Arrogant it may be, but I suspect that when deep in the tunnel of research, a lot of PhD students look to a glimmer at the end of it that is about the size and shape of a playing card, and shines in the sun. I am talking about a credit or debit card, and that glorious day when you envisage walking into a bank, slapping it onto the counter, and being greeted with, "Good morning, Doctor."

As I blogged when I passed my viva, the process of completing is somewhat subdued. Because there are so many stages to go through, you are never actually sure when you have cleared the final hurdle into doctorship. But the moment that new bank card lands on your doormat, and you start using it in everyday life, is the moment you know you have finally done with the thing.

Which is why I have been frustrated about how hard it actually is to get a card with this new epithet on. When I applied to the Youth Hostel Association, I used the tag, but got back a card simply with my name on it. Likewise, I thought Waterstones ought to be impressed by having a doctor (of English literature, don't they know!) amongst their customers. But you would not have known it from the plain card which arrived after I had applied, which had nothing on save for a string of numbers. My bank, Smile, similarly did not have any easy way of changing my card, though having spoken to a somewhat bemused man on the phone, I am waiting for a new card to flutter onto the doormat any day now.

However, my vanity may well have got the better of me. In this new tax year, I applied for a new ISA, using my new tag (for, surely, they will invest my money more carefully, won't they?). A couple of days later, though, an unexpected letter arrives on the mat. "Dear Dr." it reads, "We have been unable to verify your identity through the usual records checks. Please supply three items of identification showing clearly your name and address." Naturally, my recent utility bills and passports have not been updated, so I am left to worry: will they trust there's a doctor in the house?

Labels: bank cards, Dr., Postgraduate Diary, University Life

When I started this Postgraduate Diary back in 2005, my work load was somewhat lighter than it has been over the past year. This has meant that over the past few months in the run up to submission and then preparing for the viva, when one would have thought I would have most to say about the unique experience that is doing a PhD, I have had least time to blog about it. As a consequence (and further cutting the cover of my pseudonym and coming closer to revealing my real identity), I joined the Twittering masses.

If you follow me on Twitter, or look at the most recent updates in the sidebar on the right on The Pequod, you will see that my thoughts in the run-up to the viva, which took place yesterday, went something like this.

• Oh shit


• Achooo!


• Oh shit


• What was all the fuss about?

To explain a bit less succinctly, after the end of term, and having spent the first week of the vacation sending out overdue book chapters and a couple of reviews and preparing a paper for the British Society for Literature and Science conference, I managed to go down with flu, which meant that the week I had allocated to preparing for the viva was spent mostly in bed, with the thesis on my knee and me asleep or buried in tissues.

Eventually, I did plough through the thing, at which point my anxiety kicked in - hence the second expletive. Apart from noticing several typos and clumsy sentences, which I always resignedly knew (and knew my examiners understood) would creep through, my opinions on my thesis became utterly distorted. The problem was that at no point did any of my ideas make me sit up and say, "Oh, how interesting." This is because by now my interpretations of the literary works, or the arguments I strung together, were so familiar as to seem self-evident. I simply could not place myself in the position of a naive reader who would be attending to what was there afresh.

As I have commented previously, the art of learning to write well is, in a sense, the art of learning to read naively, understanding what new readers are going to take from a work, rather than what you as the writer believe yourself to have put in. But whilst this may be an art I have more or less mastered at the level of the essay, obviously writing a book-length study was entirely new to me. A book entails a different dynamic, because by virtue of its length a reader's concentration ebbs and wanes, and one often reads with less attention to style and structure (and hence to problems in that style) and responds more to broad ideas as they emerge from the fog of the whole. However, as a writer I am not experienced enough to conceptualise my ideal book reader. Consequently, in my own re-reading of my thesis, I focused intently on the elisions, the errors, the bits of structure that I felt could be improved; in a way my experience of reading my thesis was the experience of reading the thesis I did not write. So many times I wondered why I had not added another critic, or why I had not covered a particular angle of potential argument. I knew the answer - lack of time - would not really wash in the viva, but I convinced myself that these absences were all that the examiners, my first proper readers, would notice, rather than them attending to the things I had written.

When I finally emerged from the fug of flu, then, I ended up wandering around our local countryside doing rather perverse versions of some silent movie mannequin. There I would find myself, walking through the woods, waving my arms about and muttering to myself. What I was doing inside my head was holding mock vivas, imagining all the questions that might be put to me, and constructing idealised answers. If I was a cartoon, I would be Homer Simpson, with his monkey homunculi inside his skull, only in my case two of the monkey-examiners would be wearing figurative grey beards and I would be a small child chattering in the corner.

So in the run up to my viva, I went around in something of a nervous state, not quite a wreck but certainly more anxious than I had expected I would be. I think part of the issue with a viva is that in a technical sense it matters little. Unless a supervisor has been utterly useless, there is no way any student could submit a thesis that was going to fail outright. So the viva really only determines whether one will pass with a few typo corrections, or provisionally pass with the need for substantial rewriting over the coming months, a prospect no PhD student relishes, being no doubt sick of the sight of their thesis by this point. So instead of being like an exam result, with the mark passively waiting on a piece of paper, the viva is a sustained, active confrontation with two academics who are going to either look down on you, or treat you as (more or less) their equal. Especially for someone considering an academic career, like myself, this sets a tone, rather than being a final determinant of the future. Am I an academic, or am I a person who just happens to have a PhD?

So, then, to the thing itself. At which point my examiners broke all the rules by strongly implying that there was not much risk of me doing anything over the course of the exam that could see me fail, or having to go back to the drawing board. This immediately set me at ease, and meant that all the questions to follow took place within a framework in which the issues were less deconstructions and more in the same spirit of academic enquiry that follows any reading of any published book. After all, very few of us have ever read an academic monograph, no matter how good, without thinking certain aspects were weaker than others, or certain things merit further study, without this devaluing the nature of the work as a whole. Like science, studies in the humanities only chip away at the understanding of the universe. When it comes to the human world, there is no theory of everything.

And so the viva was more like a broad ranging conversation than the detailed picking apart that it had been during my internal monologues in the previous week. We talked about things in wider cultural studies beyond the scope of my thesis - including, bizarrely, a discussion of the Nintendo Wii. There were a few technical points which my examiners picked up on, including my use of the term "the viewer" in my discussions of films, as if film goers are all idealised Platonic entities who respond in the same way, rather than a diverse crowd, some of whom fidget, and some of whom pay the attention the director desires. This was quite awkward, as it was an entirely legitimate point which I myself had already spotted as a flaw, but I had to find some way to justify my use of it (in this case, it was a handy shortcut). As it was, I sort of wriggled my way around and then - because I knew that I had already passed - admitted that it needed changing. We chatted a bit about how to rework certain aspects for publication, and which publishers to aim for. And then it was all over. They stayed behind closed doors to draft their final report, and I drifted off for a celebratory lunch with my supervisor.

The whole event seemed, in the end, a bit anti-climactic. Did three years of hard slog really come down to this two hours of fairly gentle academic chatter? Rather than the elation I felt when I finally submitted "the thing" before Christmas, I now just feel a gentle kind of relief. One of the odd things is that there is not really a definitive moment when you pass a PhD. Unlike other exams, there always seems to be one more hurdle to go through before graduation. I have a few corrections to do, then have to get it hard bound, then have to fill in some more forms. And, in a peculiar way, with hindsight I had already passed the moment I submitted, and those words irrevocably printed on the page were just waiting to be read by the examiners who would confirm it. Then again, had I actually passed the moment about eighteen months ago when the chapter structure finally became clear and coherent? Or did I pass the moment when I came up with the original concept for my thesis, an originality which thrilled the examiners? Was it really always going to happen, and all those troubles of writing just going through a necessary motion?

Alternatively, looking ahead, if I want an academic career, the epithet "Dr" really means very little. I have little hope of an academic job without one published book, and a few more journal articles. The thesis is just one necessary, but ultimately minor, step on the road. Neither of my two examiners, nor my supervisor, had ever got their theses published, as it was just the launchpad to something else.

In a peculiar kind of way, this blog mirrors this effect. Over the last year or so, my Postgraduate Diary has got less and less regular, and I have started instead thinking and talking about other things, like the historical novel, or Renaissance science. So I suppose it is appropriate that this will be my final post in the Postgraduate Diary - though that only frees up opportunity for more diverse thoughts in the future.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary, viva

I recently posted about the way I feel a loss of identity having submitted my thesis but prior to my viva. One other thing that has disturbed me is this:

As I have moaned on numerous occasions, you do not so much do a PhD as live it, lugging its intellectual baggage around with you inside your head. Every radio programmme, casual conversation, conference, news bulletin, magazine, lecture, book, article, student essay, web page becomes potential material, sparking off a synaptic connection between the thing you are watching, reading or discussing and your research. Furthermore, a new thought or setence or way of restructuring a chapter can sneak up on you just as easily at 3.00 one sleepless morning, or in the shower, or whilst out for a walk as when you are sat in front of the computer ostensibly "working."

So knowing the way I have not so much lived a postgraduate life, as had the PhD inhabit me, I expected that I would not be able simply to let go of the thesis I had nurtured into the world. The surprise has been that since I submitted just before Christmas, my thesis has lain quietly on my pile of papers, gradually sinking to the bottom beneath sheafs of other material, like some archaeological relic. I have, quite remarkably, simply discarded the thing from my mind. I have no desire to go an just check over that chapter one last time, in the hopes of catching some errant full stop wandering off the page. No sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night with some fresh idea which yes, dear, I simply must jot down before it goes. Zip. Blank.

Partly, I guess, I benefited from handing it in, and then going off for two week's break at my parent's over Christmas, slouching in front of a fire with a glass in my hand. Partly, too, I have been so busy teaching this term that I have not had time to consider researching anything (which makes me wonder how on earth that other person, who only hazily seems to have been me, managed simultaneously to do teaching, writing up, and a new job at a library last term). But even so that obsessive compulsion to write, read and (to quote E.M. Forster) "only connect," seems to have vanished as if by some magic therapy.

Until now, that is, when the repressed returns, as at last I have the date set for my viva (early April). Now that term has finished I must switch - or flicker - back into research mode. I will pick up the thing one more time and, no doubt, spot a million mistakes and things I wish I had changed. That's just the nature of the beast, but the question is whether, in a fortnight's time, I will be Doctored or set back by several months. I will keep you posted.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary, viva

Any decent Graduate School training programme includes workshops to help a student along every step of the road to a doctorate. There are programmes on how to use Microsoft Word, workshops on time management, guides to dealing with a supervisor, advice on preparing for a viva and, finally, guidance on finding jobs when that doctorate is in hand. But pause and backtrack. Between these final stages there is a step missing, one you do not even think about when you are writing and researching, and which I encountered only on my return from the Christmas break.

Having submitted a few days before Santa geared up his reindeer, when I came back after the festivities were over, and sat down at my desk to catch up on the emails that had built up, I went to compose a reply and realised my signature was wrong. Previously, my signature line included my name followed by an unambiguous statement of my position: "PhD Research Student." I also included the address of my department, and a link to my research profile.

But what should my signature line say now? I am not really a PhD student any more, as I have not gone into continuation and have paid no fees, and I am not actively researching. But neither am I a post-doc, since I have no doctorate yet. Using the departmental address, too, seems a bit odd, since although I am teaching a considerable amount in my department, the bulk of my salary comes from a job at one of the university libraries. Then again, putting "Library Dogsbody" after my name would confuse my students. So I went for the minimal approach, just my plain old name and email address. Not even any of the letters I have accumulated: BA, MA, AHEA. As I have come to realise, the period after submitting but before viva-ing (is that a verb? it sounds like some Latin dance) has no name, which perhaps explains why it is overlooked on training programmes.

Since Christmas, I have been caught in a peculiar routine. Following the advice of friends who have graduated, I am not going to look at or work on my thesis until closer to my viva in Easter. Instead, I have spent the last month or so getting on with my teaching preparation, reading Paradise Lost and Midnight's Children, and mugging up on Freud and deconstruction. I have also had a lot of marking to do. However, my days are by not bursting at the seams of time as they were in the run up to submission last term.

I do have a few research thoughts bubbling in the back of my mind - something on mobile phone fictions, something on complexity, a paper on Frederic Jameson and computer games - but to be honest I simply cannot be bothered to get going on any one of these; when I do, no doubt I'll post thoughts in progress on this blog.

I think I was so burnt out before Christmas that I cannot bear the thought of starting from scratch on a new project. Indeed, I am not sure I can even remember how to begin in principle, because it is so long since I actually researched anything original, took down notes, and wrote down ideas. Although I have never worked harder than the previous six months, that period of finishing my thesis consisted mostly of re-writing and editing, with very little original thought, and certainly no writing 1000 words on a page that had been blank at the start of the day. This was the Polyfiller phase of PhD, when I filled in the gaps and smoothed the cracks of my existing writing and research. Those days three long years ago when I used to sit reading all morning, go for a walk after lunch, and dash out some brilliant (or so they seemed at the time) paragraphs on my computer are distant memories.

This phase, then, can best be described as a limbo. I am not in the heavenly phase of discovering new and interesting ideas, but neither am I experiencing the hell of getting these ideas coherently written during excessively busy days. I am something more than a PhD student, for in the last six months I finally became confident as a researcher, but I am not yet wearing the badge of "Dr" that makes my skills official. And, of course, there is the distinct possibility that I will not be awarded the PhD straight away, but will have to do substantial corrections.

I am still kicking around my department, nattering easily with staff and other postgraduates as I photocopy teaching handouts, but I am conscious that my eyes should really be set on other jobs, in a different university. I am financially comfortable, what with my library and teaching jobs and Mrs. Ishmael's salary also, and could happily drift along like this for the next few years; however, I know that this is not a long-term, secure career.

Perhaps I would feel happier if I at least had a label to attach to this short phase of my life. Pre-post-doc is a bit clumsy. Post-Phd-student is a bit contradictory. Any better ideas?

Labels: Postgraduate Diary, viva

And so it began, and so it has been, and so it ends. Not with a bang, but with the mechanical clunking of a printer, sending out three hundred pages of prose, the only matter that - at this point in time - matters in my life. For it has been my life, for the last three years. It has been the first thing I thought about when I woke. Every item of reading, every shred of prose, every lecture, every television programme and every film has, potentially, had something to say about my research. No matter how hard I tried, I could not switch off from an incessant dialogue.

Sometimes I felt like a medieval scribe, the passive medium of the voice of some divine wisom. There was a world out there, to be understood, and a page on which to mark that understanding, and me, caught in the middle, mediating a ceaseless flow of information from the world into words on the page. And the suspicion I have had - and the thing I still fear - is that even now, I do not quite understand what I have done. My agency has not been all there. Those words and ideas somehow always floated away from me, just beyond the clutch of my comprehension and the grasp of my articulation. Do I really know the postmodern condition I have described? Have I really appreciated all those films and fictions I have looked at in my research? Did I really write that paragraph? Can this thread of detection really be concluded? It will be, of course, concluded of sorts, by those academic Poirots I will confront, not in some cosy lounge but in an anonymous seminar room, where I will undergo my viva.

For now, though, as my words are burnt onto pages through the precise heat of lasers and a fine cloud of toner, I wonder about the things I have done (or did not), arguments I have written (or have not), the books I have read (and those I did not). And I think about what might have been, three years ago, when I started off researching medical narratives, and I wonder how it is that it has ended - right here, right now - with a thesis on the demonic metaphors of postmodern cyberfiction. If only I could recreate the strange permutations, the happenstances of books I just found, the ideas that happened to be floating in academia at the time, and the quirky firing of a few neurons in my own grey matter, that somehow led me here. Does all knowledge have to be produced this way, beyond the control and predictive abilities of those who actually make it?

Even as I end, I think of new beginnings, forking trajectories that point out of my thesis like a web of possibilities. These alternative research directions, I know, I will pursue differently. I now how a body of knowledge in my head, whereas before it was waiting, concealed behind dusty covers, on the library shelves. I feel I could write from the off on any number of new topics, and do it with more acumen, more insight and - most importantly of all - I would actually be conscious of what I was doing, rather than simply allowing the thesis to lead me down numerous dead end alleys, as well as exciting, interesting paths. I look at those two inches of paper, lying like a dead weight beside me on the desk as I type this, and I think - I have done something. Three years ago, this thing, this possessive thing, was not in the world. These ideas, did not exist or, if they did, they were hazy, drifting in the air of academia between different people, but now honed and compressed by me into a single, coherent argument. In spite of my feeling that I was never quite in control of my own work, my ego has to come into play now. It is my thesis I am about to trot across and land on someone's desk. I made this. I am become...a writer.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

Joy of joys, and season's greetings, it is essay marking time again. Actually, I do quite enjoy it - there's something pleasingly hubristic in questioning students' ideas and pointing out their syntactical bloopers, and students do, on the whole, seem genuinely grateful to have some feedback from which they can learn. The tedium comes when I find myself saying certain things over again.

One of the most common problems in first year students is that they think they have to cover every aspect of a literary work. Not only do they want to talk about racism in Heart of Darkness, but they also want to bring in feminism, Conrad's representation of place, frame narration, capitalism and, in fact, pretty much anything else that has ever been said that they have found remotely interesting and that now springs in the mind and that must be poured out on to the page.

So what I find myself doing is pointing out the paradox. This is that if an essay has one really intelligent and elegantly expressed argument, a reader is unlikely to bother about what has been left out; they will never be aware of all the ideas that once floated around in the mind, but that did not make it to the page. Not being telepathic (else why would we need essays?) they can only read what they have in front of them. On the other hand, any reader will be bewildered by a range of different ideas, each worthy of study in their own right, but hanging badly together in an over-long essay.

But why, then, do I fail to practise what I preach. For here I find myself, with just two weeks to go before my thesis is due to be handed in, over the word limit. Way over. Like high altitude sickness over. A few days ago, it was at 105 000 excluding footnotes, and 118 000 including footnotes. The limit is 100 000 including footnotes. So here I am editing like mad. So far, in two days, I have excised just 2300 words. My supervisor does not think it necessary to take the drastic step of cutting out a whole 10 000 word chapter, though I do have one that could slip out without too much fuss. Surely, she says, I can cut it down significantly without too much trouble.

Joke. I find myself shaving a bit here and sanding a rough sentence there, rather than taking the axe to it. It is all very depressing, to find the product of a morning's work is 200 words saved. So now I am not at 118 000, but at 117 800. A 200 word cut from a 2000 word essay might just turn a floppy, overloaded piece into a tightly-wrought argument. In the case of a book length thesis, however, the phrase tips and (large) icebergs float in my mind.

The trouble is, I am too close to the thesis, having lived with it for the past three years, and I do not perceive it in the same way as a naïve reader - that is, the examiner - would do. My supervisor cannot really help; she is also too familiar with it. So how do I follow the lesson that I give to my students, step outside the writing for a moment, and conceptualise it from the point of view of a reader? It seems impossible to come to it afresh, as if I had never read it before, and conceptualise it as its arguments evolve in a linear fashion. I know how it all hangs together, how beginnings meet with ends, and so any argument early in the essay that might seem odd to a new reader, seems legitimate and logical to me. I guess this is why word limits are valuable, if frustrating. They force one to really look at writing, ideas and arguments, all slippery and qualitative things, from a hard-nosed, quantitative point of view. So I have my spreadsheet, and slowly, incrementally, the words get chipped away from the monolith of my prose.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary, word counts

I have a proviso to add to my previous post, in which I wrote about the largely positive nature of having a substantial teaching load. This is - what else could it be? - a gripe about pay. Now during the previous years when I have taught just a couple of groups, the pay was largely irrelevant. The demands on my time, over the course of the year, were minimal, and though that £60 or so each month was welcome, I would probably have done it for free because the experience was so positive.

Now, though, I find myself in the unenviable but by no means uncommon of being an hourly-paid university teacher. The University and College Union have been campaigning about this for years, but I have always passed over the mutters and grumbles in my UCU magazine. I now realise what they were on about - indeed, you can consider this post my virtual placard.

I am paid at the rate of £30 per contact hour with each group, plus £30 for one hour's preparation per group. Not a bad wage, on the face of it. Until I worked out how many hours I actually have done, compared to how many I have been officially paid for. Totting up the hours I have spent in preparation for each tutorial, sitting in front of a computer making groovy handouts and thinking up exciting activities, I have done around 60 hours to teach six different modules. Though it's a bit hard to calculate, because my monthly salary is divided into twelve equal installments whereas the teaching is erratic depending on the times we arrange to meet over the year, I guess I'm probably being paid for only about one quarter of the time I actually put in. And, I should note, that this 60 hour estimate is just formal time when I have switched on the computer for the sole purpose of preparing a tutorial. It does not include all those accumulated minutes snatched on the bus or before bed at night when I have done the primary reading of the various novels and poems I am teaching. It does not include the incidental minutes when I have had to field email questions, or upload resources onto our online learning system. It does not include all the admin of printing, photocopying, and filling in absentee reports.

Finally, for those who haven't switched off after this petty rant, I want to add a note about employment rights in my "casual" teaching role. When I also started work in the university library, I had to churn through whole wads of paper relating to my pension contributions, health and safety, employment rights, mentoring, staff development opportunities and so on. Which is all very laughable, given that I spend twice as much time teaching as I do in my library job. For what passes for my teaching "contract," by contrast, I am technically not employed by the university. I can be dismissed without notice at any point in the year. I have no automatic right to a pension. I am not eligible to undertake any process of personal development, and receive no money to support my training. Worst of all, my library rights and computing access will in principle be withdrawn once I submit my thesis (although through a combination of luck and planning, my library role will still allow me these privileges, so I personally should not notice any difference).

The nail in the coffin is the fact that I am helpless in the face of all these contradictions. I realise that the teaching will ultimately pay off in the long run, as the experience will round off my CV so I can apply for proper academic posts next year. But any of the other postdocs (i.e. my friends) in my department no doubt realise this likewise. Were I to refuse to teach in protest, others would be only too happy to step into my shoes. Were I to kick up a fuss to the university big wigs, they would no doubt pressure my department simply to drop me.The only ray of enlightenment and glimmer of gold might be found in a recent report in my UCU magazine. This concerns hourly-paid teaching staff at Aberdeen (including postgraduates), whose concerns and frustrations seem remarkably similar to my own. But, having waved their painted placards at their university administration, they have had some success. In conjunction with the union, the University reached a new agreement with Teaching Assistants:

TAs are paid for 'sufficient hours to carry out their duties', including
marking papers and emailing students, and specifying that TAs are entitled to
pay progression for each year of experience. As this newsletter went to
press, TAs were being issued with contracts. Early indications are that in some
departments, the assessment of hours of work has increased by 40%, the number of
students in tutorials has been reduced to 2005 levels, and TAs will be paid to
participate in course reviews.

Labels: hourly paid, Postgraduate Diary, teaching

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have taken on a lot more teaching this year, having requested it back in those naive days of Summer sun when I assumed I would have submitted my thesis by September. As I said before, the combined load of teaching and research has put me under a lot of strain. However, unexpectedly, some positive things have come out of teaching many different groups across different modules, with a workload which is relatively representative of the normal lecturer's. My experience may well be typical of postgraduates moving from a very restricted teaching role of their PhD years, to more extensive duties post-doctorate. And although I am talking about my experience in an Arts' faculty, I am sure many of the same themes will occur to any new university teacher.

As three of my tutorials are on the introductory modules of the first-year English Literature degree, the main thing I have noticed is that the different modules have ideas and historical contexts which cut across them. So, for example, teaching on the early eighteenth-century novel, Robinson Crusoe, I tried to get my tutorial groups to explore the way in which the fact that Daniel Defoe was a Protestant may have informed his representation of Crusoe's spiritual epiphany on the island. Feeling that God must be punishing him for his youthful arrogance in leaving home, Crusoe reads the signs of a Providential God in the events that happen to him. He also embodies a Protestant work ethic, so that he does not expect to drop to his knees and find his prayers for deliverance being answered; rather, he must work for himself, in the process learning to farm and fabricate the food and tools he needs to survive, discoveries which form much of the novel's plot.

Now as some one who researches postmodern fiction, much of this religious context was comparatively new to me. And I was therefore glad that I gained a mutual insight from my work in teaching the poet, John Donne. Donne was born in 1571 of a Catholic family, in an England where Catholics could expect to be persecuted, totured and arrested. Having seen his brother die in prison for harbouring a Catholic priest, Donne was torn between the religious expectations of his family, and his ambitions to climb the career ladder of the civil service. Eventually, Donne did convert to Protestantism, preaching fierce sermons at St. Paul's Cathedral, and receiving the respect he craved. However, just as Crusoe is repeatedly anxious that God has got it in for him, Donne too is never quite sure of the theological ground he stands on. For Catholics, performing the expected rites is the way to reach closer to God; and what could be a better way to guarantee passage to Heaven than if one has been willing to die for the faith, as Donne's brother did? And what could be less certain than Protestantism, with its salvation through faith alone? How could Donne know how much faith is enough? How could he know that his personal reading of the Bible was done with enough conviction? That there are no guarantees in Protestantism, only questions and doubts, lies at the heart of Donne's poetry, which offers some of the most elegantly tortured verse in the English language.

As you can tell by this brief excursion through the religious detail of English literary history, this postmodernist scholar has got surprisingly engaged with this earlier material, and though it is by no means my usual field, I had the experience over the course of these two authors of conducting what felt like personally original research. Although I have always loved the unpredictable excitement of face-to-face teaching, and the feeling that I am actually doing something productive with my time, I have rarely had that buzz of discovery that I know from my PhD life. That energy, though, did start to flicker in my mind as I researched these general periods and ideas, rather than just particular texts to be taught on a single module.

In a different relationship between teaching and research, my own research into literary theory has, naturally, informed and guided my teaching on the module of that name. For example, whilst lectures on the canon discuss whether Shakespeare could ever be considered "bad" literature in a different culture or period, my own research into cybernetic fiction led me to ask the inverse question of my tutorial groups: can we imagine a time in the future when a computer-generated poem is considered to be "good" literature? And not only has my research helped my teaching here, my research has benefited from some of the esoteric background reading I had to do in order to teach the rest of the syllabus on this module. It is not quite a teach one module, get some research in for free; but the more teaching you do, the more likely it is that you will mutually accrue benefits on both sides of the teaching-research equation.

The other benefit of teaching more groups in more subjects is that I start to see the same faces and to build a relationship with students, rather than having them simply flicker into my life at certain periods, before then fading away again. If I know a student is particularly vocal in one class, but silent in another, I can start to guage where their particular interests and abilities lie. If a student writes one good essay, and one bad one, I can say more usefully specific things about where they need to improve, and where they are already doing well, because I have a relative understanding of how good they are overall.

Finally, and egocentrically, I am better able to evaluate my own teaching. If I have really engaged discussions with five groups for one module, then find the sixth to be comparatively silent and inert, I guess that it is probably not due to the content of the tutorial I have designed, but rather to the idiosyncrasies of the individuals in the sixth group. Conversely, if one group is very vocal in my tutorial for one module, but the same group seems quite quiet in the tutorial for a different module, I figure that either they are not so engaged with the subject matter of the latter, or - more likely - that I need to adapt my teaching style to fit with their predispositions and the ways they are responding to the different material.

So whilst we are all familiar with professorial grumbles about the teaching-research imbalance, it seems to me worth thinking about how more teaching can actually be a bonus, even if it does take up a remarkably disproportionate amount of time. Maybe I am at that naive stage when teaching is still exciting and new enough for me to feel pleasure in it; maybe, after fielding a whole load more emails asking when our next tutorial is or when a certain author died, I will have become a grumpily resentful of the claims on my research time that teaching makes. But hey, at least this arts' teacher can always escape to those desert islands in the mind, like Robinson Crusoe.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary, teaching

A friend of mine, a PhD student, commented recently on his frustration that his parents still ask him when he intends to get a real job. I know exactly how he feels. I have spent the last three years trying to convince my parents that, surely, starting writing at 9.00 and finishing writing at 5.00 or thereabouts is what they mean by "real work." I know from my gap year in this supposedly more concrete reality of paid work that office life often involves chatting, discussion, making phone calls and filling in paperwork mindlessly; and at the end of the day, office life ends the moment you kick back your desk chair, to begin your leisure time, usually using the money you have earned to pay for it. Surely it is the world of normal work that is the more unreal, requiring you to inhabit a split personality, acting and existing differently depending on whether you are before your family or your boss. I suspect that what parents everywhere mean by the "real" world is that within which there is some sort of oversight, chains of responsibility tying you to times and tasks that you must do, lest you get the sack.

But what could be stranger, less real, than this artificial system in which work and life are kept apart from each other by the glass of 9.00 and 5.00, and in which you may be responsible to managers who (apparently) do less useful work than yourself? By contrast, PhD life becomes your total reality: the mind you occupy whilst doing your PhD is, to a large extent, the only one you have. PhD life is solipsistic and demands total concentration; there are few opportunities to do mindless things like paperwork or phone calls, because by definition a PhD is the use of the mind and the application of the pen or keyboard, not casual chat or filling in time sheets. You eat, sleep and breathe your thesis. The PhD is with you when you shower. It creeps into your consciousness just when you are drifting off to sleep. And it waits at the end of the bed to welcome you with the crack of dawn. So the call to all parents everywhere has to be: "get real." Doing a PhD is probably the hardest work anyone can do, because it is so self-driven and so intimate to the cells of brain and body whilst doing it.

But there comes a stage towards the end of their PhD when most researchers find that the PhD finds a way to press itself even into those precious cracks of time still, wistfully, called "time off." Most significantly, of course, is the need to complete by a certain deadline. But there is also the fact that after three years, funding will dry up (if you have been lucky enough to have some in the first place), and researchers will need to start looking for temporary jobs and long-term futures, those entities that allegedly belong to the parental "real" world.

Now at this stage in may career, I realise how naive I was ever to believe that a PhD was "hard" work. For at this point I find myself holding down six different jobs or positions, some of them paid and some of them voluntary. In addition to trying to polish off the last few footnotes and dropped apostrophes of my thesis, I have been allocated to teach across five different modules. I asked for this amount of teaching back in the glorious days at the start of summer, when I naively imagined I would have finished researching by September. Now, though, I am essentially trying to do all the reading and lectures for an undergraduate degree, whilst adding the PhD on top of that. In addition, I've got a larger than normal pastoral tutor group in my college, have started a job in the library three evenings a week, and am working as publicity officer for my department. In an unpaid capacity, I'm editor of a journal, volunteering for our local literature festival, and moonlighting for Graduate Junction.

These days, I seem to jump from one thing to the next, like an errant fly alighting on one subject only for a moment, before something else calls. I am living and working minute by minute, squeezing in research in the odd half hour between ending library shifts and the bus back home, reading the poems I will teach the next day on that same vibrating vehicle, or doing teaching admin and photocopying first thing in the morning, before my email inbox comes alive. I am stressed and tired. But in an unexpected way, I also feel peculiarly satisfied with my work to a degree that I have not been over the previous three years of doing pure research. Now, for the first time since my year out in the "real world" of an office job, I start to tick things off on a daily basis. Tasks get done, and the list of things still to do gets smaller (at least until another head of the email hydra glowers from my refreshed inbox). With a PhD being as it is, you never feel quite finished, and at the end of the day, no matter how superficially productive, you never feel quite as if you have worked enough or to a sufficient standard. Now, though, I find myself to be a doer, a finisher. People task me with jobs, I work through them, and move on to something else. So it is this sort of experience that outsiders or parents probably mean by the "real," the mentality of the production line and the in-tray out-tray with which they are familiar. So what, I wonder, could be better or more real, more productive and more satisfying, than finally completing my bloody PhD?

Labels: PhD, Postgraduate Diary

Labels: bibliography, citation, footnotes, MLA, Postgraduate Diary

Facebook took off thanks to the sociable Scrabulous addicts at universities in the US and UK, who provided its initial pool of registrants. Facebook is great for staying in touch with friends (and excellent for indoctrinating a generation of virtual stalkers), because you can display your profile in all its aspects: provide a snappy status update, post a blog or note, see how you fit in to your friendship networks, display photos of the night before. But it is precisely because your profile is so accessible and broad that Facebook can reveal your true nature, otherwise hidden behind the mask you present to employers, schools or universities. For this university tutor, for example, it's a great way to find out what your students are really up to. So, Sheila Smith, I do wonder why, if you were too ill to complete your essay on time, you were well enough to be photographed in the local nightclub.


If you want to avoid such exposure, you need to become a dramatic artist, able to control your profile online and display a different costume and face for different readers. In my case, for example, I am conscious that academics may consider my blog here to represent the standard of my academic writing, when actually my posts are often written hastily and clumsily. Hence I author this website and blog under the protective pseudonym of Ishmael, and choose to tell about it only to selected friends and colleagues.


The problem is that many of my fellow postgraduates - not just those I know personally - may be more open-minded and interested in my work; thus keeping it concealed from some academics also means that I may not reach the broader audience of postgraduate readers, and thus the blog cannot become a way for exchanging research ideas which is, potentially, one of its best uses. How, then, can I put my research face out into the world, without having either to display the other hard drinkin' fun lovin' side of my character (as would happen on Facebook) or to conceal myself behind the smokescreen of a pseudonym (as in The Pequod)? Step forward Graduate Junction.


Graduate Junction stems from the concerns of two postgraduates, Esther and Dan, who wanted to provide researchers with way to share research with others, and to host listings of relevant information (conferences, jobs etc.) without being compromised by banner advertising and beery photos. Having recently been treated to a revamp, the site allows postgraduates to post their research profiles, create networks and forums for sharing research in particular disciplines, to publish research blogs, and to post on message boards.


There are also listings of conferences which, being searchable by keyword, are far more workable than Conference Alerts - in the case of the latter, you have to be so careful about what you choose, because you either end up being emailed about loads of irrelevant events, or none at all. Similarly, though jobs.ac.uk provides comprehensive listings, they are almost too complete. I may aspire to be Professor of Modern Literature at Cambridge one day, but for now receiving emails excitingly headed "10 new jobs," all of which turn out to be way beyond my scale, is a bit depressing. I would prefer fewer emails, with jobs that a lowly postdoc like myself might realistically attain. Given that Graduate Junction's audience is solely the postgraduate and new academic community, the jobs listed there should tend to be more relevant.

It's clear, then, that there is a space in the market for a site like Graduate Junction. And - to confess my conflict of interest - as I play a small role on the inside, I know that Esther and Dan are really pushing to develop it in the right way. The comparison with Facebook here is both appropriate and unfortunate. On the one hand, Facebook succeeds because it has a critical mass of users, so that it becomes pretty hard not to sign up to it; if Graduate Junction can attract a substantial proportion of the postgraduate community, there is every reason to believe that it, too, will become an integral part of the postgraduate student's life. I know Esther and Dan are working very hard to publicise the site as widely as possible, and I suspect that this October, when new postgraduates start their courses, will be the vital test - if it garners sufficient support, Graduate Junction will take off; if not, it may simply fade away.

If it does take off, though, it will diverge from Facebook's route in one respect. Facebook has used its social network to hand advertisers their dream markets on a golden platter. Dan and Esther, however, will probably not want to star in any Hollywood movie; they want to produce something that works for the community, rather than using the community to turn them into billionaires. There is no charge for registering, no intrusive banner advertising, and no sense of corporate ownership. The only corporate involvement (and monetary charges) are in listing jobs and conferences in a way which, as I said above, is actually very beneficial to the postgraduate community.

So what, then, is to stop you from signing up right away? Well, it may be that you already have a research profile on your department's web page, contribute to a message board in Google Groups, and blog on your own website. Why should you add yet another online space which you must continually monitor and tinker with? If Graduate Junction gets over the first problem of building a critical mass of users, the corollary issue will be whether it can allow users to synthesise their activities in other online areas under the umbrella of Graduate Junction. Whereas I will not publish this blog feed automatically to Facebook (because I need to keep my anonymity), I would be prepared to let other postgraduates read it, and would be happy to syndicate it to my profile in Graduate Junction. Likewise, I could do with some way of keeping my publication history all in one place, so that when I publish a new paper I do not have to edit my department's web page, online curriculum vitae, and Graduate Junction profile, but can edit just one and syndicate it to the others. This problem of synthesis is a big ask - and an issue for Web 2.0 in general, not just for Graduate Junction. But I have all fingers crossed, and every belief, that Graduate Junction will go some way to solve these problems in the future.

Labels: Graduate Junction, identity, Postgraduate Diary, Technology

One of my thesis chapters is on Philip K. Dick, and concerns his representation of the paranoia that arises in a technologised society. But whilst admiring Dick's work a great deal, I have found myself partaking in the culture of replication which he critiques, because by now, after three years of research and with my thesis nearly done, I have become utterly paranoid about the possibility of losing it at the last through a computer error or virus.

As a digital photographer, I have always been quite careful to keep frequent backups, using firstly CDs and then, when my collection became too large, an external hard drive which goes in the drawer when we go away overnight - because I'm sure those robbers won't be rummaging amongst my underpants! My crucial documents are duplicated here on a weekly basis. However, lying in bed fretting one night, I decided that this was not sufficient, and I added a third, internal drive to back them up automatically on a daily basis. Of course, the problem is that these are all in one place. What if the house burns down, or a power surge wipes the whole system?

A few sleepless nights later, and I have discovered the perfect solution. This is the online file store DriveHQ. Through a small but nifty piece of software that loads when my computer starts, I can set it to a real-time backup mode, so that the instant I save a file on my computer, making that critical word change or crossing that final "t," it is duplicated online. The system keeps up to ten previous versions of updated files, so you can roll back if you realise you want to retrieve an earlier version. And, best of all, it's completely free for up to 1GB of files. Paranoid but impoverished PhD students have no excuses; with DriveHQ the digital equivalent of the cat/homework/munchies scenario is a thing of the past!

Labels: backup, DriveHQ, Postgraduate Diary, Technology

I like to think that I am a fairly well-organised person. I try to be punctual for meetings; I take a dull pleasure in establishing arcane filing systems for my emails; I synchronise my online calendar with my phone to ensure I never miss an important appointment or birthday. I hope that something of this aspect of my personality shows in my prose, as I also delight in correcting every last stop and comma, and perversely enjoy conforming to the rigours of MLA style.

But, as is evidenced by the scores of poets and writers institutionalised in literary history, writing is a schizophrenic activity. The impulsive Byron can produce some of the most perfectly contrived metrics in English verse; conversely, the scrupulous yours truly finds his writing refuses to stay trim. One morning I awake bursting with inspiration; the next, mind and page are a literal blank. Sleepless nights and restless dreams give rise to expansive Xanadu's of prose; hours of attention in the library yield nothing. Reconciling my writing personality with my more fastidious one has been a challenge for me, in my PhD years, as the months since Christmas (and since my distant previous entry in my Postgraduate Diary) have evidenced sharply.

Over the vacation, I attended a workshop on planning for completion. This explored the practical timetable of submitting titles choosing examiners and getting the thesis printed and bound, and also the intellectual planning required for writing up, honing abstracts and proof reading. Duly, after the workshop, I poured procrastination into the coloured bars of an Excel project planner.

I would devote March to the four conference papers I was giving that month; April and June would be focused on writing the Introduction and Conclusion chapters; three months at the end would be set aside for proof reading; and the three months between Christmas and March would provide ample time for me to write a brief chapter on The Matrix, the final part of my thesis's body.

But over the months since Christmas, that brief chapter became greedy. It swallowed contextual thinking on philosophy and religious allegory; gulped down postmodernism; fatted itself on phenomenology; and then it demanded more. More on the history of Artificial Intelligences in cinema. More on postmodern simulacra. More on representations of Cartesian deceiving demons in fiction.

By March - when I had to break off to write my conference papers - that simple, final chapter had become a confabulatory hydra, chattering about Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and about disincarnate intelligences in early science fiction, and about androids in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and about replicants in Ridley Scott's adaptation of the former, Blade Runner, and about how these different texts (the first two from 1968, the latter from 1982) illustrated the move to postmodern grounds for science fiction which The Matrix then occupies, and about how postmodernism has been conceptualised by Frederic Jameson as the product of late capitalist logic. By April, when I had beaten it into a shape suitable for showing to my supervisor, the beast was 30 000 words long, and I had not even started on The Matrix.

My carefully laid plans thus became horribly corrupted. But - and here is the thing that is both frustrating and thrilling about writing and research - the mutant that unexpectedly now constitutes a third of my 100 000 word limit has made the overall project far stronger. The fact that I was not able to predict I would cover this ground from the outset implies that I have inadvertently uncovered cultural connections and currents that will, because so unexpected, probably lend my research some originality. And, on reflection, it only took three months to write; that is to say, a third of my word count took one twelfth of my three years. Why, writing must be almost becoming easy.

Nevertheless, it is only with hindsight that I can be so positive. The last few months have been a dark and agonising period in my research career. Things now, though, are looking up. When I finally got around to it, the chapter on The Matrix only took three weeks to write, probably because the time away made me realise just how redundant many of my notes were, and to construct an argument based on just a couple of premises. The body of my thesis, though punctuated with "xxx" that mark gaps I have to fill, is now generally complete. I can even afford to take five days off, on a camping trip which I delight in planning to the last detail...except the weather.

Labels: PhD, Postgraduate Diary

A fun article from the Guardian Education about "The Art of Reading," from their How to Be a Student series:

you don't just need to do it, you need to be seen to be doing it (and acting upon it). Sometimes you can be seen to be doing it even if you're not. This is called adding footnotes. Always read at least the title and name of the author, however, because it's never a good idea to pretend you've read some thing unless you're absolutely sure your tutor hasn't written it.

The secret Harriet Swain did not mention, however, was that this applies not only to new undergraduates, but to doctoral students and, yes, even professors.

Indeed, without wanting to sound too vain, I consider myself a Master of the Art of nodding sagely, when asked by my supervisor/conference delegate/peer etc. whether I have read Book X, and of then twisting the subject to my own self-inflating ends. "Yes, I found Book X most interesting. But I thought Book Y" - which I have read, or at least read the review of - "was the more accessible text." This game of intellectual ping-pong can go on for hours, as my initial interrogator must dissimulate equally: "Book Y was interesting, but I thought Book Z..."

Labels: Literature, Postgraduate Diary

My nemesis Patrick Tomlin (or he who writes in the column I would really like to occupy) over at Guardian Education, has come up with a "survival guide" for new PhD students. Not to be outdone (and from the superior position of my third year to his second), I have produced my own version of distilled wisdom:


1. Tomlin's number five on the list is my number one: try to treat a PhD as a job. Sure, no one will be looking over your shoulder or conducting a daily word count; yes, if you want to take an afternoon off to go shopping no one will stop you; certainly, that two week holiday in Brittany can be taken without any need to beg for time off.

However, it is precisely because of this that if you act as if you have all the freedom in the world, then you will find it difficult to do anything at all; a kind of intelletual agoraphobia sets in, whereby there seems so many limitless possibilities that it is safest just to do nothing. Instead, do something, rigorously. Turn on the computer at 9.00. Turn off the computer at 6.00 (if you happen to be nocturnal these times can refer to pm as well as am). Repeat for the equivalent of five days a week (take that afternoon off but go to a seminar at the weekend), for forty-five weeks of the year, for three years, and - regardless of how difficult the work seems, or how many bad days you have (see Number Five on this list) - you will get the job done, if not within three years then somewhere close.


2. A crucial ingredient in this recipe for success will be how you differentiate yourself from undergraduates. Sure, there will be many of the distractions of undergraduate life around you: a ready-made social scene, sports clubs, societies, and a flagrant disregard for deadlines. By all means go to the pub, play sports - indeed, make a point of doing these things (again, see Number Five). But remember that the classmates with whom you graduated could not be further from undergraduate life, since as you study they are probably being lashed under the slave-drivers who run graduate recruitment programmes for big corporations. Presumably, you did a PhD partly because you wanted to do something other than make money for other people. But that does not mean that you should feel free to stay in the student rut whilst others (taxpayers) are running out of breath around of you.


3. If all this sounds a bit like a lesson in dullness, however, realise that social life and work need not be mutually exclusive things. In my first year, I was a solipstic scholar reading books and emerging only to see my supervisor once a month. Having attended the UK Grad summer programme and all the team exercises on it, I realised that actually I really like working with other people, communicating with faces rather than staring at wordy pages. I now regularly go to three discussion groups and buzz round conferences, and work on collaborative projects. If to some extent you can combine socialising with an academic twist, then you really can have the best of both worlds, strike that work-life balance.

4. And it gets better (though possibly only for PhD students in the Arts and Humanities)! Rule number four is be omnivorous in order to become omniscient. If a PhD is in part preparation for the academic job market, you must discover and engage in all the activities – the seminars, the research institutes, the journal publications – that develop and produce the research that supports the meniscus of undergraduate teaching. You must become absorbed in your subject: devour the weekend book supplements in the newspapers or read the reviews sections of journals; go to discussion groups and attend seminar series; discover that a few notches down from Radio 1 is Radio 4, with all its first-class intellectual broadcasting.

And write on anything, whether a review of a book in a few paragraphs on a scrap of paper, or a full essay to be handed in, or indeed discover the benefits of blogging. One of the worst aspects of PhD research is that it can sometimes take months between the germination of an idea, the reading around it (which often leads down dead-ends anyway), and its manifestation in a solid, completed chapter. Weeks go by, and you feel that you have done or produced nothing. Writing regularly and engaging in the full range of research activities provides a vent for this frustration. Further, the more broadly you read and write, the more chance that you will hit upon an innovative idea, and take the unusual angles of approach that will distinguish your research from its predecessors, making it - that crucial requirement of a thesis - original.

But.

5. They say that only two things in life are guaranteed: death and taxes. Most PhD students being young, the former probably seems quite a long way off, whilst as students taxes are mystical demons we have heard of but never encountered in their scariest guise. But, lest we lack a grindstone that keeps us keen, a third thing is guaranteed for the PhD student: that there will be times when you will simply feel unable to work, and the guilt sets in.

Writing seems to be going badly, you cannot seem to get your head around a chapter, the tab bar on your web browser becomes cluttered with football stories and Facebook because you simply cannot concentrate on the task in hand. Everyone else seems to be getting on with productive study, and if you happen to live with people in gainful employment, then it seems all the worse that you have swivelled on your chair all day whilst they have been chained industriously to a desk between nine and five and come home relieved at the end of the day whilst you are only plunged deeper into self-pity.

Accept these times as inevitable, and learn to let them go. When they loom, walk in the countryside. Spend the afternoon taking photographs. Or go camping for three days. Or, if you do not share my tastes, choose your own favourite escape. And if you still feel down at the end of the week, go to the pub regardless and treat yourself to a pint. Sure, it tastes best if you know it signals the start of a weekend, a break from hard and productive work in the five days before. But if you don't make any distinction between play time and work time no matter how little you seem to have spent on the latter, you will risk becoming a melancholy loner, the archetype of the sick genius tormented by the great idea that always seems elusive. But writing and serious researching is hard; if it wasn't, there would be no need to do PhDs. It is precisely because it is tough that there will be bad days (or weeks, or months); these are sometimes a signal not that you are weak and inadequate to the task, but that the work you are doing is worthwhile and the end all the more significant.

Labels: phd survival guide, Postgraduate Diary

In Italo Calvino's famous meditation on the relationship between novelists and readers, If On a Winter's Night A Traveller, comes a warning about the fundamental trap of a literary research thesis:

A girl came to see me who is writing a thesis on my novels for a very important university seminar in literary studies. I see that my work serves her perfectly to demonstrate her theories, and this is certainly a positive fact - for the novels or for the theories, I do not know which. From her very detailed talk, I got the idea of a piece of work being seriously pursued, but my books seen through her eyes seem unrecognisable to me. I am sure this Lotaria (that is her name) has read them conscientiously, but I believe she has read them only to find in them what she was already convinced of before reading them.

In science, you carefully choose the dataset on which you will run a test for a hypothesis, selecting a target which will provide results most efficiently and with the minimum of uncontrolled variables. But, ultimately, the dataset chosen by the scientist should be entirely irrelevant: the data must be independent of the conclusion if the scientific theory is valid. In the apocryphal story, Newton may have been standing under an apple tree when he reasoned the theory of gravity, but that theory applies equally whether the observational data is falling apples or dropped bombs. Were the theory to stop being applicable in a comparable situation - under a plum tree, for example - then the theory would have been falsified, such that we would need to recognise either that the theory must be fundamentally wrong, or that it requires modification in order that it apply (or appreciates why it cannot apply) equally for different varieties of fruit (or, more realistically, in the extreme conditions of entities such as black holes).

In literary study, however, the division between theory and data is less clear cut, as the Calvino passage makes clear in its parody. Currently researching some of Umberto Eco's semiotic theories, I notice that although deconstruction claims itself as a method applicable across all texts and language - since it places language as the very centre of our way of being in and knowing the world - most often the texts to which it is applied are always already open to deconstructive readings: works that are self-referential, embrace paradox rather than conclusiveness, are conscious of their being as texts. Thus Barthes examines some stories by Edgar Allan Poe, but not the editorial correspondence from the New England Magazine in which many of them were published.

And literary writers such as Italo Calvino (or A.S. Byatt, Umberto Eco, John Fowles), conscious of the ways in which the academy will appraise their texts, deliberately pre-empt and parody those modes of criticism. Thus texts such as If On a Winter's Night adopt what I call the critically sarcastic attitude. A Lotaria, or other academic reader, comes to the work from a pre-conceived theoretical angle, finds that the text deconstructs itself (or performs according to the predictions of some other theory), and thus the text can do nothing but applaud that critic ironically: "Well done," it says, "of course such and such a theoretically knowing symbol/structure/tone/philosophy etc. was there. I put it there. I knew you would come looking for it."

I am not a poststructuralist myself, though I am aware that I regularly (often subconsciously) dip into its toolbox in my analysis of texts, just as I do Marxism, psychoanalysis, historicism, or the close readings of new criticism. However, though I do not have a single preconceived critical angle, in my research I still risk falling into the Lotarian trap.

Without giving my game away too much (anonymity matters, as does the intellectual property of my original idea in my thesis), I am examining the use of a particular metaphor in literary fiction and science. Now hovering on the brink of its third year, my research is well-developed, most chapters are drafted or written, my ideas are well-honed and focused. Among other things, I am going to be looking at four novels and a couple of films which use my metaphor. However, to select these - effectively my dataset - I discarded tens of other novels which I read over the previous two years which did not happen to contain the image or symbol for which I was looking. It is therefore inevitable that I will give the impression that I "read them only to find in them what [I] was already convinced of before reading them." This is where Chapter One: The Introduction comes in, and I realise only now that in spite of it being only a small component, it is probably the most important single chapter of my thesis, since it is this that will make-or-break it in a viva.

If I fully admit the qualifications, and paradoxes of my research there, then what follows will stand or fall by the internal logic of the framework I publicly have set myself; I admit my theory works only within the orchard of texts in which I have chosen to wander. If I fail to recognise the inherent limits of my methods, however, then a single plum dropped by the examiner will falsify it, showing my data to rely wholly on my theory, rather than existing independently of it. The moral of my experience, and Calvino's story, and The Lotarian Trap, is that literary theory becomes a bad pseudoscience when it seems to explain both apples and plums.

Labels: If on A Winter's Night a Traveller, literary theory, Postgraduate Diary, Science and Culture

Johnathan Wolff has a very astute article about the innate dullness of much academic writing in the Education Guardian. In the midst of a PhD crisis at the moment deriving from precisely my feeling that a thesis should be engaging and interesting (perhaps even in the loosest sense "tell a story"), his article hits home. I will say more about how my writing is going when I am less fraught.

Labels: literary theory, Postgraduate Diary

Further to my previous posts on plagiarism and my warning in the citation guide for this website, it is humbling to learn that plagiarism can be committed by even the best of scholars. The Times Higher Education Supplement this week announces that "Cambridge University Press will issue an apology and correction after The Times Higher revealed that passages in its Cambridge Companion to D.H. Lawrence had been lifted from a 1960s work without acknowledgement." Apparently two Cambridge scholars, Con Coroneos and Trudi Tate, had quoted from Graham Hough's book The Dark Sun: A Study of D.H. Lawrence without acknowledgement. Thankfully, according to Kevin Taylor, director of intellectual property at CUP, the plagiarism appears to have been due to unconscious error: "The co-authors made notes before writing up their chapter, and Con Coroneos made notes on Dr Hough's book without annotating them, which he later took to be his own words."

Though in my earlier comments on the subject I have admonished those visitors to The Pequod who may deliberately represent my work as their own, plagiarism of the passive sort is certainly the more insidious, and perhaps even the more serious. For my own part, I am sure that in my 100 000 word thesis, some concepts will be paraphrases or - horror - direct quotations of authors I have read, and that some will slip through the net of my referencing due to my shoddy scholarship and less than meticulous methods. Though I try to keep my bibliographic databases up to date, and in all my writing make footnotes referring in brief to the full Reference Manager record, in many cases in which I was desperate to get the flow of my thoughts on page uninterrupted I have digitally scribbled an "xxx" instead of an author's name. Like pornography or weak Australian beer, these letters indicate something nasty lurking beneath my thesis. I hope that as I start to edit and proof over the coming final year, the xxx's resolve themselves into proper names and books, and remove any risk of my having copied the work of others without acknowledgement.

Labels: plagiarism, Postgraduate Diary

I have not posted anything here for a while. This is not due to my unwillingness to comment on Tony Blair's retirement, the climate change bill, the bad science of Panorama's Wi-Fi "investigation," or the hilarious science of the newly opened Creation Museum in Kentucky. Rather, it's got much to do with the large pile of exam papers that have been sitting on my desk for the past couple of weeks. This time last year, I commented on the postgraduate perspective on undergraduate exams, lamenting the communal hush brought by exams upon the lively university activity as well as remembering that they provide for one of the great British moments of the communal moan.

This year, that general moan has felt a little more prosaic, as I have heard it not amongst the students but amongst staff who have to mark the papers. Merrily responding to an email asking if I would like to mark some exams this year, my smile dropped as I was landed with 70 plus scripts. Marking these has been a frustrating experience, time consuming, often repetitive, but - conscious of the responsibility of marking summative as opposed to formative work - I have had to focus closely on the task.

Marking criteria in a subject such as English are notoriously problemmatic. Whilst the rubric has obviously been carefully considered, how is one to judge the difference between "well focused work" (65% to 69%) and "relevant work" (60% to 64%)? The mark schemes can only be taken up to a point, from where intuition takes over, the sense of a First as opposed to Two-One class work; this indefinable difference leaves high Two-One students seeing through a notorious glass barrier between a 69% and 70%. I have some sympathy with the government's plans to standardise degree classifications, which at the moment are not comparable across different universities or subjects, making it very difficult for employers (who may not be aware of the divide between a First and a Two-One, or of the difference between the University of Polytechnic and the University of Redbrick) to compare candidates.

And yet, having covered so many scripts, the glass barrier seems to me to be a valid one, and there is a qualitative difference between top and good work, one which cannot accurately be reflected in the quantitative difference of a single percentage point. Further, marking by a combination of rubric and experience does appear to work, at least according to the systems of double marking, moderation, external examining and the distribution curves against which we are judged. My grades passed their moderation, though with some slight modification in precise percentages in the first category, and the tally chart of grades I have been keeping has turned out to form the tell-tale bell of the normal distribution, centred around the high two-one.

More positively from a personal point of view has been the opportunity to get the sense of a year group, and a year's work (something I can't obtain by teaching a few tutorials a year to a few groups). As script after script pursues similar lines of argument, and presents comparable pieces of evidence, and similar historical, social and philosophical understanding, I realise that teaching does actually work: lectures have been attended, information has been absorbed, knowledge gained. Even when formal teaching comprises the minor part (about six hours) of the undergraduate week, it has a huge impact on a student's cumulative education.

However, the recognition of this leaves me frustrated that a further opportunity to educate students is not being pursued. The greatest frustration of marking has been my inability to follow up those marks with individual advice about how they might be improved. A student (not one of mine) last week remarked that she had never attended any of the one-to-one essay handback consultations with her tutors. I remarked that, regardless of whether they wanted to go or not, it is slightly unfair on the lecturer not to attend, since if they are anything like me, the greatest satisfaction is filling an essay with red pen, but then being able to tell the student precisely which aspects of their work were really positive, and how they can build on them. Seeing their subsequent essays, in which they have adopted this advice, gives a massive boost to the teacher. Teaching the really bright students, those who come with a unique and advanced writing style anyway, is rewarding, but I'm not sure how much "teaching" they actually benefit from; teaching those with potential not yet fulfilled, and bringing it out through contact with them, is by far the best aspect of the job.

Yet it is an aspect for which there is not as yet a replicable system in relation to the end of year exams. How frustrating it is to mark a paper in which one answer attains a good First, whilst the other two answers are solid Two-Ones! I am confident that, because the students don't see the breakdown of their marks, that Two-One candidate might go away from the board on which results are published believing themselves to be sitting comfortably in that latter category, whereas I know that, if they were told that they were capable of the very highest work, and shown the evidence of this on the papers, then the prophetic fallacy might kick in. At the bottom of our marking forms is a reminder that under new data protection laws, students can ask to see the forms, but since I doubt many are pro-active, we should make it available to them from the beginning. Our feedback may only take the form of a couple of sentences, and clearly there are not the resources to have face-to-face meetings with students, but to see that First on the page, nestling there amongst the expected results, would be, one hopes, a significant incentive for the second and third years, when marks count towards their final degree classification.

There is a great danger that the First word is something only whispered to a select few, adding to the mystique of the glass barrier. I know this was something I encountered, and even by the end of my degree I was still unsure precisely what constituted top work, and even whether I deserved it. This really is a culture of (a word often used wrongly) elitism, because every student coming to the top universities with good A-level grades should be capable of striving for the ultimate result, though for a number of reasons they may not reach it (the formal degree is only a part of a university education). So today, with almost every student, I bring the word into public discourse, saying openly which parts are First Class responses, demanding that if they get a Two-One on their early essays they should be aiming to achive the grade above by the end. Inexperienced (and possibly naive), I cannot know what impact this actually has. But it's a shame to put so much effort into marking, only to have students discouraged from making efforts for top marks.

Labels: essay marking, exams, Postgraduate Diary

Once again, the greatest work of American culture reveals itself highly tuned to the nuances and stereotypes of life, this time of the humble postgraduate:

Labels: Postgraduate Diary, The Simpsons

Today is the big day: the poster I have been working on since Christmas goes into a competition against others from the Grad School. As I sit at a desk in the printer room, waiting to trim the edges on the large cutting board, ahead of me in the queue clutching her tightly rolled printout is a woman dressed in a sharp suit and shocking pink high-heels deals. I am dressed, as I usually do, in jeans and a hoody. I wonder whether it will make the slightest difference to my chances, and suspect not - albeit an old one, I am a student, after all; casual is what the judges will expect.

The competition itself starts after lunch, and as soon as I walk into the room I am struck by the odd atmospheric mingling of the sociable (the hoodies) and the serious (the suits). We are given information packs and name badges, as if this was a proper conference; however, it is the tea and biscuits which occupies as much attention, as student stereotypes prove fitting again. Whilst I chat to other amiable postgraduates (there's no one I know particularly well, though I recognise faces from having sat with them at other Grad School events and training sessions throughout the year), there's a tight undercurrent of competition, as we glance at the other posters on their assigned boards and compare them cautiously to our own: Is that one too texty, or is it that mine does not say enough? That one seems to lack colour, but is it perhaps that mine is too cheerfully bright with its red and black fonts?

As I stand by my poster, I get the first hints that mine is not really fulfilling its job as a piece of publicity about my research, as three different people ask me "So what's this about, then?" Though I (gifted with the gob) am happy answering questions and talking through my research, the poster is supposed to be largely self-evident, and to communicate my project and findings to a broad audience. At least people seem interested and when comparing my research with those scientific topics displayed around me, I realise that is the best I can expect: whereas the scientists' posters tend to be divided into neatly boxed sections with aims, method, outcomes and applications, mine lacks the latter. Not for me the carbon nanotubes that promise super-lightweight building materials in the future, or studies of how sleep patterns affect obesity in children. The only thing I can hope for, then, is that people from all backgrounds and interests agree that my research is interesting, if it is not of direct public benefit (this is the old "What is the value of my PhD?" question I have posed before on this blog).

Once the judges arrive at my stand and make the same observation - though put in the subtle terms of, "Oh, this looks interesting, so, er, talk me through it then" - I see the prize money (up to £200) fluttering away on the wind. Again, the judges seem to go away full of praise for my research, but left a little cold by the poster itself. Sure enough, out of the four posters entered in the Arts and Humanities category, I come one of bottom, second from bottom, or third from bottom. The winning entry, on medieval history and romance, was certainly a well-designed poster. But, sore loser that I am, I note that whereas following the workshops I have been on my poster text was in at least size 30 font, so as to be legible from five feet away, the winner's required closer peering and reading. I am thus left uncertain as to what constitutes a good poster. Is is one which visually grabs the attention, attracting a viewer towards me rather than another so that I can then discuss my research with them, doing the all-important "networking"? Or is it one that explains my study in a thousand words, such that a reader can leave with new knowledge of some recent research (rather as in a conference paper)? The one drawback of an otherwise excellent event is that I leave more baffled than pleased. I will certainly redesign my poster so that it makes clearer the aims and methods of my research; but whether I should use large fonts and pretty pictures, or aim for an essay which happens to be dispersed in boxes across the page, I am less sure.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

In contrast to the previous two days, which have seen me quite productive, today is a slow one. I spend some of the day chugging my way through Charles Taylor's philosophical treatise, Sources of the Self. Like much contemporary theoretical philosophy it's hard going; in order to ensure as logic dictates that every plausible loophole or opposition or flaw its closed, it becomes dense with argument, packed with detailed reference to earlier arguments, both Taylors and his beloved Plato.

When I get bored, or realise I have been turning the pages without actually reading (a strange case of mind-body separation?) I set to work on the computer, typing up my notes from Warner's Phantasmagoria.

At this stage in my thesis, half-way through with around 60,000 words written, any secondary material tends to get inserted into my existing chapters, rather than leading me down new research lines. Whereas I imagine a scientist might spend the first year doing background research, the second year collecting data, and the third year writing-up - with the difficult decision being when to stop reading and when to start experimenting or writing - there has been no such distinction for me. In an English PhD, and with my personal style of thinking, my writing is my research: I develop my thoughts as the ink gets laid on the page, and I do not make a distinction between researching, drafting, and writing - in true evolutionary fashion the finished chapter emerges out of the gradually growing embryo of my notes, so that it is not clear where or when my notes end and my essay begins. The benefit of my approach is that I progress steadily, and I am perhaps more likely to produce some original insights than if I were to read everything already written on my topic and merely produce a synthesis of existing argument; the drawback is that, if I write too much too soon, my work becomes concretised and rigid in the mould of the early stages of my thinking, and is hard to alter if I read something later which modifies it. This is the issue which, albeit in a mild form, I am encountering now. With seven chapters, I find myself cutting and pasting between them, trying to insert quotes or concepts from my latest reading (in this case, Marina Warner) wherever they best fit, then tying the loose edges together. I am sure it will all work in the end, and I am confident that my research is going to be quite novel and develop through a clear argument; but I have several frustrating months ahead of me during which I must tidy up the tens of paragraphs of bold type, which indicate changes or drafts that exist, like monstrous lumps, within the tidy text of an otherwise finished chapter.

Alongside my writing, I also make a mini-bibliography of books referenced by Warner that might be useful to read. Naturally, having wiped my record clean by returning most of my books to the library yesterday, now is a good opportunity to get more reading material out to plug the gap on my shelf - they will look impressive, even if they will never be looked in.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

Today starts badly. As I open Thunderbird, the email program downloads headers for several messages that require my responses today, and then stubbornly refuses to open them. Regardless, I type an email - containing an abstract for a seminar group in a month's time, on the topic of "What Darwin Means to Me" - hit send, and watch as the blue bar moves, jerks, then stops. Unsent, unsaved, I try to retype my piece as best I can remember, then save it in notepad for later; clearly there's a problem with the University's email system - but how strange it is that whereas on most days email is a distraction, on the day when I actually need to use it the system is broken.

Luckily, the library seems to be up and running; given that over the past few days I have been bombarded with emails reminding me to take books back (the postgraduate loan "quarter" is coming to an end), I realise it would be a good time to return those tens of books I got out hopefully months ago, and have never read. The most depressing thing when checking my loan record is how many of those books have been renewed too many times, and thus must go back today - this means I have had some out for nearly a year, without opening them.

Bag packed, I go back to my note taking and reading, then head into town for a meeting with other English Postgraduates at our weekly discussion group. We start off discussing the agreed topic, biography, but somehow we move from discussing why Jade's story is a reworking of the Biblical redemption narrative, or is grounded on a fairy-tale prototype, to bemoaning the dropping of Shelley and Keats from G.C.S.E. English. At least, the Romantics in the group bemoan the fact. As I commented in my post on the English National Curriculum, and on my criticism of Andrew Motion for believing all school leavers should have read Ulysses, I think it is naive to expect modern students to study the Leavisite canon on its own. Certainly, there should be some Shakespeare, some traditional poetry, but we cannot be sure that teachers, straitjacketed by the demands of league tables and curricula, are going to have time to explore and explain these works; thus their presence needs to be tempered by other, more immediately accessible forms: modern poetry (even rap, as I suggested yesterday, to some sneers), contemporary novels, science fiction. The discussion got a little personal (along the lines of you're so middle class what would you know), but out of it I did take one point that I had not thought of before, having never experienced it in my excellent education: how demeaning it is for teachers not to try to teach, for example, Shakespeare, because they believe that their inner-city pupils are more interested in drugs and sex than the romantic story of a couple falling in love against the wishes of their parents; to not teach Shakespeare because it is "beyond them" is to reinforce low expectations, and is a prophetic fallacy to be avoided for sure, though it is one of the risks of my middle-way approach.

After lunch, I go back to my poster, spending an hour trying to work out how to print to the A1 plotter printer in I.T. services. I think I have it cracked, and hit the "Print" button (not a minor decision, given that I have been working on the poster for months and printing it will cost £6.00). As the clock ticks towards five, and I get ready to go home, the email system comes back online. I spend another 45 minutes writing to a student worrying about an essay. One of the frustrations of teaching as a postgraduate is that I don't have an office (not that I do enough teaching to justify one). Instead of suggesting that a student come and chat to me, perhaps show a draft, I have to try to guess what their problems are, say what I think would be most helpful for me to say, and put at the bottom a "if you have any more problems please don't hesitate to get in touch" disclaimer. The email's sent into the void; I keep fingers crossed that it will arrive at the desk of the student and let them work through their problems with their essay.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

The alarm goes off at 8:00 this morning, and, it being quite light outside, I manage to get out of bed after the third snooze. Some people, citizens of the alternate universe called "RealWorld," would envy my being able to lie in this late before getting up for work. For me, though, it is often the most challenging aspect of the day. Since I am completely flexible with my time, why worry if I want to stay in bed until 8:30, 9:00, the afternoon? I can always work later into the evening, or make some confident excuse why the extra time in bed now can be worked off later in the week, month, year. Neither probed by the demands of immediate work deadlines nor, in the cold and dull days of Winter, prodded by the sun piercing even our net curtains, I often feel no impulse to get up at all.

This morning, however, perhaps on account of it being a Monday, I do manage to roll out of the duvet and into whatever warm clothes happen to be lying on the floor. I eat breakfast whilst listening to a Naughtie rant and a Humphries hump on the Today programme and, there being few stories of interest, and Start the Week that follows having no topics of literary interest, I open my first book by 8:30, and start to read.

This time, it's Marina Warner's Phantasmagoria, a glorious miscellany of ghosts and spirit encounters in art, literature and life, from the Renaissance to the cybernetic age. She has a wonderfully encyclopaedic range, though sometimes reading her I feel as her father must have felt as, taking her around museums as a kid, as I am sure she would have tugged him insistently in many directions, running through the galleries trailing demands and questions. The first hour is almost always my best for concentration and reading (the writing hour, if it comes at all, will kick in at some unpredictably late hour of the day), and I get to 10:00 without a break.

I spend the next hour getting myself up-to-date online: I scan BBC News for the stories and sport that didn't make it onto Today, check the stats for this website (75 hits the whole of yesterday, Sunday, and the same number by 10:00 today), use Google Reader for feeds from my favourite books and literary blogs, as well as photoblogs, and check emails. I also start this post - as well as all its other benefits, blogging is my equivalent of an athelete's warm up, a way of getting into a writing frame of mind. As I start to waste time online, and I realise that I really am did not need to know that Britney Spears has shaved (or pulled out?) all her hair, I go back downstairs and continue to read.

I get close to the end of the book, before it's time for lunch. Often over recent weeks I have taken to working in the library or in one of our Postgraduate study rooms. Maybe it's simply because it's too cold to think in our house, or (more likely) it's the absence of other distractions and the presence of numerous hunched heads working hard, but I have found the change quite conducive to writing. Today, however, checking the bread bin in the morning, I discover only half a stale loaf, suitable for toast but unsuitable for lunch box sandwiches. Thus I decided to work at home until after lunch today. It reveals something about life as a PhD student that deciding whether to work in the "office" or at home comes down to something as simple as the quality of your bread.

In the afternoon, however, I go back to the computer; intending just to check my emails before heading to the library, I suddenly become inspired. I am trying to produce a A1 size poster outlining my research; I've been at it on-and-off since before Christmas, but somehow the deadline (this coming Thursday) has crept up on me. By the time I turn from my text boxes and pictures (does carefully dragging a text box half an inch to the left, then an hour later carefully dragging it back again count as "work"?) and look at the clock, I realise it's late into the afternoon. This period is when PhD work becomes an absolute pleasure rather than a chore; utterly absorbed in my research interests, time really does fly as I have fun whilst being thoroughly productive. I an perverse way, I often feel more tired having done an hour's plodding reading, or staring at a screen searching for inspiration on a blank page, than doing an entire afternoon in full flow.

I go back to Phantasmagoria, and finish it off, before heading into town. There is an evening lecture series on Darwin I have been attending; seriously high quality speakers, it has been often accessible but sometimes baffling. Today's falls into the latter category - an argument for a three-dimensional, topographical approach to descent and ancestry that I don't quite follow. Nevertheless, I have done another hour-and-a-half of "work" with the minimum possible effort on my part; it being late in the evening, I feel I have built up time in lieu to take off later in the week, when I'm bored of working and the next level on Project Gotham Racing 2 really does need to be completed.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

Every Friday afternoon, whilst up and down the country workers recieve early parole from their stuffy offices to go to bars and pubs, I sit in our kitchen and grumble at Helen. Rather than looking forward to the weekend as a time of relaxation, I moan about how little I appear to have done over the preceding five days. As a result of my perception, the concept of time-off over the coming 48 hours does not seem so appealingly different from time-at-table, with books in front of me.

When you think about the numbers, doing a PhD in an arts subject should really be little effort. I have to write about 80,000 words, in three years, which works out at around 500 words a week, or 100 a day. No wonder, then, that I feel like I do little on a week by week basis. Of course, behind every word I write are several more books and papers read, not to mention emails written, lectures and seminars attended, discussion groups done and games of Yetisports played. In spite of the fact that in theory I need to write so little, I seem to manage to fill my weekdays from 9 to 5 just as any other office worker does. Indeed, unlike many office workers, my days are not spent in distracting coffee room banter or chatting about marketing strategies, but head down, pen up, solitarily in front of a book and a desk. So, Helen suggests, I should keep a diary of what I have actually done during a typical week of PhD research. Over the next five days, that's what you'll get, then, on this blog...

Update: Once again, Patrick Tomlin of the Guardian beats me to it: he writes on Monday about a typical day in the life of a politics PhD research student.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

It is a phrase which no doubt appears in your inbox several times a day, and gets dragged to the junk folder. However, in trying to push through the financial reforms in higher education - under which students would take out loans to pay for their university tuition and living costs, rather than getting grants - the government likewise advertised that these loans would be "interest free." Just as you should never click on a spam email, you should always suspect something is not quite right when a government promises you something-for-nothing. Read the small print in this case, and you will find that the "interest free" loans are tied to the base-rate of inflation, increasing annually by the same amount. But who of us desperate to go to university ever bothered to read the small print? I didn't, and clearly neither has Donald Macleod, who writes on the Education Guardian Blog that:

When tuition fees of £3,000 squeaked through the Commons by five votes keeping student loans to zero real interest rates was obviously a price ministers had to pay.

Students in fact got an outrageously good deal - no fees upfront, interest free loans to cover the cost of tuition and repayment when they were earning as graduates.

Macleod concludes that:

Spending £1bn a year to subsidise graduates who as a rule earn more than the national average seems a waste when there is so much that deserves funding in universities - and even more so in schools.

As one respondent complained of Macleod "You make me sick - tory w@nker!" I agreed with his tone, if not with his vocabulary, so (for all that they will not be read) I added some words of my own, nothing that from my own experience, with inflation running at around 2.5% a year, I graduated owing £10,000 and now five years later I owe around £12,000. Having chosen to do a PhD, and hence defer entry into the job market, you could say that I brought this extra £2000 of debt upon myself.

However, I have friends who went into jobs from graduation, are now on average salaries, and their repayments only just cover the cost of the "interest" on the supposedly interest-free loan; they have yet to pay back a penny of what they originally received from the government. Of course, I also have friends who have yet to find graduate jobs (in spite of having not one but two degrees, the increasingly-necessary postgraduate degree being paid for by further debt through the Career Development Loans scheme), and I also have friends whose salaries (often in the public or voluntary sector) do not track inflation, unlike their loans.

Even so you could argue that many students will ultimately end up in better paid jobs, perhaps working as corporate bankers in London. I agree that students, and not just the average taxpayers of Blair's generation, should put something back into the system. Unfortunately, the way the loans/tution fees scheme was instigated has been unfair on students, unfair on taxpayers who are still owed money by graduates, and unfair in relation to foreign students who can take from the loans pot without being compelled to put back into it.

Nevertheless, I pleaded to Macleod, please don't imply students got the good deal, as if they are scrounging on the society that put them through university. It is this generation of students who, besides, possibly, earning salaries higher than the national average, will be developing the technologies to combat the climate change for which our parent's generation are entirely responsible, and the medicines which will allow them to live longer (and enjoy a longer retirement). They may even do something about spam.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary, student loans

In this week's Education Guardian I read two articles that resonate with my experiences. In the first, postgraduate Patrick Tomlin writes about his first experience of living in a University town during the holidays. For him, the benefits are "finding books on shelves (even the popular ones!), reading without ringtones, getting a seat in the pub, making my way to the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? machine without having to push past several people." For myself, as I commented in Postgraduate Diary: Return of the Natives, relief comes from being able to "get seats in the cinema, to go out without feeling surrounded by people who are (surely?) to young to be in the nightclubs, to go shopping without lines of girls stretching across the street, woven together into an unbreakable arm-in-arm chain." But we both of us noted that the calm is not necessarily preferable to the storm of voices and bodies, since these are so often full of humour, energy and passion.

Sadly, as Jonathan Taylor observes, these are traits which get lost as one moves from being an English undergraduate to being an academic. As he entered university, he remembers that "studying English was a synonym for laziness, hippiness, laid-backness...[English students] were fascinating because they studied a subject that they actually enjoyed, yet frustrating because they never seemed to do the subject they enjoyed so much." But by the time they have completed their PhDs, lecturers seem to undergo a magical process of embalming, or "dry-ification", in which "old hippies lose their bodily moisture and start wearing ties, using words like "scholarly" and quoting institutional regulations."

I don't wear a tie, even when I teach, and in my mid-twenties I can get away with a hoodie and jeans. But what to do if ever I do get a full-time university post? If I wear my casual clothes, I become a comedy Cameron, trying too hard to be "street"; but if I dress smartly but dispense with the tie and wear a white t-shirt beneath my suit, I present myself as a dilettante artiste. Yesterday in the pub (I'm clearly not a fully embalmed academic just yet) my friend showed me two books, and their author photographs. The one showed a man in a muscle top, looking not unlike Jack Black in wrestling comedy Nacho Libre. He may have been literal example of what Jonathan Taylor calls the "academic bouncer," one who ironically in spite of his hard-man look was dedicated to "making sure all who enter have sufficient footnotes and footnotes of footnotes in their work." the other showed a feminist, dressed to kill, in sharp suit with hair tied tightly into a pony tail. I suspect she may indeed have felt that "Joy is a deeply suspicious character who is probably working for the bourgeois."

Although my thesis is going well, my writing starting to flow after the break of Christmas, I wonder if I should try and slow down somewhat. I just bought Project Gotham Racing 2 for the Xbox. An afternoon spent playing that should reawaken the remnant genes of undergraduate life that are still dormant within me.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

(This topic continues the theme of a post earlier this year)

Around this time of year, as the Christmas holidays draw to a close and after they have had a chance to reflect on their first term at university, I receive a trickle of emails from first year students asking advice about changing course. The majority of these involve students who have started doing joint honours (such as English and Philosophy) deciding that they wish to convert to single honours in one of the subjects. Little do they realise it, but my students are touching the fringes of a large and key debate about what a university is, and what sort of education it should provide.

For the fact that students are encouraged to pick and choose courses from the vast range offered by universities is the key complaint of Peter Berkowitz, who writes in the Hoover Institution's Policy Review that "at universities and colleges throughout the [United States], parents and students pay large sums of money for — and federal and state governments contribute sizeable tax exemptions to support — liberal education, despite administrators and faculty lacking a coherent idea about what constitutes an educated human being." The essay is slightly stilted, in that it attacks the liberal education system in America - in which students can choose from a large range of courses and "major" in one branch in their final year - whilst comparing it unfavourably with the principles Mill set out in the British context in the mid-nineteenth century. Had he looked over here in the United Kingdom, he would have found less evidence of the "compassless curriculum": in this country, rather than "majoring" in one discipline only in their final year, students generally do a single honours degree for the full three years, or a joint honours split 50-50 between two related subjects.

However, whilst I think (and Berkowitz's complaint confirms) that specialisation is preferable to spreading study across an eclectic mix of subjects, one of the limitations of the British system is that it deceptively compartmentalises us into different areas of interest, when in fact there is a great deal of overlap: several of my peers doing an English PhD started off in philosophy, and I'm sure the reciprocal is true over in the philosophy department; conferences tend to be organised by faculties rather than individual departments, and over coffee you encounter scholars from all backgrounds, not just those in your prosaic field.

If cultural theory has done one thing successfully, it has been to spread itself seductively across every discipline, so a student doing history or archaeology or literature may well encounter the same broad scheme of ideas - from postmodernism to postcolonialism - in each discipline. What shifts is the subject matter, whilst the approaches to them run through parallel perspectives. It is this fact which means that in response to my students' emails I almost invariably advise them to go with their hearts, since their heads are probably more than capable of absorbing the switch. However, is it really the case that all disciplines are of equal value in sending students into the world equipped with a philosophical and scientific guidebook? F.R. Leavis certainly didn't think so, when he placed the English department as the spider at the centre of the entire academic web, which could interpret any branch of intellectual life since it critiqued the language which structures thought, whether in particle physics or historical research.

Even if English departments are no longer seen as the most important generators of liberal wisdom, a residue of the Leavisite approach can be seen in the buzzword of modern academia, literary criticism especially: interdisciplinarity. Almost every call for papers that lands in my inbox on a Friday stresses that papers that straddle traditional disciplines are most welcome; I myself am not so much reading English, as philosophy, history, fiction, film, novels and computer games. The critical arts now possess a proud sense of the range and scope they are permitted to cover, and so I would suggest that academia is starting to find a middle way between variety and speciality.

Of course, one risk of this is relativism: if it is not what you say or study which matters, but how you say or write your study which matters, do we not end up with an aimless mess of disciplines shouting ever louder but actually doing very little by way of good and lasting research. This is a danger Berkowitz analyses, when he notes that professors tend to teach the fields which coincides with their interests, rather than teaching those texts, in those ways, which will most permanently benefit the student entering the "real" world.

The second problem with the spreading range of Arts study is that it sets itself up to compete with the sciences (both theoretically and in the battle for funding), rather than seeing both Arts and Science as necessary elements of a student's education. Leavis's elastic approach has become stretched by some brands of postmodern criticism, which, as the Sokal hoax showed, absurdly recruits empirical principles to scrutinise texts or narratives. Obviously, it is not possible for the arts student to use particle physics to analyse Silas Marner; equally particle physics is not simply a narrative in numbers that expresses ideology and meaning in the same way that a George Eliot novel does. (I critique this in my essay "Science as Writing, Writing as Science: Addressing the Boundaries of Literary Criticism and Fiction"). What participation, then, should science make in informing the student of the liberal arts? Here, Mill also strikes a chord with my views, arguing along utilitarian lines: "While it is not to be expected that many will achieve mastery of the laws to which the physical world is subject, students should acquire the basics that will enable them to distinguish those who are competent to provide the public advice on scientific and technological matters." Certainly, with Bush's withdrawal of funds for embryological research (leading to a bizarre jumble of red table and stickers in science labs) and Blair's hysterical reaction to supposed hybrid cow-men, one can see the value of ensuring that leaders educated in business (in Bush's case) or law (in Blair's) are encouraged also to appreciate, if not to deploy, the dispassionate scientific method.

In this coincidental way, the opposition between Arts and Sciences in the university context can be seen to affect the political split between conservatism and progressivism. Berkowitz notes that Mill was open to the positive aspects of both wings of the political spectrum, and argued that the cultivation of a liberal "third way" means accepting that each side, for all that its general outlook may be erroneous, may nevertheless have something of value to contribute to the detail of moral debate. Berkowitz argues that:

universities that purport to provide a liberal education will be failing in their mission unless their graduates, progressives and conservatives alike, prove capable of sympathetically understanding the positions of the political party to which they do not belong and discerning what is true and enduring in the beliefs of their partisan opponents.

But the comparison between Bush and Blair highlights that the liberal education systems of Harvard and Oxford have, in actuality, very much succeeded in providing perspectives on both parties. So much so that this Republican right-winger is now the best of friends with the Labour prime minister, one who marched for CND in the 1960s. Blair's brilliance has been his ability precisely to understand the position of the right, and to simultaneously occupy that ground whilst pulling both progressives and conservatives closer to the centre - the rise of fellow blogger (oh, yes, and Conservative leader) David Cameron indicates his success. Unfortunately, rather than promoting toleration (as Mill hoped) the accommodation of those on both left and right who are close to the centre has further marginalised anyone who breaks from the new majority centre. As Bush said two months after September 11, "you're either with us, or against us": if I am against Bush, detest Guantanamo, and think the war on terror utterly misguided in its approach, I am, by inference, a terrorist.

If the risk of interdisciplinarity in the Arts has been a relativistic "anything goes so long as you can talk the talk," the risk of representing and treating both political outlooks as equals is to imply that it does not matter whether you are left or right wing, so long as you fall into line under whoever happens to rule. This is where study of the classics might come in, since they (as Paul Cartledge reminds us on Radio 4's recent: "The Greeks: For Better or for Worse") form the philosophical foundations for modern culture. As Berkowitz says:

Accordingly, liberal education should concentrate on the languages and literature of the ancients, of the Greeks and Romans, because of both their farness and their nearness. On the one hand, the circumstances and sensibility of classical authors differ the most profoundly from ours (without being, Mill stipulates, like those of Asia, “so totally dissimilar, that the labor of a life is required to enable us to understand them”). On the other hand, their writings are rich in the wisdom of the common life of humanity. The classics both challenge our moral and political assumptions and provide models of human excellence. Particularly the writings of Plato and Aristotle represent “the perfection of good sense.”

Happily, having plummeted down the ranks of academic esteem, classics seems to be starting to come back into favour. The new, controversial, Cambridge Latin Course is helping us to see that Latin is far from a dead language. Study of the Ancients might help us to accept that human thought and morality is always variable and that, above all, a good democratic system needs to accommodate difference, rather than eliding it as Neo-Conservatism or New Labour have done.

All this has wandered very far from my original impulse for this post, and the idea that the form of liberal education can inform the war on terror is probably quite far from the minds of the students who contact me wishing to change course. Nevertheless, besides being an excuse to have another political dig, the sheer range of Berkowitz's essay, and my criticism, leads me to realise that, specialist though universities may be, they and their courses really do form the foundations for society. My thinking about the "Idea of a University" started with my justifying being funded to study an English PhD; the ends of that concept, however, are tangled and deep. I rather liked Mill's comment that "Whatever helps to shape the human being; to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is not, is part of his education." However, not only is whatever shapes the human being part of his education, education is clearly the principal means by which modern societies seek to shape the individual. The study of the idea of the university is the study of our modern selves.

Labels: J.S. Mill, Peter Berkowitz, Postgraduate Diary, the idea of a university

Having at long last rounded off my chapter on A Whistling Woman, I am moving on to look at A.S. Byatt's Possession (although with only a week before I go home for Christmas, I am trying productively to procrastinate and to re-edit existing chapters, rather than starting a new one now). Among its many other subjects, this Booker-winning novel provides a parody of postmodern literary criticism. At one gloriously anarchistic moment in the novel, Maud (the heroine) stands in the shower and thinks about Fergus, an arrogant, academic anti-hero with whom she had a brief fling at a conference. Maud is a feminist, psychoanalytic critic, a form of analysis Byatt mockingly plays up to here:

Freud was right, Maud thought, vigorously rubbing her white legs, desire lies on the other side of repugnance. The Paris conference where she had met Fergus had been on Gender and the Autonomous Text. She had talked about thresholds and he had given an authoritative paper on 'The Potent Castrato: the phallogocentricstructuration ofBalzac'shermaphroditehero/ines'. The drift of his argument appeared to be feminist. The thrust of his presentation was somehow mocking and subversive. He flirted with self-parody. He expected Maud to come into his bed.

The passage reminds that we are addicted to jargon and conjunctions as evidence of our own cleverness. But, as Maud rubs her legs, naked in the shower, it lays bare through the puns that our vocabulary provides a screen of language which conceal s the fact that, behind it all, we are, simply, obsessed about sex. (See Acephalous for some unfortunate, hilarious proof).

Byatt is herself a former institutionalised literary critic (as opposed to the public intellectual she is now). However critical, her writing also indicates that we do have a sense of humour, able to mock ourselves even whilst taking and presenting ourselves seriously and (perhaps incongruently) sexily as well. Given the passage above, Byatt would probably have approved of The Amazing and Incredible, Only-slightly-Laughable Politically Unassailable, PoMo English Title Generator. Here, you type in an author and a novel and let the generator produce a clever sounding title, for use by the undergraduate in his dissertation topic, or by the professor "trying to obtain department funding to go to that high-flying, hard-drinking conference." Try Balzac, and what emerges is not unlike the title Byatt invents for her fictional characters. From "Collusive Relic and the Dis-ease of Masculist Dualism in Balzac's La Comédie humaine" to "Merging Seduction: Testicular Capitalism in Balzac's La Comédie humaine," the generator produces titles which, worrying, would be quite feasible in some of the postmodern literary journals and conferences of the sort the two fictional academics attend. For myself, I am not sure that I dare write on "Complicity and Feminism in Possession: A.S. Byatt Visioning Orgasmic Discourse," though it remains a possibility if the current theme of my chapter proves unproductive.

We are driven by sex, and as part of that impulse we show off our learning with the pretentious peacock feathers of language (an ostentatious piece of alliteration and metaphor if ever there was one). Literary criticism has thus become something of a cult, with its own morals and codes of discourse. Perhaps, therefore, not every reader of this blog will appreciate the humour derived from intense anthropological observation of our group that goes into Jorge Cham's comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD). If you are lucky enough to have escaped academia for the real world, the subtleties of some of these may pass you by. If you are yourself a postgraduate, however, you may be able to comment on whether, since I dare not use a randomly generated title in my PhD, I dare at least show this or this to my supervisor, as I fail to get my writing on Possession off the ground?

Labels: A.S. Byatt, literary theory, Postgraduate Diary

I was obviously quite amused by the discovery that my work was being used by students at an American university as part of their course. But this finding, in conjunction with the fact that, over the last couple of months, hits to this site have shot up to about 200 a day, reminds me of a more serious problem of publishing online. As I said, I have just finished marking my first batch of essays; it is not, in my opinion, particularly challenging to mark a university essay, because the categories are so broad: almost by the end of the first paragraph I am generally sure whether it is going to be a 2.1 or a First. And of far more importance than the grade itself is the discursive individual handback session with each student. However, as a postgraduate tutor I do lack one key skill that a more experienced tutor has, which is to be attuned to recognise where work has recruited specific ideas or phrases from an existing critic.

Sometimes I can spot plagiarism. Last year, for example, by the time I had read five essays all talking about the "fetishistic pistols" in Hedda Gabler, I had twigged that there must be some source from which this nice quote was drawn, and it wasn't too difficult to trace it to an essay by Elaine Showalter. But more difficult to spot are those paraphrases of less well-known critical texts. Whereas a lecturer on the course will probably have read most of the works on the subject, I do not have the time or need to do this. Hence it is quite possible that in some of the essays given to me a phrase has slipped passed my red pen radar. Neither am I in the position to experience something one of the tutors who ran our teaching induction had: an essay which blatantly plagiarises a book which the tutor herself had written.

Having said that, there is the possibility that this might happen through this website. As a fellow postgraduate blogger has recently experienced, with online sources increasingly used by tech-savvy students, the chances of work drawn from the internet being applied in essays increases as well. Clearly, in a digital age, it ought to be correspondingly easier to trace plagiarism of online sources immediately through tools such as Turnitin. But these are not perfect, and not all tutors have access to it - I don't, or I would have checked to see whether it registered the essays available on The Pequod, which with my increased hits and with me now being a scholar of international reputation, may increasingly be a source for plagiarism. I would be horrified to learn that this is the case; so at the weekend I put a piece of warning text at the top of every essay:

Plagiarism is theft! If using this essay in your own work, please ensure you use the correct citation.

Not that this will prevent a plagiarist, but it at least salves my conscience to know that I have publicly denounced and drawn attention to it, and take no pleasure from students using my work unless, as with those lucky students who studied it as part of their course, they acknowledge it.

Labels: plagiarism, Postgraduate Diary

One of my favourite tasks of the academic year took place last week, when I handed back my first-year students' first essays. At my university, we are lucky enough still to have a system whereby each student has an individual fifteen minute slot with their tutor, in which the tutor returns the marked essay and explains and discusses its positive and negative points. Obviously, this is a massively intensive use of teaching resources, compared to tutorials (one teacher to eight students) or lectures (one tutor to several hundred). It is also massively useful, both for the tutors and for the students.

In the case of the latter, who are coming to our university with straight A-grades, it can often be shocking suddenly to find that they have gone from getting many ticks on their work from a school teacher who thinks the world of them, to having scrawls of red corrective pen applied condemnatorily by a tutor who has known them for a couple of hours. Shockingly, it is possible for an A-level English Literature student to get 100%; and to have met our standard entry criteria, all our students will have achieved higher than 80%. So to get their first essays back with a mark of 60% (a mere 60%!) can be quite a shock to the system. I know it was to me. With the handback sessions, however, we get to alleviate these concerns, to assure them that a 2.1 is perfectly normal for their stage of work: after all they are three years from becoming graduates, and three months from being school pupils. When put in context in the handback session, that corrective red pen is less a condemnation of where they are at, than a prompt to look at areas in which they need to improve, if they are to realise their potential and achieve a First.

For my part, the handbacks are beneficial because I get to have an individual meeting with my students, in which I can find out how work really is going (cutting through the mumbled happiness that comes across in a tutorial group at 9.00 on a Monday morning), I learn a little bit about their background and other interests, and I get to talk to them as individuals. It is after the first round of essay handbacks that I finally start to remember student's names, and put names to faces, which has a beneficial effect on tutorials, preventing me from seeming like some anonymous voice of divine wisdom. And, without wanting to sound too arrogant, when a student comes in feeling nervous about how they have performed, and goes out knowing precisely what they did well and what they need to work on to do better in their second essays, I feel like I am making a real difference to them, intellectually and emotionally.

But if this is the high point of my postgraduate life, one of the lows must be getting negative feedback on one's own work. It is one thing for an A-Level student let down by a weak exam system to come to university unable to write grammatical sentences; it is another for a PhD student to suffer the same humiliating corrections to their style. Luckily, grammar is not one of my weak points, and although I occasionally write an over-long sentence with too many embedded clauses, this is a mark more of failed ambition than of limited capability. However, my supervisor is a fast reader, but a close marker, and any misspellings or errors will not escape her red pen, just as I hope none of my students escape mine (there is something faintly hubristic about the experience of marking).

But, in case the reader thinks I am getting a little vain, I must cut myself down to size. Although happily now I am able to write to a technically high standard, it was not always the case. Although most of the essays on The Pequod were written in the last couple of years, a few of the essays were written as undergraduate assignments (the bottom seven on the Essays page). That there are so few is partly because my computer crashed in my second year, so I lost quite a lot of work, and partly because I only put on those essays which were actually any good, both in my opinion and in the eyes of those who marked them. The exception is my essay on "The Representation of Memory in Time's Arrow and Shame." Written in my second year, I got a low 2.1 for this essay, and I was pretty upset, because I had thought I was writing in a very advanced way. Contrary to my principles, I decided to put this one online to spite my tutor, rather than for grander principles of public education.

But my vindictiveness has come back to haunt me. Through my Statcounter, I discovered that an English Instructor at the University of West Georgia has given her students a link to my essay in their reading assignments, and asked them to critique it in class. Through Google I discovered some of their presentations and responses were also published online. In the same response my tutor might conceivably have had, one of these complained that:

the author [sic] thoughts were confusing. He made random points that were not valuable to his argument. We believe the intended reaction was to inform the reader of the importance of time and narration in the story. Yes because we were too confused to understand the point author was trying to get across.

How dearly I would love a handback session with these students! Although, actually, on re-reading the essay, their points are valid. Whilst some of the other responses were more complimentary, I have to admit that the argument does appear highly convoluted, with structural weaknesses both at the level of sentences (winding and long-winded) and of the essay as a whole. Finding my original essay plan, at 6000 words I expect I probably had too much information, and a too-passionate desire to disseminate all my knowledge, rather than succinctly presenting a briefer but more coherent argument (a comment that could have been lifted from one of several of the handback forms I distributed to my own students last week).

Whereas when I received my mark at the time I was a little horrified (and clearly still am, given my drive to publish it online when I launched The Pequod in 2004), I can now look back laconically. I can appreciate the flaws in the essay, safe in the knowledge that, in my second year of a PhD, I would not write in such a way today. And I can laugh at the irony that, a week after I return work to my students, here is an English postgraduate in the United States, probably the same age as myself, giving her undergraduate students my old undergraduate essay to read, and then publishing their comments on my work online. Oh, what incestuous circles we English literature students weave and wander in.

Labels: essay marking, Postgraduate Diary

I mentioned here the other day that in his list of books Andrew Motion believes prospective English undergraduates should read, he controversially included James Joyce's Ulysses. At his Newcastle lecture on "Reading for Life," he hailed the novel's profound democracy, its willingness to plot and describe the minutiae of life, of any life, even of a sexually frustrated Dublin Jew. At 1000 pages long, however, this detail can be its downfall, depressing many readers within a few chapters.

As with all books, though, if you can't be bothered to read it, just wait for the movie. In 2004, director Sean Walsh obligingly provided one adaptation, entitled Bloom. I missed this when it came out, but I did get a chance to see it last weekend. The film itself was enjoyable without being particularly memorable. But it was the discussion afterwards that encouraged me to write this post.

The occasion for my watching the film was that I was at an Irish Studies conference. Given that my research is in science and contemporary fiction, it might seem odd that I spent two days at such an event. Without going into detail, I was offered a free place, and I thought it politically expedient to go, even if slightly alien intellectually. But it was precisely this experience of alienation that I suffered at the end of the film, when we were asked for our comments. The chair enquired whether there were any in the audience who had not read the book first, and if so to comment on how this affected their response to the film. One man (an archaeologist) tentatively put up his hand; the rest in the room, all literary people, kept their hands down. Including myself.

This was disingenuous. Although Ulysses was naturally a set text on the modernism module of my undergraduate degree, I never actually completed it. I reached the Aeolus chapter (I got up to midday, even if not mid-way) and this was enough for me to give a tutorial presentation and to write an essay. My failure was not so much to do with the pressure of time, as the fact that I just didn't get on with it. Whilst I ploughed through the couple of hundred pages of Djuna Barne's modernist novel Nightwood, without enjoying it one bit, I could not bring myself to continue on through Joyce's comparable paradigm of high modernism.

Thinking about my fib later that night, however, I decided that perhaps I should have a little more confidence. A-level English courses today are dominated by short books: Wide Sargasso Sea, Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby. These are beautiful examples of compression and symbolism; but also, handily, they cut down the hours of reading required for sometimes uninspired students. But it would be wrong to believe that these texts evidence the need for a high-speed, twenty-first century culture to have everything presented in bitesize chunks. Sit on any train, and the businessman connected furiously to the world through his Blackberry might very well be holding in his other hand the latest Harry Potter (650 pages) or Lord of the Rings (1000-plus pages). So the fact that Ulysses is a long book, one that stretches the "adhesive limits of binding-binding glue" (as James Lasdun nicely puts it in his review of Thomas Pynchon's latest epic, Pynchon being often heralded as a contemporary Joyce), should not automatically deter readers. I am not an example of a contemporary English Literature student, adept at using Spark Notes synopses and unwilling to spend time reading at length; and I suspect that the idea that the shorter the novel, the more popular it will be does not stand up.

What does deter readers, including myself, is the experience of reading. Whilst I love Joyce's Dubliners, its short stories cunningly crafted and displaying a more controlled linguistic exuberance than in the novel, I made a subjective judgement that Ulysses was, for me, not so successful a book. Objectively and critically, I am aware of the importance of Ulysses as an inspiration to later modernist novelists; I appreciate the full range of innovative devices it employs, from parralax to stream of consciousness; I understand how Joyce's position as an exile, both geographically and historically, is important in relation to this paradigm story of place; historically, I am aware of how significant Ulysses was in the struggles of censorship and taste in the early twentieth century. So when I say I have not read Ulysses, I do not see it as at all evidencing my limitations as a practitioner in English Literature. Nor does it mark my failure as a dedicated, even professional reader. Surely the ability to read a long book ought not to be the final test of one's readiness to study English at university (as Andrew Motion has it). Rather, being willing to react against the authorities who hold this up as a text that must be read and must be enjoyed is the tougher test.

The next day, in a session of papers on Joyce, I found myself sitting next to an English lecturer new to our university, who happens to be a world authority on the man. Chatting about the previous night's film, I decided to put my theoretical belief to the test, and I admitted that I had never completed Ulysses. "Shame on you," he replied, half-jokingly but also, significantly, half-serious. I had certainly wiped out in a moment any of the careerist Brownie points I had hoped to accrue by spending my weekend at the conference. But I did not really mind; I had proved my point, both to myself and to him. I always imagined that I would finally finish Ulysses sometime in the future, when (the old, endless prevarication) I got around to it. I have now determined that, unless I end up teaching the novel, I will take a defiant last stand against those gunning for the canon, and not take it off my shelves again. I may even drop it into Oxfam.

Labels: James Joyce, Literature, Postgraduate Diary, Ulysses

I remember being horrified by the amount of red pen scrawled across the first university essay I handed in, correcting basic grammar and sentence construction. If the technicalities of my writing were not up to scratch when I started university, I could blame my teachers and (probably more significant) a flimsy A-level system which allowed me to score high marks without being able to write grammatical English. Seeing red, both literally and figuratively, I was shocked into action, and I am happy to say that by the end of my first year my essays were being commented on more for their content than for their syntax.

Having taught last year, and having hovered and plunged my red pen above and into numerous essays, regular as a sewing needle stiching the holes in English usage, I was clearly not alone in being unable to construct an essay without splitting my infinitives or, worse, leaving a comma hanging mid-sentence when there should have been a full stop. I only hope my red pen electrified my first year students into corrective action, as it did to me.

With term now underway, in a couple of weeks I can expect to meet my new tutorial groups. So it is by a happy coincidence that our local, parochial Parish News dropped through our letterbox the other day, with the following helpful advice that I can give to my students when I first meet them:

I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.

Eye ran this poem threw it,
Your sure reel glad two no.
Its vary polished in it's weigh.
My checker tolled me sew.

You know you have an English degree when you are confident in telling your Word grammar checker that those squiggly-underlined sentences really are perfectly constructed, and that contrary to the spelling advice you really are practising (not practicing) good English in your essays.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

The yellow AA signs are out, and girls in short skirts wander up and down the streets handing out flyers for the hottest bars in town. A strange cuddly kangaroo waits outside the union, ready to pounce with a hug on anyone younger than 25. Dads sweat at the steering wheels of their cars, whilst their children struggle with downloaded maps. In their orange/blue/green/purple t-shirts, freshers' helpers fall over each other in their desire to help point the way.

Yes, it's that time of year again. A university town, especially when it has a relatively high proportion of students as mine has, is ghostly quiet during the summer. For these three months, it is possible to get seats in the cinema, to go out without feeling surrounded by people who are (surely?) to young to be in the nightclubs, to go shopping without lines of girls stretching across the street, woven together into an unbreakable arm-in-arm chain. And so I can't help but feel slightly resentful that 10,000 people will march in this weekend, like some colonial horde arrogantly reclaiming land that is not natively theirs.

But then again, with the invaders comes a current of happiness that is maintained in a high buzz of voices throughout the year, even during the permanent dullness of winter, dipping perhaps only just before exams. I live in a village three miles out of town, so I escape to the countryside each night, when the buzz spills over into drunkenness. But even if I lived in the town, I expect I could cope with the odd stray traffic cone, a small, if irritating, piece of evidence of the high spirits students bring with them, along with their bootloads of scrappy posters and laptops. Speaking to a policeman the other day, he admitted that they have far more serious trouble - fights, drugs - in the holiday periods when the locals have free reign, than when the students, noisy but usually good-natured, are around.

And, after all, I was a real (i.e. lazy) student once, as opposed to a postgraduate working 9 to 5. We were having a general reminisce the other day about the period which threatens to remain, in spite of the weddings and kids and the steady money of good jobs to come, the "best days of our lives." Rather worryingly, we realised that when we started university, this year's new students were probably only twelve, barely out of primary school. In spite of this horrifying age gap, I still hope to be able to pull off the old trick when I start teaching again this term. As my students line up nervously along the wall outside the seminar room, I try and join in the banter: yes, I did get most horribly drunk last night; no, I haven't read all the books on the reading list sent during the holidays...The look on their faces when I sit down, open my files, and take the register is a memory that will remain with me throughout the year, a welcome score on my part to remember when, later, I am parrying emails trying to persuade me that, really sorry, the essay has not yet been finished because they really have been laid in bed all week with a cold, and not leaning all week at the bar...

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

Friday 22nd September is OneWebDay, a celebration of the way the internet has changed peoples' lives. One of the things that never ceases to amaze me are the strangely meandering routes by which one aspect can link to another. I saw on my webstats that some visitors were coming to my site searching for "Dr. Depressed" about which I blogged last week. So I followed the backlink to Google, and realised that I was appearing number 2 in the rankings for the keywords. The site below mine was called, intriguingly, Gooseania, so I followed it and turned up the weblog for a Manchester-based PhD student, Craig Laughton. Like The Pequod blog, he uses his site to voice his anxieties and pass on experiences about doing doctoral research (in his case, in mathematics). He also wrote an article, published in Mathematics Today, entitled Exploring the Blogosphere, which I very much recommend. I was particularly struck by this comment:

Perhaps the least obvious but most beneficial aspect of blogging (from a maths student’s perspective) is that you are dragged away from scribbling sums and equations to having to write some actual English. Composing a short article every few days massively improves your writing skills, which is going to be crucial when it comes to typing reports and finally, your thesis.

The biggest change in perspective I have undergone this year is that I see my research work in a really holistic way, unlike when I was doing my taught courses. What I mean by this is that rather than simply viewing my thesis as an extended essay with a single question to be answered and handed in, I have learnt to be happy to explore routes and ideas that seem - at first glance - tangential to my research. I do not feel guilty if I listen to Radio 4 for half an hour (especially on an issue as topical as The Idea of a University). I am happy to read the London Review of Books as a part of, rather than escape from, my denser "work" reading. Occasionally I come across an article that is "outside the box" of my research but, playing into it, I receive an unexpected boost and novel insight. And I now see it as important that I write a blog entry a couple of times a week, as it is that I get 500 words written on my thesis.

For Craig Laughton, his blog protects and maintains his general writing skills when he might otherwise be in danger of becoming a stammering solipsist with his specialist equations. Although writing is the foundation of my work, and my basic literary skills do not lack exercise, nevertheless this blog does benefit and broaden my style. When I write for research, I do so fully conscious that I must be technically perfect, with the complex and argumentative style my specialist audience anticipates. But I hope that I maintain an eloquence that reaches to a broader audience than the small company of Lit. Crit. PLC and, as the best form of this writing can do (see "A Critical High Light"), that I write with a kind of creativity immanent in my critical discourse. But it is difficult to force this mode, and I cannot predict when it will flow freely. Creativity comes when I least expect it and, a fragile glass through which I seem to see so clearly the text in question, it can be broken by the shrill of a phone call. Even then, these bursts of my best work are swallowed in the gaping hole/whole of the 100,000 total.

My blog entries, however, are self-contained and must be written quickly, in response to recent events (the political situation in Lebanon, the discovery of a strange link) rather than in response to a piece of literature considered and dissected over weeks. (I have been reading A.S. Byatt, so perhaps a better metaphor, in a Byattian parody, might be: a novel whose choicest elements I excise and leave to grow on the petri-dish of my brain, so that I end up with a mouldy critical terminology which grows and spreads parasitical over the original organic text). You see, I would not have come up with this image without having embarked on this blog; certainly it would never be allowed to sneak itself into my objective and dispassionate critical prose.

Blogs can benefit all research students, whether mathematicians or literary critics, and if you are yourself a postgraduate who has followed the strange web of links to this page, I urge you to continue that journey: start at PhD Weblogs, and I hope you will find your way to Blogger.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

I commented the other day that I have been reading a great deal recently, and that this brings with it problems of perseverance that might seem strange to those who would see reading as a pleasure rather than a chore. Yesterday exemplified the extent to which, in a PhD in English literature, reading constitutes the bulk of what I do, although the extent to which my reading influences my writing can be - certainly in quantitative terms - difficult to detect.

As I have said before, I am currently working on A.S. Byatt, and in several places in her non-fiction she comments on Gabriel Josipovici's phrase "the demonic analogy." This describes the shift in modern fiction away from Dante-esque allegory, in which events in the book stand for the philosophical order of a divinely ordered universe, towards a reflection on the status of the book itself. When the metafiction so common in modern literature reminds us that we have been lulled into believing the world of fiction, we are shocked that what we had taken to be the fictional world - which was one with our private world - was actually only a projection of our unique desires. Thus analogy in modern fiction becomes demonic, a sign of our dementia. This criticism, interesting though not entirely original, points towards one of the responsibilities I think Byatt sees her fiction as holding. However, it is pretty tangential to my main interest in Byatt, and the ratio of the time it took me to read and understand Josipovici, compared to the amount of words I wrote on the primary text, is pretty disappointing, though not unusual in my experience of literary research.

I have a variety of ways of reading. For texts that are probably going to be largely irrelevant, I follow the speed-reading techniques I learnt in my first year. Those novels I know I am going to have to go through twice, the second time with a fine-toothed critical comb, or science books whose content is largely irrelevant, though the style of which is interesting, I read in the normal way, sitting comfortably in an armchair or in the garden; occasionally, I may make notes. Finally, books and articles that are particularly heavy going, or that I need to make detailed notes on, I read sat at our kitchen table, with scrap paper by my side. I make a synopsis and copy out quotations as I go along and then, at intervals, I transcribe these notes onto the computer. (In winter, our stone cottage gets very cold, with the kitchen being the only warm room as it contains the boiler; as a result, the intervals of computer work have to coincide with the central heating coming on). This process has two benefits: firstly, it forces me to read slowly, when I might be tempted to skip as my mind wanders off the difficult or tangential topic; secondly, as I go through the note taking stages on paper and then computer, I have time to step back objectively and analytically and think about how the work relates to mine, whether I agree with it or find flaws in the argument.

It was this latter approach that I brought to Josipovici, and as a result reading the 25-page chapter in The World and the Book took me the best part of a day (in between sending emails and reading book reviews and refreshing the BBC sport pages every few minutes). The chapter was probably in the region of 20, 000 words long, but when I had finished my reading and notes about it, and used that knowledge to write part of my thesis, I had added a total of 479 words to my research. Extrapolated over three years of work, that ratio works out at about 470 words read, to every one word of the 100, 000 I must write.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

Listening to Martha Kearney's excellent mini-series The Idea of a University, I hear the steady tread of modernising and economically-minded feet marching towards my ivory tower. Her series covers the rise of the polytechnic universities following Harold Wilson's "white heat of technology" speech in 1963, in which he warned that the new sciences promised to leave behind those industries with outdated practices and methods. With their musty jackets, academics in traditional universities might have provided one example of the latter, and the polytechnics were the antidote to their staid culture, with their emphasis on vocational courses that could deliver cutting-edge teaching and research and disseminate it into industry through students who would go directly into relevant, and often local, workplaces.

"Relevance" is a dread word for me. A year in to my research, and I have come up with the vital 50-word answer when, at parties, I am asked what my thesis is about. The idea of my stock response is that it be simple enough to be understood without patronising, and elevated enough so that the person to whom I am speaking is not tempted to engage in a long dialogue about it. I socialise to escape research, not to discuss it. But the question I dislike most, and one to which I do not have a definitive answer, is: "Why is my research relevant?"

Last year, my university paid me £15,000 to study, and for the coming two years the AHRC are going to donate some £30,000 to me in the form of living allowances and tuition fees. In some ways, the provision of this money answers the question, or at least redirects it: if my research wasn't relevant, then the higher bodies in education would not have sent down their nuggets of gold from the heavens. Nevertheless, higher education can be accused (and it has been in The Idea of a University) of being a self-fulfilling loop, in which traditional university scholarship is felt to be worthwhile because the people at the top in government, themselves products of that system, feel it to have been of value to them. I have to bear in mind, therefore, that ultimately the money that pays for my research (and my beer and petrol and cameras) comes from outside this loop, from the taxpayer, and the question of value asked by the typical taxpayer I meet at my parties is one I have a responsibility to answer.

The word "value" has a double-meaning. In the first sense, which the OED gives as "That amount of some commodity, medium of exchange, etc., which is considered to be an equivalent for something else," the value of my PhD is not too difficult to estimate. With just 4% of PhDs in Arts and Humanities unemployed after completing their thesis, I will be more likely to obtain a skilled role as part of the UK workforce than I would have been had I joined the ranks of my peers who left as BAs, many of whom are still either unemployed (around 7%) or doing menial work behind bars and in garden centres. In the findings of the document "What do PhDs Do?" commissioned by the UK Grad programme, "In a modern knowledge-based economy, highly educated and skilled people - knowledge workers - are in great demand. PhD graduates are, arguably, the most highly skilled and educated people in our society." According to some figures, salaries reflect this, with PhDs earning up to a third more than those with only first degrees. So, over the course of the next fifty years in employment, I can expect to repay the investment made in me several times over.

Nevertheless, in the immediate term of the coming few years, it is the second meaning of the word "value" - "The relative status of a thing, or the estimate in which it is held, according to its real or supposed worth, usefulness, or importance" - to which I need to respond. Harold Wilson may have wanted universities to drive the UK economy forward through the white heat of technology, and there is no doubt that in the science sector the universities have been powerhouses of research and development. I heard a talk the other day from a former university lecturer whose spin-off company developing imaging crystals is now worth some £15 million, with contracts from the European Space Agency and potential worldwide markets opening in airport security systems. This, from a relatively small initial investment, as the university already had the infrastructure in place to pursue new lines of interest with ease: an international research community, the freedom to innovate, laboratories and, yes, a pool of eager doctoral students able to contribute their skills much more cheaply than could similar workers in industry.

But the "white heat" quite literally generated in the chemistry labs is hardly something I experience at my desk. In the words of a famous Punch cartoon, "Sometimes I sits and thinks, and then again I just sits" in, on good days, a smoulder of good ideas and words. In Education and the University: A Sketch for an English School, F.R. Leavis may have placed the English department at the centre of university life, but his heyday is long gone. When asked by Kearney about the changes in higher education that have taken place over the last thirty years, Mary Warnock, in her considered tones, lamented the passing of the idea that one could do research simply for the joyful sake of it. She did not, however, say why this ever was a valid argument, and the idea of ars gratia artis (art for the sake of art) no longer satisfies even me; it certainly, therefore, would not be expected to satisfy most taxpayers or Blairite politicians. If Warnock - one of our most respected philosophers - failed to come up with a response, I cannot be expected to do so either, at least not in the brief space of this blog. For the time being, I will have to satisfy my party interrogators with the financial statements of my "value" to UK Plc. Answering the other part of the "value" issue is something I must, however, work on.

Labels: AHRC, PhD, Postgraduate Diary, the idea of a university

I am not sure why they didn't ask me, but The Guardian is going to be running a series of monthly columns by Patrick Tomlin, who is about to start a doctorate in political theory at Oxford. Having dropped out of "gainful employment," Tomlin notes that two-thirds of students will not complete their PhD, and that "doctoral depression" is now a recognised problem, particularly in Arts subjects:

What places you at risk of both of these problems is isolation and lack of direction. In scientific subjects, where you're genetically modifying fish to play poker, or whatever goes on in those labs, you work in teams. You have gossip, interaction and a sense of shared responsibility. In subjects like mine, where the emphasis is on reading and thinking about stuff (that wasn't quite what I put in my funding application), you are afforded no such perks. It's just you, a laptop and some books.

This experience of loneliness I well recognise. Which is why blogs like this are so useful as a space in which to air my frustrations and experiences. It's just a shame that, unlike Tomlin, I won't be getting paid in the process.

Labels: Patrick Tomlin, Postgraduate Diary

I haven't posted for a while, principally because I have been away on several extended weekend breaks, firstly to Derbyshire for a wedding, and then entertaining my parents with a tour of Northumberland. I much prefer taking holidays in this form, because it leaves you with pin points of escape to look forward to throughout the summer, as opposed to anticipating two weeks by an exotic pool, and then suffering the deflation that comes after this period has passed. However, my appraoch does mean that my work habits have become very disjointed.

Coming worringly close to the end of my first year, the introductory component of my PhD (about 35 000 words) has taken shape although, to extend the cliche, it is one that is a little ragged round the edges, with localised holes in the middle. About three weeks ago, I started to move on to my first primary text, A.S. Byatt's Possession. Appearing on Radio 4's Start the Week programme on the brain at about the same time as I read Possession, A.S. Byatt complained bluntly about Freudian literary critics: "I am a writer, and I know what I am doing." In my reading of Possession I am looking at the impact of cybernetics and neuroscience, but although this multidimensional work covers much from Victorian poetry and evolution to modern academia, cybernetics is a very trace element indeed. So although I am not a Freudian critic, as with any interpretation that embraces the affective fallacy, I am nevertheless plunging, against Byatt's deadening warning, into the subterranean workings of her mind, showing the subconscious influences on this most deliberate and learned of authors.

Just as I was beginning to believe I was negotiating the tightrope, and drawing out cybernetic elements without tugging too hard at the "hooks and eyes" (a Byattian trope) of her cognition, I had to leave it again for another long weekend, and I returned to find my exitement dented, the notes I made in a heady rush of thinking somewhat incomprehensible. If after a great pain a formal feeling comes, then you need to be realising that feeling on paper for the strange and wonderful period whilst it lasts, not lounging on a sofa or walking across the Northumberland moors.

And so, with a clear ten days in between breaks, I have taken another approach, and rather than writing I have immersed myself in reading. Whereas in an undergraduate essay I might get away with looking at just one work by a major author, such an isolation of the "key text" is not really valid in a thesis. Particularly with this polymathic author, I need also to read several of her other novels in order to get a sense of what history - what learning and interests and biography - she brings to the main text in which I am interested. For the past three days then, for eight hours a day, starting with The Virgin in the Garden, I have been working my way through a quartet of texts, following the fortunes of Frederica Potter, a brilliant intellectual but a human being who is unsympathetic to the feelings both of others and herself.

But, disorientatingly, my head starts to fill to clotting point with characters and settings, such that reality and fiction begin to merge into a seamless web of existences. On the radio this morning, The Idea of a University deals with the same 1960s concrete towers of new academies as feature in Babel Tower , with its imaginary University of North Yorkshire; even as the presenter interviews someone at the University of Sussex, I call up an image of "The Language Tower. The Evolution Tower. The Mathematics Tower. The Social Studies or Social Sciences Tower" with their "layers of connecting walkways" looking like a "beehive." In that same book, Daniel, a disturbed vicar, answers strange telephone calls for a listening service, and when my telephone rings, and my girlfriend plays a prank by putting on a Scottish accent, I put the phone down with anxiety. Vladimir Tretchikoff dies, and I see his "Green Lady" portrait not in terms of colour, but in the words of colour; in the manner of Still Life, I try and pin verbal identities on the grassy shades of the face of his "Green Lady." A friend of mind is currently in Nigeria working on an infra-red telescope, spending twelve hours a day absorbing rows of data streaming down a monitor. She is, she says, going slowly mad. This reading is my equivalent of the scientists' data collection; it is the guts of my research, and although easier than writing, because it is less involved and more reliable than writing - I know the words are not going to dry up when I turn the page - it brings with it a strange kind of tedium, enjoyable though the novels may be.

Most people look forward to holidays curled up with a good book, and would envy me the opportunity to spend my time (fully funded) reading on my couch or lying in bed deep into the morning and night. Suddenly, though, I look forward to next week, when I will spend three days in North Yorkshire, hopefully without a book in sight.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

I usually go into any workshop labelled “Networking” or “Transferable Skills” or similar with a great deal of cynicism. In numerous negative experiences, I have found such events often involve a person nominated (against his or her wishes) as a “Professional Development Co-Ordinator” standing in front of some powerpoint presentation and reading, parrot fashion, slides developed by a consultant with little connection to academia. And so when I was told that I had to attend a UK Local Grad School whose title was “Communication Skills + More” I was a little resentful, particularly as it was a residential school taking a chunky four days out of my research.

From the start, it didn't look good. The course was structured so that we stayed in specific teams throughout the week, each team being led by a tutor. Looking at the biographical profiles of these was like browsing a graduate careers fair: senior managers of Barclay's Bank, IT professionals at Proctor & Gamble, the Wildlife Officer representing the voluntary sector. The whiff of a recruitment drive was heavy in the air. I was one of those who graduated determined to avoid being whipped into what we labelled (not unaptly) "corporate whoreage." One reason for this is that the language that circulates in the business arena terrifies me with its moral meanings carefully occluded by technical terms: goal-centric development (i.e. putting profit over ethics), streamlining (i.e. job cuts), networking (i.e. never socialising without a martini in one hand and a C.V. in the other).

The Grad School initiative came about because of the Joint Skills Statement made by the UK funding councils, which noted that PhDs and their associated project management experiences are not promoted enough to industry and commerce. So it is that a business approach has crept its way even into the ivory towers of the universities. Happily on my way to becoming a dishevelled arts professor, however, all too often I sit in the sessions supposed to develop my "transferable skills" with the streams of jargon and new initiatives brushing past my ears, hot from the board rooms of corporate America. It was refreshing, then, that for the first time at the Grad School, the people delivering such concepts admitted that the ideas theorised here had no direct applicability to myself or to my studies; it was only through self-reflexively thinking about how they might point towards better ways of working that they might have an impact.

For example, introducing the Belbin test (which evaluates what role you most often play in a team), the presenter first showed a slide of four multicoloured shapes, and asked us to choose intuitively which we preferred. Those who chose the lighting bolt were apparently dynamic and creative, the triangles career driven at all costs, the circles (myself included) were hedonists. But then it was revealed that all these were rubbish; though presented in the same way as many personality tests, there was no empirical basis for the results. The message was clear: personality tests might have some significance, but they are neither the whole answer, nor do they necessarily provide any more information than can be gained intuitively known by those with a sensitivity to personality, whether theirs or others. With this admission having been made, I was able to see beyond the terminology and respect the professionalism of the tutors involved. These were not people who had swallowed wholesale the heavily theorised ideals of "team building" etc. Rather, they had real-world experience of the applicability and, crucially, the flaws of management exercises. They inspired by example, and not by the book.

Not that I was aware for much of the time that I was engaged specifically in team working and managerial skills. This was because the "tasks" came with healthily sugared spoonfuls of enjoyment, since they took the form of role plays and realistic (though idiosyncratic) scenarios. So rather than being told how to rise up the academic career ladder, we were asked to act out an imaginary job appeals panel. From the grumpy and time-pressed head of department, to the research co-ordinator who didn't give a monkeys about the appellant's teaching credentials, this was a fairly recognisable situation. Academics are always being encouraged to commercialise and seek funding for their research, but rather than simply looking at slideshows, our teams were instructed to develop a business plan and give presentations as if delivering a sales pitch in the BBC program "Dragon's Den." We rounded off the course by putting our new teamworking skills to the test, as we acted out a scenario (based on a real event) in which a sewage leak was putting residents in danger. Playing the GMB union, we had to think and work on our feet, quickly liaising with the companies and residents and environment agencies played by the other teams (and bypassing the manipulative media as much as possible!) in order to ensure the safety and financial position of our workers at the sewage plant.

I went into the Grad School hoping that I would either have a great deal of fun, even if I learnt nothing, or that I would learn lots of new practical skills I could bring to my work, even if they were not presented in the most stimulating way. In the event, I got the best balance of both: four days of laughs and enjoyment with some fantastic people, some useful advice on careers in academia, and more holistic ideas about how I see myself and my own research. Take this as a recommendation that if you receive an email invitation to a Grad School in your inbox this time next year, hit the reply button right away.

Labels: Grad School, HEFCE, Postgraduate Diary

As I mentioned in an earlier post, for the past month or so I have been writing a paper on Maxwell's demon, particularly as it relates to the "Two Cultures" debate and the contemporary "Science Wars." The interesting thing about this thought experiment of mid-nineteenth-century thermodynamics is that James Clerk Maxwell never used the terminology of a demon at all; it was his fellow scientist, William Thomson, who provided that label, much to Maxwell's annoyance.

In the wake of the Sokal hoax, literary critics were accused of drawing on the terminologies and theories of fields quantum physics or chaos theory in order to bolster their own arguments as having the same epistemological status within the academy as the much respected science faculty. They were using scientific models as metaphors for textual semantics and discourse, a practice which the scientists Paul Gross and Norman Levitt derided as "metaphor mongering."

My essay on Maxwell's demon shows how, whilst literary and literary critical uses of Maxwell's demon lend credence to this complaint about the abuses of science, simultaneously the evolution of Maxwell's demon shows that it is not simply literary intellectuals who are responsible for turning models into metaphors: scientists themselves sometimes do so in ways that play a key role in the development of new paradigms in science.

Very interesting, interdisciplinary stuff. Having used the essay as my end-of-year review piece, I was just waiting for feedback from my second supervisor, before submitting it to some of the relevant journals. Unlike tenured staff, I am not driven by the demands of the Research Assessment Exercise (or whatever may replace it now Gordon Brown has scrapped it) that one publish a certain amount each year. So I was intending to aim high for this paper, and to submit it to some of the more prestigious journals first, perhaps dropping down the unofficial ranks if it did not get accepted over the coming months. In particular, I was looking at the Configurations journal, the official publication of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts. With people such as Gillian Beer and David Porush on the advisory board, this is about as respected as they come.

But academic research, driven by the requirement that it be in some sense aways provocatively original, has an uncanny way of holding the reins of the research you strain to pursue. Searching the web on a tangential topic last week, there at the top of the Google results was a link to "Bruce Clark: Allegories of Victorian Thermodynamics..." Its lacunae led me to a stomach dropping moment: there, published in Configurations in 1996, were twenty-three pages of careful historical research into the development of Maxwell's demon, relating it to the "Two Cultures," showing how allegories and models can mutate into metaphors because of the concerns of scientists.

The last four weeks of hard research and writing - pursuits that have taken me at quite a tangent to the specific concerns of my PhD - are invalidated in an instant. With a Faustian hubris, I had believed that my engagement with Maxwell's demon might lead me to produce new knowledge, to providing the all-important first publication on my academic CV. Instead, Maxwell's demon has returned to haunt me. This morning, in my inbox, like a digital cackle, the Oxford English Dictionary "Word of the Day" lurks: "Maxwell n. Compounds 1a. Maxwell's demon."

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

If the "two cultures" fracture lies anywhere, it is between academic analytic philosophy of mind and just about everything and everyone else. Attending a conference on the philosophy of mind and cognitive science last week, as an outsider to the discipline I was struck by just how occlusive all of the papers were, some to the point where - over their hour long delivery - I was unable to understand the gist, barely even a phrase, of what was being argued. As academics in the humanities have a tendency to do, people spoke about other philosophers in an ideological manner, locating them firmly in a particular camp by attaching -ists and -isms to their work: he's a neutral monist, that philosopher is a logical positivist, that position demonstrates a bias towards existentialism. As for myself, I guess I am a too much of a liberal subjectivist to enjoy such absolute interpretations of other people and their works.

Thirty years ago, in the heyday of the Continental theorists such as Derrida and Baudrillard, literary criticism went through phase of using a dazzling array of jargon drawn - some would say plundered - from the sciences, in an attempt to assert itself as a discipline as objective and thus worthwhile as physics or mathematics. Since then, and in the wake of the Sokal hoax, many literary critics have stepped away from the elitist style of writing and interpretation and have tried instead to forge (or, rather, rediscover) a more intuitive and creative approach (see, for example, The Arts and Sciences of Criticism). The style of philosophy I encountered at the conference, however, was situated where literary criticism was thirty years ago.

Functionalist diagrams purporting to explain how the mind operates abounded (although the popular philosopher of mind, Daniel Dennett, has cautioned against the habit of "boxology") . They reminded me of the old nursery rhyme about the body - "the thigh bone's connected to the hip bone, the hip bone's connected to your back bone..." - only in this case the connections were between short term memory (STM) and feedback loops and input conditions (IC) and Spatio-Temporal Imaginations (STI). As you can tell, acronyms abounded, giving the papers the feel of a scientific approach. But "feel" is the crucial word; the methods in this philosophy of mind were highly scientistic, but not scientific. Apart from a couple of papers given by psychology students, no one tried at length to validate their complex diagrams through reference to empirical studies of the physical brain, behavioural traits or computational simulations of intelligence.

With Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) rapidly improving in resolution and response, I wonder whether this is not going to catch the pure philosophers unawares. As they dispute amongst themselves about what the imagination is, or what memory is, the MRI scientists are going to be able to present them with a conclusive map of the brain, its technicolour detail mapping precisely where imagination acts, where memory resides. In a final blow for dualism, it becomes possible to say that the imagination is the firing of synapses x, y and z and memory the activation of v, w and x, and to leave it at that. Philosophers may respond by saying that a map of the "where" does not explain the "how" or the "why" of the experience (to use their terms, MRI data is a necessary but not sufficient solution to the problem). But literature has already been dealing with these issues of the "qualia" (the sensation of experience) for hundreds of years; as Freud acknowledged when he wrote about the unconscious, creative writers got there first, and provide the sensual framework for what it is like to access another mind better than anyone else. David Lodge's Thinks..., perhaps the most accessible - because fictional - introduction to studies in consciousness, evidences this.

In most of the other humanities lectures I have attended, questions tend to be either precise points of factual contention, or they raise interesting points of connection that might have been overlooked by someone working in a particular historical area ("that comment about modernist x reminded me about what Greek poet y had to say..."), or they take the form of an open request ("I was very interested in that, perhaps you could say more about this aspect..."). This room, however, seemed filled with intellectual testosterone, the hot blood of eager young scholars wanting to make their marks with their peers and faculty superiors (the combatative assertiveness exacerbated by the fact that about eighty-percent of the participants were men, an unusually high majority for the conventionally female dominated humanities). Their questions were not so much probes as wrecking balls. For five, sometimes ten minutes, a questioner from the audience would systematically demolish the speaker's entire argument, and assert his own as the ultimate and perfect consideration of the topic.

That the atmosphere of the conference was so hostile and non-dialectical was a shame. A couple of days ago, I was speaking to a friend who is marking philosophy A-level papers this year. She said the best responses came on topics surrounding philosophy of mind; it is not hard to see why this should be the case, since the questions surrounding it are so engaging and have potentially extensive implications for our moral and social lives: at what point does a machine simulating intelligence become sentient? Is consciousness something shared by all higher animals or unique to humans? How do we know that other people see the world in the same way we do? Though tricky, as the popularity of The Matrix shows, they are not problems that only the elite few can start to address or discuss. However, any outsider attending this conference on philosophy of mind would be left with the impression that the only proper answers are those which are so complex, that few can understand or evaluate them, even as they make ultimate claims to knowledge.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

Just read an article about Scholars Who Blog. Perhaps the top literary blog is Erin O'Connor's Critical Mass, though oddly the list of blogs featured in the article seemed skewed away from traditional humanities intellectuals and towards sociologists. More obvious was the emphasis on U.S. based academics. Perhaps those in the technologically conservative U.K. have yet to cotton on to the power of the blogging phenomenon, though with the lecturers' dispute rapidly degenerating into civil war there should be more than enough to comment on.

A more comprehensive list of scholarly blogs is maintained at Rhetoricia; the best annotated guide to weblogs on general literary topics is at The Complete Review.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

Although I did not have any exams last year, my girlfriend did, and so this is the first spring in a long time when the black stresses of revision have not buzzed either around our kitchen table or in my head, thick and horrible as the swarms of flies that emerge at this time of year. You would think, then, that sitting on the other side of the table in the exam hall as an invigilator would be a pleasant experience, a refreshing dose of shadenfreude. However, sitting exposed at the front, scanning the ranks of hunched heads before me, I think I experience something like a mild case of PTSD. As the spiel plays out of my own mouth - "read the rubric," "don't forget to fill in your exam code," "you have one hour remaining," "fifteen minutes remaining" - I step back momentarily to the other side and my heart races slightly, my palms sweat and, I swear, the skin on the fingers that pinch my pen starts to toughen to blisters.

In reality, though, I have nothing more stressful to do than to hand out spare paper, escort people to the toilet, catch up on my reading or, indeed, write this blog entry. I am also in the position of being able to reflect on the sheer waste of it all. Over the next three weeks, the stationery juggernaut rumbles through academia: mountains of paper are despatched to accumulate in (striking) lecturers' offices; gallons of ink are poured on blank pages; treasury tags, graph paper, forms, lists stand piled on the invigilators' desks; thousands of randomly generated exam codes are etched on minds for a few weeks, then wiped forever. Wasted above all seem the thousands of hours that between them these talented intellects, sportspeople, artists, fundraisers, hell raisers, have spent in the flickering flourescence of the library away from these activities, all for the sake of three hours crunched beneath a small desk, desperately writing the last, dying pages of their university careers on which the value of the whole of the previous three or four years rests.

In the day's of witch hunting there was a classic catch-22 test, brilliantly parodied in Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail). In it the accused witch was tossed into a pond with feet and hands bound. If the she floated, the judges believed God had rejected her, proving she was evil. If she sank, however, this showed God's acceptance of her; of course, this also often lead to drowning. This analogy captures what I believe to be the unfair judgements intrinsic to end-of-year exams. Those who have worked steadily and well throughout the year might underperform, whilst those who have not committed time and effort in their studies might spontaneously produce a brilliant script. The judgement of the exams might sink you no matter how good you are.

So why bother? Students hate them; examiners loathe marking them; the only person who benefits is me, getting paid for three hours of "staying vigilant." However, surely Spring would not feel the same without the ritual coming-around of exams. There is something about knowing that this rite of passage, with its standard rubrics and its protocals and its silences, is being undertaken in the same way in every lecture room in this university, in universities up and down the country, for thousands of students. Like England being knocked out of a major sporting event and the Summer hosepipe ban, this is one of our great British moments of the communal moan.

Nevertheless, having made that optimistic point, as I must stop writing now to give the fifteen minute warning, I glad to be watching rather than doing. The "post" that signifies where I am in my university career is a welcome reminder that these events are, for me, finished.

Labels: exams, Postgraduate Diary

I remember an embarrassing moment in a second-year tutorial on Chaucer, when the tutor asked our group if anyone knew the dates of Shakespeare's birth and death. Though we all had a good general idea, none of us knew them precisely (for the record, it's 1564-1616), and we all felt humiliated before the lecturer's contemptuous glower. Albeit in a more congenial environment, when on Monday nights my girlfriend and I settle down to watch University Challenge, as questions about English Literature start issuing from Jeremy Paxman, apparently directed caustically at me in my living room, my girlfriend's gaze settles on me in expectation of an answer. Often, I get them right; but a significant proportion of the questions I, supposedly an expert in my discipline, get wrong.

I naturally feel some angst at this, but then re-reading C.P. Snow's influential book The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution again yesterday cast my ignorance in a different, more amenable light. Snow, angered at the scorn his literary colleagues showered on scientists’ limited reading habits, demanded that literary critics explain the fundamental second law of thermodynamics. Having recently read Hans Christian von Baeyer's excellent, accessible and entertaining history of the law, Heat Disperses and Time Passes: The History of Heat, I am confident that I could rise to Snow's challenge. I wonder, however, whether my second year Chaucer tutor could; I suspect not.

My tutor implied by his question that no self-respecting English student could know his subject unless he had the dates of the births and deaths of its famous figures at his fingertips. But as English department prospectuses proudly proclaim, studying English literature is not about accumulating raw knowledge but about inculcating the ability to interpret and debate the aesthetic and cultural values of texts. By extension, is there any reason why I should be ashamed of knowing little about the biography of Shakespeare, and quite a lot about the second law of thermodynamics, when my area of research starts with Darwin and runs to contemporary literature, exploring the relationship between sciences and arts? For every University Challenge question I get wrong on literary topics, I possibly get another on scientific history and theories correct. I suspect that for the average Chaucerian scholar, focused on the pre-Englightenment period, this would, understandably, not be the case. Though I would not go so far as to say I am proud not to have known the year Shakespeare was born, I am certainly not ashamed that I know more about one of the fundamental laws of the universe than I do about the details of the most important figure in English literature. Nevertheless, whether sitting in my English department or in my sitting room, the need to assert the value of possessing areas of knowledge drawn from different disciplines is one of the problems of being engaged in interdisciplinary work.

The other danger is less subjective. I realised the other day, as I elbowed my way through the library packed with revision conscious undergraduates, that you know you are engaged in cross-cultural work when a trip to collect books leaves your thighs feeling like they have climbed Everest, as your borrowings take you from the basement (English literature) to the middle (science) and top (social science) floors and down again. I wonder if Health and Safety have been informed of the special physical exertions facing those whose work straddles the two cultures?

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

About six months into my first year of life as a PhD student, and a whispered question starts to be asked amongst my peers: "How is the writing?" Notice the absence of a pronoun in the question, as if the thesis is not my writing but, passively, the thing to be written, the 100 000 word obstacle to overcome. The Book seems to loom as a large shape out there on the third-year horizon, hazily resolved out of the miscellany of notes, scattered and incomplete chapters, an inky mass of jotted paragraphs, without even (as yet) a definite title with which to identify it.

Darwinism was a radical theory that thoroughly subverted Victorian confidence not so much because it exposed man's humble origins, but because it forced the realisation that there was no teleos or ultimate end towards which human activity - art, science, philosophy, law - was directed. In a similar way, original research work must evolve organically from numerous dips into your very specialised "meme-pool," but you are always unsure as to precisely what the outcome of the ideas you are replicating, with a slight twist under the terms of your thesis proposal, are going to be. The question thus provocatively reminds of the crisis that underlies all long-term studies, as it leaves you wondering precisely how the writing is going, since if you do not know the end, how can you judge the success of the route?

In answering the question, then, it is simplest just to deliver the current word count (which will probably be ingrained in your memory if, like me, you rush for that beautiful button every time you have completed a paragraph). This method has its risks, however, for it places highly theoretical theses, each written in the unique style of their authors - in some cases brilliantly succinct, in others elongated and discursive - in a simple league table, and if your word count appears below that of anyone else, your confidence immediately takes a dent and you can't help but feel you are irrecoverably behind on your work, and wish you had started writing, however badly, from day one.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

I sometimes wonder whether the choice of primary texts I explore in my thesis is going to be governed less by intellectual criteria than by which second hand books happen to be shelved in our local Oxfam in town. I tend to have a quick browse about once a week, and several times now I have seen a work I had never heard of or been told about which nevertheless contains along its spine some of the keywords - consciousness, mind, brain, dualism, evolution - that now trigger my intellectual synapses (another of my new favourite words), and lead me to dig my hand into my pocket and to buy on a whim new reading material for the coming week. Reading Richard Dawkins' 3rd edition of The Selfish Gene recently, I can't help but imagine that this is a strange case of my mental genes enabling the reproductive spread of memes, for altruistic effects in the third world.

Except, of course, my purchases are not wholly charitable. Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether this very arbitrary method might have quite interesting consequences for my small field of literary exploration, in that it will naturally lead me to those books which have been made to drop to the bottom of the meme pool by their depositors which I with my new thesis-meme, however small an influence it may be, might nevertheless once more bring to attention, should my ideas be replicated by others. As well as being a paper purgatory, the second hand book shop is thus also a final, chaotically-ordered line of defence against the demarcations of the "literary" canon as established by the campus and its library of essential texts.

Labels: Oxfam, Postgraduate Diary

I sometimes wonder whether the choice of primary texts I explore in my thesis is going to be governed less by intellectual criteria than by which second hand books happen to be shelved in our local Oxfam in town. I tend to have a quick browse about once a week, and several times now I have seen a work I had never heard of or been told about which nevertheless contains along its spine some of the keywords - consciousness, mind, brain, dualism, evolution - that now trigger my intellectual synapses (another of my new favourite words), and lead me to dig my hand into my pocket and to buy on a whim new reading material for the coming week. Reading Richard Dawkins' 3rd edition of The Selfish Gene recently, I can't help but imagine that this is a strange case of my mental genes enabling the reproductive spread of memes, for altruistic effects in the third world.

Except, of course, my purchases are not wholly charitable. Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether this very arbitrary method might have quite interesting consequences for my small field of literary exploration, in that it will naturally lead me to those books which have been made to drop to the bottom of the meme pool by their depositors which I with my new thesis-meme, however small an influence it may be, might nevertheless once more bring to attention, should my ideas be replicated by others. As well as being a paper purgatory, the second hand book shop is thus also a final, chaotically-ordered line of defence against the demarcations of the "literary" canon as established by the campus and its library of essential texts.

Labels: Oxfam, Postgraduate Diary

Whenever I read critical works in the past, I used to be a fastidious note-taker, making chapter-by-chapter synopses as I read, creating abstracts, copying out key quotations, all neatly word-processed and filed. This form of "active" reading worked for me, as I found I could concentrate better on what were often quite challenging, and sometimes dull, secondary texts; secondly, finding precisely where that quote I later needed came from was simply a matter of using the search facility on my PC.

Such a form of reading is no doubt the best when, as is the case for undergraduate essays, you might only need to read a couple of texts which, your lecturer has assured you, will shed the most light on the topic in question. When it comes to a PhD, however, the reading list is infinite (or at least exponential) as every book you read points to several other potentially vital texts in its bibliography. Six months in, and my reading list is already 100 books and articles long. Perhaps the biggest challenge for me has been to learn to break away from my careful plotting of a critical book through detailed note taking, and instead to learn to read in a more laid back way, unconcerned if parts of chapters skip my comprehension, just so long as the general thesis of the book becomes clear. With such an expansive reading list, to carry out the sort of note taking I used to would be impossible, and occasionally this leads to frustration, as I try to access the database of my flawed memory, rather than my computer's perfect memory, in order to recollect where an argument or quote I suddenly, a month of writing later, I realise I would like to inject into my argument. There is thus a delicate balance to be found between reading fast, and making reading fast, making it stick in your mind by commentating actively on it as you read.

The speed reading workshop I attended today threatened to upset any balance between the two I had found. Promising to treble my initial, average to high reading speed (450 words per minute), I worried whether it might also result in reducing to a third my ability to comprehend difficult texts. However, though I am always cynical about these skills workshops that promise much and often deliver little, the reading tools we were taught were practical, the effects immediate, and the threat to comprehension not particularly great. In fact, the most simple thing we were told was to go back to primary school, and pick up again that pen or finger your teacher told you to put down if you wanted to be a good reader, and to trace every word with it. This allows the eyes, rather than saccading in leaps across the line, to smoothly flow across every word or every chunk of words (the next exercise in speed reading being to comprehend phrases, rather than words, at a time). The net bonus was two-fold: firstly, my speed doubled to about 800 words a minute; secondly, because I was engaging more of my brain in the exercise of reading, I was less distracted by events around me, my attention wandered less, and my comprehension (though obviously difficult to measure in a workshop environment) went up. If only I had been taught these tricks five years ago!

Labels: Postgraduate Diary, speed reading

When I was an undergraduate, a poster for one of the union's late night events said: "Don't let your degree get in the way of your education!" Whilst I'm not entirely convinced that dancing in a sweaty club drinking warm, still Fosters is entirely "educational," I do agree with the sentiment. So it was refreshing to have spent today doing something vitally educational, yet with little in relation to PhDs, as I attended a first aid workshop. Yes, it involved getting down with some dolls and manoeuvring people into odd positions (perhaps not so different to the union event, then). But by the end of it, I felt quietly confident that I had actually learnt something tremendously important. Although much first aid is common sense (raising injured limbs and watering burns, just like your mother always taught you), it's nice to be reassured, and to know that it is in my power now to save a life through CPR, rather than standing passively on the sidelines.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

Sitting in lecture theatres, I sometimes get a distorted sense of perspective, not unlike the experience of reading some of Woolf's peculiarly angled descriptions of characters seen from cliffs and offshore boats in The Voyage Out. In lectures, I usually try to worm my way to the back; as the lecture goes on, and as the rows of heads descend away in front of me, their silhouettes correspondingly seem to enlarge with each drop down and away, swelling, I imagine, with the increasingly brilliant minds they must (surely) contain, until the front row almost obscures the lecturer. In this way, when the moment comes and the papers are tapped into order on the lectern, and the chairperson invites questions, I find myself terrified of projecting my weak voice from the back, lobbing my intellectual ball over those assembled brains towards the speaker.

Today was a case in point. I attended a paper given by John Cottingham, Professor of Philosophy at Reading, editor of Ratio and a world authority on Descartes. He was arguing that science could be incorporated into a religious outlook if, in a variation of Pascal's wager, man were to adopt a regulative principle to proceed as if God exists. I desperately wanted to point out that the counter movement was increasingly true, and that science can incorporate religion into its momentum. I wanted to suggest that, a century after the General Theory, the unified theory still has not been solved, and increasingly cosmologers and physicists are wondering whether the factor that blocks their equations from resolving might not be a factor of uncertainty, one which might be labelled "God." Modern science is searching for the "God particle," the fundamental building block which constitutes matter, the existence of which implies a single, fundamental law inscribed in the very fabric of the universe. Yet - as the title of Leon Lederman's The God Particle: If The Universe is the Answer What is the Question? implies - if this is an essential physical property of the universe, out there to be found, paradoxically its discovery may recover the incomprehensible miracle of creation, since beyond this limit of scrutiny nothing more about the way the universe was created can be discovered; from manifesting himself in the large and miraculous, God may be seen to operate, perhaps more radically than conceived before, at the subatomic level.

Instead of asking for his take on this alternative perspective, I sat on my hands and closed my mouth. The next day, as I was walking through town, John Cottingham passed me, trundling his suitcase towards the station. The moment passed too, and I said nothing. One day, hopefully, I will have the guts to believe my own ideas are worth shouting about. Until then, I will have to buy his book - The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value - and scribble my contentions silently in the margins.

Labels: John Cottingham, Postgraduate Diary

With some long-term projects - my MA dissertation on illness and the nineteenth-century short story, for example - you see a clear and small prick of light towards which you are tunnelling, and the task is to fumble around in the dark and dust of the archives and libraries to reach it. With this PhD, however, I feel like I am standing in a large, windowed room like the top of a lighthouse with ideas streaming in like light from all sides, with a full circle of limitless horizons. My first task is to run around and frantically close some blinds, limit the directions in which I could turn, making the brightness that at the moment is swamping me into a smaller, narrower beam of light towards which I can begin to tread.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

It's been over a month since my last post. As I write this, the words of Rochester, opening the second chapter of Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, echo in my head: "So it was all over, the advance and retreat, the doubts and hesitations. Everything finished, for better or for worse." Like Rochester, I am just about to move in to a new house (in fact, I will have done by the time you read this, as I have no means of uploading to the site until then). Like Rochester, I now find myself married - in my case to another three years of study - a marriage which, due to financial reasons, I was never sure I would be able to make.

Without giving away too much detail - and hence losing the anonymity which, to some degree, protects me from accusations of arrogance in publishing my weak works here - I will be effectively paid to explore and write on a literary field of my interest. This is an exciting time. It is also intensely frightening and bewildering: in what other trade is the deadline for completion of a project 3 or 4 years ahead, with little contact time with other experienced colleagues or superiors during that period? Among its other topics of interest, this blog will now become a record of my postgraduate experiences, and my attempts to come to terms with these trepidations; I hope you will join me, and perhaps help me, along the way.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary