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The Bunk Thesis Topic

By Sarah Stodola

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While recently in the midst of an intensive weeks-long brainstorm to figure out just what topic would become the lucky focus of my Master's thesis, I sat down for a chat with a professor in my program. Like everyone always feels before they are forced to actually articulate their complex thoughts to another person, I felt good about my ideas. It was all still a bit amorphous, of course, but that was good at this point. It meant that I was completely open to suggestions about exactly which direction my thesis ought to take.

My idea, at that point, involved finding a connection between literature and concrete historical events. I really want literature to mean something, I want it to have significance; I want it to be more than a bunch of pretentious, over-educated, abstract thinkers sitting around creating all of this for the sake of, well, nothing.

And so I relayed this to my professor. At the time, I'd just finished reading Habermas - the guy who developed the contemporary concept of the public sphere. And in his groundbreaking work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, he mentions that literature is an important part of the public sphere, which is, under the right circumstances, an important part of shaping society and politics. However, he doesn't really explain how literature (and by literature here, I mean fiction or creative nonfiction or poetry) contributes to the public sphere, not the way he explains how cultural criticism, journalism, and debate do. So in a way, I suppose, I wanted to fill in this perceived gap. Not that I thought I could do better than Habermas. I just thought that maybe I could continue in one vein where he left off.

My professor had no confidence - none whatsoever - in my proposed endeavor.

He asked me things like how was I going to prove a connection between any piece of literature and it supposed corresponding real-world event? Was I going to go through all the newspapers in the English-speaking world and count the number of times a certain novel was mentioned in the same article as a particular event? Was this going to be a purely empirical project? Because, you know, that could be deathly boring. Did I really think it was possible to come to an unequivocal conclusion with something like this?

I wish I would have had a few minutes just then to organize my response, but alas, I had to answer directly. I am a writer, not a speaker, precisely because I invariably need a few moments to organize my thoughts. They don’t just stream from me. So beyond saying over and over, “I’m not sure I agree with you,” I had no choice but to concede that he might be right.

What I wish I would have thought to say is this: No, I don’t think I’m going to prove anything. If I did, I would have gone into something mathematical. I am studying literature here, which is by its very nature highly theoretical and open to interpretation. This isn’t necessarily about coming to an impenetrable conclusion, it’s just about solidifying the possibility that literature does indeed have its place in human history. And if the possibility doesn’t exist, then I’d like to know, because all this time that I’ve been doing this literary stuff, I’ve been doing it because of the feeling I have that it is something important. So I would just like to explore this feeling a little further. A lot further, actually.

It seems that intellectuals live under the unquestioned assumption that what they are doing is important. And not just important, but profoundly important. So important that the entire world should be listening to them, and if they aren’t listening to them, it is because most of the world population is completely banal. I guess that sometimes it’s fine and good to just assume that your life’s work is important. But in reality, doing so is sort of like being religious; you are taking a leap of faith just because you feel it, or want it, to be so.

And this is why I can’t let go of this need to find the connection. I do want all of this thinking and creativity to be important. And even though I can’t prove it, I'm quite sure that it is. I just haven’t quite figured out how to explain it in so many words yet.

So I have a different thesis topic now. And it’s a really good thesis topic, I think. But when all of this thesis stuff is said and done, I’m still going to wonder if those scores of pages I will have written have any importance outside of themselves or not.  Because although I'm sure of it, no one has quite been able to debunk these mental masturbation quips for me yet.  At least not with undeniable proof.

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Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three.  She can be contacted at [email protected].

© 2004 Me Three