?

1. More like an article and thus more easily edited into one.
2. I have no problem produce reams and reams and reams of prose.  You want an 84 page chapter with a 129 footnotes?  No problem.  Want something with a shot at publication?  Force me to be selective.

Abandoning this plan is necessary if I'm to finish by 14 March.  But a 50 page introduction and four 30 page chapters does not a dissertation make.  So I'm currently revising back into my chapters the ancillary material I earlier edited out.  I'm not adding fluff—I'm funyunizing. 

For those unfamiliar with the term, a "Funyun" is an "onion flavored ring" with absolutely no nutritional content.  Just as daily consumption of Funyuns results in unadvised weight gain, daily funyunization of dissertation chapters transforms dutiful acknowledgments of previous scholar's work into winding engagements with their minutiae; brief explanations of historical events into expansive as the rhetoric originally used to describe and descry them; minor characters from minor novels into major players in marginal disputes; &c.  You know, all the extraneous material that separates a dissertation from a first book.

You could say I'm unbooking my dissertation.  I'm packing on unhealthy pounds, chancing the dangers attendant upon spare tires, knowing that I'll need to unfunyun it back into a lean beast if I ever want to see it in a university library.  (I'm saving copies of its svelte youth to accommodate the inevitable montage.)  But all this talk of health must step aside for the moment.  I need to funyun ... and an essay I was reading earlier today tossed me a bag of onion-flavored deliciousness:

The most striking feature of this account—second only to its blatant racism—is ...

How could I have missed this?  I can open damn near every discussion of every Nineteenth Century novel and poem and study and article I address with this very sentence.  That must be what?  An extra five or six pages righteously funyuned in right there.  Into the boilerplate with you!

Comments

[Karl Steel]

The most striking feature of this account—second only to its lack of prescience regarding the internet—is

The most striking feature of this account—second only to its preference for the Los Angeles over the Brooklyn Dodgers—is

The most striking feature of this account—third only to its length (which is second only to its heighth)—is

Mine was a 23 page intro, chapters of 30, 70, 44, and 70 pages, and an 11 page epilogue, and then 40+ pages of bib. Do not follow my model.

[Sisyphus]

But a 50 page introduction and four 30 page chapters does not a dissertation make.

Uhhh, why not? We have people graduating from here with dissertations that length. My friend the French postdoc visiting from an ivy had four 30 page chapters on her diss. Isn't that 120 pages? _Plus_ a nice long introduction? That's plenty long.

Sounds like that puppy's done. Get it on out there ---- you don't want the funyunization and de-funyunization to give your dissertation heart problems.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Does that mean that you're actually dropping a chapter? Oh no I've just realized that my head is full of SEK dissertation minutae, kept there by the mnemonic effect of so many parody poems: "Wharton, London, Mitchell, and Twain". Surely this is the most useless trivia ever.

Well, let's see Google -- hey, Google doesn't seem to index your comments. You should rectify this... but at any rate it should be site-indexed under "Dissertation". Yes, here it is:

Wharton, London, Mitchell, and Twain
Wrote about people who changed under strain
Was it Social Darwinism in American thought?
Not with so many other theories. It was not.
Warton couldn't judge between claims
London took whatever matched his aims
Mitchell thought knowledge left women undone
And Twain's chapter has not yet been begun
It was Lamark that boggled the brains
Of Wharton, London, Mitchell, and Twain

Based on this and the accompanying post which said that you would have an introductory chapter on evolutionary theories, I'm guessing you dropped Twain, and that's why you have to bulk up everything else. Right?

[N Pepperell]

Yeah - I have apparently uncontrollable streamlining impulses when I look at my chapters. I'll happily blurt thousands of words of roughly equivalent material on the blog, repeating and padding and trundling around my own point without much worry. But start calling it a chapter and, no matter how similar to content to what I blog, something else takes over. And that something has the effect that I'll go through a draft and pare things down very tightly. Then I'll decide this makes the text read about as well as a list of syllogisms, and so I'll go back through and try to turn it into something someone might want to read. This inevitably makes me think of points I should have mentioned, which means new material on which this same dynamic then starts working. I know I'm about finished with the chapter when I find myself making reciprocal edits on alternating drafts: one read, I'll cut something; the next read, I'll put that same thing back. That's pretty much when I decide it's a wrap...

Good luck with the home stretch :-)

[John Emerson]

In the end does the dissertation merge with the personal crisis, with Jack London's ghost possessing your next door neighbor and making him into a Social Darwinist hit man purging the world of -- you?

[Ahistoricality]

I can't imagine what your advisor is thinking: is it the rest of your committee that needs Funyun apparatus to approve the diss?

If the chapters are sound as they stand, what possible pedagogic or diagnostic value is Funyunizing?

I'm honestly and truly unclear on the concept.

(for the record, my dissertation had four chapters and came in under 200 pages. But it was in history, not literature, which is why I average about four footnotes per page.)

[aaron]

I say funyunize. you'll be a celebrity for courageous weight gain, like Tyra Banks or Rene Zellweger, and we'll all take strides towards freeing graduate students everywhere who toil and labor under unrealistic expectations of dissertation sveltness. Down with society's dictates!

[aaron]

I say funyunize. You'll be a celebrity for courageous weight gain, like Tyra Banks or Rene Zellweger, and we'll all take strides towards freeing graduate students everywhere who toil and labor under unrealistic expectations of dissertation sveltness. Down with society's dictates!

[Doug]

I don't get this at all. Why is what you had not sufficient--or almost sufficient? Why does it need to be longer, for godssake? That's crazy. I was given a couple of directives regarding my bloated chapters. One was streamline. If it doesn't directly address the central theses of the diss as laid out in the intro, then it's suspect. Another was (and this was chanted over and over, a dharani for Doug): "It's just a dissertation." It doesn't have to be the last word--your's or anyone else's--on the topic. It's the beginning of your career, not the end. I don't know how many times I heard that. Of course, it was an ethnography not a literary study, and with all this good direction, I still took years to finish, but it was a slim 240 with biblio in the end. Anyway, kick it out the door.

[SEK]

Karl,

Mine was a 23 page intro, chapters of 30, 70, 44, and 70 pages, and an 11 page epilogue, and then 40+ pages of bib. Do not follow my model.

Actually, that's about how long mine'll end up being (250 pages, not including the bib, which will be a monster). So I am following your model, only I'm going to divide the pages more evenly between the chapters. (Which makes a difference, inasmuch as I won't need to trim too much from any one to whip it into job talk/writing sample shape.)

Sisyphus,

My friend the French postdoc visiting from an ivy had four 30 page chapters on her diss. Isn't that 120 pages?

That's insanity. I mean, unless it's as dense as Our America -- which takes N.P.'s syllogism fetish to new heights -- it's difficult to imagine someone adequately covering a topic worthy of a dissertation in so few pages. I mean, I was going to try to, but strategically: get them published as articles, get a better job, more time to convert them into a book, but alas! it's not to be. (Of course, your friend might've had the same idea. It's just that around here the typical dissertation ends up being about 250 plus footnotes.)

Rich,

Actually, the Twain will appear, I'm simply reneging on the whole "separate introduction" thing. One introduction about the history of evolutionary theory, then a conclusion which will, at some future time, be the actual introduction to my project. (And I'm pretty sure Google indexes my comments. For instance, I can search for your name here and it'll pop up.)

[SEK]

Where did all those other comments come from? Hm. Give me a minute, I'll respond.

[SEK]

John,

In the end does the dissertation merge with the personal crisis, with Jack London's ghost possessing your next door neighbor and making him into a Social Darwinist hit man purging the world of -- you?

Nope. Outside of the acknowledgments page, you'll not see word one about my personal life. (Outside of a couple of in-jokes which will, of course, be excised before I publish it as a best-selling work of care and importance with details the likes of which the world has never seen.) (Or something.)

Ahistoricality,

If the chapters are sound as they stand, what possible pedagogic or diagnostic value is Funyunizing? I'm honestly and truly unclear on the concept.

It's largely a departmental thing -- dissertations must be of a certain weight and heft or produce a couple of stellar articles (as my friend and sometimes commenter Stephen's did when he landed a chapter in PMLA). It's about demonstrating that you've done your homework, investigated all the possible approaches to your problem and chose the one you took.

Aaron,

Yes, celebrity, yes! (As opposed to "blog celebrity," which Scott McLemee called me, but which I can't really put on the CV.) (Although, hopefully, people will know about it anyway, as that's the only shot I've got in a crowded, terrible market.)

Doug,

I was given a couple of directives regarding my bloated chapters. One was streamline. If it doesn't directly address the central theses of the diss as laid out in the intro, then it's suspect.

Well, all of it is pertinent, but it's material that wouldn't be in an article. For instance, I can only address one of Silas Weir Mitchell's Revolutionary War romances in an article if I want to include the (lengthy) section on his aestheticized notion of historical progress, so I cut the discussion of Red City. But it's something that deserves more than the footnote I gave it -- esp. in a longer study of his thoughts about American imperialism. So back in it goes!

it was a slim 240 with biblio in the end.

That's about where I'll end up, only with a 90 page bibliography. (Which is, yes, insanity, but I read a lot of contemporary newspaper clippings, and cite a good number of them in footnotes.)

[Ahistoricality]

It's about demonstrating that you've done your homework, investigated all the possible approaches to your problem and chose the one you took.

Well, I guess I should just thank my lucky stars that my dissertation committee was about as uninterested in theory and "approaches" as you can get. Also, I picked a topic on which the historiography was pretty thin to begin with, at least in my region.

Seems to me, though, that this sort of checkboxing is what comprehensive exams and dissertation prospecti are for.

Anyway, you do what you need to do to be done: "The best dissertation is a finished dissertation" I was told once. Make 'em laugh, and get out of there!

[Sisyphus]

Well, I think for people who produce four chapters of lapidary close reading on four different canonical texts are getting out with much shorter projects, so there's that to think of in regards to the literary historicism approach.

I still think that padd-- er, funyunization is not the best way to go; if you need something longer, throw in a whole 'nuther chapter, even if it's absolute crap, because you can revise it up into an article or part of the book, whereas the funyuny goodness is just going to have to come right back out again before you do anything to the diss/book project.

Ok, now I'm having a craving for those nasty little fried things. You are terrible.

[Tenure or Bust]

This may be the moment to consider the possibility of selling advertising space within your dissertation. There's nothing wrong with flipping to an indiscriminate page and having someone tell you to "Eat at Joe's." You're getting your dissertation the number of pages it needs and making money on the side.

Or, just have your dissertation start taking steroids, everyone else is doing them!

Just a thought (or two).

[Rich Puchalsky]

Wow, that's advice suitable to your name, Sisyphus. I think it would go something like this:

1. Scott reads 20 pages of footnotes worth of new research material for new chapter.
2. Scott adds chapter.
3. Chapter is too long! Scott revises chapter to make it smaller.
4. Chapter is fine. Now diss is too short! Go to step 1.

That process should have Scott finishing not only a diss, but also an illustration of the mathematical phenomenon of convergence of a series to a limit. The 30th chapter will be about 3 pages long. The 1100th chapter will be a sentence fragment. The 4840th chapter will be a single letter, but will still have three footnotes.

[Karl Steel]

Asymptote is the word you want, Rich, yes? I caught this word either from Lacan or Zizek: one of those boys overuses it, and probably both.

90 Page Bib Scott? Okay, I honor you.

Tenure of B: where were you last year at this time? You could have saved me a lot of trouble...

[Sisyphus]

Ooh, ads! Not only would that fill the pages, but provide added revenue as well!

I approve.

(Rich, is there any _other_ way to do a dissertation?)

[JPool]

Oh, I see, the amazon links things was really just a dry run for the use of product placements/ads in the diss. This makes sense, but if you're going to make any money off of this, you're either going to have to go higher end ("London often wrote of coffee brewing under rough and unforgiving conditions, but in his own life he secretly and anachronistically enjoyed the home luxury of the Impressa Z6 espresso coffee maker.") or else more mass market ("Wharton carefully considered here epistlatory responses, often while enjoying a Diet Coke, which, along with the construction of insightful social portraits, constituted one of her abiding passions.")
Don't try and get any more money out of Funyuns. As you may have deduced from their current market position, they are content to occupy a niche position based upon small groups of dedicated primarily bowling alley-based consumers and ironic youth market consumption.

[slavdude]

My history dissertation was 431 pages including the bibliography, which itself was some 30 or so pages. There was very little funyunization in it, partly because I was in a hurry and in fact neglected some things I should have put in it. Now that I am quixotically working on turning it into a book, I can remove the dissertationy stuff and add in stuff I took out or didn't do in the first place.

Call it Kissingeresque diarrhea of the keyboard.

[SEK]

Too much good material here to address it tonight. I'll handle on a day when I haven't wasted my brain on not selling advertising space in the diss. (Why didn't I think of that? I mean, granted, you see all the ads cluttering this place, so you'd think it'd be natural ... but I'm seriously considering trying to line up some corporate sponsors. Think Nike would want to branch out into Competitions of The Mind?)

[Sisyphus]

Dude, you're missing the big, inevitable and obvious suggestions: Big Pharma.

Xanax? Percocet? Clonapin? Heck, get some quarter-page ads for Valium etc. in there too...

(not sure if Viagra would be the best for your specific diss topic there ... maybe birth control would be better...)

[Scrumptious]

What's wrong with bigger margins and triple-spaced paragraphs? Thus making it four forty-page chapters? Still not enough?

That's right, laugh me to scorn.

[Mikael Vejdemo Johansson]

Well, y'know, my dissertation is going to be about 60 pages. Total.

Introduction, chapters, everything.

Then again, I'm in pure mathematics...

[Julep]

My natural inclination is to funyunize, at least on the first draft or two. It seems like I never know what's important so I have to write it all down. But because dissertations in my field are moving toward the manuscript format in which they need to be a series of extremely concise and separate manuscripts ready for publication, I spend more time and effort un-funyunizing.