dissertation-to-book

Plastic Bodies (Tom Sparrow) points us to a USEFUL ARTICLE in the Chronicle of Higher Education on how to turn your dissertation into a book.

It’s not bad advice, but there’s another method that is even simpler, if a bit riskier: write your dissertation as though you were writing a book in the first place. I did that for the simple reason that Alphonso Lingis (who had advised my M.A. some years earlier) strongly encouraged me to do so. I followed his advice, and in fact Tool-Being is the same thing as my dissertation of the same title, except that I rewrote every sentence for style and added the Dreyfus and Žižek sections while preparing the manuscript for press.

The “risky” part of doing it that way is that it may annoy your advisor just as it did mine. It didn’t seem quite loaded enough with citations and footnotes to be a dissertation. Let’s just say that the dissertation was much better received by the two readers than by the chair of the committee, who was Heideggerian to the core, though not a bad guy in the end.

I also had the advantage that DePaul was (and probably still is) a fairly hands-off environment when it comes to student work. They let us do our own thing, and to some extent I advised my own dissertation, which is exactly how I wanted it. Other circumstances may require different strategies.

next: to Venice

Packed a lot into one morning: rode the ferry boats a bit to and from the Asian side of the city while drinking their ultra-strong tea, which is one of the nicest things to do in Istanbul; then around the grounds of Topkapı Palace (the line for going in was much too long); then into the Hagia Sophia for the first time since 2002. Istanbul is booming with visitors today.

I’ll close this first stop in Istanbul (I have another overnight here in less than a week) with a “view from my hotel room” photo of the Blue Mosque. This room is almost embarrassing in its unexpected luxury. I feel like the Bolsheviks are likely to shoot me as I walk out the door.

good morning, Istanbul

It’s chilly, jacket weather. But it’s not really threatening rain as much as it looks in this photo. The feel is more foggy than rainy.