(dave e)

retrospect 2

The day before the defense, I had not heard from any committee members, which I read as a good thing. No emails means no one thinks the dissertation isn't ready. My adviser writes to say it in fact looks very good. We meet and talk briefly about the defense procedure and address a concern that another faculty member had raised (remedied with no trouble at all).

The committee put me at ease immediately at the defense's opening. After joking for a few minutes about the agony they had planned for me, they asked me to address the project's history and its outlook. I did so, and no one seemed worried or confused. The protocol calls for the committee chair, my advisor, to provide each committee member the opportunity to ask questions in order, so each gets a turn. That didn't really happen at my defense. As I concluded my initial presentation, a committee member pointed to what she rightly saw as a major weakness in the introduction. My stomach fell when she asked me to articulate the argument of the dissertation; as it happens, that wasn't presented clearly enough in the introduction. All suspense was dropped, however, as she explained that she would happily sign off on the dissertation, so long as I refined the introduction. My presentation of that argument was strong, and the committee seemed to agree that the dissertation generally made its case, even if the introduction didn't.

We talked about the ways to frame the work in the criticism of life writing, the routes toward book-dom, and the ways I might work with the urgency of life writing in our contemporary moment, one that most of the committee agreed is frought with accomodating both the constructedness of the Real and the material risks of the political. One committee member looks me dead ahead and asserts that all of this poststructuralism is well and good, but aren't these life writers each trying to be true to something. What is it? I got a bit worked up, too, and said that, yes, of course they are - they're committed to bashing their heads against the conditions that mean their memoirs can't simply be accounts of what's happened to them, that memory and stories construct as much as they remember, that their class of remembering is construction... Even if the whole conversation was a little over the top, it was great because it seemed to accomodate the scholarly without being too laden with the boundaries of the academic. I had five very dissimilar committee members, and they were all nodding their heads.

We also talked about the need to raise a more precise gender and class critique, to account for my absence throughout the dissertation, the unreliability of the word "unreliable" in my work, the need to devote more attention to China Men as a response to Frank Chin, and the risk of using postmodernism as a critical frame when poststructuralism alone gets it done.

They kicked me out of the room for two or three minutes. I was then congratulated. The only provision was the aforementioned revision of the introduction.

I took the rest of the day off but worked on the introduction Thursday and Friday. It was approved Saturday, and I submitted the dissertation electronically on Sunday afternoon.

At the moment, as far as I can tell, all bureaucratic hurdles have been hurdled. I seem to be done with grad school. That was the idea all along.

The defense presented me with a number of what look to be very promising ideas. Now, I'll start looking at ways to work with and through them.

I am very lucky to have had the committee I found.

Posted by dave at December 6, 2005 9:17 PM | TrackBack