One of the projects we have underway at Foreign Literatures in America (FLA) is to save these kinds of academic documents from obscurity (and possibly oblivion.) While most go unread for decades, old dissertations and theses on literary topics present a unique opportunity for scholars – and scholarly projects such as FLA – interested in the reception history of literary texts. First, looking at such material expands the pool of critical responses quite considerably. Published items such as professional essays, scholarly monographs, book reviews, and newspaper articles are all great sources of information about literary history and each category caters to a slightly different audience. However, as we have begun to compile bibliographic metadata on the reception history of Joseph Conrad at FLA, it quickly became clear that many of the articles, books, reviews of Conrad’s work over the course of his long career were actually written by a small handful of interested writers. By contrast, our initial effort to locate dissertations and theses written on Conrad in the years between 1900 and 1960, turned up two hundred and eight different projects either entirely or significantly focused on Conrad. A little digging is likely to turn up more. Even if we can locate copies of only a portion of these manuscripts, we will be able to get a broader view of Conrad’s place within the academy and use the bibliographies and citations contained in these documents to map how ideas about Conrad spread and circulated over time and across space.

Also, since these documents were written for or by students they provide a glimpse into the early days of Conrad Studies in American classrooms. For example, Heart of Darkness is now the most common gateway text, appearing on most syllabi of introductory English courses. But was this always the case? Have other Conrad texts gone through periods of prominence and obscurity on college campuses? How quickly do ideas trickle down from professional scholarship on Conrad to student-generated writing?

Finally, the relatively large size of the data set available from student papers makes possible comparative scholarship between different subsets of the student population. For example, almost half of the available academic projects on Conrad were written by female students. This alone is a somewhat surprising fact given Conrad’s reputation as a “masculine” author. Will we see differences in focus, emphasis, or approach towards Conrad’s work based on gender? If present, will these differences change over time?

We are excited that FLA will provide a full-text, searchable repository for the often excellent and unfortunately obscure scholarship on foreign authors done by generations of American students. Personally, I will be pleased if in 2112 a future user of the FLA database runs an algorithm in which my dissertation provides a data point. Oh, immortality.

Rebecca Borden is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Maryland.  Her dissertation is titled “Making Meaning Together: Information, Propaganda, and Rumor in British Fiction of the First World War.” She is also the Executive Editor for Modern British Literature at FLA.

The post My Dissertation in the Year 2112 appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Errol’s film is very much concerned with this difference between what is visible on the surface and what is only visible with the aid of microscopic investigations. Much of the film is an interview with JFK assassination investigator Josiah “Tink” Thompson. After Thompson first identified “the umbrella man,” theories about this man abounded. Thompson asked for the real umbrella man to step forward. When he did, Louie Steven Witt explained that he brought the umbrella with him that day as a reference to the umbrella carried by Neville Chamberlain and as a protest against the appeasement policies of Kennedy’s father, Joseph Kennedy, during the Second World War. In the film, Thompson points out that this explanation is “wacky enough it has to be true” and that Witt’s existence should be a cautionary tale to all historians. The true story behind “the umbrella man” makes the point that “you can never on your own think up all the non-sinister, perfectly valid explanations for that fact.”

According to Thompson, John Updike wrote about “the umbrella man” in 1967. Updike’s argument is interesting*, but I prefer Thompson’s more colloquial phrasing: “In historical research, there may be a dimension similar to the quantum dimension in physical reality. If you put any event under a microscope, you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on. It’s as if there is the macro-level of historical research, where things sort of obey natural laws, the usual things happen, and unusual things don’t happen, and then there’s this other level where everything is really weird.” In a way, FLA is trying to make possible just this kind of research – the “quantum dimension” of historical research on the reception of foreign authors in America. We hope to find as much of the really weird stuff as we can.

*Updike wrote:  “We wonder whether a genuine mystery is being concealed here or whether any similar scrutiny of a minute section of time and space would yield similar strangenesses—gaps, inconsistencies, warps, and bubbles in the surface of circumstance. Perhaps, as with the elements of matter, investigation passes a threshold of common sense and enters a sub-atomic realm where laws are mocked, where persons have the life-span of beta particles and the transparency of neutrinos, and where a rough kind of averaging out must substitute for absolute truth. The truth about those seconds in Dallas is especially elusive; the search for it seems to demonstrate how perilously empiricism verges on magic.”

Rebecca Borden is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of Maryland. Foreign Literatures in America is a project directed by MITH Faculty Fellow Peter Mallios. Read more about FLA here.

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