Our sincerest thanks to: Matthew Abbate, Pascale-Anne Brault, Fabrizio Cariani, Gary Cestaro, Roger Conover, Michael Naas, and Anna Souchuk.
Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina
DePaul University
INTRODUCTION TO THE ORIGINAL 1977 EDITION
In the past, the Italian university was an elite institution. Only the children of university graduates attended, and with rare exceptions, students had all the time they needed at their disposal. The university allowed students to proceed slowly, with time allotted for study, for “healthy” fraternal pastimes, or for the activities of student government. Classes took the form of prestigious lectures, after which the most interested students would convene with professors and their teaching assistants in unhurried seminars, consisting of 10 or 15 people at the most.
This is still the case in many American universities, where a course never exceeds 10 or 20 students who pay generously for unlimited access to their professors. In Oxford and other British universities, there is a professor who advises the research thesis of as few as one or two students each year, and who follows their work on a daily basis. If the situation in Italian universities were similar, there would be no need to write this book, although some of its advice may also be useful in the ideal academic situation I describe above.
But today the Italian university is a university for the masses. Students of all social classes arrive from a variety of high schools. Perhaps they enroll in philosophy or classics, even if they come from a technical high school where they have never studied ancient Greek or Latin. (It may be true that Latin is of little use for many activities, but it is of great service to students of philosophy and literature.) Some Italian university courses have thousands of enrolled students, and are taught by a professor who knows only the 30 or so who attend most frequently. Even with the help of teaching assistants, the professor may be able to engage only 100 students with some regularity during the semester.
Among these students, there are many affluent young men and women who were raised in cultivated families and exposed to lively cultural environments, who were able to take educational trips, attend art and theater festivals, and go abroad. Then there are “the others,” students who, for example, work in the city clerk’s office in their hometown of only 10,000 inhabitants, a town where there are perhaps only newsstands that substitute for proper booksellers. Other such students, disappointed by their university experience, become radicalized and seek education through political action, but they too must eventually meet their thesis obligations. Still others are forced to choose their courses by calculating the cost of required textbooks. These students may refer to a “$13 course” by cost rather than by topic, and choose the less expensive of two electives. And finally there are students who have never learned how to take advantage of the resources of their hometown libraries, how to sign up for a library card, how to search for a book, or in which libraries to look.
The advice in this book is especially useful for these students, as well as for high school graduates who are about to embark on their college studies and who wish to understand the alchemy of the university thesis. With this book, I would like to convince these students of two points:
1. One can write a decent thesis despite being in a difficult situation resulting from inequity past and present.
2. Regardless of the disappointment and frustration that these studentsmay experience at the university, their thesis provides an opportunity to regain a positive and progressive notion of study. According to this notion, studying is not simply gathering information, but is the critical elaboration of an experience. Through study, students acquire the capacity to identify problems, confront them methodically, and articulate them systematically in expository detail. These skills will serve students for a lifetime.
That said, this book is not an attempt to fully explain how to carry out academic research, nor is it a theoretical dissertation on the value of study. It is only a series of considerations on how to present oneself before a committee with a physical object, prescribed by Italian law, and constituted by a certain quantity of typewritten pages, that is supposed to have some relationship to the discipline of one’s major, and that will not plunge one’s thesis advisor into a state of painful stupor.
Let it be clear that this book will not tell you what to put into your thesis. That is your job. This book will tell you:
1. What constitutes a thesis,
2. How to choose the topic and organize a work schedule,
3. How to conduct bibliographical research,
4. How to organize the material you find,
5. How to format the thesis.
Inevitably, this book will provide the most precise instruction on the final task in this list, even if it seems to be the least important, because it is the only one with a fairly exact set of rules.
This book deals with a thesis in the humanities. Since my experience relates to studies in literature and philosophy, the majority of the examples in this book naturally concern such topics. However, within the limits set by this book, the criteria I suggest are also applicable to a thesis in political science, education, or law. If you adopt a historical or theoretical approach, rather than an experimental or applicative one, you should be able to use the model I propose for a thesis in architecture, economics, business, or some scientific topics; but do not trust me too much on those.
At the time of this book’s publication, the reform of the Italian university is being debated, and there is talk of introducing two or three different levels of university degrees. It remains to be seen if this reform will radically change the concept of the thesis. If this reform creates various levels of university degrees, as is the case in most foreign countries, we will have a situation similar to what I describe in the first chapter (section 1.1), and there will be a PhD thesis in addition to the thesis already required for the laurea, currently the terminal humanities degree offered by Italian universities. The advice I provide in this book applies to both of these, and I will clarify when there are differences between them. Therefore, I believe that the following pages can guide students through the long transition toward prospective reform.
Cesare Segre read the manuscript of this book and has provided advice. Since I heeded some and disregarded some, he is not responsible for the final product. Naturally, I wholeheartedly thank him.
Finally, the following pages address both male and female students, and they refer to both male and female professors. However, when the language doesn’t provide a gender-neutral expression, I have chosen to use the male, and I mean no gender discrimination with this grammatical usage.1
INTRODUCTION TO THE 1985 EDITION
This new edition of my book has been published eight years after the first. I initially wrote this book to avoid repeating time and again the same recommendations to my students, and since then the book has circulated widely. I am grateful to those colleagues who still recommend it to their students. I am most grateful to those students who discovered it by chance, after years of trying unsuccessfully to complete their college degree, and who wrote to me and said that these pages had finally encouraged them to start their thesis, or to finish one they had started. I must take some responsibility for facilitating an increase in the number of Italian college graduates, although I am not sure that this is a good thing.
Although I wrote this book based on my personal university teaching experience, and with the humanities in mind, I discovered that it was useful to almost everyone, since it focuses on the spirit, mentality, and research methods required to write a good thesis, rather than on its content. Therefore, this book has been read by people not pursuing or not yet pursuing university studies, and even by middle school students preparing research projects or reports.
This book has been translated into the languages of foreign countries that have different thesis requirements. Naturally, editors in those countries have made some adjustments, yet it seems that on the whole they have been able to retain the general argument. This does not surprise me, since the methods necessary to conduct high-quality research, at any level of complexity, are the same all over the world.
When I was writing this book, the reform of the Italian university had not yet been implemented. In the original introduction, I suggested that this book was appropriate not only for the traditional laurea thesis but also for the PhD thesis that was about to be implemented as part of these reforms. I believe my prediction was sensible, and today I feel I can present these pages even to a PhD student. (Although I hope that a PhD student has already learned these things, one never knows.)
In the introduction to the first edition, I talked about the shortcomings of the Italian university, shortcomings that made my little book useful to the many thousands of students who otherwise lacked the instruction to successfully complete their thesis. Today, I would happily send the remaining copies of this book to the recycling bin rather than have to republish it. Alas, these shortcomings remain, and my original argument is as relevant today as it was in 1977.
Strange things have happened to me since this
