Division of Literature & Languages
Suggestions for Thesis Students
1) Choosing a thesis topic and a thesis advisor
2) Guidelines for the thesis writing process
1) Choosing a thesis topic and a thesis advisor
The thesis is a unique opportunity. Many students find it the high point of their course work at Reed. Yet it doesn't just burst into bloom, obviously. It doesn't even bud without some coaxing. A few students--the exceptions--come upon a thesis topic early on, fix on it, are happy with it, follow it through the procedure of approval when the time comes, and are on their way. Most students, however, grope for a topic. These students may have gathered many particular interests in their field, but deciding upon a topic is another matter. Your teachers are well aware of this dilemma.
To find a thesis topic it is best to begin early and range widely. Begin during your junior year and consider large categories first. You might begin, for example, with the genres. Do you have a preference among fiction, drama, and poetry? Another large category to consider is the period; you may feel particularly attuned to one period of literature. Or you might find it more helpful to decide, tentatively, whether you would rather work on a single text or on several. If you do focus on a single text, it should be of sufficient importance to warrant your spending a full year on it. You do not want to grow bored with your subject, nor run out of steam. It might be better to work on several texts by the same author, or on a selection of texts that have some significant relation to one another; or to investigate a critical problem which can be treated with reference to a range of texts. Another question to ask yourself is whether you lean toward a theoretical issue as a starting point, or toward practical criticism and interpretation.
If you come upon a topic that focuses on literature not written in the language of your major, you should inquire to see if the topic is permissible. As a rule, working with prose in translation is permissible, with poetry not.
If in pondering these general questions you might be helped by specific considerations, you might, for instance, look back at papers you have written. An idea may surface. A number of theses are, in one way or another, extensions of a subject the student has already examined.
Discuss your ideas, or lack of them, with teachers and with other majors in your department; you may get help and suggestions from these quarters. Make lists of possibilities. Use the process of elimination. Don't be afraid to consider something vague or unfamiliar; your teachers can help you focus your interest, and your own explorations may point you in unexpected directions.
There is plenty of time to raise a number of possibilities, as murky as they may be. Besides, in talking with teachers you may find someone with whom you would like to work. Such shopping around is expected and it allows you to consider topics in relation to the particular fields of the teachers. For example, if you find a professor you would like to work with before you fix on a topic, then you would do best to look for a subject within his or her general fields of interest. If you get this far, you should check with the teacher to find out if he or she will be teaching at Reed during the year that you will be writing your thesis. Some faculty members take one semester leaves; if you work in the Fall with Professor X who then takes a Spring leave, you may be assigned to Professor Y for the second semester, and you should know this in advance.
Since there have been more students writing in English and American literature than in foreign literatures, faculty in the English Department are always in danger of being over-booked. To deal with this problem, the Division recommends that faculty members in the foreign language departments direct English theses when those instructors feel knowledgeable about a subject and wish to undertake the project. Therefore, students in English should not overlook Divisional faculty members from outside the English Department as potential advisors.
Your orals board will consist of four faculty members. The Division will assign three faculty members to your orals board--your advisor, your first reader and another so-called "second reader." You must find a fourth member of the board, a faculty member from another Division of the College. You will probably want someone with whom you are acquainted, but make sure that person has some knowledge of or at least an interest in your topic. Though you may want to begin early thinking about and talking to prospective 4th Readers, you will have to wait until after the orals schedules are distributed, approximately mid-second semester, for faculty to commit to being 4th Readers.
2) Guidelines for the thesis writing process
The Division sets due dates as guidelines and a list of thesis due dates will be sent to you at the beginning of the semester you start writing your thesis. Requirements for formatting your thesis are found in the College Senior Handbook, which is distributed by the Registrarís Office, but the Division strongly recommends that the appropriate length of theses is between 50-80 pages, 1.5 spaced. The College provides Thesis Help classes, computer guidelines and Library thesis desk lottery. It is also strongly recommended that you learn about these things even before you being your research.
By the beginning of your senior year you should have some notion of a topic. Two weeks into the first semester of your senior year the Division of Literature and Languages expects you to choose an advisor and tentative topic, and two weeks later you must write a one or two page statement setting out your thesis topic. (Some departments have additional guidelines. For instance, the English Department requires its majors to submit a statement at the end of the first week of classes in the senior year; then the Department meets to match advisors, advisees, and topics.) Of course the topic can be changed, and you should regard this declaration as a statement of a preliminary topic. But if you make a radical shift in the topic--say, from Shakespeare to Proust--you will need the approval of your Department and the Division. The Division meets shortly after its first deadline and hears from each teacher the name and topic of his or her thesis advisees; the Division tries to match student and faculty choices, but protects faculty members from having too many thesis advisees, a situation which is bad for all parties. We try to insure an equitable distribution of seniors among Division instructors. Those students who are not included in this listing may not be able to get the thesis advisor they wish.
The declaration of topic is tentative only in that your topic may naturally change, at least somewhat, as you read and try to frame and integrate your ideas. This stage of formulating your thesis may be the most difficult if not the most important. Much of the first semester is spent, in fact, reading widely and focusing on a subject. During this period, discussion with your advisor should be particularly helpful.
The initial work on the thesis almost always consists of gathering a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. The place to begin is the P.M.L.A. (Publication of the Modern Language Association). Bibliographies are annually listed here by national literature, period, author, and work. Your thesis advisor will know of and direct you to more specific bibliographies.
Work in the first semester, therefore, is preparatory. Some writing is done then. But most of the writing is done during the second semester. One obvious bind you can get into is to leave a major block of the writing to the end. The danger is more deceptive then it sounds: many people who have no intention of postponing any large portion of the actual thesis writing do so nevertheless. If you are used to deadlines, to the extent that you feel dependent on them, then you will have to create your own and stick to them. Your advisor will probably set up a schedule of meetings, assignments and deadlines with you, and the Divisional Secretary will send you a list of Division due dates.
There is another common way in which the writing gets postponed. After the initial planning, there is the second stage of the reading and note taking. It's easy to become so involved in all this groundwork that you lose all track of time. You slip into the kind of thinking that goes like this: I know I should get to the real writing, but first I should read this, and check that, and organize my notes again, and look over my outline. This fragmented approach can go on indefinitely because it is a combination of the excitement of the reading and thinking and the natural hesitation to try to focus and articulate on paper all this background preparation. Even people who want to get to the actual writing fall into this trap. The more reading and note taking you do, the more material you have to sift through; starting to write can become an awesome event.
Besides the two reasons mentioned here (the lack of pressing deadlines and the deepening involvement in the reading, note taking and planning) there are specific, practical problems that can arise, like trying to locate a certain text or periodical. Therefore, it is worth setting up a system, as eccentric as it might seem, to keep yourself on schedule. Otherwise, you may become frantic at the end; your writing will be hurried, and you will have little time to do any re-writing. Your thesis will inevitably reflect your haste.
In an effort to prevent last-minute, hurried writing, the Division requests a substantial piece of work towards the end of the first semester. This submission is on the order of twenty pages or, ideally, the rough draft of a chapter, which you may or may not choose to use eventually. The purpose of this requirement is to get you into the actual work that constitutes your final product.
A second purpose of this writing is to introduce you to your thesis orals. This introduction is done by scheduling a meeting at the end of the first semester for you, your thesis advisor, and a "first reader." This first reader (another teacher in the Division) also reads your piece and is prepared to discuss it with you. Your "first reader" will be on your thesis orals board.
Other senior Divisional majors are welcome at this meeting, just as you are welcome at theirs. This sharing can be comforting. It can be enjoyable and interesting, too. Certainly the opportunity to acquaint yourself with other students' thesis projects is informative and generally reassuring. The openness of these meetings also serves to limit the otherwise rather solitary nature of thesis work. Finally, the end of the year is, at this point, far enough away that much of the discussion at the meeting consists of exploring of ideas, and noting of specific suggestions by the faculty member.
This meeting gets you rolling officially: you receive response to what you have written, which, in turn, may aid you in further redefinition of your topic. The meeting is a sounding board and guiding session. Although the meeting is informal, it nevertheless simulates the thesis orals. As a "pre-orals," it demystifies this long-awaited event. Even the most articulate and extroverted of students anticipates the thesis orals with some trepidation. Since the orals lasts two hours, losing the first hour to nervousness is pointless.
Whatever is written for the "pre-orals" is filed with the Divisional Secretary and posted at the Library's front desk so that other students may look at it. Obviously, you may browse through these writings before preparing your own. This arrangement is intended partly to quell your fears and to keep the project within bounds, for the thesis is only one course. However important it may become personally, it remains one course, and the Division is determined to prevent conscientious students from losing themselves in a morass of awesome, self-imposed, unrealistic demands. And while we want you to put your best foot forward, we do not want you to magnify the standards so greatly that you feel you can never accomplish the work.
In an effort to improve the quality of your thesis experience and of the final product, the division has adopted a draft deadline for all students in the division, except for those writing creative theses. You will submit to the Divisional Secretary the draft of the complete thesis. Your thesis advisor will read the draft and provide you with suggested revisions within one week. Any student who does not meet the draft deadline will not be guaranteed comments by the advisor. In addition, because the Division considers this an essential portion of the thesis course, any student who does not meet the draft deadline should not expect to graduate at the regular time. If, in spite of this, the thesis is accepted for graduation, the final grade for the thesis course may be lowered.
There are two thesis "parades" at the end of your senior year: one is for those students who have finished their thesis and their orals; they all march from the Library to Eliot Hall. The other thesis "parade"--well, it isn't really a parade. It is a gathering of those students who didn't finish.
Not finishing your thesis is not only disheartening; it's expensive. You have to sign up for another semester. So whatever your topic, your temperament or your work habits, it remains crucial that you try to meet each deadline. Setting up a mutually agreeable schedule of meetings with your advisor is helpful. Stick to the draft deadline so that you will be assured of having enough time for re-writing, certainly one of the crucial aspects of the project.
The Divisional Secretary will distribute a thesis orals schedule, and post the master list at the Division office. You are expected to come to the Division office and write on this master list the name of the fourth member of your board, and you are responsible for informing this person of the scheduled time and place.
The orals can be an intellectually challenging experience; a chance to exchange views about your work, to clarify points, and even to say what you might have done if you had time to expand the project. You might be asked questions which allow you to relate your work to other literary, critical and theoretical issues. The orals are almost always interesting occasions for everyone, and there is generally a lot of goodwill on the part of the faculty. You probably have less to be concerned with than you think; after all, you have worked with your subject all year, and know it with an expertise and freshness. The orals at best can be an opportunity for everyone to engage in mutual learning. Try to think about it less as a question and answer session, and more as a sophisticated discussion among interested and informed parties.
