So I did bring How to Write a Thesis with me to the United States, and for the past twenty years have continued to use it and to recommend it to students who read Italian, or Spanish, or one of the many other languages into which it has been translated. As it ages, its usefulness only increases. The translation of How to Write a Thesis into English is long overdue.
Among the many causes of today’s crisis in the humanities is the fact that there is a loss of concrete practices and capabilities—of experiences where one must “work methodically,” of opportunities “to build an object.” It is a crisis long in the making. I suspect that soon after the publication of How to Write a Thesis, Eco himself sensed that the cultural and political centrality that criticism had enjoyed since the postwar period was about to end. While he did not give up his scholarly research, he became engaged with fiction. In the fall of 1980, his first novel, The Name of the Rose, was published. The society of the spectacle had truly started, with its emphasis on ratings, market surveys, and opinion polls.
But the pendulum may be swinging back. The digital humanities, for example, have revitalized archival research, philology, and curation. Today, Eco’s book represents a similar invitation to rediscover the material foundation of knowledge, ideas, and research. Consider the complex filing system that he recommends: “Each type of index card should have a different color, and should include in the top right corner abbreviations that cross-reference one series of cards to another, and to the general plan.
The result is something majestic.” The same information could have been recorded in a notebook or on slips of paper and then heaped together haphazardly, but this would not have accomplished the same thing. Eco’s ordering is principally an ordering of the mind and therefore a pleasure in itself: “something majestic.” In fact, it constitutes a proposal for a sort of slow research, legitimized not by its results but by its procedures. An experience, a training in accuracy and responsibility. And one in innovation as well. Eco stresses the advantages of what he defines as academic humility, that is, the willingness to “listen with respect to anyone, without this exempting us from pronouncing our value judgments.” Both elements are indispensable: openness and judgment. There is a moment for listening and a moment for intervening.
Another lesson that we can draw from How to Write a Thesis is that no discourse in the humanities can exist without intriguing an audience. The humanities deal with serious issues, but it is the responsibility of those who produce discourse on those issues to make them exciting to others. Eco has acknowledged this throughout his career. Whether writing about Thomas Aquinas, James Bond, fascism, or semiotics, he has consistently succeeded in entertaining and informing his readers at the same time. This book is no exception. Millions of readers have consulted the Chicago Manual of Style and followed its rules, but very few have read it from beginning to end. In the late 1970s I did read every page of How to Write a Thesis, and I did so again recently, when Roger Conover told me he was considering having the book translated into English for publication by the MIT Press. It’s interesting to think, almost 40 years after its publication in Italian, that reading this book from beginning to end in English could now become a natural exercise again.
Francesco Erspamer
Harvard University
TRANSLATORS’ FOREWORD
If you consult any dictionary you will see that the word “exactitude” is not among the synonyms of faithfulness. There are rather loyalty, honesty, respect, and devotion. Umberto Eco1
Although Eco was referring to the translation of literary texts in the lines above, his principle of faithfulness has provided the foundation for our translation of Come si fa una tesi di laurea. We have striven to create a translation that is loyal to the original text but also useful and enjoyable to contemporary English readers.
Although most of the students for whom Eco wrote this book in 1977 shared a genuine desire for the challenges and rewards of a university education, many lacked the time, resources, and experience to navigate a university system embroiled in the social and economic crisis that Eco describes in his original introduction to the book. Because these unique circumstances define the book’s ethos, we have preserved evidence of the book’s historical context whenever possible. We have anglicized only the most obtrusive Italian references. We have replaced Italian expressions with close English equivalents only when necessary, and we have preserved others when the meaning was clear in English, despite their probable unfamiliarity to English readers. Most importantly, we have made every effort to preserve Eco’s stern but nurturing tone (including his precise lists of didactic rules, copious use of italics for emphasis, and deadpan ironies) that so stimulated and inspired his original readers. The author of Come si fa una tesi di laurea held his students to a single, high standard; but he also demonstrated unfailing empathy and genuine commitment to their progress. We hope the same will be said of the author of How to Write a Thesis.
This book contains references to a great number of foreign books and articles, many of which have not been translated into English. We have indicated that there is no published English translation of a work by including our translation of the title after the original title, in sentence style and enclosed in parentheses. Where a published English translation does exist, we have used its title alone, unless the context also required the original title (in which case we have included the English title after the original, in parentheses and with standard formatting). Although this system may occasionally seem cumbersome, we feel that it achieves the best balance between readability and bibliographical accuracy, since it indicates the cited work’s original language where the context fails to do so.
For the most part, English readers need not be familiar with the literature that Eco cites to follow his argument, and the references themselves provide a rare glimpse of Eco’s diverse interests. In fact many of the works were obscure to his Italian readers in the 1970s, and they are infinitely more accessible to today’s wired readers than they were to Eco’s hypothetical Italian student whose only resource was the card catalog in his modest hometown library. And speaking of this student who reappears throughout the book, instead of replacing him with a contemporary English equivalent, we have left him unequivocally Italian, and in his original context of what may seem to us like the dawn of information technology. We hope Englishspeaking students will not only relate to his struggles and successes, but also gain valuable perspective from his unique situation, a situation that originally necessitated this book.
Early drafts of our translation occasionally suffered from the exactitude against which Eco warns, primarily on a sentence and paragraph level, and for this reason we have made many cosmetic changes. These include adding context, omitting redundancies, updating archaisms, clarifying obscure references, correcting typos and other errors, Americanizing distances and currencies,2 and making other functional and stylistic choices that we hope have liberated Eco’s nuanced ideas for a new generation of Englishspeaking readers.
Additionally, we envisioned a translation that would serve Englishspeaking students as well as the original has served students in Italy. Rather than take an overarching approach to translating all of Eco’s writing instructions, we have approached them on a case-by-case basis. We have omitted certain instructions that do not apply to English, and that would have held only trivial value for the English reader. We have revised other instructions to conform to current English usage whenever we could do so without undue violence to the original text, and whenever the results would be relevant to English-speaking students. (Where appropriate, we have altered these instructions to be consistent with the Chicago Manual of Style, the manual that provides the editorial foundation for this book.) Finally, Eco occasionally provides instructions that do not reflect current English usage, but that are nonetheless valuable because of the perspective or argument they contain; these we have kept and noted as such.
Finally, we have preserved Eco’s handwritten index card research system in all its detail, precisely because it is the soul of How to Write a Thesis. Obviously the card catalog of the small town library is primitive compared to today’s online research systems, but the research skills that Eco teaches are perhaps even more relevant today. Eco’s system demands critical thinking, resourcefulness, creativity, attention to detail, and academic pride and humility; these are precisely the skills that aid students overwhelmed by the ever-growing demands made on their time and resources, and confused by the seemingly endless torrents of information available to them. Much as today’s college students lug laptops to the library in their backpacks, Eco’s students lugged their files of index cards. Today’s students carry access to boundless information that Eco’s students could not have begun to fathom, but Eco’s students owned every word they carried. They meticulously curated every
