1.4 Four Obvious Rules for Choosing a Thesis Topic
Although we will discuss thesis topics in greater detail in the next chapter, the following rules will help you get started. They do not apply if the professor pressures you to choose a particular topic (see section 2.7, “How to Avoid Being Exploited by Your Advisor”), or if you lack interest and are willing to choose any topic so as to graduate quickly. If you are inspired by a particular interest, and your advisor is willing to facilitate this interest, the following rules will guide you:
1. The topic should reflect your previous studies and experience. It should be related to your completed courses; your other research; and your political, cultural, or religious experience.
2. The necessary sources should be materially accessible. You should be near enough to the sources for convenient access, and you should have the permission you need to access them.
3. The necessary sources should be manageable. In other words, you should have the ability, experience, and background knowledge needed to understand the sources.
4. You should have some experience with the methodological framework that you will use in the thesis. For example, if your thesis topic requires you to analyze a Bach violin sonata, you should be versed in music theory and analysis.
Put this way, these four rules seem banal. We could summarize them in this single rule: “You must write a thesis that you are able to write.” This rule may seem trivial, but it is true, and many a thesis has been dramatically aborted precisely because this rule was broken.2 The following chapters will provide instruction on how to write a thesis that is both manageable and feasible.
2 CHOOSING THE TOPIC
2.1 Monograph or Survey?
The first temptation of any student is to write a thesis that is too broad. For example, the first impulse of a literature student is to write a thesis titled “Literature Today.” If advised to narrow the scope, the student might choose “Italian Literature from the Postwar Period to the Sixties,” a topic with slightly more focus, but one that is still impossibly vast.
A thesis like this is dangerous. Such a topic will make a seasoned scholar tremble, and will present an impossible challenge for a young student. Presented with this challenge, a student will either write a tedious survey consisting only of author’s names and current scholarly opinions, or will try to imitate the approach of a mature critic and will inevitably be accused of unforgivable omissions.
In 1957 the great contemporary Italian critic Gianfranco Contini published a survey titled Letteratura italiana. Ottocento-Novecento (Italian literature: The nineteenth and twentieth centuries). Had the survey been a thesis, it would have earned a failing grade, despite its 472 pages in length. Contini dedicated entire chapters to so-called “minor” authors, and relegated certain “major” authors to mentions in short footnotes or omitted them altogether. The committee would have attributed these choices to carelessness or ignorance. Naturally, since Contini is a scholar of recognized historical knowledge and critical acumen, readers understood that the omissions and disproportions were intentional, and that the absence of a particular author was a more eloquent expression of Contini’s disfavor than a hostile review. But if a student in his twenties plays the same trick, who guarantees that there is shrewdness behind his silence? Do the omissions replace criticism that the student has written elsewhere, or that he would be capable of writing?
Usually, with a thesis of this kind, the student later accuses the committee members of having failed to understand him. But a thesis that is too broad cannot be understood, and therefore is always an act of pride. It is not that intellectual pride in a thesis should be rejected a priori. A student can even argue that Dante was a lousy poet, but only after at least 300 pages of rigorous analysis of Dante’s texts. However, the necessary breadth of a topic like “Italian Literature from the Postwar Period to the Sixties” leaves no space for these demonstrations, and this is why the student should aptly choose something more modest. Not “The Novels of Beppe Fenoglio,” but “The Different Versions of Johnny the Partisan.” Boring? Maybe, but the challenge it presents is ultimately more interesting.
If you think about it, specificity is also an act of shrewdness. A survey of 40 years of literature is vulnerable to all kinds of objections. How can the advisor or another committee member resist the temptation to show his knowledge of a minor author absent from the student’s work? If each committee member jots down even two or three omissions in the margins of the table of contents, the thesis will end up looking like a missing persons list, and the student will become the target of a burst of charges. If instead the student works diligently on a specific topic, he will find himself mastering material unknown to most of the committee members. I am not suggesting a cheap trick. (It may be a trick, but it takes hard work, so it is certainly not cheap.) The candidate simply presents himself as “expert” in front of a less expert audience, and since he worked hard to gain his expertise, it is fair that he benefits from the situation.
Between these two extremes of a 40-year literature survey and a strict monograph on the variants of a short text, there are thesis topics of varying scope. We can find topics like “The New Literary Avant-garde of the Sixties,” or “The Image of the Langhe in Pavese and Fenoglio,” or even “Similarities and Differences in Three Writers of the Fantastic: Savinio, Buzzati, and Landolfi.”
As for the sciences, a little book on the same topic as ours gives advice that is valid for all subjects:
The subject “Geology,” for instance, is much too broad a topic. “Vulcanology,” as a branch of geology, is still too comprehensive. “Volcanoes in Mexico” might be developed into a good but superficial paper. However, a further limitation to “The History of Popocatepetl” (which one of Cortéz’s conquistadores probably climbed in 1519 and which erupted violently as late as 1702) would make for a more valuable study. Another limited topic, spanning fewer years, would be
“The Birth and Apparent Death of Paricutín” (February 20, 1943, to March 4, 1952).1
Here, I would suggest the last topic, but only if the candidate really says all there is to say about that damned volcano.
Some time ago a student approached me with the impossibly broad topic “The Symbol in Contemporary Thought.” At the very least, I did not understand what the student meant by “symbol,” a term that has different meanings to different authors, meanings that are sometimes directly opposed. Consider that formal logicians and mathematicians designate with the term “symbol” certain expressions without meaning that occupy a specific place with a specific function in a given formalized calculus (such as the a and b or x and y of algebraic formulas), whereas other authors use the term to mean a form full of ambiguous meanings, such as images in dreams, in which a tree can refer to a sex organ, the desire of growth, and so on. So how can anybody write a thesis with this title?
One would have to analyze all of the meanings of “symbol” in all of contemporary culture, list their similarities and differences, determine whether there is an underlying fundamental unitary concept in each author and each theory, and whether the differences nevertheless make the theories in question incompatible. Well then, no contemporary philosopher, linguist, or psychoanalyst has yet been able to complete such a work satisfactorily. How can a neophyte succeed? How can we expect such a work from a young student who, albeit precocious, has no more than six or seven years of academic reading behind him? Even if he could intelligently write at least part of an argument, he would still face the problems of Contini’s history of Italian literature. Alternatively, he could neglect the work of other authors and propose his own theory of the symbol, but we will discuss this questionable choice in section 2.2.
I spoke with the student in question. We discussed the possibility of a thesis on symbol in Freud and Jung, one that would have excluded all other definitions of the term and would have compared only the meanings given to it by these two authors. Then I learned that the student’s only foreign language was English. (We will return to the question of foreign language skills in section 2.5.) We then settled on “The Concept of Symbol in
Peirce,” a thesis that would require only English-language skills. Naturally over the course of the thesis the student would have described how Peirce’s definition of the term differed from that of authors such as Freud and Jung, but these German-speaking authors would not be central to the thesis. Nobody could object that the student had read these authors only in translation, since the thesis proposed to study only the American author fully and in the original language. In this way, we managed to limit the survey to a
