My Life and Thoughts

In September, I finally filed my dissertation in the Stanford department of comparative literature. The dissertation is called “The Windmill and the Giant: Double-Entry Bookkeeping in the Novel” and is full of just the kind of big ideas you would expect, on subjects including graphomania and the professionalization of the writer. Texts discussed include: Don Quijote, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Anna Karenina, and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

You can read the first chapter here; there is a relatively low-theory summary here. Acknowledgements junkies may click here.

It’s no joke to file a dissertation, let me tell you. For example, the graduate student bulletin said that all dissertations must be filed at the Registrar’s Office in the Old Union. However, when I got to the Old Union, I discovered that it had been converted into some kind of pizzeria. This is just the kind of exciting discovery—castles turning out to be taverns, and so on—that leads Don Quijote to an early grave.

I spent the next two hours wandering around campus with four acid-free copies of my weighty study on professional graphomania, looking for the Temporary Registrar’s Office. The Temporary Registrar’s Office turned out to be located in a trailer in some bushes, near the trailer where you have to go if you want to study the languages of the former Yugoslavia.

The clerk at the Temporary Registrar’s office demonstrated a serious commitment to his job of ensuring that only the most persevering candidates are rewarded with a doctoral degree from Stanford University. After many hours of interesting bureaucratic hurdles, I was finally able to deposit the four copies in the back of the trailer. Now I have a Ph.D.

Here is a video of my doctoral “hooding” by my advisor, Monika Greenleaf. I am receiving a beautiful leather folder which contains a fake diploma (because the ceremony took place in June, before I had finished the dissertation)—one of those little touches that show how Stanford is really a “class act.”

The regalia I am wearing ($495) was loaned to me by the literary historian Luba Golburt (pictured, left).

Tags: academic life, comparative literature, dissertation, Don Quijote, events, Russian literature, Stanford

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 9:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.