Wednesday, August 06, 2008
(12:12 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Prolegomena to Any Future Dissertation
I am planning to start writing chapter 2 of my dissertation soon. Once I am finished with it, I plan to rearticulate chapters 1 and 2 into a tripartite argument, though I am currently unclear as to whether that will require the use of three chapters or a single long chapter in three parts.At that point, the project will be fully laid out and broadly situated in terms of the contemporary field, and the sensible thing to do would be to proceed to actually do what I say I am going to do. Yet isn't there another, equally attractive option here? Couldn't I continue to expand the argument of "chapters 1 and 2" to the point where they were effectively an entire dissertation, then write a concluding chapter pointing toward my original dissertation topic as a promising avenue for future research?
