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