Envisioning the Thesis as

a Whole

In dreams begin responsibility.

W. B. Yeats^1

W

hat is your dissertation about? And what contribution do

you aim to achieve? What will be new or different about

your work? How would you justify the time and resources that

you will devote to it? These fundamental questions will seem

very pressing in the beginning stages of your research, as Yeats’

intangible process of locking you into a long-run project begins.

But they do not go away later on. You can often push such issues

into the background in the central stages of the thesis, during

field visits, case studies or the hard slog of library or archive work

or data collection and analysis. But they tend to return during

the ‘mid-term slump’ in morale that often afflicts dissertation

authors. And they invariably crop up again when you have a first

draft of your complete thesis, and have to fashion it into a

polished and defensible final version. This chapter is about the

importance of thinking through some reasonable answers before

you invest too heavily in a particular research topic and approach.

I consider first how to define one or several questions that will

inform your project as a whole. The second section looks at the

demands of doing ‘original’ and interesting research.

Defining the central research questions

Certain books seem to have been written, not in

order to afford us any instruction, but merely for

18

2