{"id":9783,"date":"2010-03-29T09:00:25","date_gmt":"2010-03-29T13:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=9783"},"modified":"2010-03-29T09:00:25","modified_gmt":"2010-03-29T13:00:25","slug":"doctoral-programmes-in-literary-studies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/03\/29\/doctoral-programmes-in-literary-studies\/","title":{"rendered":"Doctoral Programmes in Literary Studies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/03\/thesis1.gif\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-9790\" src=\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/03\/thesis1.gif\" alt=\"thesis\" width=\"462\" height=\"200\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong><\/strong>In the last few years, there has been considerable discussion of the possibility of rethinking the nature of the doctoral dissertation in literary studies.\u00a0 This is in part prompted by the fact that many students apparently take an inordinate amount of time to complete a PhD, and in part by the crisis in scholarly publishing, in which greater pressure to produce scholarly monographs to obtain tenure and promotion has coincided with reductions in the number of books published by many prominent academic presses.\u00a0 The underlying causes of these various facts are complex, and disputed, and I do not want to address them here; but it is important to recognize that they provide a context for the discussion about the requirements of doctoral programmes.<\/p>\n<p>In the Spring 2010 <em>MLA Newsletter<\/em>, MLA President Sidonie Smith\u2019s column is entitled \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mla.org\/fromthepres\">Beyond the Dissertation Monograph<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 Mentioning both the adverse conditions that prevail for many students in humanities programmes and the digital revolution, Smith suggests that we should perhaps \u201cbegin to expand the forms the dissertation might take.\u201d\u00a0 By this, she primarily means that we should be looking at alternative forms to the Gutenberg-era book.\u00a0 I noted that one of the \u201cMember Comments\u201d on her column was from Bob Denham, who observed that Northrop Frye, who among his innumerable accomplishments was President of the MLA, never earned a Ph.D., although he was awarded 38 honorary degrees. \u00a0Bob adds, \u201cIn fact, he likened the doctoral regimen to \u2018jumping through the hoops\u2019 and \u2018turning Ph.D. cartwheels\u2019 for the amusement of one\u2019s elders.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I thought it might be interesting to look at a few other passages in Frye that relate to the topic of scholarship in the humanities, in the hope of provoking some more discussion on the blog about it.\u00a0 In <em>Spiritus Mundi<\/em> (1976), Frye remarks on the immense amount of effort required to produce first a humanities dissertation and then a book on the same material, but adds, \u201cThere are many things in the Ph.D. program which are extremely valuable, as I know to my cost.\u00a0 I avoided the Ph.D. myself by sheer accident, but there were elements in the training which I wish I had got in the regular way, and have always felt the lack of.\u201d\u00a0 He contrasts the centrality of the book in the humanities with the way that for scientists the article is the standard means of communication.\u00a0 Of course, the question here is to what extent digital technologies have changed the situation that Frye is describing.\u00a0 At the very least, it seems to be true that scholars do not buy as many scholarly books as they used to.\u00a0 But ebooks have started to appear in the collections of academic libraries, which might indicate that the monograph will continue to flourish in a new material form.<\/p>\n<p>In 1989, Frye gave a talk entitled \u201cLiterary and Mechanical Models\u201d to a conference on Computers and the Humanities (published in <em>The Eternal Act of Creation<\/em>).\u00a0 He tells the story of Pelham Edgar\u2019s dissertation of Shelley\u2019s imagery, the bulk of which was a catalogue of various images and their contexts.\u00a0 Frye writes that \u201cClearly it was of immense benefit to the author of the thesis to steep himself so thoroughly in Shelley\u2019s poetic vocabulary, but still most of the thesis could have been done by an appropriately programmed computer in a matter of seconds.\u201d\u00a0 Frye\u2019s utopian fantasy, later in the essay, is that the idea of a \u201cproductive scholar\u201d should be replaced by the idea of the \u201ccreative scholar,\u201d and the dissertation should be seen as something solely for the benefit of the student, \u201cSo the crazy chain of thesis, thesis rewritten as book, book published, book bought by libraries, book added to an already groaning bibliography, would be broken.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the last few 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