Choosing a Thesis Topic: Monograph or Survey?

The first temptation of any student is to write a thesis that is too broad. For example, the first impulse of a literature stu­dent is to write a thesis titled “Literature Today.” If advised to narrow the scope, the student might choose “Italian Lit­erature from the Postwar Period to the Sixties,” a topic with slightly more focus, but one that is still impossibly vast.

A thesis like this is dangerous. Such a topic will make a seasoned scholar tremble, and will present an impossible challenge for a young student. Presented with this challenge, a student will either write a tedious survey consisting only of author’s names and current scholarly opinions, or will try to imitate the approach of a mature critic and will inevitably be accused of unforgivable omissions. In 1957 the great con­temporary Italian critic Gianfranco Contini published a sur­vey titled Letteratura italiana. Ottocento-Novecento (Italian literature: The nineteenth and twentieth centuries). Had the survey been a thesis, it would have earned a failing grade, despite its 472 pages in length. Contini dedicated entire chapters to so-called “minor” authors, and relegated certain “major” authors to mentions in short footnotes or omit­ted them altogether. The committee would have attributed these choices to carelessness or ignorance. Naturally, since Contini is a scholar of recognized historical knowledge and critical acumen, readers understood that the omissions and disproportions were intentional, and that the absence of a particular author was a more eloquent expression of

Contini’s disfavor than a hostile review. But if a student in his twenties plays the same trick, who guarantees that there is shrewdness behind his silence? Do the omissions replace criticism that the student has written elsewhere, or that he would be capable of writing?

Usually, with a thesis of this kind, the student later accuses the committee members of having failed to understand him.

But a thesis that is too broad cannot be understood, and therefore is always an act of pride. It is not that intellectual pride in a thesis should be rejected a priori. A student can even argue that Dante was a lousy poet, but only after at least 300 pages of rigorous analysis of Dante’s texts. However, the necessary breadth of a topic like “Italian Literature from the Postwar Period to the Sixties” leaves no space for these demonstrations, and this is why the student should aptly choose something more modest. Not “The Novels of Beppe Fenoglio,” but “The Different Versions of Johnny the Parti­san.” Boring? Maybe, but the challenge it presents is ulti­mately more interesting.

If you think about it, specificity is also an act of shrewd­ness. A survey of 40 years of literature is vulnerable to all kinds of objections. How can the advisor or another commit­tee member resist the temptation to show his knowledge of a minor author absent from the student’s work? If each com­mittee member jots down even two or three omissions in the margins of the table of contents, the thesis will end up look­ing like a missing persons list, and the student will become the target of a burst of charges. If instead the student works diligently on a specific topic, he will find himself mastering material unknown to most of the committee members. I am not suggesting a cheap trick. (It may be a trick, but it takes hard work, so it is certainly not cheap.) The candidate simply presents himself as “expert” in front of a less expert audi­ence, and since he worked hard to gain his expertise, it is fair that he benefits from the situation.

Between these two extremes of a 40-year literature sur­vey and a strict monograph on the variants of a short text, there are thesis topics of varying scope. We can find top­ics like “The New Literary Avant-garde of the Sixties,” or “The Image of the Langhe in Pavese and Fenoglio,” or even

“Similarities and Differences in Three Writers of the Fantas­tic: Savinio, Buzzati, and Landolfi.”

As for the sciences, a little book on the same topic as ours gives advice that is valid for all subjects:

The subject “Geology,” for instance, is much too broad a topic. “Vulcanology,” as a branch of geology, is still too com­prehensive. “Volcanoes in Mexico” might be developed into a good but superficial paper. However, a further limitation to “The History of Popocatepetl” (which one of 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.