In How to Write a Thesis, Umberto Eco walks students through the craft and rewards of sustained research. Credit Photograph by Martine Franck / Magnum
How to Write a Thesis, by Umberto Eco, first appeared on Italian bookshelves in 1977. For Eco, the playful philosopher and novelist best known for his work on semiotics, there was a practical reason for writing it. Up until 1999, a thesis of original research was required of every student pursuing the Italian equivalent of a bachelors degree. Collecting his thoughts on the thesis process would save him the trouble of reciting the same advice to students each year. Since its publication,How to Write a Thesishas gone through twenty-three editions in Italy and has been translated into at least seventeen languages. Its first English edition is only now available, in a translation by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina.
We in the English-speaking world have survived thirty-seven years withoutHow to Write a Thesis. Why bother with it now? After all, Eco wrote his thesis-writing manual before the advent of widespread word processing and the Internet. There are long passages devoted to quaint technologies such as note cards and address books, careful strategies for how to overcome the limitations of your local library. But the books enduring appealthe reason it might interest someone whose life no longer demands the writing of anything longer than an e-mailhas little to do with the rigors of undergraduate honors requirements. Instead, its about what, in Ecos rhapsodic and often funny book, the thesis represents: a magical process of self-realization, a kind of careful, curious engagement with the world that need not end in ones early twenties. Your thesis, Eco foretells, is like your first love: it will be difficult to forget. By mastering the demands and protocols of the fusty old thesis, Eco passionately demonstrates, we become equipped for a world outside ourselvesa world of ideas, philosophies, and debates.
Ecos career has been defined by a desire to share the rarefied concerns of academia with a broader reading public. He wrote a novel that enacted literary theory (The Name of the Rose) and a childrens book about atoms conscientiously objecting to their fate as war machines (The Bomb and the General).How to Write a Thesisis sparked by the wish to give any student with the desire and a respect for the process the tools for producing a rigorous and meaningful piece of writing. A more just society, Eco writes at the books outset, would be one where anyone with true aspirations would be supported by the state, regardless of their background or resources. Our society does not quite work that way. It is the students of privilege, the beneficiaries of the best training available, who tend to initiate and then breeze through the thesis process.
Eco walks students through the craft and rewards of sustained research, the nuances of outlining, different systems for collating ones research notes, what to do ifper Ecos invocation of thesis-as-first-loveyou fear that someones made all these moves before. There are broad strategies for laying out the projects center and periphery as well as philosophical asides about originality and attribution. Work on a contemporary author as if he were ancient, and an ancient one as if he were contemporary, Eco wisely advises. You will have more fun and write a better thesis. Other suggestions may strike the modern student as anachronistic, such as the novel idea of using an address book to keep a log of ones sources.
But there are also old-fashioned approaches that seem more useful than ever: he recommends, for instance, a system of sortable index cards to explore a projects potential trajectories. Moments like these makeHow to Write a Thesisfeel like an instruction manual for finding ones center in a dizzying era of information overload. Consider Ecos caution against the alibi of photocopies: A student makes hundreds of pages of photocopies and takes them home, and the manual labor he exercises in doing so gives him the impression that he possesses the work. Owning the photocopies exempts the student from actually reading them. This sort of vertigo of accumulation, a neocapitalism of information, happens to many. Many of us suffer from an accelerated version of this nowadays, as we effortlessly bookmark links or save articles to Instapaper, satisfied with our aspiration to horde all this new information, unsure if we will ever get around to actually dealing with it. (Ecos not-entirely-helpful solution: read everything as soon as possible.)
But the most alluring aspect of Ecos book is the way he imagines the community that results from any honest intellectual endeavorthe conversations you enter into across time and space, across age or hierarchy, in the spirit of free-flowing, democratic conversation. He cautions students against losing themselves down a narcissistic rabbit hole: you are not a defrauded genius simply because someone else has happened upon the same set of research questions. You must overcome any shyness and have a conversation with the librarian, he writes, because he can offer you reliable advice that will save you much time. You must consider that the librarian (if not overworked or neurotic) is happy when he can demonstrate two things: the quality of his memory and erudition and the richness of his library, especially if it is small. The more isolated and disregarded the library, the more the librarian is consumed with sorrow for its underestimation.
Eco captures a basic set of experiences and anxieties familiar to anyone who has written a thesis, from finding a mentor (How to Avoid Being Exploited By Your Advisor) to fighting through episodes of self-doubt. Ultimately, its the process and struggle that make a thesis a formative experience. When everything else you learned in college is marooned in the pastwhen you happen upon an old notebook and wonder what you spent all your time doing, since you have no recollection whatsoever of a senior-year postmodernism seminarit is the thesis that remains, providing the once-mastered scholarly foundation that continues to authorize, decades-later, barroom observations about the late-career works of William Faulker or the Hotelling effect. (Full disclosure: I doubt that anyone on Earth can rival my mastery of John TravoltasWhite Mans Burden, owing to an idyllic Berkeley spring spent studying awful movies about race.)
In his foreword to Ecos book, the scholar Francesco Erspamer contends thatHow to Write a Thesiscontinues to resonate with readers because it gets at the very essence of the humanities. There are certainly reasons to believe that the current crisis of the humanities owes partly to the poor job they do of explaining and justifying themselves. As critics continue to assail the prohibitive cost and possible uselessness of collegeand at a time when anything that takes more than a few minutes to skim is called a longreadits understandable that devoting a small chunk of ones frisky twenties to writing a thesis can seem a waste of time, outlandishly quaint, maybe even selfish. And, as higher education continues to bend to the logic of consumption and marketable skills, platitudes about pursuing knowledge for its own sake can seem certifiably bananas. Even from the perspective of the collegiate bureaucracy, the thesis is useful primarily as another mode of assessment, a benchmark of student achievement thats legible and quantifiable. Its also a great parting reminder to parents that your senior learned and achieved something.
ButHow to Write a Thesisis ultimately about much more than the leisurely pursuits of college students. Writing and research manuals such as The Elements of Style,The Craft of Research, andTurabianoffer a vision of our best selves. They are exacting and exhaustive, full of protocols and standards that might seem pretentious, even strange. Acknowledging these rules, Eco would argue, allows the average person entry into a veritable universe of argument and discussion.How to Write a Thesis, then, isnt just about fulfilling a degree requirement. Its also about engaging difference and attempting a project that is seemingly impossible, humbly reckoning with the knowledge that anyone can teach us something. It models a kind of self-actualization, a belief in the integrity of ones own voice.
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A Guide to Thesis Writing That Is a Guide to Life
