Compiling an Effective and Relevant Dissertation Bibliography
August 31, 2009
After isolating the questions that have driven and continue to drive my research (hey, I’m in the humanities, figuring out the point of something after the fact is part of the fun! *wink*), this past week I set about compiling an effective starting bibliography for my dissertation. There are any number of ways to go about this, I’m sure, but here’s how I went about determining what sources are relevant to my research.
The very first step was basic, but I think it’s easy to skip: What’s on my shelves? All of my books are in my apartment’s living room and entrance foyer. I literally went to each shelf, pulled out the books I thought were relevant, and typed up the requisite bibliographic information. I’ve been in graduate school for half a decade, and I’ve moved a number of times during that period, each time winnowing my library to some degree, keeping what seems most relevant to my life and work. While some things (Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, or the many comic books, my official diversions from my dissertation reading) were immediately dismissed as not being directly pertinent, much of the nonfiction that I’d retained through multiple moves was, in fact, most relevant to my project. (Sifry’s reader of Gulf War primary documents? Check. Cohen on mid-century consumerism and mass consumption? Check. Johnson on homosexuality and McCarthyism? A very definite check.) This part of my process generated about 70 immediately relevant books—and I won’t have to go to a library to find them later, either. They’re all on my shelves.
My second step was an obvious one: What did I read for my orals? I had my final reading lists for my candidacy examination in my e-mail, because the chair of my committee had asked for them a few days before the exam. One of the three parts of my orals was a comparative list on 19th-century poetry—examining trends in Britain, the U.S. and France. While reading this set of books was essential to my future teaching—one cannot properly expound upon twentieth century American poetry unless one understands the context from which it emerges—the only elements of this list that seemed relevant to my dissertation project were a few critical works on American poetry in general. The reading lists for the other two-thirds of my exam, however, were wholly relevant, so they were merged into my overall bibliography in their entirety. In looking over these lists, I was grateful that so much thought went into their construction—I had already done the work of isolating what I most needed. My list on “Sexuality in Cold War America”, in particular—which included a “primary sources” segment of selected fiction, drama and poetry, as well as sections devoted to U.S. history and to relevant literary theory—was something it took days of research to generate, back when I was in the early stages of orals preparation. I spent the better part of a week in 3 different NYC research libraries, running through databases and online catalogs, and then pulling stuff off of the shelves. That’s paid off tenfold now.
Between my home library and my orals lists, I already had a pretty long bibliography. But what I didn’t have was a comprehensive overview of the literary criticism relevant to my project. That was my last question: What have other people said about this topic?
Answering this question was by far the most difficult and time-consuming aspect of this process. First of all, poetry criticism is often harder to find than literary criticism in general. It might well be in poetry journals primarily devoted to creative work, or in little magazines which only ran for a year or two, or printed in one-off pamphlets which have long since gone out of print. Sure, some core book-length works of analysis had emerged from my earlier steps. But what about the odd pamphlet published by a random northern California collective in, say, 1972? Well, to be perfectly honest, this is where I had to remind myself, “my dissertation is a work in progress.” I’m sure that as I revisit some of the reading contained in this bibliography, I’ll stumble across a referent or ten that I absolutely must track down. It’s foolish to think you can fully know the scope of an academic conversation before you begin introducing your own voice.
That said, you can know what other people have said to an extent—especially if they wrote dissertations about your topic. I developed a list of relevant keywords (author’s names, the names of specific poems, sex/sexuality/gender, nationalism, Cold War, etcetera), and spent some quality time with ProQuest’s dissertation and theses database. After many searches, I culled about 85 abstracts of relevant PhD projects written at other schools (or, in a few cases, at CUNY). I printed them all out (stressing the poor departmental printer, I admit it), and read through them, starring the ones which from their abstracts exhibited a similar theoretical approach, or which were so obviously relevant I had to be aware of them. Then I took that culled list and tried to determine what portions of those dissertations got published. Did the person have some related articles? Did they get a book out of this project? What else have they been publishing since they finished their PhD? Given that I was examining dissertations not only in English but in History and American Studies, I used a combination of the MLA Bibliography database and Google Scholar to help me determine what each person had been up to since finishing grad school. Sometimes I had to leave the specialized databases behind entirely, and simply Google a name—hoping I’d find a departmental web page, with a list of projects or even a full C.V.
When a given scholar had generated a lot of output since leaving graduate school, I usually ended up including their more polished articles and books in my bibliography. (I was reminded during this step of my process that the writing of Christopher Beach is something I can’t ignore—I will in fact need to foreground my response to his work on Pound.) If they hadn’t done anything since writing their dissertation, I sometimes included that project on my list. (Dissertations are actually fairly easy to acquire. I have had great luck with the Graduate Center’s ILL service in this regard.) Dissertations from the last five years or so are quite probably in the process of being revised for publication, so those were often included in my list “as-is”—one might as well work from the original project until the revised work comes out as a book. Finally, if the dissertation was written very very recently, ProQuest may well have it as a PDF for download, making it immediately accessible. (I’ve got a 2009 dissertation from SUNY Buffalo waiting for me on my computer right now.) This is helpful not only in terms of content and form (you can really only learn what a dissertation might look like by reading past ones), but in terms of furthering my bibliography later on: the lengthy bibliography hanging out in the back of a two-year-old dissertation might reveal hidden treasures.
So that’s my bibliography thus far. It’s now 13 pages long. I won’t be submitting all of it with my dissertation prospectus, of course—that would overwhelm my readers, and perhaps hinder the speedy approval I’m seeking. For that piece, I’ll be culling my bibliography to the most relevant, most important works. Nevertheless, given the diversity of techniques I used here, I feel confident about its relevance and its scope. And in the case that I’ve missed an essential work of literary scholarship, I feel certain my committee will address that tout suite. *smile*
Stay tuned for a post on the writing and revising of a dissertation prospectus, or, as I have been asking over the past few weeks, how the #@!# am I supposed to summarize this project before I write it?!
Entry Filed under: Dissertation. Posted in Dissertation .
