Category: Writing a thesis

Umberto Eco was one of these professors. In 1977, just before he became famous for The Name of the Rose, he wrote a small handbook to help struggling students. How to Write a Thesis has been in print for over 40 years. Used and beloved by generations of students in Europe and beyond, it was only recently translated into English. What accounts for the enduring popularity of the book?

Eco’s style is wry and funny, even when delving into exacting detail. But what makes this small book, full of old-fashioned advice about typewriting, index cards, and libraries, still relevant today is Eco’s belief in the almost magical power of the thesis journey as a true foundation for future challenges in life. It’s an irresistible love letter to research and the creative thrill of rigorous process.

Your thesis is like your first love: it will be difficult to forget. In the end, it will represent your first serious and rigorous academic work, and this is no small thing.

But it’s not just for academics. Anyone who researches or writes for others will find something useful here.

In many ways, Eco’s advice about approaching the challenge is more important than the details—which are often either outdated, or can vary by institution. Here is a summary of the broader advice.

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Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

A thesis is a typewritten manuscript, usually 100 to 400 pages in length, in which the student addresses a particu­lar problem in his chosen field. Italian law requires students to successfully complete a thesis before they are granted the laurea, currently the terminal humanities degree offered by Italian universities. Once the student has passed all required exams and finished writing his thesis, he defends it in front of a committee. During this defense, the thesis advisor and one or more readers give a report that may include objec­tions to the candidate’s thesis. This report sparks a discus­sion in which other professors participate as members of the committee. The advisor and a second professor identify the strengths and weaknesses of the thesis and evaluate the candidate’s capacity to defend the opinions he expressed in his thesis, and these influence the committee’s final evalua­tion. After calculating the student’s grade point average, the committee evaluates the thesis on a numeric scale of 66 to 110 points. The committee may also grant a score of 110 cum laude, and designate the thesis as worthy of publication. This process applies to a laurea in the humanities, as other fields of study may have different requirements.

As you may know, most universities around the world do not require a thesis for a first-level degree. In some uni­versities, there are also certain higher-level degrees that are obtainable without a thesis. In others, there is a first-level degree that has similar requirements to the Italian laurea, obtainable through a series of exams and, in some cases, through completion of a less demanding research project. Still other universities offer various second-level degrees that require thesis-like research projects of varying complex­ity. Some universities outside of Italy also confer a certificate degree, called a licentiate, that shares certain affinities with the Italian laurea. The licentiate in its various forms verifies a graduate’s competence within a certain profession.

However, outside of Italy, the thesis proper generally applies to the doctorate, a degree pursued by those students who wish to specialize and pursue academic research in a particular discipline. Although the doctorate has various des­ignations in different parts of the world, we will use the com­mon abbreviation “PhD.” Although this is an abbreviation for “doctor of philosophy,” it is generally used internation­ally to refer to anyone with a doctorate in the humanities, from the sociologist to the ancient Greek scholar. (Scientific disciplines use other abbreviations, such as MD, or doctor of medicine.) The PhD certifies competence in academic research, and most PhD graduates appropriately pursue aca­demic careers.

In universities around the world that traditionally grant the PhD, the thesis usually refers to a doctoral thesis, known as a “dissertation.” This is a piece of original research through which the candidate must demonstrate his scholarly capa­bility of furthering his discipline. Although there are very young PhDs, the dissertation is generally not undertaken as an Italian student undertakes a laurea thesis, at the age of 22, but rather when he is older, sometimes as old as 40 or 50.

Why wait so long? Because the dissertation is a piece of original research, in which one must not only know the work of other scholars but also “discover” something that other scholars have not yet said. In the humanities, this “discov­ery” will rarely be a sweeping invention such as atomic scis­sion, the theory of relativity, or a medicine that cures cancer. PhD candidates in the humanities make more modest schol­arly discoveries: a new way to interpret and understand a classic text, the attribution of a manuscript that illuminates an author’s biography, a reassessment of secondary studies that ripens ideas once wandering lost in various other texts.

In any case, the scholar must produce a work that, in theory, other scholars in the field should not ignore, because it says something new (see section 2.6.1).

Is the “Italian-style” laurea thesis of the same kind? Rarely. In fact, since students undertake it in their early twenties while they are still completing their course work, a laurea thesis cannot represent the conclusion of long research and contemplation, or provide evidence of full scholarly matu­ration. Therefore, although there may be an occasional lau­rea thesis (completed by a particularly gifted student) that attains the quality of a PhD thesis, most do not, nor does the university encourage such an accomplishment. In fact a good laurea thesis need not be a research thesis in the traditional sense; instead it can take the form of a “literature review.”

In a literature review, the student simply demonstrates that he has critically read the majority of the existing “criti­cal literature,” or the published writings on a particular topic. The student explains the literature clearly, connects the vari­ous points of view of its authors, and thus offers an intelligent review, perhaps useful even to a specialist in the field who had never conducted an in-depth study on that specific topic.

Therefore, the student seeking a laurea has a choice: he can write a literature review appropriate for a laurea degree; or he can undertake a research thesis, one that could even attain the level of scholarship appropriate for a PhD. A research thesis is always more time-consuming, laborious, and demanding. A literature review can also be laborious and time-consuming (some have taken many years), but will usu­ally require less time and present less risk. Writing a litera­ture review in no way precludes a student from later taking the avenue of research; the review can constitute an act of diligence on the part of the young scholar who, before begin­ning independent research, wants to clarify for himself a few ideas by gathering background information on the topic. This is certainly preferable to producing a hastily finished work that claims to represent research but is in fact just a bad the­sis that annoys readers and does no good for its author.

Accordingly, the choice between a literature review and a research thesis is linked to the student’s ability and matu­rity. And regrettably, it is often linked to financial factors, because a working student certainly has less time and energy to dedicate to long hours of research and trips to foreign research institutes or libraries, and often lacks money for the purchase of rare and expensive books and other resources.

Sadly, this book will not offer advice on financial matters. Until a short time ago, research was the privilege of rich stu­dents around the world. Today, academic scholarships, travel scholarships, and foreign research grants have hardly solved this problem. A more just society would be one in which research was a profession funded by the state, and only people with true aspirations to study were compensated. It would be a society in which a piece of paper was not required to find employment or to obtain a promotion in the public sector, and a university graduate would not surpass other qualified applicants simply because the graduate had earned a laurea.¹

But this is not the case in the Italian university, nor in the Italian society in which it was born. We can only hope that students of all social classes can attend the university without stressful sacrifices, and then proceed to explain the many ways in which one can write a decent thesis, taking into account one’s available time, energy, and specific aspirations.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

There are two ways to write a thesis that is useful after graduation. A student can write a thesis that becomes the foundation of a broader research project that will continue into the years ahead, if he has the means and desire to do so. Additionally, writing a thesis develops valuable profes­sional skills that are useful after graduation. For example, the director of a local tourist office who authored a thesis titled “From Stephen Hero to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” will have developed skills needed for his profession. He will have done the following:

1. Identified a precise topic,
2. Collected documents on that topic,
3. Ordered these documents,
4. Reexamined the topic in light of the documents col­lected,
5. Organized all this work into an organic form,
6. Ensured that his readers have understood him,
7. Provided the necessary documentation so that readers may reexamine the topic through his sources.

Writing a thesis requires a student to organize ideas and data, to work methodically, and to build an “object” that in principle will serve others. In reality, the research experience matters more than the topic. The student who was able to carefully research these two versions of Joyce’s novel will have trained himself to methodically collect, organize, and present information, and for other professional responsibil­ities he will encounter working at the tourist office.

As a writer myself, I have already published ten books on different topics, but I was able to write the last nine because of the experience of the first, which happened to be a revi­sion of my own laurea thesis. Without that first effort, I would never have acquired the skills I needed for the others. And, for better or for worse, the other books still show traces of the first. With time, a writer becomes more astute and knowledgeable, but how he uses his knowledge will always depend on how he originally researched the many things he did not know.

At the very least, writing a thesis is like training the mem­ory. One will retain a good memory when he is old if he has trained it when he was young. It doesn’t matter if the train­ing involved memorizing the players of every Italian A-series soccer team, Dante’s poetry, or every Roman emperor from Augustus to Romulus Augustulus. Since we are training our own memory, it is certainly better to serve our interests and needs; but sometimes it is even good exercise to learn useless things. Therefore, even if it is better to research an appeal­ing topic, the topic is secondary to the research method and the actual experience of writing the thesis. If a student works rigorously, no topic is truly foolish, and the student can draw useful conclusions even from a remote or peripheral topic.

In fact, Marx wrote his thesis on the two ancient Greek philosophers Epicurus and Democritus, not on political economy, and this was no accident. Perhaps Marx was able to approach the theoretical questions of history and economy with such rigor precisely because of his scrupulous work on these ancient Greek philosophers. Also, considering that so many students start with an ambitious thesis on Marx and then end up working at the personnel office of a big capital­ist business, we might begin to question the utility, topical­ity, and political relevance of thesis topics.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

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.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

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 Cortez’s con- quistadores 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 Paricutin” (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 medium length, while not changing it into a strict monograph. This solution was acceptable to all.

I should also clarify that the term “monograph” can have a broader meaning than the one we have used here. A mono­graph is the study of a single topic, and as such it is opposed to a “history of,” a manual, and an encyclopedia. A mono­graph can analyze many writers, but only from the perspec­tive of a specific theme. For example, a monograph could appropriately be titled “The Theme of ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ in Medieval Writers,” and it could explore the paradox in which fish can fly, birds can swim, and so on. The student could write an excellent monograph on this topic if he worked rigorously. However, this topic would include a vast amount of readings, as the student would need to famil­iarize himself with all the writers who treated the subject, however minor or obscure. The student might do well to nar­row his scope to “The Theme of ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ in Carolingian Poets.”

A student may consider a survey more exciting than a monograph, if only because focusing on the same author for one, two, or more years may seem boring. But the student should understand that a strict monograph also involves the author’s cultural and historical context. A thesis on Beppe Fenoglio’s fiction requires reading related writers such as Cesare Pavese or Elio Vittorini, reading the American writers whom Fenoglio read and translated, and examining Italian realism in general. It is only possible to understand and inter­pret an author within his wider cultural context. However, it is one thing for a portraitist to paint a landscape for his sub­ject’s background, and it is another thing to paint a complete, detailed landscape painting. The portrait of a gentleman might contain the countryside with a river in the back­ground, but a landscape contains fields, valleys, and rivers, all in fine detail. The technique or, in photographic terms, the focus must change between the two. In a monograph, the landscape can even be somewhat out of focus, incomplete, or unoriginal.

Finally, remember this fundamental principle: the more you narrow the field, the better and more safely you will work. Always prefer a monograph to a survey. It is better for your thesis to resemble an essay than a complete history or an encyclopedia.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

This choice only applies to certain subjects. A thesis in his­tory of mathematics, Romance philology, history of German literature, and other similar subjects can only be historical. A thesis on experimental subjects such as architectural com­position, nuclear reactor physics, or comparative anatomy is usually theoretical. But there are other subjects such as theo­retical philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology, aesthet­ics, philosophy of law, pedagogy, or international law that allow a thesis of both kinds.

In a theoretical thesis, a student confronts an abstract problem upon which other works may or may not have already reflected: the nature of human will, the concept of freedom, the notion of social role, the existence of God, or the genetic code. Considered together, such topics may elicit smiles, as they require the writer to compose what Antonio Gramsci called “brief notes on the universe.” And yet illustri­ous thinkers have devoted themselves to such topics. How­ever, they usually did so after decades of reflection.

In the hands of less experienced students, these topics can generate two outcomes. The first and less worrisome is a survey like the one defined in the previous section, on which I have already provided observations. For example, the stu­dent tackles the concept of social role as it appears in the writings of a chosen set of authors. The second outcome is more tragic, because the candidate presumes he can solve the question of God or define the concept of freedom, within only a few pages. My experience is that a thesis like this usu­ally turns out to be short and unorganized, and resembles more a lyric poem than an academic study. Usually, when the committee objects to the candidate’s argument as too per­sonalized, generic, informal, and lacking in historiographic verification and evidence, the candidate responds that he has been misunderstood, and that his thesis is more intelligent than other banal literature surveys. This may be true, but this answer usually comes from a candidate with confused ideas, one who lacks academic humility and communicative skills. I will define academic humility (which requires pride, and is not a virtue for the weak) in section 4.2.4. This candi­date may indeed be a genius who has acquired a lifetime of knowledge in a mere 22 years, and let it be clear that I am presenting this hypothesis without any shade of irony. How­ever, it takes a long time for mankind to notice that such a genius has appeared on the Earth’s crust, and his work must be read and digested for a certain number of years before its greatness is grasped. How can we expect that the busy committee, responsible for so many students, should grasp at first sight the greatness of this lone runner?

Let us hypothesize that the student believes he has under­stood an important problem. Since nothing is born from nothing, the student must have developed his thoughts under a particular author’s influence. In this case, he should transform his theoretical thesis into a historiographic the­sis. In other words, he should not discuss the problem of being, the notion of freedom, or the concept of social action; but develop a topic such as “The Question of Being in Early Heidegger,” “The Notion of Freedom in Kant,” or “The Con­cept of Social Action in Parsons.” His original ideas will emerge as he grapples with his author’s ideas, as it is possible to say new things about freedom while studying an author’s work on the concept. If he is ambitious, he can transform the theoretical thesis that he originally conceived into the final chapter of his historiographic thesis. Consequently, readers will understand his original ideas in the context of a previous thinker, and the concepts he proposes will gain support from their proper frame of reference.

Even the brightest young writer will find it difficult to work in a vacuum and establish an argument ab initio. He must find a foothold in past scholarship, especially for ques­tions as vague as the notions of being and freedom. Even if someone is a genius, and especially if someone is a genius, he will never be diminished by starting from another author’s work. Building on a previous author’s work does not mean a student must fetishize, adore, or swear by that author, and in fact the student can demonstrate the author’s errors and limits. Medieval writers saw themselves as “dwarves” com­pared to the “giant” ancients they revered, and yet they could see further than the ancients because they were “dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Not all of these observations are valid for applied and laboratory-based subjects. In psychology for example, the alternative to “The Question of Perception in Piaget” is not “The Question of Perception,” even if there were a student reckless enough to attempt such a dangerously generic topic. The alternative to the first topic’s historiographic approach is rather an experimental approach, such as “The Perception of Colors in a Group of Handicapped Children.” This is a dif­ferent story, because the student has the right to approach a question through experimentation, provided he has a sound research method, adequate laboratory conditions, and the necessary assistance. But a good laboratory researcher will not begin an experiment without having compiled a literature review that examines the results of similar experiments. He would otherwise risk reinventing the wheel by proving some­thing that has already been amply proven, or by applying methods that have already failed (although the new verifica­tion of a heretofore unsuccessful method could provide the foundation for a successful thesis). Therefore an experimen­tal thesis requires library research, laboratory work, and an established research method. Here the student should follow the examples of the medieval authors and climb onto the shoulders of a giant, at least one of modest height, or even onto another dwarf. The student will always have the chance to develop his own original ideas later in his career.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

Here I am not attempting to revive the age-old quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.

Instead I am here using the term “ancient” in the most general sense of “very old,” referring to authors whose works have survived and been studied by scholars. The choice between an ancient and a contemporary author does not apply to subjects such as the history of contemporary Ital­ian literature, although even a thesis in Latin could involve both Horace and the state of Horatian studies in the last two decades. Nevertheless, Italian students frequently prefer con­temporary authors, like Cesare Pavese, Giorgio Bassani, and Edoardo Sanguineti, to the sixteenth-century Petrarchan or the eighteenth-century Arcadian poets suggested by their advisors. Sometimes the student chooses a poet out of an authentic love for his work, and this is a choice that is diffi­cult to challenge. Other times the student is under the false conviction that a contemporary author is easier and more fun.

Let us state from the outset that a thesis on a contemporary author is always more difficult. It may be true that scholarship on a contemporary author generally involves a smaller bibli­ography of easily accessible texts, and that the student can accomplish the first phase of the research by reading a good novel on the beach, rather than sitting in a library. The prob­lem arises when the student begins to comment on the author, considering that the thesis will be flawed if he simply repeats what other critics have said. (If the student is to write a flawed thesis, he could do so more easily on a sixteenth-century Petrarchan poet.) Since opinions on most contemporary authors are still vague and divided, the student’s critical skills will be hindered by a lack of perspective, and the project will become enormously difficult. On the other hand, the texts of ancient authors are usually supported by a solid foun­dation of interpretation upon which the student can build. Certainly a thesis on an ancient author involves more labo­rious reading, and more careful bibliographical research, but the titles are more organized, and complete bibliographies are common. Moreover, if the student approaches his thesis as a chance to learn how to properly conduct research, a thesis on a past author will provide better training. And even if the student has a flair for contemporary criticism, the thesis can provide a final opportunity for him to challenge himself with literature of the past, and to exercise his taste and reading skills. He would be in good company, for many great contem­porary authors, even avant-garde authors, wrote their thesis on Dante or Foscolo rather than Montale or Pound.

To be sure, there are no precise rules, and a good researcher can historically or stylistically analyze a contem­porary or past author with equal philological acumen and precision. The problem also varies among disciplines: in philosophy, a thesis on Husserl might provide the student with a more challenging research experience than one on Descartes; and the fact that it is easier to read Pascal than Carnap shows that a modern author may require more labo­rious reading than an ancient. Therefore, I can confidently provide only this advice: work on a contemporary author as if he were ancient, and an ancient one as if he were contemporary. You will have more fun and write a better thesis.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

Let us state from the outset: no longer than three years and no less than six months. This period includes not just the time necessary to write the final draft, which may take only a month or two weeks, depending on the student’s work hab­its. Instead, this period begins at the genesis of the first idea and ends at the delivery of the final work. For example, a stu­dent may only work on his thesis for a year, but he may use ideas and readings accumulated in the two preceding years, even though he initially did not know what would come from this preliminary research.

A thesis should take no more than three years because, if the student has failed to delimit his topic and find the nec­essary sources after this period, he has one of the following problems:

1. The student has chosen an overwhelming topic that is beyond his skill level.
2. The student is one of those insatiable persons who would like to write about everything, and who will con­tinue to work on his thesis for 20 years. (A clever scholar will instead set limits, however modest, and produce something definitive within those limits.)
3. The “thesis neurosis” has begun: the student aban­dons the thesis, returns to it, feels unfulfilled, loses focus, and uses his thesis as an alibi to avoid other challenges in his life that he is too cowardly to address. This student will never graduate.

A thesis should take no less than six months because, even if the student’s goal is a modest journal article of less than 60 typewritten pages, six months pass in a flash. This may not be sufficient time for the student to structure the work, research the bibliography, catalog the sources, and draft the text. Surely a more experienced scholar can compose an essay in less time, but only because he has years of reading behind him, complete with cataloged notes. The student must instead start from scratch.

Ideally the student will choose his thesis topic and thesis advisor toward the end of his sophomore year. By then the student has already become familiar with various subjects, and he even has a general understanding of disciplines he has not yet studied, their focus, and the difficulties they present. Such a timely choice is neither compromising nor irreversible. The student has an entire year to assess the choice, and if need be, to change the topic, the advisor, or even the discipline. Note that even if the student spends a year researching ancient Greek literature and later realizes that he prefers contemporary history, he has not wasted his time, as he will have learned how to create a prelimi­nary bibliography, how to take notes on a text, and how to organize a table of contents. Remember the point we made in section 1.3: first and foremost, a thesis teaches one to coordinate ideas, and the topic is secondary.

If the student chooses his topic toward the end of his sophomore year, he will have until the spring of the fourth year to graduate well within the time frame outlined above. He will have two complete years to finish his thesis and two summers to devote to research and, if he has the resources, to research trips. During this period, he can also choose courses and readings that are appropriate for his thesis. To be sure, if the student is writing a thesis on experimental psychology, he will still be required to take Latin or other unrelated courses. However, in courses related to philosophy and sociology, the student may be able to arrange with the professor to substi­tute texts related to the thesis for course texts (even required ones), as long as this is done without dialectical contortions or puerile tricks. In this case, an intelligent professor will prefer a motivated student taking his course purposefully to one taking his course without passion, randomly, or out of an obligation to fulfill a requirement.

In any case, nothing forbids the student from choosing a thesis topic earlier. And nothing forbids the student from choosing it later, if he is willing to take more than the pre­scribed four years to graduate. But the biggest mistake he can make is to fail to allow sufficient time for his thesis.

If the student is to write a good thesis, he must discuss his work incrementally with his advisor, at least within reason. This is not to put the professor on a pedestal. Instead, because writing a thesis is like writing a book, working incrementally with the professor is a communi­cation exercise that assumes the existence of an audience, and the advisor is the only competent audience available to the student during the course of his work. If the student completes the thesis hastily, the advisor will only have time to skim the text. Moreover, if the student presents the the­sis to his advisor at the last minute, and if the advisor is dissatisfied with the results, he will challenge the candidate at the defense. This will produce unpleasant results not only for the student but also for the advisor, who should never arrive at a defense with a thesis he does not support. In this case, the advisor shares in the defeat. Early in the process, if the advisor notices that the candidate is having trouble, he must immediately inform the candidate, and suggest either that the student pursue another topic or that he postpone his thesis until he is better prepared. If the student ignores this advice, and if he is in a rush to graduate or if he sim­ply believes that his advisor is wrong, he will again face a stormy defense, but he will do so deliberately.

Considering these risks, a six-month thesis is certainly not the optimum choice, even though it is within our range of acceptability. But as we have implied, it may prove suc­cessful if the topic, chosen in the last six months, builds on research and experience gained in the years before. Also, sometimes a student must complete a thesis in six months because of some external necessity. In these cases, the stu­dent must find a topic that he can research thoroughly and that will yield a decent product in that short period of time.

Here I do not want to sound too much like a salesman, as if I were selling an inexpensive “six-month thesis” and a pric­ier “three-year thesis,” a thesis to satisfy every kind of cus­tomer. Instead my point is that, without a doubt, a student can produce a decent thesis in as little as six months. There are three requirements for a six-month thesis:

1. The topic should be clearly defined.
2. The topic should be contemporary (notwithstanding the advice given in section 2.3), eliminating the need to explore a bibliography that goes back to the ancient Greeks. Alternatively, it should be a marginal subject on which little has been written.
3. The primary and secondary sources must be locally available and easily accessible.

Let us look at some examples. If I choose the topic “The Church of Santa Maria di Castello in Alessandria,” I can hope to find everything I need to reconstruct its history and the events of its restoration in the municipal library of Alessan­dria, and also in the city’s civic archives. I use the word “hope” because I am speaking hypothetically, and putting myself in the shoes of a student who hopes to complete a thesis in six months. Before I begin the project, I should test the validity of my hypothesis. First, I should verify that I will reside in or near Alessandria during the process; if I live 930 miles south in Caltanissetta, I have made a bad choice. Additionally, if some of the available sources are unpublished medieval man­uscripts, I should know something of paleography and have the skills necessary to decipher these manuscripts. Here you can see how a seemingly easy topic can quickly become diffi­cult. If I determine, instead, that all of the secondary sources have been published no earlier than the nineteenth century, I am safe to proceed on solid ground.

Here is another example: Raffaele La Capria is a contem­porary Italian writer who has written only three novels and a single book of essays, all published by the Italian publisher Bompiani. Let us imagine a thesis with the title “The For­tunes of Raffaele La Capria in Contemporary Italian Criti­cism.” Since publishers commonly archive all of the critical essays and articles written about their authors, I can hope to find almost all the texts I need in a series of visits to the pub­lisher in Milan. Since the author is living, I can write to him or interview him in person, ask him for other bibliographic suggestions, and probably even obtain photocopies of these relevant texts. Surely a certain critical essay will refer us to other authors to whom La Capria is compared or contrasted, widening the research field a bit, but in a manageable way. This project will pose no problem if I have chosen La Capria out of a more general interest in Italian contemporary litera­ture. If this is not the case, I have probably chosen cynically, coldly, and recklessly.

Here is another example of a six-month thesis: “The Interpretation of World War II in Middle School History Books Published in the Last Five Years.” The student may have some difficulty locating all of the Italian middle school history books in circulation, but in fact there are only a few scholastic presses. Once the student has acquired or photo­copied the texts, he will find that the treatments of World War II occupy a few pages in each, and that he can quickly do good comparative work. However, in order to judge a book’s treatment of World War II, the student must compare it to half a dozen reputable histories of the war, and also assess the book’s treatment of history in general. Thus he must widen his scope. Surely, without these forms of critical examination, the student could write the thesis in a week rather than in six months, but it would take the form of a newspaper article instead of a thesis. The article may even be sharp and brilliant, yet it would still be unfit to document the candidate’s research abilities.

Ultimately, if you want to write a six-month thesis but are only willing to commit an hour each day, there is no point in continuing our discussion. Please refer to the advice given in section 1.2: copy a thesis and call it quits.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

This section does not concern those students writing a the­sis on a foreign language or on foreign literature. One would hope that these students know the language on which they write their thesis. Better still, one would hope that a stu­dent studying a French author writes his thesis in French, as many universities around the world rightfully require.

Also, the observations below are no substitute for learning the language by spending time in the country in question. However, this is an expensive solution, and here I would like to advise students who do not have this option.

Let us pose the problem of an Italian student who writes his thesis in philosophy, sociology, law, political science, his­tory, or natural sciences. Even if the thesis involves Italian history, Dante, or the Renaissance, the student will inevita­bly have to read a book in a foreign language, since illustri­ous scholars of Dante and the Renaissance have written in English, German, and other languages foreign to our Italian student. In these cases, the student generally uses the thesis as an excuse to start reading in a new language. If the stu­dent is motivated by the topic and up to the challenge, he will begin to gain understanding. Often this is how the student first learns a foreign language. Although he will not learn to speak the new language, he will learn to read it, which is better than nothing. If there is only one book in German on a specific topic, and if the student does not know German, he can ask someone to read him the most important chapters.

He will have the decency not to rely on that particular book too much, but at least he will be able to legitimately include it in his bibliography.

But these are all secondary issues. The main tenet is this: we should not choose a topic that involves foreign language skills that we do not currently possess, or that we are not willing to acquire. For now, let us examine some essential requirements:

1. We cannot write a thesis on a foreign author if we do not read his texts in the original language. This seems self-ev­ident if the author is a poet, but many students do not see this as a prerequisite for a thesis on Kant, Freud, or Marx. However, it is required for three reasons. First, not all of the author’s works may be available in translation, and sometimes neglecting even a minor work can lead to a misrepresentation of the author’s intellectual background, or his work in general. Second, most of the secondary sources on a given author are usually in the author’s orig­inal language. Even if the author is available in transla­tion, his critics may not be. Finally, the translation does not always do justice to an author’s thought, and writing a thesis involves the act of restoring the author’s original thought from the distortions of translations, and from vulgarizations of various kinds. Writing a thesis requires going beyond the easy formulas of school textbooks, such as “Foscolo is a classicist while Leopardi is a romantic,” or “Plato is an idealist and Aristotle is a realist,” or “Pascal favors the heart and Descartes favors reason.”
2. We cannot write a thesis on a topic on which the most important secondary sources are in a language we do not know. For example, since some of the past decade’s most groundbreaking reassessments of Nietzsche’s German texts have been written in French, a student whose only foreign language was German could not write a thesis on Nietzsche. The same applies to Freud; it would be diffi­cult to reinterpret the Viennese master without consid­ering the American Freudian “revisionists” or the French structuralists.
3. We cannot write a thesis on an author or a topic by read­ing only the sources written in familiar languages. How can we know beforehand that the most influential secondary source on our author or topic is written in a language in which we are fluent? Surely questions like this can lead to paralysis, so here we should use common sense: rules of academic rigor allow a Western student to acknowledge a secondary source written in Japanese, and to admit that he has not read it. This “license to ignore” usually extends to non-Western languages and Slavic languages, so that a student can complete a rigorous study on Marx and still admit his ignorance of Russian sources. But in these cases, the rigorous scholar will demonstrate that he has explored these sources through reviews or abstracts. For example, Soviet, Bulgarian, Czechoslovakian, and Israeli academic journals usually provide abstracts of their arti­cles in English or French. Therefore, if the student works on a French author, he may manage with no knowledge of Russian, but he must read at least English. In any case, before the student chooses a topic, he must have the good sense to consult the existing bibliography in order to avoid considerable linguistic difficulties. In some cases, this is easy to determine: it is unthinkable to write a the­sis in Greek philology without knowing German, the lan­guage in which there is a flood of important studies on the subject.

Additionally, the thesis will inevitably introduce the stu­dent to a smattering of general terminology in all Western languages. For example, even if the student does not read Russian, he must at least be able to recognize the Cyrillic alphabet enough to determine whether a quoted book speaks of art or science. It takes an evening to gain this familiarity, and after comparing a few titles the student will know that iskusstvo means “art” and nauka means “science.” Do not let this terrorize you. You should consider your thesis a unique chance to learn skills that will serve you for a lifetime.

Let us form a final, conciliatory hypothesis. Suppose an Italian student is interested in the problem of visual per­ception pertaining to the topic of art. This student does not know any foreign languages, nor does he have the time to learn them. (Or the student may have some kind of psychological block; there are people who learn Swedish in a week, and others who can barely speak French after ten years of prac­tice.) In addition to these limitations, let us suppose that the student must write a six-month thesis for economic rea­sons. Although the student must graduate quickly and find employment, he is sincerely interested in his topic, and he eventually plans to study it more deeply when time permits. (We must think of this kind of student as well.)

In this case, the student may narrow his topic to “The Problems of Visual Perception in Relation to Figurative Arts in Particular Contemporary Authors.” First, he must paint a picture of the psychological question, and on this topic there is a series of works translated into Italian, from Richard L. Gregory’s Eye and Brain to major texts on the psychology of perception and transactional psychology. Then the student can bring the theme into focus in three authors: he can use Rudolf Arnheim for the Gestalt approach, Ernst Gombrich for the semiological-informational approach, and Erwin Panof- sky for his essays on perspective from an iconological point of view. After all, from three different points of view, these three authors discuss the role of nature and culture in the perception of images. There are some works, for example the books of Gillo Dorfles, that will help the student contextual­ize and link these authors. Once the student has traced these three perspectives, he can also attempt to apply their criteria to a specific painting, perhaps by revising an already classic interpretation (for example drawing from Roberto Longhi’s analysis of Piero della Francesca’s paintings) and integrating it with the more “contemporary” data that he has gathered from these authors. The final product will be nothing original, and it will fall between the survey and the monograph, but the student will be able to develop it on the basis of Italian trans­lations. The student will avoid reproach for not having read all Panofsky, including work available only in German or English, because the thesis is not on Panofsky. Panofsky is relevant only to a specific aspect of the topic, and is useful as a reference only for some questions presented by the thesis. As I said in section 2.1, this type of thesis is not the best choice, because it risks becoming incomplete and generic. To be clear, this is an example of a six-month thesis for a student who wishes to gather preliminary data on a problem about which he truly cares. It is a makeshift solution, yet it can produce a decent thesis.

In any case, if our Italian student does not know any for­eign languages, and if he cannot seize this precious oppor­tunity that the thesis provides to acquire them, the most reasonable solution is for the student to choose a specifically Italian topic, so that he can eliminate the need for foreign sources completely, or at least rely on the few sources that have been translated into Italian. Therefore, if the student wishes to write a thesis on “The Models of the Historical Novel in Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Prose,” he should have some basic knowledge of Walter Scott and his role as the origina­tor of the modern historical novel, in addition to the nine­teenth-century Italian polemic on the same subject. He could also find some reference works in Italian, and he could find at least the major works of Walter Scott in translation, espe­cially if he searched the library for the nineteenth-century Italian translations. A topic such as “Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi’s Influence on the Italian Culture of the Risorgi- mento” would pose even fewer problems. Obviously, the stu­dent should never begin his work based on such optimistic assumptions, and he should always consult available bibli­ographies to determine which foreign authors have written on his topic.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

Some identify science with natural sciences or quantita­tive research. In other words, they believe research is only scientific if it contains formulas and diagrams. From this perspective, research on Aristotle’s ethics would not be sci­entific, nor would a thesis on class consciousness and the peasant revolts during the Protestant Reformation. Clearly this is not the meaning that academia assigns to the term “scientific.”

Let us try to understand by what reasoning we can call a work scientific. We can still take as a model the natural sci­ences as they have been defined since the beginning of the modern period. In this sense, research is scientific when it fulfills the following conditions:

1. The research deals with a specific object, defined so that others can identify it. The term “object” need not neces­sarily have a physical meaning. Even the square root of a number is an object, though it cannot actually be seen or touched. Social class is also an object of research, despite the objection that we can only know individuals or sta­tistical means and not actual classes. In this sense, the class of all integers above 3,725 also lacks physical real­ity, though a mathematician could study it. Defining the object therefore means defining the conditions by which we can talk about it, based on rules that we establish, or that others have established before us. If we establish the conditions that allow anyone to discern an integer above 3,725 when he encounters it, we have established our object’s rules of identification.

Obviously, problems arise if we must speak, for exam­ple, of a fictional being such as the centaur, commonly understood to be nonexistent. At this point we have three alternatives. First, we can decide to talk about centaurs as they are presented in classical mythology. Here our object becomes publicly recognizable and identifiable, because we are dealing with the texts (verbal or visual) in which these mythical creatures appear. We will then have to determine the characteristics that an object being described in clas­sical mythology must possess for it to be recognized as a centaur. Second, we can conduct a hypothetical investi­gation to determine which characteristics a creature liv­ing in a possible world (that is, not the real world) should possess in order to be a centaur. Then we would have to define the conditions of existence of this possible world, taking care to inform our readers that all of our discussion is developed within this hypothesis. If we remain rigor­ously faithful to the initial assumption, we have defined an object appropriate for scientific investigation. Third, we can produce sufficient evidence to prove that centaurs are in fact real. In this case, to build a realistic object of discussion, we should present evidence (skeletons, bone remains, tracks petrified in lava, infrared photographs from Greek woodlands, and whatever else might support our case) so that others might agree that, regardless of the correctness of our hypothesis, there is something we can talk about. Obviously this example is paradoxical, and I can’t believe that anyone would want to write a thesis on centaurs, especially by way of the third alternative. Instead, my purpose is to show how it is always possible, given certain conditions, to constitute a publicly recogniz­able object of research. And if it is possible with centaurs, it will surely be possible with notions such as moral behav­ior, desires, values, or the concept of historical progress.

2. The research says things that have not yet been said about this object, or it revises the things that have already been said from a different perspective. A mathematically correct the­sis that proved the Pythagorean theorem with traditional methods would not be a scientific work, because it would not add anything to our knowledge. At best, it would provide clear instruction on how to solve the theorem, much as a manual provides instruction on how to build a doghouse using wood, nails, a plane, a saw, and a ham­mer. As we have already said in section 1.1, a literature review can also be scientifically useful because the author has collected and organically linked together the opinions expressed by others on a particular topic. Similarly, an instruction manual on how to build a doghouse is not a scientific work, but a work that discusses and compares all known doghouse-building methods can make a mod­est claim of scientific value. However, bear in mind that a literature review has scientific value only if something similar does not already exist in a given field. If someone has already written a work comparing the systems used to build a doghouse, writing a similar manual is at best a waste of time, at worst plagiarism (see section 5.3.2).

3. The research is useful to others. An article that presents a new finding on the behavior of the elementary particles of physics is useful. An article that presents a transcription of an unpublished letter by the Italian romantic poet Gia­como Leopardi, and that recounts the circumstances of its discovery, is useful. A work is scientific if, in addition to fulfilling the two conditions above, it advances the knowl­edge of the community, and if all future works on the topic will have to take it into consideration, at least in theory.

Naturally the scientific relevance is commensurate with the contribution’s significance. Scholars must take certain contributions into account in order to say any­thing relevant on a particular topic, while they can leave others behind without serious consequences. Recently, a number of letters from James Joyce to his wife have been published, specifically letters that deal with explicit sexual matters. People studying the origin of Molly Bloom’s char­acter in Joyce’s Ulysses may find it useful to know that, in his private life, Joyce attributed to his wife a sexuality as vivacious and developed as Molly’s. Therefore, the publi­cation of these letters is a useful scientific contribution. On the other hand, some superb interpretations of Ulysses present a keen analysis of Molly’s character without this data. Therefore this contribution is not indispensable. We can find an example of a more important scientific contribution in the publication of Stephen Hero, the first version of Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen Hero is generally considered fundamental for understanding the development of the Irish writer, and is therefore a fundamental scientific contribution.

Here we should address the so-called “laundry lists” often associated with extremely meticulous German phi­lologists. These might include an author’s shopping list, to-do list, and other incidental texts that are generally of low value. Occasionally these kinds of data are useful because they shed the light of humanity on a reclusive author, or they reveal that during a certain period he lived in extreme poverty. Other times these texts do not add anything to what we already know. They are small biographical curiosities with no scientific value, even if there are people who build reputations as indefatigable researchers by bringing these trifles to light. We should not discourage those who enjoy pursuing this type of research, but we also should understand that they are not advancing human knowledge. From a pedagogical perspective, if not from a scientific one, it would be more fruitful for them to write an entertaining popular biogra­phy that recounted the author’s life and works.

4. The research provides the elements required to verify or disprove the hypotheses it presents, and therefore it provides the foundation for future research. This is a fundamental requirement. For example, to prove that centaurs live in Peloponnesus I must do the following with precision:

(a) produce proof (as we have already said, at least a tail bone); (b) recount exactly how I discovered and exhumed the archaeological find; (c) instruct readers on how more evidence can be unearthed; and (d) if possible, give examples of the precise type of bone (or other archaeo­logical find) that would disprove my hypothesis, were it to be discovered in the future. If I accomplish these four goals, I have not only provided the evidence to support my hypothesis, but I have facilitated the continuation of research that may confirm or challenge it.

The same is true for any topic. Suppose I am writing a thesis on an Italian extraparliamentary movement that took place in 1969, and that is generally believed to have been politically homogeneous. In my thesis, I wish to prove that there were in fact two factions, one Leninist and the other Trotskyist. For my thesis to be successful, I must produce documents (flyers, audio recordings of meetings, articles, etc.) that verify my hypothesis; recount the circumstances of the acquisition of this material to provide a foundation for further research; and present the criteria by which I attribute the supporting documents to the members of the 1969 movement. For example, if the group was dissolved in 1970, I must weigh the rele­vance of material produced by members while the group was active against that produced by former members of the group after its dissolution, considering that they may have cultivated their ideas while the group was still active. I must also define the criteria for group membership, such as actual registration, participation in meetings, and pre­sumptions of the police. In doing this, I provide the foun­dation for further investigation, even if it may eventually invalidate my own conclusions. For example, let us sup­pose that I consider a person a member of the group based on evidence from the police, but future research exposes evidence that other members never considered the person in question as a member, and therefore he should not be judged as such. In this way, I have presented not only a hypothesis and supporting evidence, but also methods for its verification or falsification.

The various examples that we have discussed demonstrate that a student can apply the requirements for scientific valid­ity to any topic. They also illustrate the artificial opposition between a “scientific” and a “political” thesis. In fact a political thesis can observe all the rules necessary for scientific validity. For example, I could write a thesis that is both scientific and political, and that would analyze my experience as an activist establishing an independent radio station in a working-class community. The thesis will be scientific to the extent to which it documents my experience in a public and verifiable manner, and allows future researchers to reproduce the expe­rience either to obtain the same results or to discover that my results were accidental and not linked to my intervention, but to other factors I failed to consider. The beauty of a sci­entific approach is that it does not waste the time of future researchers. If a future researcher is working in the wake of my scientific hypothesis and discovers that it is incorrect, my initial hypothesis has still proven useful. In this exam­ple, if my thesis inspires a future researcher to also become an activist in a working-class community, my work has had a positive result, even if my original assumptions were naive.

In these terms, there is clearly no opposition between a scientific and a political thesis, and as we have seen, one can write a “scientific” thesis without using logarithms and test tubes. On one hand, every scientific work has a positive political value in that it contributes to the development of knowledge (every action that aims at stopping the process of knowledge has a negative political value); but on the other hand, every political enterprise with a chance of success must be grounded in the scientific diligence I have described.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

Here our initial question returns in a new form: is it more useful to write an erudite thesis on an established, scholarly topic, or one tied to practical experiences and direct social activities? In other words, is it more useful to write a thesis that involves famous authors or ancient texts, or one that calls for a direct participation in the contemporary world, be it of a theoretical nature (“The Concept of Exploitation in Neocapitalist Ideology”) or of a practical nature (“The Condi­tions of Slum Dwellers on the Outskirts of Rome”)?

In itself the question is pointless. A student will gravitate toward his interest and experience, and if he has spent four years studying Romance philology we cannot expect him to write on Roman slum dwellers. Similarly, it would be absurd to require an act of “academic humility” from someone who has studied for four years with the Italian social activist and sociologist Danilo Dolci, by asking the student to write a the­sis on the royal family of France.

But suppose the person who asks the question is a stu­dent in crisis, one who is wondering about the usefulness of his university studies, and especially about what to expect from the thesis experience. Suppose this student has strong political and social interests, and that he is afraid of betray­ing his calling by choosing a “bookish” topic. Now, if this stu­dent is already immersed in a political-social experience that suggests the possibility of building a conclusive argument, he should consider how he could treat his experience in a sci­entific manner. But if he has not yet had such an experience, then it seems to me that his fear is naive, albeit noble. As we have already said, the experience of writing a thesis is always useful for our future work (be it professional or political) not so much for the chosen topic, but instead for the training that it demands, for the experience of rigor it provides, and for the skills required to organize the material.

Paradoxically, we could then say that a student with polit­ical aspirations will not betray his ideals if he writes a thesis on the recurrence of demonstrative pronouns in the writings of an eighteenth-century botanist. Or on the theory of impe­tus in pre-Galilean science; or on non-Euclidean geometries; or on the dawn of ecclesiastical law; or on the mystical sect of the Hesychasts; or on medieval Arabic medicine; or on the article of criminal law on bid rigging in public auctions. A student can cultivate a political interest in unions, for exam­ple, by writing a historical thesis on workers’ movements in the past century. A student can even understand the contem­porary need for independent information among the subal­tern classes by studying the style, circulation, and modes of production of popular xylographic prints in the Renaissance period. In fact, if I wanted to be controversial, I would advise a student whose only experience was in political and social activism to choose precisely one of these topics, rather than narrate his own experience. This is because the thesis will provide his last opportunity to acquire historical, theoreti­cal, and technical knowledge; to learn systems of documen­tation; and to reflect in a more dispassionate manner on the theoretical and historical assumptions of his political work.

Obviously this is just my opinion. Since I wish to respect points of view different from my own, I will now address this question of someone who is immersed in political activity, someone who wishes to orient his thesis toward his work, and to orient his political experience to the writing of his thesis. It is certainly possible to do this, and to do it well. But to make such an endeavor respectable, it is necessary to clarify a few points.

Occasionally a student will hastily prepare a hundred pages of flyers, debate recordings, activity reports, and sta­tistics (perhaps borrowed from some previous study) and present his work as a “political” thesis. And sometimes the committee will even accept the work, out of laziness, dem­agogy, or incompetence. But this work is a joke, not only because it betrays the university’s thesis criteria, but pre­cisely because it does a disservice to the political cause.

There is a serious way and an irresponsible way to partic­ipate in politics. A politician who approves a development plan without sufficient information on the community’s sit­uation is simply a fool, if not a criminal. Similarly, one can betray his political party by writing a political thesis that lacks scientific rigor.

Once I encountered a student defending a thesis that dealt with a topic related to mass communication. He claimed that he had conducted a “survey” of the TV audience among workers in a certain region. In reality, he had tape-recorded a dozen interviews of commuters during two train trips. Natu­rally the resulting transcriptions of these opinions could not constitute a survey, not only because they lacked standards of verifiability, but also because of the banality of the results.

(For example, it is predictable that the majority of 12 Ital­ians will declare that they enjoy watching a live soccer game.) Consequently, a 30-page pseudo-survey that concludes with such predictable results is a joke. It also constitutes self-de­ception for the student, who believes he has acquired “objec­tive” data, while he has only superficially supported his own preconceived opinions.

A political thesis in particular risks superficiality for two reasons. First, unlike a historical or philological thesis that requires traditional methods of investigation, a thesis on a specific current social phenomenon often requires the stu­dent to invent his methodology. (For this reason, the process of writing a historical thesis may seem serene compared to that of a good political thesis.) Secondly, a political thesis risks superficiality because a large segment of “American-style” social research methodology has fetishized quantitative sta­tistical methods, producing enormous studies that are dense with data but not useful for understanding real phenomena. Consequently, many young politicized people are skeptical of this “sociometry,” and they accuse it of simply serving the system by providing ideological cover. But people who react this way often end up doing no research at all, and their thesis becomes a sequence of flyers, appeals, or purely theoretical statements.

We can avoid this risk in various ways, including consult­ing “serious” works on similar topics, following the practices of an experienced group of activists, mastering proven meth­ods of gathering and analyzing data, realizing that surveys are long and expensive and cannot be conducted in just a few weeks, etc. But since the problems presented by a historical thesis vary according to different fields, different topics, and students’ skills, it is impossible to give generic advice. I will therefore limit myself to one example. I will choose a brand- new subject on which no research has previously been done; that is of great topical interest; that has unquestionable political, ideological, and practical implications; and that many traditional professors would define as “purely journal­istic”: the phenomenon of “free radio” stations.³

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

As most Italians know, scores of these stations have appeared in large Italian cities. There are a few even in cen­ters of a hundred thousand inhabitants, and more continue to appear across Italy. They can be political or commercial in nature. They often have legal problems, but the legislation regarding these stations is ambiguous and evolving. In the period between the genesis of this book and its publication, the situation will already have changed; as it would change during the time it would take for a student to complete this hypothetical thesis.

Therefore, I first must define the exact geographical and chronological limits of my investigation. It could be as lim­ited as “Free Radio Stations from 1975 to 1976,” but within those limits the investigation must be thorough and com­plete. If I choose to examine only those radio stations located in Milan, I must examine all the radio stations in Milan. Oth­erwise I risk neglecting the most significant radio station in terms of its programs, ratings, location (suburb, neighbor­hood, city center), and the cultural composition of its hosts. If I decide to work on a national sample of 30 radio stations, so be it. However, I must establish the selection criteria for this sample. If nationally there are in fact three commer­cial stations for every five political radio stations, or one extreme right-wing station for every five left-wing stations, my sample must reflect this reality. I cannot choose a sample of 30 stations in which 29 are left-wing or 29 are right-wing.

If I do so, I will represent the phenomenon in proportion to my hopes and fears, instead of to the facts.

I could also decide to renounce the investigation of radio stations as they appear in reality and propose an ideal radio station, much as I tried to prove the existence of centaurs in a possible world. But in this case, the project must not only be organic and realistic (I cannot assume the existence of broadcasting equipment that does not exist, or that is inac­cessible to a small private group), but it must also consider the trends of the actual phenomenon. Therefore, a prelimi­nary investigation is indispensable, even in this case.

After I determine the limits of my investigation, I must define exactly what I mean by “free radio station,” so that the object of my investigation is publicly recognizable.

When I use the term “free radio station,” do I mean only a left-wing radio station? Or a radio station built by a small group of people under semilegal circumstances? Or a radio station that is independent of the state monopoly, even if it happens to be well organized and has solely commercial purposes? Or should I consider territorial boundaries, and include only those stations located in the Republic of San Marino or Monte Carlo? However I choose to define the term, I must clarify my criteria and explain why I exclude certain phenomena from the field of inquiry. Obviously the criteria must be defined unequivocally; if I define a free radio station as one that expresses an extreme left-wing political position, I must consider that the term is com­monly used in a broader sense. In this case, I must either clarify to my readers that I challenge the common defini­tion of the term, and defend my exclusion of the stations it refers to; or I must choose a less generic term for the radio stations I wish to examine.

At this point, I will have to describe the structure of a free radio station from an organizational, economic, and legal point of view. If full-time professionals staff some sta­tions, and part-time volunteers staff others, I will have to build an organizational typology. I must determine whether these types share common characteristics that can serve as an abstract model of a free radio station, or whether the term covers a series of heterogeneous experiences. Here you can see how the scientific rigor of this analysis is useful also from a practical perspective; if I wanted to open a free radio station myself, I would need to understand the optimal con­ditions for it to function well.

To build a reliable typology, I could draw a table that com­pared the possible characteristics as they appear in the sta­tions I have examined. I could present the characteristics of a given radio station vertically, and the statistical frequency of the given characteristic horizontally. Below, I provide a simplified and purely hypothetical example with only four parameters: the presence of professional staff, the music- speech ratio, the presence of commercials, and the ideologi­cal characterization. Each is applied to seven fictional radio stations.

This table tells me that a nonprofessional, ideologically explicit group runs Radio Pop, that the station broadcasts more music than speech, and that it accepts commercials. It also tells me that the presence of commercials and the abun­dant music content are not necessarily in contrast with the station’s ideology, since we find two radio stations with sim­ilar characteristics, and only one ideological station that broadcasts more speech than music. On the other hand, the presence of commercials and abundant music characterize all nonideological stations. And so on. This table is purely hypothetical and considers only a few parameters and a few stations. Therefore it does not allow us to draw reliable sta­tistical conclusions, and it is only a suggested starting point.

And how then do we obtain this data? We can imagine three sources: official records, managers’ statements, and listening protocols that we will establish below.

Official records: These always provide the most dependable information, but few exist for independent radio stations.

I might first look for an organization’s registration docu­ments at the local public safety authority. I might also find the organization’s constitutive act or a similar document at the local notary, although these documents may not be publicly accessible. In the future, more precise regulation may facilitate more accessible data, but for now this is the extent of what I can expect to find. However, consider that the name of the station, the broadcasting frequency, and the hours of operation are among the official data. A thesis that provided at least these three elements for each sta­tion would already be a useful contribution.

Managers’ statements: We can interview each station’s manager. Their words constitute objective data, provided that the interview transcriptions are accurate, and that we use homogeneous criteria for conducting the interviews.

We must devise a single questionnaire, so that all man­agers respond to the questions that we deem important, and so that the refusal to answer a question becomes a matter of record. The questionnaire need not necessar­ily be black and white, requiring only answers of “yes” or “no.” If each station manager releases a statement of intent, these statements together could constitute a use­ful document. Let us clarify the notion of “objective data” in this case: If the director of a particular station states, “We have no political agenda, and we do not accept out­side financing,” this may or may not be true. However, the fact that that radio station publicly presents itself in that light is an objective piece of information. Additionally, we may refute this statement based on our critical analysis of the contents of the station’s broadcasts, and this brings us to the third source of information.

Listening protocols: This aspect of the thesis will deter­mine the difference between rigorous and amateurish work. To thoroughly investigate the activity of an inde­pendent radio station, we must listen hour after hour for a few days or a week, and devise a sort of “program guide” that indicates what content is broadcast at what time, the length of each program, and the ratio of music to talk. If there are debates, the schedule should indicate the topics, participants, and so on. You will not be able to present all of the data you have collected, but you can include meaningful examples (commentary on the music, witty debate remarks, particular styles of news delivery) that define the artistic, linguistic, and ideological profile of the station you are scrutinizing. It may help to consult the models for radio and TV listening protocols developed over some years by the ARCI Bologna,⁴ in which listeners determined the duration of news presentation, the recur­rence of certain terms, and so on.

Once you have completed this investigation for various radio stations, you could compare your data. For example, you could compare the manner in which two or more radio stations introduced the same song or presented a recent event. You could also compare state-owned radio shows to those of independent stations, noting differences in the ratios of music to speech, news to entertainment, pro­grams to commercials, classical to pop music, Italian to foreign music, traditional pop music to “youth-oriented” pop music, and so on. With a tape recorder and pencil in hand, you will be able to draw many more conclusions through systematic listening than from your interviews with station managers. Sometimes even a simple compar­ison of commercial sponsors (the ratios between restau­rants, cinemas, publishers, etc.) can clarify the obscure financing sources of a given station.

The only condition is that you must not follow impres­sions or make imprudent conclusions such as, “At noon a particular radio station broadcast pop music and a Pan American commercial, so the station must be pro­American.” You must also consider what the station broadcast at one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock, and on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

If you are investigating many stations, your listening protocol should take one of the following two approaches.

The first is to listen to all the stations simultaneously for one week. You can do this by organizing a group of researchers, each one listening to a different station simul­taneously. This is the most rigorous solution because you will be able to compare the various radio stations during the same period. Your other choice is to listen to the sta­tions sequentially, one station per week. This will require hard work, and you must proceed directly from one sta­tion to the next so that the listening period is consistent.

The total listening time for all stations should not exceed six months or a year at most, since changes are fast and frequent in this sector, and since it would make no sense to compare the programs of Radio Beta in January with those of Radio Aurora in August.

When you have compiled the data from the three sources outlined above, there is still much left to do. For example, you can do the following:

Establish the size of each station’s audience. Unfortunately, there are no official ratings data, and you cannot trust the station managers’ figures. The only alternative is a random sample telephone survey in which you ask par­ticipants to which stations they listen. This is the method followed by RAI, Italy’s national broadcasting company, but it requires an organization that is both specialized and expensive. This is a good example of the difficulty involved in a scientific treatment of a contemporary, top­ical phenomenon. You cannot rely on personal impres­sions and conclude, for example, that “the majority of listeners choose Radio Delta” simply because this station is popular among four or five of your friends. (Perhaps a thesis on a subject like Roman history might be a better choice after all, and it will certainly pose fewer research problems.)

Search newspapers and magazines for mentions of the sta­tions you are scrutinizing. Record any opinions of the stations that you find, and describe any controversies. Record the specific laws relevant to the stations’ operations, and explain how various stations follow or elude them. Describe the legal issues that arise. Document the rele­vant positions of the political parties on the stations you are scrutinizing, and on free radio stations in general. Attempt to establish comparative tables of commercial fees. The managers may not disclose these, or they may pro­vide erroneous data, but you may be able to gather the data elsewhere. For example, if Radio Delta broadcasts advertisements for a particular restaurant, you may be able to solicit data from the restaurant owner.

Record specifically how different radio stations cover a spe­cific event. (For example, the Italian national elections of June 1976 would have provided a perfect opportunity for this part of the project.)

Analyze the linguistic style of the broadcasters. (The ways that they imitate American DJs or public radio hosts, their use of the terminology of specific political groups, their use of dialects, etc.)

Analyze the influence that free radio programs have had on certain public radio programs. Compare the nature of the programming, the linguistic usage, etc.

Thoroughly collect and catalog the opinions that jurists, polit­ical leaders, and other public figures express about the sta­tions you are scrutinizing. (Remember that three opinions are only enough for a newspaper article, and that a thor­ough investigation may require a hundred.)

Collect the existing bibliography on the subject of free radio stations. Collect everything from books and journal arti­cles on analogous experiments in other countries to the articles in the most remote local newspapers or smallest Italian magazines, so that you assemble the most com­plete bibliography possible.

Let it be clear that you do not have to complete all of these things. Even one of them, if done correctly and exhaustively, can constitute the subject of a thesis. Nor is this the only work to be done. I have only presented these examples to show how, even on a topic as “unscholarly” and devoid of critical literature as this one, a student can write a scien­tific work that is useful to others, that can be inserted into broader research, that is indispensable to anyone wishing to investigate the subject, and that is free of subjectivity, ran­dom observations, and imprudent conclusions.

As we have established, the dichotomy between a scien­tific and a political thesis is false. It is equally scientific to write a thesis on “The Doctrine of Ideas in Plato” and on “The Politics of ‘Lotta Continua’ from 1974 to 1976.”⁵ If you intend to do rigorous work, think hard before choosing the second topic, for it is undoubtedly more difficult. It will require superior research skills and scholarly maturity; if nothing else, you will not have a library on which to rely, but instead must effectively create your own.

In any case, we have seen that a student can write scientifi­cally on a subject that others would judge as purely “journalis­tic,” just as a student can write a journalistic thesis on a topic that most would qualify as scientific, at least from its title.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, often a student chooses a topic based on his own interests, but other times a student wishes to work with a particular professor who suggests a topic to the student. Professors tend to follow two different crite­ria when suggesting a topic: a professor can recommend a familiar topic on which he can easily advise the student, or a professor can recommend an unfamiliar topic on which he would like to know more.

Contrary as it may seem, the second criterion is the more honest and generous. The professor believes that his ability to effectively judge and assist the candidate will require him to devote himself to something new, and thus the professor will expand his horizons. When the professor chooses this second path, it is because he trusts the candidate, and he usually tells the candidate explicitly that the topic is new and interesting to him. Even though universities currently require professors to advise many students, and therefore incline professors to cater to students’ interests, some pro­fessors still refuse to advise a thesis on a banal topic.

There are also specific cases in which a professor is con­ducting a wide-ranging research project that requires vast amounts of data, and he decides to engage graduating stu­dents as members of a team. In other words, he orients the students’ work in a specific direction for a certain number of years. He will assign topics that work together to establish a complete picture of his research question. This approach is not only legitimate but also scientifically useful, as each thesis contributes to a larger project that is more important for the collective interest. This approach is also useful from a teaching perspective, because each candidate will benefit from the advice of a professor who is well informed on the question, and each student can use as background and com­parative material the theses that other students have already written on related topics. If the candidate does good work, he can hope to publish the results, at least as part of a larger collective work.

However, this approach does pose some possible risks:

1. The professor is absorbed by his own topic to such an extent that he imposes it on a candidate who has no interest in the subject. The student becomes a lackey who wearily gathers material for others to interpret. Although the student will have written a modest thesis, he risks not being credited for his work. When the professor writes the final research project, he will perhaps fish out some parts of the student’s work from the material he has gath­ered, but he may use them without citing the student, if only because the student’s specific contribution to the final product is difficult to delineate.
2. The professor is dishonest, requires the student to work on his project, approves the thesis, and then unscru­pulously uses the work as if it were his own. Sometimes this dishonesty is almost in good faith; the professor may have followed the thesis with passion and suggested many ideas, but over time he loses the ability to distinguish his students’ ideas from his own, in the same way that, after a passionate group discussion on a certain topic, we are unable to discern the ideas we introduced from those inspired by others.

How can you avoid these risks? Before approaching the professor, you should assess the professor’s honesty from the opinions of friends and the experiences of graduates whom the professor advised. You should read his books, and pay particular attention to citations of his collaborators.

This investigation will take you so far, but you must also intuitively feel some sense of trust and respect toward the professor.

On the other hand, you should not become so paranoid that you believe you have been plagiarized every time a pro­fessor or another student addresses a topic related to your thesis. For example, if you did a thesis on the relationship of Darwinism and Lamarckism, your research would show that many scholars have treated the same topic, and have shared many common ideas. Therefore, you should not feel like a defrauded genius if the professor, one of his teaching assistants, or one of your classmates writes on the same topic. The actual theft of scientific work means something different altogether: using specific data from your exper­iments, appropriating your original transcriptions of rare manuscripts, using statistical data that you were the first to collect, or using your original translations of texts that were either never translated or translated differently by others.

These constitute theft only if you have not been cited as a source, because once you publish your thesis, others have the right to cite it.

So, without slipping into paranoia, consider your willing­ness to join a collective project, and consider whether the risks are worth it.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

A thesis studies an object by making use of specific instru­ments. Often the object is a book and the instruments are other books. For a thesis on “Adam Smith’s Economic Thought,” the object is Adam Smith’s bibliography, and the instruments are other books on Adam Smith. In this case, we can say that Adam Smith’s writings constitute the pri­mary sources and the writings about Adam Smith are the sec­ondary sources or the critical literature. Naturally, if the topic were “The Sources of Adam Smith’s Economic Thought,” the primary sources would then be the books or other writings that inspired Adam Smith. Certainly historical events (and particular discussions on certain concrete phenomena that Smith may have witnessed) may also have inspired Adam Smith’s work, but these events are nevertheless accessible to us in the form of written material, that is, in the form of other texts.

But there are also cases in which the object is a real phe­nomenon. This would be true for a thesis on the internal migrations of Italians in the twentieth century, the behavior of a group of handicapped children, or an audience’s opin­ion of a current TV program. In these cases, primary sources may not yet exist in an organized written form. Instead you must gather and create your primary documents, including statistical data, interview transcriptions, and sometimes photographs or even audiovisual documents. The critical literature in these cases will not differ greatly from that of our thesis on Adam Smith, although it may consist of news­paper articles and other kinds of documents, instead of books and journal articles.

You must be able to clearly distinguish primary sources from critical literature. The critical literature often reproduces quotes from primary sources, but—as we will see in the next paragraph—these are indirect sources. Moreover, a student conducting hasty and disorderly research can easily mistake the arguments contained in primary sources with those of the critical literature. For example, if I am writing a thesis on “Adam Smith’s Economic Thought” and I notice that I am dwelling on a certain author’s interpretations more than my own direct reading of Smith, I must either return to the source or change my topic to “The Interpretations of Adam Smith in Contemporary English Liberal Thought.” The latter topic will not exempt me from understanding Smith’s work, but my primary interest will be the interpretations of Smith’s work by others. Obviously, an in-depth study of Smith’s critics will require a comparison of their work to the original text.

However, there could be a case in which the original object matters little to me. Suppose I begin a thesis on traditional Japanese Zen philosophy. Clearly I must be able to read Jap­anese, and I cannot trust the few available Western transla­tions. Now suppose that, in examining the critical literature, I become interested in how certain literary and artistic avant- garde movements in the United States made use of Zen in the fifties. At this point, I am no longer interested in under­standing the meaning of Zen thought with absolute theolog­ical and philological accuracy. Instead, I am now interested in how original Oriental ideas have become elements of a West­ern artistic ideology. I will change my topic to “Zen Princi­ples in the ‘San Francisco Renaissance’ of the 1950s,” and my primary sources will become the texts of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and so on. As for my understanding of original Zen philosophy, some reliable critical works and good trans­lations will now suffice. Naturally, this approach assumes that I do not wish to demonstrate that the Californians mis­interpreted the original Zen thought, which would require me to make comparisons with the Japanese originals. But because the Californians loosely based their work on Western translations, I am more interested in their interpretations than in the original philosophy.

This example also illustrates that I should promptly define the true object of my thesis so that I can determine the avail­ability of my sources from the outset. In section 3.2.4, I will demonstrate how to start a thesis from scratch with no pre­conceived bibliography, and how to obtain all the sources I need from a single, small library. Although this procedure is possible, the situation will rarely occur, because realistically I would not choose a topic unless I already knew: (a) where I could find the sources, (b) whether they were easily acces­sible, and (c) whether I was capable of fully understanding them. It would be imprudent of me to accept a thesis on a particular set of James Joyce’s manuscripts without know­ing that they reside at the University of Buffalo, or (if I knew their location) knowing full well that I would never be able to travel to New York. It would be equally unwise to enthusi­astically accept a topic on a private collection of documents belonging to a family that is overly protective of them, and that reveals them only to renowned scholars. And I should not accept a topic that deals with medieval manuscripts, no matter how accessible they are, if I lack the proper training needed to read them.

More realistically, I might agree to study an author only to learn that his original texts are very rare, and that I must travel like a maniac from library to library, or even from country to country. Or I may rely on the fact that microfilms of his complete oeuvre are readily available, forgetting that my department does not own the apparatus to read them, or that I suffer from conjunctivitis and cannot endure such exhausting work. And it would be quite useless for me, if I were studying film at an Italian university, to plan a thesis on a minor work of a director from the 1920s, if I then dis­cover that the only copy of this work resides in the Library of Congress in Washington.

Once the problem of the primary sources is resolved, the same questions arise for the critical literature. I could choose a thesis on a minor eighteenth-century author because the first edition of his work coincidentally resides in my city’s library, but I may then learn that the best critical works on my author are not available at any library to which I have access, and are very expensive to purchase. You cannot avoid this problem by deciding to work only on the sources to which you have access. You must read all of the critical literature, or at least all of it that matters, and you must access the sources directly (see the following paragraph). Otherwise, you should choose another topic according to the criteria described in chapter 2, rather than irresponsibly complete a thesis with unforgivable omissions.

Let us look at some concrete examples from thesis defenses that I have recently attended. In each of these, the authors precisely identified sources that were unquestionably within their range of expertise, verified the availability of these sources, and used them effectively. The first thesis was on “The Clerical-Moderate Experience in the City Hall Admin­istration of Modena (1889-1910).” As the title indicates, the candidate (or the advisor) had precisely defined the scope of the project. The candidate was from Modena, so he could work locally. He discriminated between a general bibliogra­phy and bibliography specifically on the subject of Modena. He may have traveled to other cities for the former, and I assume he was able to work in the city libraries of Modena on the latter. He also divided the primary sources into archival sources and journalistic sources, the latter including relevant articles from contemporary newspapers.

The second thesis was on “The Scholastic Policy of the Italian Communist Party (P.C.I.) from the Formation of the Center-Left (1963) to the Student Protests (1968).” Here too, the student specified the topic with precision and, I would say, prudence, because conducting research on the period after 1968 would have been difficult due to the sheer quantity of sources. The student judiciously chose to focus on the period before 1968, limiting his sources to the offi­cial press of the Communist Party, the parliamentary acts, the party’s archives, and the general press. I have to imag­ine that, no matter how precisely the student researched the general press, some information must have slipped through the cracks due to the amount of coverage involved. Neverthe­less, the general press was unquestionably a valid secondary source of opinions and criticisms. As for the other sources, the official declarations were sufficient to define the Com­munist Party’s scholastic policy. Had the thesis dealt with the scholastic policy of the Christian Democracy, a party in the government coalition, this would have been a very differ­ent story, and the research would surely have assumed dra­matic proportions. On one hand there would have been the official statements, on the other the actual governmental acts that may have contradicted these statements. Take also into account that, if the period had extended beyond 1968, the student would have had to include, among the sources of unofficial opinions, all the publications of the extrapar­liamentary movements that began to proliferate after that period. Once again, the research would have been far more difficult. Finally, I imagine that the candidate had the oppor­tunity to work in Rome, or he was able to have the required material photocopied and sent to him.

The third thesis dealt with medieval history, and was on a seemingly difficult topic. It examined the vicissitudes of the San Zeno Abbey’s estate in Verona during the High Mid­dle Ages. The heart of the work consisted of a transcription, previously never attempted, of certain folios from the San Zeno Abbey’s registry in the thirteenth century. Naturally, the project required some knowledge of paleography, but once the candidate acquired this technique, he only needed to diligently execute the transcription and comment on the results. Nevertheless, the thesis included a bibliography of 30 titles, a sign that the student had historically contextual­ized the specific problem on the basis of previous literature. I assume that the candidate was from Verona and had cho­sen a project that did not involve much travel.

The fourth thesis was titled “Contemporary Drama Perfor­mances in Trentino.” The candidate, who lived in that region of Italy, knew that there had been a limited number of per­formances, and he reconstructed them by consulting news­papers, city archives, and statistical surveys on the audience’s frequency. The fifth thesis, “Aspects of Cultural Policy in the City of Budrio with Particular Reference to the City Library’s Activity,” was similar. These are two examples of projects whose sources are easily available, but that are nevertheless useful because they require a compilation of statistical-socio­logical documentation that will serve future researchers.

A sixth thesis required more time and effort than the others. It illustrates how a student can treat with scien­tific rigor a topic that at first seems appropriate only for an honest literature survey. The title was “The Question of the Actor in Adolphe Appia’s Oeuvre.” Appia is a well-known Swiss author and the subject of abundant historical and the­oretical theater studies that, it would seem, have exhausted all there is to say about him. But the candidate painstak­ingly researched the Swiss archives, along with countless libraries, and explored each and every place where Appia had worked. The student was able to compile an exhaustive bibliography of works on the author, along with the author’s own writings, including minor articles that had been for­gotten shortly after their original publication. This gave the thesis a breadth and precision that, according to the advi­sor, qualified it as a definitive contribution. The student thus went beyond the literature survey by making these obscure sources accessible.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

Regarding books, a direct source is an original edition or a critical edition of the work in question.

A translation is not a direct source: it is instead a prosthetic like dentures or a pair of glasses. It is a means by which I gain limited access to something that lies outside my range.

An anthology is not a direct source: it is a stew of sources, useful only for a first approach to the topic. If I write a thesis on a particular author, my goal is to see in him what others have not, and an anthology only provides someone else’s view.

The critical works of other authors, no matter how rich with quotations, are not direct sources: at best, they are indirect sources.

Indirect sources can take many forms. If the subject of my thesis is the Italian communist politician Palmiro Togliatti, the parliamentary speeches published by the newspaper Unita constitute an indirect source, because there is no as­surance that the newspaper has not made edits or mistakes. Instead, the parliamentary acts themselves constitute a di-rect source. If I could locate an actual text written by Togliatti himself, I would have the ultimate direct source. If I want to study the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, the only direct source is the origi­nal document. However, a good photocopy can also be con­sidered a direct source. I can also use as a direct source the critical edition by a historiographer of undisputed rigor, if I define “undisputed” to mean that his edition has never been challenged by other critical works. Clearly the concepts of “direct” and “indirect” sources depend on my perspective and the approach that I take for my thesis. If I wish to dis­cuss the political meaning of the Declaration of Indepen­dence in my thesis, a good critical edition will be more than adequate. If I want to write a thesis on “The Narrative Struc­tures in The Betrothed,” any edition of Alessandro Manzoni’s novel will suffice. Instead, my thesis might be called “Man­zoni’s Linguistic Transformation from Milan to Florence.” It would explore the novel’s linguistic change from the blend of Lombard vernacular and traditional literary language of the 1827 edition to the contemporary Florentine of the 1840 edition. In this case, my thesis would require a good critical edition of each version of the novel.

Let us then say that my sources should always be direct, within the limits set by the object of my research. The only absolute rule is that I should not quote my author through another quote. In theory, a rigorous scientific work should never quote from any quote, even if the material that I wish to quote is from someone other than the object of my thesis. Nevertheless, there are reasonable exceptions, especially for a thesis. For example, if you choose “The Question of the Tran­scendental Nature of Beauty in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae,” your primary source will be Thomas Aquinas’s Summa. Let us say that Marietti’s currently available edition is sufficient, unless you suspect that it betrays the original, in which case you must return to other editions. (In this case your thesis will have a philological character, instead of an aesthetic/philosophical character.) You will soon discover that Aquinas also addresses the transcendental nature of beauty in his Commentary to Pseudo-Dionysius’s De divinis nominibus (The Divine Names), and you must address this work as well, despite your thesis’s restrictive title. Finally you will discover that Aquinas’s work on this theme drew from an entire religious tradition, and that researching all of the original sources would take a scholar his entire career. You will also discover that such a work already exists, and that its author is Dom Henry Pouillon who, in this vast work of his, quotes large passages from all the authors who commented on Pseudo-Dionysius and illuminates the relationships, ori­gins, and contradictions of these commentaries. Within the scope of your thesis, you can certainly use the material Pouil- lon gathered each time you refer to Alexander of Hales or Hilduin. If you come to realize that Alexander of Hales’ text becomes essential for the development of your argument, then you can consult the Quaracchi edition of the direct text, but if you only need to refer to a short quote, it will suffice to declare that you found the source through Pouillon. Nobody will fault you because Pouillon is a rigorous scholar, and because the text you quoted indirectly through him was not central to your thesis.

What you should never do is quote from an indirect source pretending that you have read the original. This is not just a matter of professional ethics. Imagine if someone asked how you were able to read a certain manuscript directly, when it is common knowledge that it was destroyed in 1944! This being said, you need not get caught up in “direct source neurosis.” The fact that Napoleon died on May 5, 1821 is common knowledge, usually acquired through indirect sources, such as history books written on the basis of other history books. If you wish to study the precise date of Napoleon’s death, you would need to locate original documentation. But if you wish to address the influence of Napoleon’s death on the psychol­ogy of European liberal youth, you can trust the date that appears in any history book. After you declare that you are citing an indirect source in your thesis, it may be prudent to check other indirect sources to determine the accuracy of a certain quote, or the reference to a certain fact or opinion. If you find inconsistencies that raise suspicion, you can either choose not to quote the data, or search for the direct source.

For example, since we have already mentioned St. Thom­as’s aesthetic thought, let us note that a number of recent texts that discuss this topic assume that St. Thomas said the following: “pulchrum est id quod visum placet.” Since I wrote my own thesis on this topic, I consulted the original texts and noticed that St. Thomas had never said that. Instead, he said, “pulchra dicuntur quae visa placent,” and I will not go into the details of why the two formulations can lead to very different interpretations. What had happened? Many years ago the philosopher Jacques Maritain had proposed the first formulation, thinking he was faithfully summarizing St. Thomas’s thought. Since then, other scholars have referred to Maritain’s formulation (which Maritain had drawn from an indirect source), without bothering to check the original.¹

The same issue arises in regard to bibliographical entries. In a rush, you may decide to include in your bibliography sources you have not read; you may discuss these works in footnotes, or what’s worse, in the body of the text, all along drawing from information that you gathered indirectly. For example, you may find yourself writing a thesis on the baroque; having read Luciano Anceschi’s article “Bacone tra Rinascimento e Barocco” (Bacon between the Renaissance and baroque), in Da Bacone a Kant (From Bacon to Kant) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1972), you cite this article in a note and then, to make a good impression, you add the following com­ment: “For other acute and stimulating observations on the same topic see Id., ‘L’estetica di Bacone’ (Bacon’s aesthetics), in L’estetica dell’empirismo inglese (The aesthetic of English empiricism) (Bologna: Alfa, 1959).” However, since you have not actually read “L’estetica di Bacone,” and you are simply mentioning a text that you saw referenced in a note, you will make a terrible impression when a professor points out that the two articles are one and the same, “L’estetica di Bacone” having been published 13 years before “Bacone tra Rinasci­mento e Barocco” in a more limited edition.

These observations are also valid if the object of your the­sis is a current event rather than a series of texts. If I want to address the reactions of farmers from Romagna to a particular set of TV news programs, a primary source will be the survey I conduct in the field, interviewing a reliable and adequate sam­ple of farmers according to defined rules. If not this, I should at least use as my primary source a recent analogous survey published by a reliable source. Clearly I would be at fault if I relied on ten-year-old research, if nothing else because both the farmers and the TV news programs have changed signifi­cantly over the past decade. However, this research might be appropriate for a thesis titled “Studies on the Relationship between the Audience and Television in the Sixties.”

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

How should a student conduct preliminary research in the library? If he already has a reliable bibliography, he can obvi­ously search the author catalog to discover what a particular library has to offer. If the library lacks some of the titles in his bibliography, he can search another library, and so on. But this method assumes that he already has a bibliography, and that he is able to access a series of libraries, maybe one in Rome and another in London. But as we have previously discussed, readers of this book may not have such oppor­tunities. Nor do many professional scholars. Furthermore, although we sometimes go to the library to find a book that we already know exists, we often go to the library to find out if a book exists, or to discover books about which we have no previous knowledge. In other words, we often go to the library to compile a bibliography, and this means searching for sources that we do not yet know exist. A good researcher can enter a library without having the faintest idea about scholarship on a particular topic, and exit knowing more about it, if only a little more.

The catalog The library offers some resources that allow us to find relevant sources about which we have no previous knowledge. Naturally, the first is called the subject catalog. Of course there is also an alphabetically arranged author catalog that is useful to those who already know what they want, but the subject catalog is for those who do not yet know. Here, a good library tells me everything that I can find in its stacks, for example, on the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

But querying the subject catalog requires some skill. Clearly we cannot find the entry “Fall of the Roman Empire” under the letter “F,” unless we are dealing with a library with a very sophisticated indexing system. We will have to look under “Roman Empire,” and then under “Rome,” and then under “(Roman) History.” And if we have retained some pre­liminary knowledge from primary school, we will have the foresight to consult “Romulus Augustulus” or “Augustu- lus (Romulus),” “Orestes,” “Odoacer,” “Barbarians,” and “Roman-barbarian (regna).”

Our problems do not end there. In many libraries there are two author catalogs and two subject catalogs: old ones that stop at a certain date, and the new ones that are works in progress and that will absorb the old ones only at some future date. And we will not necessarily find information on the fall of the Roman Empire in the old catalog simply because that event took place centuries ago. In fact there could be recent books on the subject that are only indexed in the new catalog. Also, in certain libraries there are sepa­rate catalogs for different collections. In other libraries, sub­jects and authors are indexed together. There also may be separate catalogs for books and journals, divided by subject and author; and we may even encounter a library that stores books on the first floor and journals on the second. Con­sequently, we must study the system used by the library in which we are working, and make our decisions accordingly. Also, some intuition is usually necessary. For example, if the older of the two catalogs is very old, and I am researching the Greek region of Laconia, I should also search for the obsolete spelling “Lacedaemonia,” because an overly diligent librarian may have indexed this entry separately.

Also note that the author catalog is always more reliable than the subject catalog because the act of compiling it does not depend on the librarian’s interpretation, as is the case with the subject catalog. In fact, if the library has a book by John Smith, you will invariably find “Smith, John” under “S” in the author catalog. But if John Smith has written an arti­cle on “The Role of Odoacer in the Fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Advent of the Roman-Barbarian Regna,” the librarian may have recorded it under the subject “(Roman) History” or “Odoacer,” but not necessarily under the entry “Western Roman Empire” where you are currently looking.

Finally, the author and subject catalogs simply may not provide the information you require, and in this case you must settle for a more elementary approach. In every library there is a reference section (or an entire room) that contains a collection of encyclopedias, general histories, and bibli­ographical indexes. If you are looking for works on the West­ern Roman Empire, you can search the subject of Roman history, compile a basic bibliography starting from the refer­ence works you find, and then search for the authors in the author catalog.

Bibliographical indexes These are the safest resources for a student who already has clearly defined ideas about a topic. For some disciplines there are famous manuals where the student can find all the necessary bibliographical information. For other disciplines there are periodical in­dexes that contain updates in each issue, and even journals dedicated solely to a subject’s bibliography. For others still, there are journals that include an appendix in every issue that documents the most recent publications in the field. Bibliographical indexes are essential supplements to catalog research, as long as they are updated. In fact, some libraries may have an extensive collection of the oldest publications, but little or no updated work. Or they may offer histories or manuals of the discipline in question that were published in 1960, and that provide useful bibliographical information, but will not tell you if an interesting work was published in 1975. (The library may actually contain these recent works, but may have indexed them under a subject that you have not thought of.) An updated bibliographical index gives you exactly this kind of information on the latest contributions to a particular field.

The most convenient way to learn about bibliographical indexes is to ask your advisor. You can also ask the librarian (or a staff person at the reference desk) who can direct you to the room or the section of the stacks that contains the bibliographical indexes. Again here, the issue changes from discipline to discipline, so I cannot offer further advice.

The librarian You must overcome any shyness and have a conversation with the librarian, because he can offer you reliable advice that will save you much time. You must con­sider that the librarian (if not overworked or neurotic) is happy when he can demonstrate two things: the quality of his memory and erudition and the richness of his library, especially if it is small. The more isolated and disregarded the library, the more the librarian is consumed with sorrow for its underestimation. A person who asks for help makes the librarian happy.

Although you must rely on the librarian’s assistance, you should not trust him blindly. Listen to his advice, but then search deeply and independently. The librarian is not an expert on every subject, and he is also unaware of the par­ticular perspective you wish to adopt for your research. He may deem fundamental a particular book that you end up barely consulting, and may disregard another that you find very useful. Additionally, there is no such thing as a prede­termined hierarchy of useful and important works. An idea contained almost by mistake on a page of an otherwise use­less (and widely ignored) book may prove decisive for your research. You must discover this page on your own, with your own intuition and a little luck, and without anybody serving it to you on a silver platter.

Union catalogs, electronic catalogs, and interlibrary loan Many libraries publish updated inventories of their holdings. Therefore, in some libraries it is possible to consult catalogs that list the holdings of other national and foreign libraries, at least for some particular disciplines. Asking for informa­tion from the librarian is also useful in this case. There are certain specialized libraries linked via computer to a central memory that can quickly inform you whether and where you can find a certain book. For example, the Venice Biennale instituted the Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts that are linked via computer to the National Central Library’s ar­chive in Rome. You can search the catalog by author, title, subject, series, publisher, year of publication, etc.

If you have located a book in a national or foreign library, keep in mind that a library usually has an interlibrary loan service that may be national or international. It may take some time to get what you need, but it is worth trying if you need sources that are difficult to find. Even if there is such a service, the library that has the book may not lend it, as some libraries will only lend duplicate copies. Here again you should consult your advisor about all the possibilities of locating needed sources. In any case, remember that the ser­vices we need often do exist, but they only work if they are patronized often.

Also remember that many libraries keep a list of their new arrivals, their most recent acquisitions that have not yet been indexed. Finally do not forget that, if you are work­ing rigorously on a project that interests your advisor, you may be able to convince your institution to purchase some important texts that you cannot obtain otherwise.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

Naturally, to compile a basic bibliography you must con­sult many books. Many librarians will only lend one or two books at a time, are slow to find each book for you, and will grumble if you quickly return for new books. This is why you should not try to immediately read every book you find, but rather compile a basic bibliography of sources pertaining to your topic. A preliminary inspection of the catalogs allows you to prepare a list of books that you can then begin bor­rowing. However, the list you derive from the catalogs does not say much about each book’s contents, and it is some­times difficult to determine which books you should borrow first. For this reason, in addition to consulting the catalogs in the reference room, you should preliminarily inspect each book. When you find a chapter and its accompanying bibli­ography that pertain to your topic, you can skim the chapter (you will return to it later), but be sure to copy all of that chapter’s bibliography. Together with the chapter that you have skimmed, its bibliography (and if it is annotated, the bibliography’s comments) will show which books the author considers fundamental among those he cites, and you can begin by borrowing those. Additionally, if you cross-check the bibliographies with some reference works, you will determine which books are cited most often, and you can begin to establish a first hierarchy of sources for your topic.

This hierarchy may change as you proceed in your work, but for now it constitutes a starting point.

Now, you may object to the idea of copying the entire bib­liography from ten different sources. In fact, your research may lead you to as many as a few hundred books, even though your cross-check will eliminate doubles. (Organiz­ing your bibliography in alphabetical order will also help you eliminate doubles.) Fortunately, these days every legiti­mate library has a copy machine, and each copy costs about a dime. A specific bibliography contained in a reference work, except in very rare cases, occupies only a few pages. With a few dollars you can photocopy a series of bibliographies that you can easily organize once you return home. Once you have finished the bibliography, you can return to the library to determine which sources are actually available.

At this point it will be useful to begin to document your bibliography. You might at first be tempted to record the titles in a notebook as you encounter them. Later, after determin­ing if the titles are available in the library, you might finish each notebook entry by writing the call number near the title. The problem with this approach is that it becomes more diffi­cult to locate the titles in your notebook as your bibliography grows. Also consider that your preliminary research might generate a bibliography of hundreds of titles, even if only some of them will ultimately be useful to your thesis.

A better system is to create a bibliographical index card for each book. On each card you can record an abbreviation that signifies the library where the book is available, as well as the call number of the book. A single card might contain many library abbreviations and call numbers, indicating that the book is widely available in different locations. (There will also be index cards with no abbreviations—this is trouble!) You can then file your cards in a small index card box. You can purchase a small box of this kind inexpensively from the stationer, or you can make one yourself. You can fit one or two hundred index cards into one small box, and you can take the box with you to the library. This is your bibliogra­phy file, and if your documentation is well organized, it will give you a clear picture of the sources you have found, and those you still need to locate. Additionally, everything will be in alphabetical order and easy to find. If you wish, you could standardize your index cards so that the call number is in the top right, and a conventional abbreviation in the top left that indicates if the book is a good general reference, a source for a specific chapter, and so on.

Naturally, if you do not have the patience to organize and use this system, you can resort to using a notebook. But the disadvantages are evident: you may note the “A” authors on the first page and the “B” authors on the second, but your first page may fill up before you find an article by Federico Azzimonti or Gian Saverio Abbati. You are better off buy­ing an address book, in which you might not record Abbati before Azzimonti if you found the latter author first, but at least they will both be in the four pages dedicated to the letter “A.” The virtue of the index card system is that you can easily reorganize the cards as the bibliography grows and changes, and your cards will always be in true alphabetical order. You may also thank yourself for using this system when you need to use your bibliography file to pursue a related project later (although you will certainly need to supplement it with new sources), and you will have an organized system to lend to someone who is working on a similar topic.

In chapter 4 we will talk about some other types of index card files: the readings file, the idea file, and the quote file; and we will address the applications of each. For now, a brief introduction to the readings file and some preliminary remarks about the difference between it and the bibliogra­phy file will suffice. Your readings file should contain index cards dedicated only to the books (or articles) that you have actually read. Here you can document summaries, assess­ments, and quotes, although you may wish to dedicate an entire file exclusively to quotations. In short, on each card in your readings file you can document everything you will need when you actually begin writing your thesis and your final bibliography, bearing in mind that the book may not be available to you at that time. Unlike your bibliography file, you do not have to carry your readings file with you on every trip to the library. Also, your readings file may require larger sheets of paper, although a system of index cards is always the most manageable.

Unlike the readings file, the bibliography file must also contain index cards for all the books you must find, not only for the ones you have already located and read. It would even be possible for a bibliography file to contain ten thousand titles and a readings file a mere ten, although this would clearly illustrate a thesis that began extraordinarily well but ended very badly. In any case, you should take your bibliography file with you every time you go to a library. Its index cards contain only a book’s essential information, and the librar­ies and call numbers under which the book can be found. At most, you can annotate “very important according to author X,” “absolutely must find,” “so-and-so says this is a worthless work,” or even “buy this.” But any further annotation should be left for the readings file. An entry in the readings file can absorb multiple index cards (one book may generate many notes), whereas each item in the bibliography file comprises one and only one index card.

Finally, construct your bibliography file with care. Do not hastily scribble down titles in stenographic characters, a process prone to error. The better you make your bibliogra­phy file, the easier it will be to preserve and supplement for future research. It will also be more valuable to lend or even sell, and therefore it is worth ensuring that it is legible and well organized. Most importantly, the bibliography file will provide the foundation for the final bibliography, provided that it contains thorough documentation on the books you have found, read, and archived in the readings file.

For this reason, in the following section I will provide documentation guidelines, the instructions to correctly doc­ument your sources so that others can easily find them. Use these guidelines for each of the following:

1. The bibliography file,
2. The readings file,
3. References in notes,
4. The final bibliography.

Although I will return to these guidelines in the chapters in which I discuss these four different stages in preparing the thesis, I will establish them definitively in the following section. These guidelines are of the utmost importance, and you must have the patience to become familiar with them. You will realize that they are primarily functional guidelines, because they allow you and your reader to identify the exact book to which you are referring. But they are also rules, so to speak, of erudite etiquette. Their observance reveals a scholar who is familiar with the discipline, and their violation betrays the academic parvenu, and sometimes casts a shadow of discredit on an otherwise rigorous work. These rules of etiquette matter, and they should not be disparaged as a formalist’s weakness. There is a similar dynamic in sports, stamp collecting, billiards, and political life. If a participant misuses key expressions, he raises suspicion, like an outsider who is not “one of us.” Thus, you must heed the rules of the company you want to join. As the Italian proverb goes, “If in company you don’t pee, a spy or a thief you may be.” And if you wish to violate or oppose rules, you must first know them well enough to expose their inconsistencies or repres­sive functions. So, for example, before you can declare that it is unnecessary to italicize a book’s title, you must first know that this is in fact the convention, and you must understand the reasons for this convention.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

1. Books

Here is an example of an incorrect reference:

Wilson, J. “Philosophy and religion.” Oxford, 1961.

This reference is incorrect for the following reasons:

1. It provides only the initial of the author’s first name. The first initial is not enough, first of all, because read­ers may want to know the full name; and second of all, because there can be two authors with the same last name and first initial. If I read that the author of the book Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language is P. Rossi, I cannot determine whether the author is the phi­losopher Paolo Rossi of the University of Florence or the philosopher Pietro Rossi of the University of Turin. And who is J. Cohen? Is he the French critic and aesthetician Jean Cohen or the English philosopher Jonathan Cohen?
2. The book title is in quotation marks. However you choose to format a reference, never use quotation marks for book titles, because this is the method used almost universally to refer to journal articles or book chapters. Also, in the title in question the word “Religion” should also be capitalized. English titles capitalize nouns, adjec­tives, verbs, and adverbs; but not articles, particles, and prepositions (unless they are the last word of the title, as in The Logical Use of It).
3. It is hideous to say where the book has been pub­lished and not by whom. Suppose you find an Italian book that seems important, and that you would like to purchase, but the only publication information in the reference is “Milan, 1975.” Which press published this book? Mondadori, Rizzoli, Rusconi, Bompiani, Feltri- nelli, or Vallardi? How can the bookseller help you? And if you find “Paris, 1976,” to whom do you address your letter of inquiry? And if the book has been published in “Cambridge,” which Cambridge is it, the one in England or the one in the United States? In fact, many important authors cite books this way. Know that, except when they are writing an encyclopedia entry (where brevity is a vir­tue that saves space), these authors are snobs who despise their audience. References like these are sufficient only in the case of books published before 1900 (“Amsterdam, 1678”) that you will only find in a library, or in a limited number of antique booksellers.
4. Despite what this reference would lead you to believe, this book was not published in Oxford. As noted on the title page, the book was published by Oxford University Press, and this press has locations in London, New York, and Toronto. What’s more, it was printed in Glasgow. The reference should indicate where the book was published, not where it was printed. (Here again we make an exception in the case of very old books: because printers were also publishers and booksellers, books then were published, printed, and sold in the same location.) I once encoun­tered a reference in a thesis for a particular book that included “Farigliano: Bompiani.” Knowing that Bompiani is in Milan, I turned to the copyright page (usually located directly after the title page) and learned that by chance the book was printed at a printer located in the town of Farigliano. The person concocting such references gives the impression that he has never seen a book in his life. To be safe, never look for the publishing information only on the title page, but also on the copyright page, where you will find the real place of publication, as well as the date and number of the edition. If you only look briefly on the title page, you may incur other pathetic mistakes, such as leading your readers to believe that the quaint beach town of Cattolica on the Adriatic Sea is the place of publication for a book published by the prestigious Universita Cattolica in Milan. It would be as if an Italian student found books published by Yale University Press, Harvard University Press, or Cornell University Press and indicated that they were published in Yale, Harvard, or Cornell. These are of course not names of places, but the proper nouns of those famous private universities, located in the cities of New Haven, Cambridge (Massa­chusetts), and Ithaca respectively.

5. As for the date, it is correct only by chance. The date marked on the title page is not always the actual date of the book’s first publication. It can be that of the latest edi­tion. Only on the copyright page will you find the date of the first edition (and you may even discover that the first edition was published by another press). Sometimes the difference between these dates is very important. Sup­pose for example that you find the following reference:

Searle, J. Speech Acts. Cambridge, 1974.

On top of the other inaccuracies, by checking the copy­right page you discover that the date of the first edition is 1969. Now, the point of your thesis may be to establish whether Searle talked about these “speech acts” before or after other authors, and so the date of the first edition is fundamental. Besides, if you thoroughly read the book’s preface, you discover that he presented this fundamental thesis as his PhD dissertation in Oxford in 1959 (ten years

earlier than the book’s first publication), and that during that ten-year period various parts of the book appeared in a number of philosophical journals. And nobody would ever think to cite Herman Melville’s nineteenth-century classic as follows, simply because he is holding a recent edition that was published in Indianapolis:

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick, or, The Whale. Indianapolis, 1976.

Whether you are studying Searle or Melville, you must never spread wrong ideas about an author’s work. If you worked on a later, revised, or augmented edition by Mel­ville, Searle, Wilson, you must specify both the date of the first publication and that of the edition you quote.

Now that we have seen how not to cite a book, I will show you five ways to correctly cite these works by Searle and Wil­son.² Let it be clear that there are other methods, and that each method could be valid provided it does the following: (a) distinguishes the book from articles or the chapters of other books; (b) indicates unequivocally both the author’s name and the title; and (c) indicates the place of publica­tion, the name of the publisher, and the edition. Therefore each of the following five examples works. Each has its pros and cons; however, for a number of reasons that will soon become clear, we will prefer the first example:

1.

Searle, John R. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. 5th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. First pub­lished 1969.

Wilson, John. Philosophy and Religion: The Logic of Religious Belief. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.

2.

Searle, John R., Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1969).

Wilson, John, Philosophy and Religion (London: Oxford, 1961).

3.

Searle, John R., S p e e c h A c t s, 5th ed., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1974. First published 1969.

Wilson, John, P h i l o s o p h y a n d R e l i g i o n, London, Oxford University Press, 1961.

4.

Searle, John R., Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Wilson, John, Philosophy and Religion. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.

5.

Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Lan­guage. 5th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Wilson, John. 1961. Philosophy and Religion: The Logic of Religious Belief. London: Oxford University Press.

Naturally there are also hybrid solutions. For instance, the fourth example could contain the subtitle as do the first and fifth. As we shall see, there are even more complex sys­tems that include, for example, the title of the series. In any case, we can consider all five of these examples to be valid. For now, let us disregard the fifth (the author-date system), because it applies to a specialized bibliography that we will discuss later when we address the subjects of notes and the final bibliography. The second example is typically American, and it is more common in footnotes than in the final bibli­ography. The third example, typically German, is nowadays fairly rare, and in my opinion does not offer any advantage. The fourth is also quite popular in the United States, and I find it quite annoying because it does not allow us to imme­diately distinguish the book’s title. The first system tells us all we need to know, and that we are in fact referring to a book and not an article.

2. Journals

Consider these three different ways to cite a journal article:

Anceschi, Luciano. “Orizzonte della poesia” (Horizon of poetry). Il Verri, n.s., 1 (February 1962): 6-21.

Anceschi, Luciano. “Orizzonte della poesia.” Il Verri, n.s., 1:6-21. Anceschi, Luciano. Orizzonte della poesia. In “Il Verri” (February 1962): 6-21.

There are other systems also, but let us immediately turn to the first and the third examples. The first presents the article in quotation marks and the journal in italics; the third presents the article in italics and the journal in quo­tation marks. Why is the first preferable? Because it allows us at a glance to understand that “Orizzonte della poesia” is a short text and not a book. As we shall see, journal articles are included in the same category as book chapters and con­ference proceedings. Clearly the second example is a varia­tion of the first, but it eliminates the reference to the date of publication, and is therefore defective—it would have been better to at least include: Il Verri 1 (1962).

You will note that both the first and second examples include the indication “n.s.” or “new series.” This designa­tion is quite important because a previous series of Il Verri appeared in 1956 with another first issue. If I had to cite a reference from the first issue of volume one of the previous series, I would specify the volume in addition to the issue number, as follows:

Gorlier, Claudio. “L’Apocalisse di Dylan Thomas” (The apocalypse of Dylan Thomas). Il Verri 1, no. 1 (Fall 1956): 39-46.

In addition, note that some journals number the pages pro­gressively over the year. Therefore, if I wanted, for these journals I could omit the issue number and record only the year and the pages. For example:

Guglielmi, Guido. “Tecnica e letteratura” (Tecnique and literature). Lingua e stile, 1966:323-340.

If I then find this journal in the library, I will realize that page 323 is in the third issue of the first volume. But I do not see why I should subject my reader to this exercise (even if other authors subject theirs) when it would have been so much more convenient to write:

Guglielmi, Guido. “Tecnica e letteratura.” Lingua e stile 1, no. 3 (1966).

This reference makes the article easier to find, even though it lacks page numbers. Also, consider that if I wanted to order the journal from the publisher as a back issue, I would care only about the issue number, not the pages. However, I do need to know the first and last pages to determine the length of the article, and for this reason it is recommended to include the page numbers:

Guglielmi, Guido. “Tecnica e letteratura.” Lingua e stile 1, no. 3 (1966): 323-340.

3. Multiple authors and an editor

Let us move on to the chap­ters of larger works, be they collections of essays by the same author or miscellaneous volumes. Here is a simple example:

Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Guido. “Aristotelismo e Barocco” (Aristotelian- ism and the baroque). In Retorica e Barocco: Atti del III Congresso Internazionale di Studi Umanistici, Venezia, 15-18 giugno 1954 (Rhetoric and the baroque: Proceedings of the third international conference on humanism, Venice, June 15-18, 1954), ed. Enrico Castelli, 119-196. Rome: Bocca, 1955.

This reference tells me everything I need to know. First, it tells me that Morpurgo-Tagliabue’s text is part of a collec­tion of other texts. Although it is not a book, the number of pages his article occupies (77) tells me that it is quite a sub­stantial study. Second, it tells me that the volume is a col­lection of conference proceedings by various authors titled Retorica e Barocco. This is important information because I may discover that some bibliographies list it under the head­ing of “Convention and Conference Proceedings.” Finally, it tells me that the editor of the collection is Enrico Castelli. This information is also important, not only because some libraries may catalog the volume under his name, but also because bibliographies alphabetize multiauthor volumes under the name of the editor (ed.) or editors (eds.), as follows:

Castelli, Enrico, ed. Retorica e Barocco. Rome: Bocca, 1955.

These distinctions are important for locating a book in a library catalog or in a bibliography.

As we shall see when we conduct an actual experiment of bibliographical research in section 3.2.4, I will find Mor­purgo-Tagliabue’s essay cited in the Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian literature) published by Garzanti in the following terms:

On this topic see the miscellaneous volume Retorica e Barocco: Atti del III Congresso Internazionale di Studi Umanistici (Milan, 1955), and in particular Morpurgo-Tagliabue’s important essay “Aristotelismo e Barocco.”

This is a terrible reference because (a) it does not tell us the author’s first name; (b) it makes us think that either the con­ference was in Milan or the publisher is in Milan (neither is true); (c) it does not indicate the publisher; (d) it does not indicate the length of the essay; and (e) it does not indi­cate the editor of the volume, even though the designation of “miscellaneous” would seem to imply that the volume is a collection of essays from various authors requiring an editor. Shame on us if we wrote such a reference on our bibliograph­ical index card. Instead, we should write our reference so that there is free space for the missing information:

Morpurgo-Tagliabue, G_________________ . “Aristotelismo e Barocco.”

In Retorica e Barocco: Atti del III Congresso Internazionale di Studi

Umanistici ____________________ , edited by_______________________ ,

________________ . Milan:_________________ , 1955.

This way, we can later fill in the blanks with the missing information, once we find it in another bibliography, in the library catalog, or on the title page of the book itself.

4. Multiple authors and no editor

Suppose I want to index an essay that appeared in a book written by four different authors, none of whom is the editor. For example, let us cite a German book with four essays by T. A. van Dijk, Jens Ihwe, Janos S. Petofi, and Hannes Rieser. In this case, we should note the names of all four authors because we must include them in the bibliographical entry. But in a note, we should indicate only the first author followed by et al. or “and oth­ers” for convenience:

T.A. van Djik et al., Zur Bestimmung narrativer Strukturen auf der Grundlage von Textgrammatiken (On the determination of narra­tive structures based on textual grammar), etc.

Let us consider the more complex example of the essay “Anthropology and Sociology” by Dell Hymes. This essay appears in the third book of the twelfth volume of a multiauthor work, in which each volume has a title different from that of the entire work. Cite the essay as follows:

Hymes, Dell. “Anthropology and Sociology.” In Current Trends in Linguistics, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok, 1445-1475, vol. 12, bk. 3, Lin­guistics and Adjacent Arts and Sciences. The Hague: Mouton, 1974.

If instead we must cite the entire work, the information the reader expects is no longer in which volume Dell Hymes’s essay resides, but of how many volumes the entire work consists:

Sebeok, Thomas A., ed. Current Trends in Linguistics. 12 vols. The Hague: Mouton, 1967-1976.

When we must cite an essay belonging to a collection of essays by the same author, the reference is similar to that of a multiauthor book, except for the fact that we omit the name of the author before the book:

Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio. “Ideologia come progettazione sociale.” In Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato, 193-224. Milan: Bompiani, 1968. Trans. Martha Adams et al. as “Ideology as Social Planning,” in Language as Work and Trade (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1983), 83-106.

You may have noticed that usually the title of a chapter is cited as being “in” a given book, while the article of a journal is not “in” a journal, and the name of the journal directly follows the title of the article.

The series A more perfect reference system might require the series in which a volume appears. I do not consider this an indispensable piece of information, as it is easy enough to find a book if you know its author, title, publisher, and the year of publication. But in some disciplines, the series may guarantee or indicate a specific scientific trend. In this case, the series is noted without quotation marks or parentheses after the book title, and is followed directly by the number of the volume in the series:

Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio. Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato. Nuovi Saggi Italiani 2. Milan: Bompiani, 1968.

Anonymous authors and pseudonyms If you are dealing with an anonymous author, begin the entry with the title and alphabetize the entry accordingly, ignoring any initial article. If the author has a pseudonym, begin the entry with the pseudonym followed by the author’s real name (if known) in brackets. After the author’s real name, place a question mark if the attribution is still a hypothesis, no matter how reliable the source. If you are dealing with an author whose identity is established by tradition, but whose historicity scholars have recently challenged, record him as “Pseudo” in the following manner:

Pseudo-Longinus. On the Sublime …

Reprints in collections or anthologies A work that orig­inally appeared in a journal may have been reprinted in a collection of essays by the same author, or in a popular an­thology. If this work is of marginal interest with respect to your thesis topic, you can cite the most convenient source. If instead your thesis specifically addresses the work, then you must cite the first publication for reasons of historical accuracy. Nothing forbids you from using the most accessi­ble edition, but if the anthology or the collection of essays is well prepared, it should contain a reference to the work’s first edition. This information should allow you to create ref­erences such as this:

Fodor, Jerry A., and Jerold J. Katz. “The Structure of a Semantic Theory.” In The Structure of Language, ed. Jerry A. Fodor and Jerold J. Katz, 479-518. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964. Originally published as “The Structure of a Semantic Theory.” Language 39 (1963): 170-210.

When you use the author-date system for your bibliography (which I will discuss in section 5.4.3), include the date of the first publication, as follows:

Fodor, Jerry A., and Jerold J. Katz. 1963. “The Structure of a Semantic Theory.” In The Structure of Language, ed. Jerry A. Fodor and Jerold J. Katz, 479-518. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964.

Citing newspapers References to newspapers and maga­zines are similar to those for journals, except that it is more appropriate to put the date rather than the issue number, since it makes the source easier to find:

Nascimbeni, Giulio. “Come l’ltaliano santo e navigatore e diventato bipolare” (How the Italian saint and sailor became bipolar). Cor- riere della Sera (Milan), June 25, 1976.

For foreign newspapers it may be useful to specify the city: Times (London).

Citing official documents or monumental works Ref­erences to official documents require shortened forms and initialisms that vary from discipline to discipline, just as there are typical abbreviations for works on ancient man­uscripts. Here your best source is the critical literature in the specific discipline you are studying. Bear in mind that certain abbreviations are commonly used within a discipline and you need not explain them to your audience. For a study on U.S. Senate resolutions, an American manual suggests the following reference:

S.Res. 218, 83d Cong., 2d Sess., 100 Cong. Rec. 2972 (1954).

Specialists are able to read this as, “Senate Resolution num­ber 218 adopted at the second session of the Eighty-Third Congress, 1954, as recorded in volume 100 of the Congres­sional Record, beginning on page 2972.”³ Similarly, when you indicate that a text is available in PL 175.948 in a study on medieval philosophy, anyone in the field will know that you are referring to column 948 of the 175th volume of Jacques-Paul Migne’s Patrologia Latina, a classic collection of Latin texts of the Christian Middle Ages. However, if you are building a bibliography from scratch, it is not a bad idea to record on your index card the entire reference the first time you find it, because in the final bibliography it would be appropriate to give the full reference:

Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina, accurante J. P. Migne. 222 vols. Paris: Garnier, 1844-1866 (+ Supplementum, Turnhout: Bre- pols, 1972).

5. Citing classic works

For the citation of classic works, there are fairly universal conventions that indicate the title-book-chapter, section-paragraph, or canto-line. Some works have been subdivided according to criteria dating back to antiquity, and when modern editors superimpose new sub­divisions, they generally also preserve the traditional line or paragraph marks. Therefore, if you wanted to quote the definition of the principle of noncontradiction from Aristo­tle’s Metaphysics, the reference will be “Met. 4.3.1005b18.” An excerpt from Charles S. Peirce’s Collected Papers is cited as “CP 2.127.” A passage from the Bible is cited instead as “1 Sam. 14:6-9.” References to classical (and modern) comedies and tragedies are comprised of act, scene, and if necessary the line or lines in Arabic numerals: “Shrew, 4.2.50-51.” Nat­urally your reader must know that “Shrew” refers to Shake­speare’s The Taming of the Shrew. If your thesis is on Elizabe­than drama, there is no problem in using this short citation. If instead a mention of Shakespeare intervenes as an elegant and erudite digression in a psychology thesis, you should use a more extended reference.

In references to classic works, the first criterion should be that of practicality and intelligibility. If I refer to a Dantean line as “2.27.40,” it is reasonable to guess that I am talking about the 40th line of the 27th canto of the second canti­cle of the Divine Comedy. But a Dante scholar would rather write “Purg. XXVII.40.” It is best to follow disciplinary con­ventions; these are a second but no less important criterion. Naturally you must pay attention to ambiguous cases. For example, references to Pascal’s Pensees (Thoughts) will differ depending on the edition from which you cite; Brunschvicg’s popular edition is ordered differently from other editions. You can only learn these types of things by reading the criti­cal literature on your topic.

6. Citing unpublished works and private documents

Specify a thesis, a manuscript, and a private document as such. Here are two examples:

La Porta, Andrea. “Aspetti di una teoria dell’esecuzione nel linguag- gio naturale” (Aspects of a performance theory in natural lan­guage). Laurea thesis. University of Bologna, 1975-1976.

Valesio, Paolo. “Novantiqua: Rhetorics as a Contemporary Linguistic Theory.” Unpublished manuscript, courtesy of the author.

Cite private letters and personal communications similarly. If they are of marginal importance it is sufficient to mention them in a note, but if they are of decisive importance for your thesis, include them in the final bibliography:

Smith, John, personal letter to author, January 5, 1976.

As we shall see in section 5.3.1, for this kind of citation it is polite to ask permission from the person who originated the personal communication and, if it is oral, to submit our transcription for his approval.

Originals and translations Ideally you should always con­sult and cite a book in its original language. If you write a thesis on Moliere, it would be a serious mistake to read your author in English. But in some cases it is fine to read some books in translation. If your thesis is on romantic literature, it is acceptable to have read The Romantic Agony, the English translation published by Oxford University Press of Mario Praz’s La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. You can cite the book in English with a good conscience, but for your reference to be useful also to those who wish to go back to the original edition, a double reference would be ap­propriate. The same is true if you read the book in Italian. It is correct to cite the book in Italian, but why not aid readers who wish to know if there is an English translation and, if so, who published it? Therefore, in either case, the best choice is the following:

Praz, Mario. La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. Milan and Rome: La Cultura, 1930. Trans. Angus Davidson as The Romantic Agony (London: Oxford University Press, 1933).

Are there exceptions? Some. For example, if you cite Pla­to’s Republic in a thesis on a topic other than ancient Greek (in a thesis on law, for example), it is sufficient that you cite an English translation, provided that you specify the exact edition you used. Similarly, let us say your thesis deals with literary studies, and that you must cite the following book:

Lotman, Yu. M., G. Permyakov, P. G. Bogatyrev, and V. N. Toporov. General Semiotics. Ed. Lawrence Michael O’Toole and Ann Shuk- man. Russian Poetics in Translation 3. Oxford: Holdan Books, 1976.

In this case, it is appropriate to cite only the English trans­lation, for two good reasons: First, it is unlikely that read­ers interested in your topic will have the burning desire to examine the Russian original. Second, an original version of the cited book does not even exist, because the English volume is a collection of miscellaneous Russian essays from various sources put together by the editors. Therefore, you should cite after the book title, “Ed. Lawrence Michael O’Toole and Ann Shukman.” But if your thesis were on the current state of semiotic studies, then you would be obli­gated to proceed with more precision. Granted, you may not be able to read Russian, and readers can reasonably under­stand (provided your thesis is not on Soviet semiotics) that you are not referring to the collection in general but instead, for example, to the first essay in the collection. And then it would be interesting to know when and where the essay was originally published—all details that the editors provide in their notes on the essay. Therefore you will cite the essay as follows:

Lotman, Yuri M. “The Modeling Significance of the Concepts ‘End’ and ‘Beginning’ in Artistic Texts.” In General Semiotics, ed. Law­rence Michael O’Toole and Ann Shukman, 7-11. Russian Poetics in Translation 3. Oxford: Holdan Books, 1976. Originally pub­lished in Tezisy dokladov vo vtoroi letnei Shkole po vtorichnym modeliruyushchim sistemam, 69-74. Tartu, 1966.

This way you have not led readers to believe you have read the original text because you indicate your English source, but you have provided all the information needed to locate the original.

Also, when there is no translation available for a work in a language that is not commonly known, it is customary to include a translation of the title in parentheses directly after the original title.

Finally, let us examine a seemingly complicated case that at first suggests an elaborate solution, though this may be simplified depending on the context. David Efron is an Argentinian Jew who in 1941 published, in English and in the United States, a study on the gestural expressiveness of Jews and Italians in New York, called Gesture and Environment.

In 1970 a Spanish translation appeared in Argentina with a different title, Gesto, raza y cultura. In 1972 a new edition in English appeared in the Netherlands with the title Ges­ture, Race and Culture (similar to the one in Spanish). From this edition derives the 1974 Italian translation titled Gesto, razza e cultura. How then should an Italian student cite this book?

Let us imagine two extreme cases. In the first case, the student is writing his thesis on David Efron. His final bib­liography will contain a section dedicated to the author’s works, in which he must create references for all the editions separately in chronological order, and for each reference, he must specify whether the book is a new edition of a previous one. We assume that the candidate has examined all the edi­tions, because he must check whether they contain changes or omissions. In the second case, the student is writing his thesis in economics, political science, or sociology, and he is addressing the questions of emigration. In this case, he cites Efron’s book only because it contains some useful informa­tion on marginal aspects of his topic. Here the student may cite only the Italian edition.

But let us also discuss an intermediate case, one in which the citation is marginal but it is important to know that the study dates back to 1941 and is not recent. The best solution would then be the following:

Efron, David. Gesture and Environment. New York: King’s Crown Press, 1941. Trans. Michelangelo Spada as Gesto, razza e cultura (Milan, Bompiani, 1974).

As it happens, the Italian edition indicates in the copyright that King’s Crown Press published the original in 1941, but rather than citing the original title, it gives the full refer­ence to the Dutch 1972 edition. This is a matter of serious negligence (and I can say this because I am the editor of the Bompiani series in which Efron’s book appeared) because an Italian student might mistakenly cite the 1941 edition as Gesture, Race, and Culture. This is why it is always neces­sary to check the references against more than one source. A more scrupulous student who wished to document the for­tunes of Efron’s volume and the rhythm of its rediscovery by scholars might gather enough information to compile the following reference:

Efron, David. Gesture, Race and Culture. 2nd ed. The Hague: Mouton, 1972. Trans. Michelangelo Spada as Gesto, razza e cultura (Milan, Bompiani, 1974). First published as Gesture and Environment (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1941).

In any case, it is evident that the extent of the required infor­mation depends on the type of thesis and the book’s role in its general argument (primary source, secondary source, marginal or accessory source, etc.).

Although the instructions above provide a foundation for creating a final bibliography for your thesis, here we are only interested in creating a good bibliographical reference in order to develop our index cards, and these instructions are more than adequate for this purpose. We will talk in more detail about the final bibliography in chapter 6. Also, sections 5.4.2 and 5.4.3 describe two different citation sys­tems and the relations between notes and the bibliography. There you will also find two full pages of a sample bibliogra­phy (tables 5.2 and 5.3) that essentially summarize what we have said here.

Table 3.1 summarizes this section by listing all the information that your references should contain. Note the required usage of italics, quotation marks, parentheses, and punctuation. Essential information that you should never omit is marked with an asterisk. The other informa­tion is optional and depends on the type of thesis you are writing.

Finally, in table 3.2 you will find an example of a bibli­ographical index card. As you can see, in the course of my bibliographical research I first found a citation of the Italian translation. Then I found the book in the library catalog and I marked on the top right corner the initialism for the name of the library, and the call number of the volume. Finally I located the volume and deduced from the copyright page the original title and publisher. There was no indication of the publication date, but I found one on the dust jacket flap and noted it with reservations. I then indicated why the book is worth considering.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

Some may object that the advice I have given so far may work for a specialist, but that a young person who is about to begin his thesis, and who lacks specialized expertise, may encounter many difficulties:

1. He may not have access to a well-equipped library, per­haps because he lives in a small city.
2. He may have only vague ideas of what he is looking for, and he may not know how to begin searching the subject catalog because he has not received sufficient instruc­tions from his professor.
3. He may not be able to travel from library to library. (Perhaps he lacks the funds, the time, or he may be ill, etc.)

Let us then try to imagine the extreme situation of a work­ing Italian student who has attended the university very lit­tle during his first three years of study. He has had sporadic contact with only one professor, let us suppose, a professor of aesthetics or of history of Italian literature. Having started his thesis late, he has only the last academic year at his dis­posal. Around September he managed to approach the pro­fessor or one of the professor’s assistants, but in Italy final exams take place during this period, so the discussion was very brief. The professor told him, “Why don’t you write a thesis on the concept of metaphor used by Italian baroque treatise authors?” Afterward, the student returned to his home in a town of a thousand inhabitants, a town without a public library. The closest city (of 90,000 inhabitants) is half an hour away, and it is home to a library that is open daily. With two half-day leaves from work, the student will travel to the library and begin to formulate his thesis, and per­haps do all the work using only the resources that he finds there. He cannot afford expensive books, and the library is not able to request microfilms from elsewhere. At best, the student will be able to travel to the university (with its bet­ter-furnished libraries) two or three times between January and April. But for the moment, he must do the best he can locally. If it is truly necessary, the student can purchase a few recent books in paperback, but he can only afford to spend about 20 dollars on these.

Now that we have imagined this hypothetical picture, I will try to put myself in this student’s shoes. In fact, I am writing these very lines in a small town in southern Monfer- rato, 14.5 miles away from Alessandria, a city with 90,000 inhabitants, a public library, an art gallery, and a museum. The closest university is one hour away in Genoa, and in an hour and a half I can travel to Turin or Pavia, and in three to Bologna. This location already puts me in a privileged situa­tion, but for this experiment I will not take advantage of the university libraries. I will work only in Alessandria.

I will accept the precise challenge posed to our hypothet­ical student by his hypothetical professor, and research the concept of metaphor in Italian baroque treatise writing. As I have never specifically studied this topic, I am adequately unprepared. However, I am not a complete virgin on this topic, because I do have experience with aesthetics and rhet­oric. For example, I am aware of recent Italian publications on the baroque period by Giovanni Getto, Luciano Anceschi,

and Ezio Raimondi. I also know of II cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian telescope) by Emanuele Tesauro, a seven­teenth-century treatise that discusses these concepts exten­sively. But at a minimum our student should have similar knowledge. By the end of the third year he will have com­pleted some relevant courses and, if he had some previous contact with the aforementioned professor, he will have read some of the professor’s work in which these sources are men­tioned. In any case, to make the experiment more rigorous, I will presume to know nothing of what I know. I will limit myself to my high school knowledge: I know that the baroque has something to do with seventeenth-century art and liter­ature, and that the metaphor is a rhetorical figure. That’s all.

I choose to dedicate three afternoons to the preliminary research, from three to six p.m. I have a total of nine hours at my disposal. In nine hours I cannot read many books, but I can carry out a preliminary bibliographical investigation. In these nine hours, I will complete all the work that is doc­umented in the following pages. I do not intend to offer this experiment as a model of a complete and satisfactory work, but rather to illustrate the introductory research I will need to complete my final thesis.

As I have outlined in section 3.2.1, upon entering the library I have three paths before me:

1. I can examine the subject catalog. I can look for the following entries: “Italian (literature),” “(Italian) liter­ature,” “aesthetics,” “seventeenth century,” “baroque period,” “metaphor,” “rhetoric,” “treatise writers,” and “poetics.”⁴ The library has two catalogs, one old and one updated, both divided by subject and author. They have not yet been merged, so I must search both. Here I might make an imprudent calculation: if I am looking for a nineteenth-century work, I might assume that it resides in the old catalog. This is a mistake. If the library pur­chased the work a year ago from an antique shop, it will be in the new catalog. The only certainty is that any book published in the last ten years will be in the new catalog.
2. I can search the reference section for encyclopedias and histories of literature. In histories of literature (or aesthetics) I must look for the chapter on the seventeenth century or on the baroque period. I can search encyclope­dias for “seventeenth century,” “baroque period,” “meta­phor,” “poetics,” “aesthetics,” etc., as I would in the sub­ject catalog.

3. I can interrogate the librarian. I discard this possibil­ity immediately both because it is the easiest and because it would compromise the integrity of this experiment. I do in fact know the librarian, and when I tell him what I am doing, he barrages me with a series of titles of bib­liographical indexes available to him, even some in Ger­man and English. Were I not engaged in this experiment, I would immediately explore these possibilities. However, I do not take his advice into consideration. The librarian also offers me special borrowing privileges for a large number of books, but I refuse with courtesy, and from now on speak only with the assistants, attempting to adhere to the allotted time and challenges faced by my hypothetical student.

I decide to start from the subject catalog. Unfortunately, I am immediately exceptionally lucky, and this threatens the integrity of the experiment. Under the entry “meta­phor” I find Giuseppe Conte, La metafora barocca. Saggio sulle poetiche del Seicento (The baroque metaphor: Essay on sev­enteenth-century poetics) (Milan: Mursia, 1972). This book is essentially my thesis realized. If I were dishonest, I would simply copy it, but this would be foolish because my (hypo­thetical) advisor probably also knows this book. This book will make it difficult to write a truly original thesis, because I am wasting my time if I fail to say something new and dif­ferent. But if I want to write an honest literature review, this book could provide a straightforward starting point.

The book is defective in that it does not have a compre­hensive bibliography, but it has a thick section of notes at the end of each chapter, including not only references but also descriptions and reviews of the sources. From it I find references to roughly 50 titles, even after omitting works of contemporary aesthetics and semiotics that do not strictly relate to my topic. (However, the sources I have omitted may illuminate relationships between my topic and current issues. As we shall see later, I could use them to imagine a slightly different thesis that involves the relationships between the baroque and contemporary aesthetics.) These 50 titles, all of which are specifically on the baroque, could provide a preliminary set of index cards that I could use later to explore the author catalog. However, I decide to forgo this line of research. The stroke of luck is too singular, and may jeopardize the integrity of my experiment. Therefore, I pro­ceed as if the library did not own Conte’s book.

To work more methodically, I decide to take the second path mentioned above. I enter the reference room and begin to explore the reference texts, specifically the Enciclopedia Treccani (Treccani encyclopedia). Although this encyclopedia contains an entry for “Baroque Art” that is entirely devoted to the figurative arts, there is no entry for “Baroque.” The reason for this absence becomes clear when I notice that the “B” volume was published in 1930: the reassessment of the baroque had not yet commenced. I then think to search for “Secentismo,” a term used to describe the elaborate style characteristic of seventeenth-century European literature. For a long time, this term had a certain negative connota­tion, but it could have inspired the encyclopedia listing in 1930, during a period largely influenced by the philosopher Benedetto Croce’s diffidence toward the baroque period.

And here I receive a welcome surprise: a thorough, exten­sive, and mindful entry that documents all the questions of the period, from the Italian baroque theorists and poets such as Giambattista Marino and Emanuele Tesauro to the examples of the baroque style in other countries (B. Gracian, J. Lyly, L. de Gongora, R. Crashaw, etc.), complete with excel­lent quotes and a juicy bibliography. I look at the date of publication, which is 1936; I look at the author’s name and discover that it is Mario Praz, the best specialist during that period (and, for many subjects, he is still the best). Even if our hypothetical student is unaware of Praz’s greatness and unique critical subtlety, he will nonetheless realize that the entry is stimulating, and he will decide to index it more thoroughly later. For now, I proceed to the bibliography and notice that this Praz, who has written such an excellent entry, has also written two books on the topic: Secentismo e mari- nismo in Inghilterra (Secentismo and Marinism in England) in 1925, and Studi sul concettismo (Studies in Seventeenth- Century Imagery) in 1934. I decide to index these two books. I then find some Italian titles by Benedetto Croce and Ales­sandro D’Ancona that I note. I find a reference to T. S. Eliot, and finally I run into a number of works in English and Ger­man. I note them all, even if I (in the role of our hypothetical student) assume ignorance of the foreign languages. I then realize that Praz was talking about Secentismo in general, whereas I am looking for sources centered more specifically on the Italian application of the style. Evidently I will have to keep an eye on the foreign versions as background material, but perhaps this is not the best place to begin.

I return to the Treccani for the entries “Poetics,” “Rhet­oric,” and “Aesthetics.” The first term yields nothing; it simply cross-refers to “Rhetoric,” “Aesthetics,” and “Phi­lology.” “Rhetoric” is treated with some breadth. There is a paragraph on the seventeenth century worthy of investi­gation, but there are no specific bibliographical directions. The philosopher Guido Calogero wrote the entry on “Aes­thetics,” but he understood it as an eminently philosophical discipline, as was common in the 1930s. There is the phi­losopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), but there are no baroque treatise writers. This helps me envisage an avenue to follow: perhaps I will find Italian material more easily in sections on literary criticism and the history of literature than in sections that deal with the history of philosophy. (As I will see later, this is only true until recently.) Nevertheless, under Calogero’s entry “Aesthetics,” I find a series of classic histories of aesthetics that could tell me something: R. Zim- mermann (1858), M. Schlasler (1872), B. Bosanquet (1895), and also G. Saintsbury (1900-1904), M. Menendez y Pelayo (1890-1901), W. Knight (1895-1898), and finally B. Croce (1928). They are almost all in German and English, and very old. I should also say immediately that none of the texts I have mentioned are available in the library of Alessandria, except Croce. I note them anyway, because sooner or later I may want to locate them, depending on the direction that my research takes.

I look for the Grande dizionario enciclopedico UTET (UTET great encyclopedic dictionary) because I remember that it contains extensive and updated entries on “Poetics” and various other sources that I need, but apparently the library doesn’t own it. So I begin paging through the Enciclopedia filosofica (Encyclopedia of philosophy) published by San- soni. I find two interesting entries: one for “Metaphor” and another for “Baroque.” The former does not provide any use­ful bibliographical direction, but it tells me that everything begins with Aristotle’s theory of the metaphor (and only later will I realize the importance of this information). The latter provides citations of nineteenth- and twentieth-cen­tury critics (B. Croce, L. Venturi, G. Getto, J. Rousset, L. Anceschi, E. Raimondi) that I prudently note, and that I will later reencounter in more specialized reference works; in fact I will later discover that this source cites a fairly impor­tant study by Italian literature scholar Rocco Montano that was absent from other sources, in most cases because these sources preceded it.

At this point, I think that it might be more productive to tackle a reference work that is both more specialized and more recent, so I look for the Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian literature), edited by the literary critics Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno and published by Gar- zanti. In addition to chapters by various authors on poetry, prose, theater, and travel writing, I find Franco Croce’s chap­ter “Critica e trattatistica del Barocco” (Baroque criticism and treatise writing), about 50 pages long. (Do not confuse this author with Benedetto Croce whom I have mentioned above.) I limit myself to reading this particular chapter, and in fact I only skim it. (Remember that I am not yet closely reading texts; I am only assembling a bibliography.) I learn that the seventeenth-century critical discussion on the baroque begins with Alessandro Tassoni (on Petrarch), con­tinues with a series of authors (Tommaso Stigliani, Scipione Errico, Angelico Aprosio, Girolamo Aleandro, Nicola Vil- lani, and others) who discuss Marino’s illustrious epic poem Adone (Adonis), and passes through the treatise writers that Franco Croce calls “moderate baroque” (Matteo Peregrini, Pietro Sforza Pallavicino) and through Tesauro’s canonical text II cannocchiale aristotelico which is the foremost treatise in defense of baroque ingenuity and wit and, according to Franco Croce, “possibly the most exemplary of all baroque manuals in all of Europe.”⁵ Finally, the discussion finishes with the late seventeenth-century critics (Francesco Fulvio Frugoni, Giacomo Lubrano, Marco Boschini, Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Giovan Pietro Bellori, and others).

Here I realize that my interests must center on the trea­tise writers Sforza Pallavicino, Peregrini, and Tesauro, and I proceed to the chapter’s bibliography, which includes approximately one hundred titles. It is organized by subject, and it is not in alphabetical order. My system of index cards will prove effective in putting things in order. As I’ve noted, Franco Croce deals with various critics, from Tassoni to Fru­goni, and in the end it would be advantageous to index all the references he mentions. For the central argument of my thesis, I may only need the works on the moderate critics and on Tesauro, but for the introduction or the notes it may be useful to refer to other discussions that took place during the same period. Ideally, once our hypothetical student has completed the initial bibliography, he will discuss it with his advisor at least once. The advisor should know the subject well, so he will be able to efficiently determine which sources the student should read and which others he should ignore. If the student keeps his index cards in order, he and his advi­sor should be able to go through them in about an hour. In any case, let us assume that this process has taken place for my experiment, and that I have decided to limit myself to the general works on the baroque and to the specific bibliography on the treatise writers.

We have already explained how to index books when a bibliographical source is missing information. On the index card for E. Raimondi reproduced below, I left space to write the author’s first name (Ernesto? Epaminonda? Evaristo? Elio?), as well as the publisher’s name (Sansoni? Nuova Ita­lia? Nerbini?). After the date, I left additional space for other information. I obviously added the initialism “APL” that I created for Alessandria Public Library after I checked for the book in Alessandria’s author catalog, and I also found the call number of Ezio (!!) Raimondi’s book: “Co D 119.”

If I were truly writing my thesis, I would proceed the same way for all the other books. But for the sake of this experi­ment, I will instead proceed more quickly in the following pages, citing only authors and titles without adding other information.

To summarize my work up to this point, I consulted Franco Croce’s essay and the entries in the Treccani and the Enciclopedia filosofica, and I decided to note only the works on Italian treatises. In tables 3.4 and 3.5 you will find the list of what I noted. Let me repeat that, while I made only succinct bibliographical entries for the purpose of this experiment, the student should ideally create an index card (complete with space allotted for missing information) that corre­sponds with each entry. Also, in each entry in tables 3.4 and 3.5, I have noted a “yes” before titles that exist in the author catalog of the Alessandria library. In fact, as I finished filing these first sources, I took a break and skimmed the library’s card catalog. I found many of the books in my bibliography, and I can consult them for the missing information on my index cards. As you will notice, I found 14 of the 38 works I cataloged, plus 11 additional works that I encountered by the authors I was researching.

Because I am limiting myself to titles referring to Ital­ian treatise writers, I neglect, for example, Panofsky’s Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, a text that, as I will discover later from other sources, is equally important for the theoreti­cal problem in which I am interested. As we will see, when I consult Franco Croce’s essay “Le poetiche del Barocco in Italia” (Baroque poetics in Italy) in the miscellaneous vol­ume Momenti e problemi di storia dell’estetica (Moments and issues in the history of aesthetics), I will discover in that same volume an essay by literary critic Luciano Anceschi on the poetics of the European baroque, one that is three times as long. Franco Croce did not cite this essay in his chapter on the baroque, because he was limiting his study to Italian literature. This is an example of how, by discovering a text through a citation, a student can then find other citations in that text, and so on, potentially infinitely. You see that, even starting from a good history of Italian literature, I am making significant progress.

I will now glance at the Storia della letteratura italiana (His­tory of Italian literature) written by the good old Italian lit­erary critic Francesco Flora. He is not an author who lingers on theoretical problems. Instead, he enjoys savoring the wit­tiness and originality of particular passages in the texts he analyzes. In fact his book contains a chapter full of amusing quotes from Tesauro, and many other well-chosen quotes on the metaphoric techniques of seventeenth-century authors. As for the bibliography, I am not expecting much from a gen­eral work that stops at 1940, but it does confirm some of the classical texts I have already cited. The name of Eugenio D’Ors strikes me. I will have to look for him. On the subject of Tesauro, I find the names of critics C. Trabalza, T. Vallauri, E. Dervieux, and L. Vigliani, and I make a note of them.

Now I move on to consult the abovementioned miscella­neous volume Momenti e problemi di storia dell’estetica. When I find it, I notice that Marzorati is the publisher (Franco Croce told me only that it was published in Milan), so I supplement the index card. Here I find Franco Croce’s essay on the poetics of Italian baroque literature (“Le poetiche del Barocco in Italia”). It is similar to his “Critica e trattatistica del Barocco” that I have already seen, but it was written ear­lier, so the bibliography is more dated. Yet the approach is more theoretical, and I find the essay very useful. Addition­ally, the theme is not limited to the treatise writers, as in the previous essay, but deals with literary poetics in general. So, for example, “Le poetiche del Barocco in Italia” treats the Italian poet Gabriello Chiabrera at some length. And on the subject of Chiabrera, the name of literary critic Giovanni Getto (a name I have already noted) comes up again.

In the Marzorati volume, together with Franco Croce’s essay I find Anceschi’s essay “Le poetiche del barocco let- terario in Europa” (The poetics of the literary baroque in Europe), an essay that is almost a book in itself. I realize it is quite an important study not only because it philosophically contextualizes the notion of the baroque and all of its mean­ings, but also because it explains the dimensions of the ques­tion in European culture, including Spain, England, France, and Germany. I again find names that were only mentioned in Mario Praz’s entry in the Enciclopedia Treccani. I also find other names, from Bacon to Lyly and Sidney, Gracian, Gon- gora, Opitz, the theories of wit, agudeza, and ingegno. My thesis may not deal directly with the European baroque, but these notions must serve as context. In any case, if my bib­liography is to be complete, it should reflect the baroque as a whole.

Anceschi’s extensive essay provides references to approx­imately 250 titles. The bibliography at the end is divided into a concise section of general studies and a longer sec­tion of more specialized studies arranged by year from 1946 to 1958. The former section highlights the importance of the Getto and Helmut Hatzfeld studies, and of the volume Retorica e Barocco (Rhetoric and the baroque)—and here I learn that it is edited by Enrico Castelli—whereas Anceschi’s essay had already brought my attention to the critical works of Heinrich Wolfflin, Benedetto Croce, and Eugenio D’Ors. The latter section presents a flood of titles, only a few of which, I wish to make clear, I attempt to locate in the author catalog, because this would have required more time than my allotted limit of three afternoons. In any case, I learn of some foreign authors who treated the question from many points of view, and for whom I will nevertheless have to search: Ernst Robert Curtius, Rene Wellek, Arnold Hauser, and Victor Lucien Tapie. I also find references to the work of Gustav Rene Hocke, and to Eugenio Battisti’s Rinascimento e Barocco (The Renaissance and the baroque), a work that deals with the links between the literary metaphor and the poetics of art. I find more references to Morpurgo-Tagliabue that confirm his importance to my topic, and I realize that I should also see Galvano Della Volpe’s work on the Renais­sance commentators on Aristotelian poetics, Poetica del Cinquecento (Sixteenth-century poetics).

This realization also convinces me to look at Cesare Vaso- li’s extensive essay (in the Marzorati volume that I am still holding) “L’estetica dell’Umanesimo e del Rinascimento” (The aesthetics of humanism and the Renaissance). I have already seen Vasoli’s name in Franco Croce’s bibliography. In the encyclopedia entries on metaphor that I have examined, I have already noticed (and noted on the appropriate index card) that the question of metaphor had already arisen in Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric. Now I learn from Vasoli that during the sixteenth century there was an entire scene of commentators on Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric. I also learn that between these commentators and the baroque treatise writers there are the theorists of Manierismo who discussed the question of ingenuity as it relates to the concept of met­aphor. I also notice the recurrence of similar citations, and of names like Julius von Schlosser. And before leaving Ance- schi, I decide to consult his other works on the topic. I record references to Da Bacone a Kant (From Bacon to Kant), L’idea del Barocco (The idea of baroque) and an article on “Gusto e genio nel Bartoli” (On style and genius in Bartoli). However, the Alessandria library only owns this last article and the book Da Bacone a Kant.

Is my thesis threatening to become too vast? No, I will simply have to narrow my focus and work on a single aspect of my topic, while still consulting many of these books for background information.

At this point I consult Rocco Montano’s study “L’estetica del Rinascimento e del Barocco” (Renaissance and baroque aesthetics) published in Pensiero della Rinascenza e della Riforma (Renaissance and Reformation thought), the elev­enth volume of the Grande antologia filosofica Marzorati (Mar- zorati’s great anthology of philosophy). I immediately notice that it is not only a study but also an anthology of texts, many of which are very useful for my work. And I see once again the close relationships between Renaissance scholars of Aristotle’s Poetics, the mannerists, and the baroque trea­tise writers. I also find a reference to Trattatisti d’arte tra Manierismo e Controriforma (Art treatise writers between Manierismo and the Counter-Reformation), a two-volume anthology published by Laterza. As I page through the cat­alog to find this title, I discover that the Alessandria library owns another anthology published by Laterza, Trattati di poetica e retorica del Cinquecento (Sixteenth-century trea­tises on poetics and rhetoric). I am not sure if my topic will require firsthand sources, but I note the book just in case. Now I know where to find it.

I return to Montano and his bibliography, and here I must do some reconstructive work, because each chapter has its own bibliography. In any case, I recognize many familiar names and, as I read, it dawns on me that I should consult some classic histories of aesthetics, such as the aforemen­tioned Bernard Bosanquet’s, George Saintsbury’s, Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo’s, and Katherine Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn’s (1939). I also find the names of the sixteenth-cen­tury commentators of Aristotle’s Poetics that I’ve mentioned above (Robortello, Castelvetro, Scaligero, Segni, Cavalcanti, Maggi, Varchi, Vettori, Speroni, Minturno, Piccolomini, Giraldi Cinzio, etc.). I note these just in case, and I will later learn that Montano anthologized some of them, Della Volpe others, and the Laterza anthology others yet.

Montano’s bibliography refers me once again to Ma- nierismo. Panofky’s Idea continues to reappear as a pressing critical reference, and so does Morpurgo-Tagliabue’s essay “Aristotelismo e Barocco.” I wonder if I should become more informed on mannerist treatise writers like Sebastiano Serlio, Lodovico Dolce, Federico Zuccari, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, and Giorgio Vasari; but this would lead me to the figurative arts and architecture. Perhaps some classic critical texts like Wolfflin’s, Panofsky’s, Schlosser’s, or Battisti’s more recent one would suffice. I must also note the impor­tance of non-Italian authors like Sidney, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Finally, I find in Montano’s bibliography familiar names cited as having authored fundamental critical studies: Curtius, Schlosser, and Hauser, as well as Italians like Calca- terra, Getto, Anceschi, Praz, Ulivi, Marzot, and Raimondi. The circle is tightening. Some names are cited everywhere.

To catch my breath, I return to the author catalog and begin to page through it. I find important books in Ger­man, most of which are also available in English translation: Panofsky’s Idea, Ernst Curtius’s famous European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Schlosser’s Die Kunstliteratur (Art literature), and, while I am looking for Hauser’s The Social History of Art, Hauser’s fundamental volume Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art.

Realizing that I must somehow read Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics, I look for Aristotle in the author catalog. I am surprised to find 15 antiquarian editions of the Rhetoric pub­lished between 1515 and 1837: one with Ermolao Barbaro’s commentary; another, Bernardo Segni’s translation; another with Averroes and Alessandro Piccolomini’s paraphrases; and the Loeb English edition with the parallel Greek text. The Italian edition published by Laterza is absent. As far as the Poetics goes, there are also various editions, including one with Castelvetro’s and Robortello’s sixteenth-century commentaries, the Loeb edition with the parallel Greek text, and Augusto Rostagni’s and Manara Valgimigli’s two modern Italian translations. This is more than enough. In fact, it is enough for a thesis about Renaissance commentaries on the Poetics. But let us not digress.

From various hints in the texts I have consulted, I real­ize that some observations made by historians Francesco Milizia and Lodovico Antonio Muratori, and by the human­ist Girolamo Fracastoro, are also relevant to my thesis. I search for their names in the author catalog, and I learn that the Alessandria library owns antiquarian editions of these authors. I then find Della Volpe’s Poetica del Cinquecento (Sixteenth-century poetics), Santangelo’s Il secentismo nella critica (Criticism on secentismo), and Zonta’s article “Rinasci- mento, aristotelismo e barocco” (A note on the Renaissance, Aristotelianism, and the baroque). Through the name of Helmuth Hatzfeld, I find a multiauthor volume that is inter­esting in many other respects, La critica stilistica e il barocco letterario. Atti del secondo Congresso internazionale di studi ita- liani (Stylistic criticism and the literary baroque. Proceedings of the second international conference of Italian studies), that was published in Florence in 1957. I am disappointed to find that the Alessandria library does not own one of Car­mine Jannaco’s apparently important works, and also Il Sei- cento (The seventeenth century), a volume of the history of literature published by Vallardi. The library also does not own Praz’s books, Rousset’s and Tapie’s studies, the oft-quoted volume Retorica e Barocco with Morpurgo-Tagliabue’s essay, and the works of Eugenio D’Ors and Menendez y Pelayo. In a nutshell, the Alessandria library is not the Library of Con­gress in Washington, nor the Braidense Library in Milan, but all in all I have already secured 35 books, a decent beginning. Nor is this the end of my research.

In fact, sometimes a single text can solve a whole series of problems. As I continue checking the author catalog, I decide (since it is there, and since it appears to be a funda­mental reference work) to take a look at Giovanni Getto’s “La polemica sul barocco” (The polemic on the baroque), in the first volume of the 1956 miscellaneous work Let- teratura italiana. Le correnti (The currents of Italian liter­ature). I quickly notice that the study is almost a hundred pages long and exceptionally important, because it nar­rates the entire controversy on baroque style. I notice the names of major Italian writers and intellectuals who have been discussing the baroque from the seventeenth to the twentieth century: Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Girolamo Tiraboschi, Saverio Bettinelli, Giuseppe Baretti, Vittorio Alfieri, Melchiorre Cesarotti, Cesare Cantu, Vincenzo Gioberti, Francesco De Sanctis, Alessandro Manzoni, Giuseppe Mazzini, Giacomo Leo­pardi, Giosue Carducci, up to the twentieth-century writer Curzio Malaparte and the other authors that I have already noted. And Getto quotes long excerpts from many of these authors, which clarifies an issue for me: if I am to write a thesis on the historical controversy on the baroque, it should be of high scientific originality, it will require many years of work, and its purpose must be precisely to prove that Getto’s inquiry has been insufficient, or was carried out from a faulty perspective. For a thesis of this kind, I must explore all of these authors. However, works of this kind generally require more experience than that of our hypothetical student in this experiment. If instead I work on the baroque texts, or the contemporary interpretations of these texts, I will not be expected to complete such an immense project (a project that Getto has already done, and done excellently).

Now, Getto’s work provides me with sufficient documen­tation for the background of my thesis, if not on its specific topic. Extensive works such as Getto’s must generate a series of separate index cards. In other words, I will write an index card on Muratori, one on Cesarotti, one on Leopardi, and so on. I will record the work in which they expressed their opin­ions on the baroque, and I will copy Getto’s summary onto each index card, with relevant quotes. (Naturally, I will also note that I took the material from Getto’s essay.) If I eventu­ally choose to use this material in my thesis, I must honestly and prudently indicate in a footnote “as quoted in Getto” because I will be using secondhand information. In fact, since we are modeling research done with few means and lit­tle time, I will not have time to check the quote against its original source. Therefore, I will not be responsible for the quote’s possible imperfections. I will faithfully declare that I took it from another scholar, I will not pretend that I have seen the original information, and I will not have to worry. However, ideally the student would have the means to check each quote with the original text.

Having altered my course, the only authors I must not ignore at this point are the baroque authors on whom I will write my thesis. I must now search for these baroque authors because, as we have said in section 3.1.2, a thesis must also have primary sources. I cannot write about the treatise writ­ers if I do not read them in their original form. I can trust the critical studies on the mannerist theorists of the figurative arts because they do not constitute the focus of my research, but I cannot ignore a central figure of baroque poetics such as Tesauro.

So let us now turn to the baroque treatise writers. First of all, there is Ezio Raimondi’s anthology Trattatisti e nar- ratori del Seicento (Seventeenth-century treatise and nar­rative prose writers) published by Ricciardi that contains 100 pages of Tesauro’s Cannocchiale aristotelico, 60 pages of Peregrini, and 60 of Sforza Pallavicino. If I were writing a 30-page term paper instead of a thesis, this anthology would be more than sufficient. But for my thesis, I also want the entire treatises. Among them I need at least: Emanuele Tesauro, Il cannocchiale aristotelico; Matteo Peregrini, Delle acutezze (On acuities) and I fonti dell’ingegno ridotti a arte (The art of wit and its sources); Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino, Del bene (On the good) and Trattato dello stile e del dialogo (Treatise on style and dialogue). I begin to search for these in the “special collection” section of the author catalog, and I find two editions of the Cannocchiale, one from 1670 and the other from 1685. It is a real pity that the first 1654 edition is absent, all the more since I learned that content has been added to the various editions. I do find two nine­teenth-century editions of Sforza Pallavicino’s complete works, but I do not find Peregrini. (This is unfortunate, but I am consoled by the 60 pages of his work anthologized by Raimondi.)

Incidentally, in some of the critical texts I previously con­sulted, I found scattered traces of Agostino Mascardi’s 1636 treatise De l’arte istorica (On the art of history), a work that makes many observations on the art of writing but is not included in these texts among the items of baroque treatise writing. Here in Alessandria there are five editions, three from the seventeenth and two from the nineteenth century. Should I write a thesis on Mascardi? If I think about it, this is not such a strange question. If a student cannot travel far from his home, he must work with the material that is locally available. Once, a philosophy professor told me that he had written a book on a specific German philosopher only because his institute had acquired the entire new edition of the philosopher’s complete works. Otherwise he would have studied a different author. Certainly not a passionate schol­arly endeavor, but it happens.

Now, let us rest on our oars. What have I done here in Alessandria? I put together a critical bibliography that, to be conservative, includes at least 300 titles, if I record all the references I found. In the end, in Alessandria I found more than 30 of these 300 titles, in addition to original texts of at least two of the authors I could study, Tesauro and Sforza Pallavicino. This is not bad for a small city. But is it enough for my thesis?

Let us answer this question candidly. If I were to write a thesis in three months and rely mostly on indirect sources, these 30 titles would be enough. The books I have not found are probably quoted in those I have found, so if I assembled my survey effectively, I could build a solid argument. The trouble would be the bibliography; if I include only the texts that I actually read in their original form, my advisor could accuse me of neglecting a fundamental text. And what if I cheat? We have already seen how this process is both uneth­ical and imprudent.

I do know one thing for certain: for the first three months I can easily work locally, between sessions in the library and at home with books that I’ve borrowed. I must remember that reference books and very old books do not circulate, nor do volumes of periodicals (but for these, I can work with photocopies). But I can borrow most other kinds of books. In the following months, I could travel to the city of my uni­versity for some intensive sessions, and I could easily work locally from September to December. Also, in Alessandria I could find editions of all the texts by Tesauro and Sforza Pallavicino. Better still, I should ask myself if it would not be better to gamble everything on only one of these two authors, by working directly with the original text and using the bibliographical material I found for background informa­tion. Afterward, I will have to determine what other books I need, and travel to Turin or Genoa to find them. With a little luck I will eventually find everything I need. And thanks to the fact that I’ve chosen an Italian topic, I have avoided the need to travel, say, to Paris or Oxford.

Nevertheless, these are difficult decisions to make. Once I have created the bibliography, it would be wise to return to the (hypothetical) advisor and show him what I have. He will be able to suggest appropriate solutions to help me nar­row the scope, and tell me which books are absolutely nec­essary. If I am unable to find some of these in Alessandria, I can ask the librarian if the Alessandria library can borrow them from other libraries. I can also travel to the university library, where I might identify a series of books and articles. I would lack the time to read them but, for the articles, the Alessandria library could write the university library and request photocopies. An important article of 20 pages would cost me a couple of dollars plus shipping costs.

In theory, I could make a different decision. In Alessan­dria, I have some pre-1900 editions of two major baroque treatise authors, and a sufficient number of critical texts. These are enough to understand these two authors, if not to say something new on a historiographical or philological level. (If there were at least Tesauro’s first edition of II can- nocchiale aristotelico, I could write a comparison between the three seventeenth-century editions.) Let us suppose that I explore no more than four or five books tracing contempo­rary theories of metaphor. For these, I would suggest: Jakob- son’s Preliminaries to Speech Analysis, the Liege Groupe p’s A General Rhetoric, and Albert Henry’s Metonymie et meta- phore (Metonym and metaphor). Here, I have the elements to trace a structuralist history of the metaphor. And they are all books available on the market, they cost about 11 dollars altogether, and they have been translated into Italian. At this point, I could even compare the modern theories of met­aphor with the baroque theories. For a work of this kind, I might possibly use Aristotle’s texts, Tesauro, 30 or so studies on Tesauro, and the three contemporary reference texts to put together an intelligent thesis, with peaks of originality and accurate references to the baroque, but no claim to phil­ological discoveries. And all this without leaving Alessan­dria, except to find in Turin or Genoa no more than two or three fundamental books that were missing in Alessandria.

But these are all hypotheses. I could become so fascinated with my research that I choose to dedicate not one but three years to the study of the baroque; or I could take out a loan or look for a grant to study at a more relaxed pace. Do not expect this book to tell you what to put in your thesis, or what to do with your life. What I set out to demonstrate (and I think I did demonstrate) with this experiment is that a stu­dent can arrive at a small library with little knowledge on a topic and, after three afternoons, can acquire sufficiently clear and complete ideas. In other words, it is no excuse to say, “I live in a small city, I do not have the books, I do not know where to start, and nobody is helping me.”

Naturally the student must choose topics that lend them­selves to this game. For example, a thesis on Kripke and Hintikka’s logic of possible worlds may not have been a wise choice for our hypothetical student. In fact I did some research on this topic in Alessandria, and it cost me little time. A first look for “logic” in the subject catalog revealed that the library has at least 15 notable books on formal logic, including works by Tarski, Lukasiewicz, Quine, some hand­books, and some studies of Ettore Casari, Wittgenstein, Strawson, etc. But predictably, it has nothing on the most recent theories of modal logic, material that is found mostly in specialized journals and is even absent from some uni­versity libraries. However, on purpose I chose a topic that nobody would have taken on during their final year without some kind of previous knowledge, or without already owning some fundamental books on the topic.

I’m not saying that such a topic is only for students who have the resources to purchase books and for frequent travel to larger libraries. I know a student who was not rich, but who wrote a thesis on a similar topic by staying in a religious hostel and purchasing very few books. Admittedly, despite his small sacrifices, his family supported him and he was able to devote himself full time to this project because he didn’t have to work. There is no thesis that is intrinsically for rich students, because even the student who chooses “The Variations of Beach Fashion in Acapulco over a Five-Year Period” can always search for a foundation willing to sponsor such a research project. This said, a student should obviously avoid certain topics if he is in a particularly challenging situ­ation. For this reason, I am trying to demonstrate here how to cook a meal with meat and potatoes, if not with gourmet ingredients.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.

The examples in this chapter suggest that writing a thesis involves putting together a great number of books. But does a student always write a thesis on books and with books? We have already seen that there are experimental theses that document research in the field, perhaps conducted while observing mice in a maze for many months. Now, I do not feel confident giving precise suggestions on this type of research. Here the method depends on the discipline, and people who embark on this kind of research already live in the laboratory. They work with and learn from other research­ers, and they probably do not need this book. However, as I have already said, even in this kind of thesis it is necessary to contextualize the experiment with a discussion of previous scientific literature, and so even here the student must deal with books. The same would be true of a thesis in sociology that required the candidate to spend a long period of time in a real social environment. This student will need books, if nothing else, to understand how others have already car­ried out similar research projects. There are even thesis proj­ects that require the student to page through newspapers or parliamentary acts, but even these require background literature.

And finally there are the theses that discuss only books, and in general these are in the subjects of literature, philos­ophy, the history of science, canon law, and formal logic. In Italian universities these are the majority, especially for degrees in the humanities. Consider that an American student who studies cultural anthropology has the Native Americans right around the corner, or finds money to do research in the Congo, while the Italian student usually resigns himself to writing a thesis on Franz Boas’s thought. Naturally, more and more students are writing ethnographic theses that involve researching Italian society, but even in these cases the library work is relevant, if only to search pre­vious folklore collections.

Let us say that, for reasons that by now should be easy to understand, this book addresses the vast majority of theses written on books, and using only books. Here we should reit­erate that a thesis on books usually employs two kinds: the books it talks about, and the books that help it talk. In other words, the texts that are the object of the study are the pri­mary sources, and the critical literature on those texts con­stitutes the secondary sources. Regarding our experiment in Alessandria, the original texts of the baroque treatise writ­ers are the primary sources, and all those who wrote about the baroque treatise writers are secondary sources.

The following question therefore arises: should a student deal immediately with the primary sources, or first cover the critical literature? The question may be meaningless for two reasons: (a) because the decision depends on the situation of the student, who may already know his author well and decide to study him in depth, or may be approaching for the first time a very difficult and perhaps seemingly unintelligible author; (b) this is a vicious circle, because the primary source can be incomprehensible without the preliminary critical literature, but it is difficult to evaluate the critical literature without knowing the primary source. However, the question is reasonable when posed by a disoriented student, perhaps our hypothetical student who is dealing with the baroque treatise writers for the first time. He might ask us whether he should begin immediately reading Tesauro, or should first cut his teeth on Getto, Anceschi, Raimondi, and other critics.

It seems to me the most sensible answer is this: approach two or three of the most general critical texts immediately, just to get an idea of the background against which your author moves. Then approach the original author directly, and always try to understand exactly what he says. After­ward, explore the rest of the critical literature. Finally, return to examine the author in the light of the newly acquired ideas. But this advice is quite abstract. In reality, students tend to follow the rhythm of their desire, and often there is nothing wrong with consuming texts in a disorderly way. The student can meander, alternating his objectives, provided that a thick web of personal notes, possibly in the form of index cards, keeps track of these “adventurous” wanderings.

Naturally, the approach depends on the researcher’s psy­chological structure. There are monochronic people and poly­chronic people. The monochronic succeed only if they work on one endeavor at a time. They cannot read while listen­ing to music; they cannot interrupt a novel to begin another without losing the thread; at their worst, they are unable to have a conversation while they shave or put on their makeup. The polychronic are the exact opposite. They succeed only if they cultivate many interests simultaneously; if they dedi­cate themselves to only one venture, they fall prey to bore­dom. The monochronic are more methodical but often have little imagination. The polychronic seem more creative, but they are often messy and fickle. In the end, if you explore the biographies of great thinkers and writers, you will find that there were both polychronic and monochronic among them.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.