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Department of English and Linguistics

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Department of English and Linguistics

English Literature

Dissertation Guide

-857255524500

Revised September 2022

Writing a Dissertation

Contents

The Dissertation ..2

Word count... 2

Deadlines ..2

Finding your topic .3

Supervision ...4

Starting your research .5

Structuring your project 5

Writing the project .6

Presentation, Referencing, and Bibliography 7

How your work will be marked ...13

Final Points 14

1.The Dissertation

A dissertation is an extended piece of work that engages in a detailed and sustained analysis of a specific topic, theme, author, or theoretical idea across a number of interconnected chapters. Like any other assessed essay, these writing projects seek to test your ability to synthesise ideas, construct and present clear arguments, and utilise background reading. Unlike your other essays, however, the length of the dissertation, and the relative freedom permitted in choosing your topic, means that these projects specifically test your ability to undertake in-depth research and build an original argument based on your own ideas.

The University of Westminster English Literature section allows all Level 6 English Literature students to complete a dissertation on a topic of their own choice as part of their undergraduate studies. The dissertation module runs over both semesters in the final year and counts for 20 credits in total. (The code for this module is 6ELIT001W.) You should think of your dissertation as a project that takes an entire academic year to complete properly, and not something that you begin after Christmas (or even Easter) in the second semester.

100% of the mark for the module is given for the final dissertation itself. However, you will also be asked to a report on your progress and supervisions. This is designed to help you clarify the work ahead, to prioritise and manage the outstanding tasks and the writing up of your work. You will also be asked to submit a draft chapter of your dissertation in semester two. This gives you the opportunity for detailed feedback on a section of your writing.

This is a brief guide to the main issues in producing your dissertation; your supervisor will be able to help you with more detailed questions. There are a number of books on dissertation writing available in the library, several of them without needing to venture to the building itself. One e-book that is particularly recommended is Nigel Fabb and Alan Durant, How to Write Essays and Dissertations: A Guide for English Literature Students, 2nd edition (Harlow and London: Pearson Longman 2005).

2.Word Count

The dissertation must be 7,000 words in length. The word count includes quotations and footnotes, but not the bibliography. A 10% leeway is permissible if you come in under or over the word count. You should aim to remain within the limits, as any dissertation that is considerably longer or shorter will be penalised. Writing to a given limit is part of the discipline that you are practising in producing your dissertation, as in all your other coursework essays.

3.Deadline

The deadline for online submission of the dissertation is 1pm, Tuesday May 9th, 2023.

4. Finding your Topic

You are given a great deal of freedom when deciding the topic for your project. But be careful: sometimes the most original ideas do not make great dissertations. While it may sound counter-intuitive, the best topics for a longer piece of work tend to be very specific and focussed ones. A good topic will have well-defined boundaries that will allow you to encompass all your points and arguments within the space allowed. In other words, do not embark upon a history of Western thought, or the entire works of a single author.

Similarly, it is inadvisable to stray too far from the content of the English Literature degree as it is currently constructed. As a Single Honours student, for example, it may not be a good idea to begin a study of Soviet-era Latvian fiction if you have not previously studied it. A good starting point for choosing your topic is to look at the modules you have already taken and try to decide what material has interested you the most, and then find a topic based on this. You will have already got some way with that process during last years Level 5 literature tutorials.

We also require that you do not use only material that you have already studied on the course, or will be studying during your final year. For example, you should not do a dissertation on Women in Literature that uses only books that appear on taught modules, but you could still write on women in literature by expanding the range of texts that you refer to.

Generally speaking, topics take three principal forms:

Author analysis. Looking at the works of a single writer. This can be done either thematically (how a writer deals with a specific theme, such as love or death) across his or her work; or chronologically (how a writers work has developed throughout his or her career). Dissertation topics in this category might include An Analysis of Love in Shakespeares Comedies, or Thomas Hardy: From Victorian Fiction to the Beginnings of Modernism.

Thematic analysis. How a specific theme is dealt with in a variety of works. For example, you may wish to look at the idea of Empire in eighteenth-century poetry, or the representation of the male body in contemporary fiction and film. If you choose to do this kind of work, take care to set a boundary on your area of study.

Theoretical work. A piece of work that seeks to deal with one of the many theoretical ideas or problems that have been raised in the course of the degree. Such work can be purely theoretical (such as Can There Be an Ethics of Deconstruction?), or could bring theoretical work to bear on literary texts (A Psychoanalytic Reading of Three Novels by Virginia Woolf, for example).

Obviously, there are many variations on these principal approaches, and all are valid. What is most important is finding an approach that suits both your interests and your realistic expectations of being able to find enough to say on a topic. When you have thought of an area to study, you should then formulate a question that will help you to construct an argument. You should be able to state your question/argument in one sentence. For example:

It is my argument that Thomas Hardys fiction shows the transition from Victorian Realism to Modernism' OR it is my argument that Love is the most important element of Shakespeares comedies.

The topic has to be approved by the Dissertation module leaders. If you change your mind, you should inform the module leaders as this may mean a change of supervisor.

We do not guarantee that you will be able to undertake any topic that you wish; although you have a wide choice, it must be appropriate to the course and there must be someone available to supervise it.

5.Supervision

You will be assigned a supervisor for your project before the semester begins. This person will be the one whose expertise is best suited to the topic you choose.

There are three main stages to your project.

i.Initial proposal or plan. You will have produced this document at the end of the Level 5 tutorial. You will be contacted by your supervisor at the start of the third year in order to discuss the project with you. They will direct you towards useful reading and offer advice on how to proceed.

Supervision throughout the year. As you will see from the Supervision and Assessment Timetable on the Blackboard site for the module, there is a set structure to your supervisions and dates for submission of the progress report and the sample chapter. Please familiarise yourself with this information, because it is important that you work consistently within these guidelines in order to develop your work well. Make the best use of your supervision time. It is not helpful to see your supervisor if you have nothing to say, so do think about your project, working out the positive aspects and those that require help and guidance, so that you can receive specific feedback.

Writing up and submission of the final project. After your last supervision you will finish writing up your dissertation project. Your supervisor will have discussed with you the development of your work, and will have given you detailed feedback on a sample chapter. Thus, you should be able to work independently on finishing writing, redrafting, and polishing your argument. You are of course welcome to contact your supervisor if you have any problems.

6.Starting your Research

When you begin your project, there are some simple steps you can take that will make the whole process easier. Preparation and organisation are the keys to managing your research effectively.

Once you have decided upon your topic, you can then begin your research. It is a good idea to begin by compiling a reading list of all the useful sources in your particular area of study. Obviously, a library keyword search is the best place to start looking, but there are other resources you should use, such as the footnotes and bibliographies of books and invaluable electronic resources such as the MLA Bibliography a complete list of all books and articles written on topics in the humanities for around the last 15 years. If you are not sure how to conduct searches for articles on your topic, ask the librarians to show you how to do this.

When you have compiled your reading list, it is time to begin reading and making notes.

Every time you come across something that you think may be useful at a later date, make sure you keep a note of where you found it the record will be invaluable when you are writing up.

Write down the name of the author, the title of the text, its place of publication, the publisher and the date of publication, along with the page numbers of any useful quotes. You will need all this information when you are referencing your sources at a later date, so get into the habit of making a record of it from the start, otherwise you may find yourself spending a great deal of time trying to track down the source of a crucial quotation.

While you should aim to have a good reading list, there are no rules about how much you should read, or how many texts you should include, or how much theoretical material you should use. All of these will vary according to the topic you have chosen but in general terms you should avoid introductory guides and try to get a good coverage of your subject. This will include recently published material, so check the dates of publication in your bibliography to be sure that you have up-to-date work in the area. You should consult your supervisor about the material that is appropriate to your piece of work.

A reminder about plagiarism: You should be familiar with the proper ways to give acknowledgement by now, and it is crucial that you do not do anything that brings suspicion of plagiarism on your work. If you have any doubts at all about this, seek guidance from your supervisor.

7.Structuring your project

It is inadvisable to begin your work at the introduction and just keep writing until you reach the word count limit. Ideally, a dissertation consists of an introduction, three to five central chapters, a conclusion, notes, and a bibliography. When thought of in this way, it is easier to see the project as a series of interconnected aspects that share a common theme.

This approach will make the project much more manageable. When you have written an entire draft of the dissertation, you can then go back to individual chapters or sections and add phrases to bring the whole piece together by signalling things that are yet to come, and referring back to discussions you have already undertaken. Phrases such as as we have seen and as shall be argued below give the work a sense of cohesion, of each chapter or section belonging to a larger whole.

8.Writing your project

i.Style. One of the most important aspects of writing is clarity. Express your ideas as clearly as you can. You do not have to use complicated sentences or long words for your writing to be intelligent or sophisticated. Again, there are no rules about this, but a long single sentence of five or six lines is usually rather more difficult to follow than the same words broken up into two or three shorter sentences.

Also bear in mind, however, that pages and pages of very short sentences give the impression of journalism, and do not help to give your writing fluency. Vary the pace of your writing, using a mixture of longer and shorter sentences where they are appropriate to what you are saying. Try to write naturally, and read over aloud what you have written to make sure that it makes sense.

ii.Think always of relevance and coherence. Is what you are saying relevant to the topic and is it relevant to the point you are making in the paragraph? Is your sentence coherent in itself and does it have a logical connection to the rest of the paragraph? Are the paragraphs coherent with one another?

Use quotations sensibly. Always be sure that the quotations are relevant and useful, and dont leave them as the last word always respond with your own ideas. Make sure that there is a good balance between quotation and your own words. A very rough rule is that your own response to the quotation should be at least as long again as the quotation itself, i.e. if the extract you quote is four lines long, then you should have at least four lines to say about it. Where you use quotations, shorter ones (two lines or less) can be included in the body of the text within quotation marks and longer quotations (more than two lines) should be indented and without quotation marks. For example:

If, as Kant contends, the sublime discloses our reasons ability to succeed where our imagination would fail, then the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation.1 Kant repeats this idea of vocation in a paragraph that invokes Burke and connects the meaning of the experience to a moral sense:

Hence sublimity is contained not in any thing of nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious of our superiority to nature within us, and thereby nature outside us, as far as it influences us.2

The sublime, Kant argues, reveals us as moral creatures. Without question, this is a more substantive claim than the one on behalf of which Burke explains the experience.

Try to avoid repetition, especially in the conclusion. Your conclusion should aim to be more than just a re-statement of what you have already done. If you think of your project as the assembling of evidence in support of your central argument, then the conclusion should bring this evidence together and show how it answers the question you have set yourself.

9. Presentation, Referencing, and Bibliography

It is important that all these details are correct you will lose marks for poor or incorrect presentation. It may seem picky but a poorly presented dissertation suggests that you have been careless in other ways too, and the ability to produce precise documents is a transferable skill that will be useful to you in whatever work you do after university.

Presentation

Your work should be double spaced, except for longer inset quotations, which should be single spaced.

There are other presentation elements that you shouldnt forget. For example:

The titles of books are shown in italics (e.g. Heart of Darkness).

The titles of poems, short stories in collections, or chapters in books are shown in quotation marks. Sometimes a poem and the title of the collection may be the same, but they should be presented differently (e.g. The Whitsun Weddings in Larkins The Whitsun Weddings). Please note that some longer poems are books in their own right and so should appear in italics (e.g. Spensers The Faerie Queene; Miltons Paradise Lost; Eliots The Waste Land).

All foreign words appear in italics (e.g. coup detat, Bildungsroman).

Referencing

As with all your work, you must give proper acknowledgement to any sources you have used.

There are two ways to reference your work:

1. The Chicago system (where you use footnotes)

2. The Harvard system (which includes references in the text).

The Chicago system requires you to add a footnote at the end of each sentence where you have either quoted from a text or alluded to the work of another author. Footnotes can appear at the bottom of each page, or as endnotes at the end of the text. In a dissertation, footnotes should be numbered consecutively within each chapter, and begin again in each new chapter.

The Harvard system requires you to cite your source in an abbreviated form in parentheses at the end of each sentence as needed. A full bibliography of works cited is then placed at the end of the dissertation. Examples of the two methods are demonstrated in the following pages.

Bibliography

You must include a full bibliography at the end of your written piece. The bibliography should contain all the books that you have consulted, even if you have not quoted from them directly.

If you have used the Chicago system, the bibliography should be set out alphabetically using the same form as the footnotes (but without the specific page numbers from footnotes and with the surname of the author first), e.g.

Footnote: Margaret Hughes, A London Girl at the Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp.3442.

Bibliography: Hughes, Margaret. A London Girl at the Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).

If you have used the Harvard system the same information appears, but in a different order, e.g. Hughes, Margaret (1978) A London Girl at the Millennium. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Example Presentation: Chicago Footnote style

Lawrence Venuti has written that,

During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the sale of monastic and crown lands, coupled with high rates of inflation may have been most important in stimulating the rise of the merchant classes.

As the redistribution of wealth from the landowners to the entrepreneurial classes began to take shape, so a series of social contradictions became evident. There was a marked concern amongst the social commentators of the time at the speed with which merchants and traders were quickly surpassing the nobility in terms of economic power and status. In addition, the laws of primogeniture that decreed that the eldest son would inherent all his father's wealth meant that many young men of good birth were moving down the social scale as soon as they tried to make their way in the world. The economic conditions of seventeenthcentury London gradually substituted the importance of rank with the ability to earn, thereby placing an increased emphasis on independence and the responsibility of the individual to serve his or her own interests. The competitive loners of city comedy, then, can be seen as participants in an unprecedented period of social mobility that was naturally at its most pronounced in the centres of commerce. A madly accelerated vision of this social climbing appears in dumb show in the Introduction to Michaelmas Term, in which a 'fellow poor is given in the space of three terms all the trappings of a decadent civic lifestyle, apparel, a page, and a pander (I.i.34).

Example Presentation: Harvard style

Lawrence Venuti has written that,

During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the sale of monastic and crown lands, coupled with high rates of inflation may have been most important in stimulating the rise of the merchant classes (Venuti 1985: 103).

As the redistribution of wealth from the landowners to the entrepreneurial classes began to take shape, so a series of social contradictions became evident. There was a marked concern amongst the social commentators of the time at the speed with which merchants and traders were quickly surpassing the nobility in terms of economic power and status. In addition, the laws of primogeniture that decreed that the eldest son would inherent all his father's wealth meant that many young men of good birth were moving down the social scale as soon as they tried to make their way in the world (see Gibbons 1980: 1833). The economic conditions of seventeenthcentury London gradually substituted the importance of rank with the ability to earn, thereby placing an increased emphasis on independence and the responsibility of the individual to serve his or her own interests. The competitive loners of city comedy, then, can be seen as participants in an unprecedented period of social mobility that was naturally at its most pronounced in the centres of commerce (Wells 1993: 38). A madly accelerated vision of this social climbing appears in dumb show in the Introduction to Michaelmas Term, in which a 'fellow poor is given in the space of three terms all the trappings of a decadent civic lifestyle, apparel, a page, and a pander (Middleton 1995: I.i.34).

(A full bibliography of Works Cited is then appended to the end of the essay)

10. How your work will be marked

Your work will be marked by two members of staff: one will be the person who supervised you, the other will be another member of the department. Each person marks the work independently. Both markers will then write a short report and compare their grades in order to agree on the mark that your work should be given. If there is disagreement between the markers then the dissertation is sent to the external examiner (a member of staff from another university who is appointed to make sure that standards of marking are the same in all universities) who will adjudicate.

The criteria on which the dissertation will be marked are these:

Appropriateness of topic

Is the topic well-chosen? Is the field of inquiry sensibly defined in terms of breadth?

Evidence of research

Is there evidence of a range of reading in primary and secondary texts? Have sources other than obvious ones been consulted?

Structure

Is the work well structured? Does it have an introduction and conclusion? Is the work divided into appropriate sections?

Style

Is it well-written? Is it clear and interesting to read? Are spelling and grammar correct? Is the vocabulary appropriate?

Originality of approach and argument

Does the dissertation show evidence of original research and independent thinking?

Coherence of argument

Is the argument clear? Is it properly introduced and defined? Is there enough signposting throughout to enable the reader to follow the argument easily? Does each section read coherently? Is the argument summarised in the conclusion?

Use of secondary material

Is secondary material well used? Is it relevant to the topic and to the specific points being made? Is there a good balance between quotation and commentary?

Presentation

Is the dissertation properly presented according to the guidelines? Has it been checked for typing errors?

Referencing

Have all quotations been fully referenced? Is the referencing system consistent throughout?

Bibliography

Is there a bibliography? Is it properly presented and consistent with the referencing system?

Final Points

For further details of how the process of your work will be structured, and how your work will be submitted, please familiarise yourself with the information given on the Blackboard site for the module. If you have any further questions, please contact your supervisor, or the Module Leaders.

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