I am currently serving on a dissertation committee that has raised a number of questions for me about what role the literature review should play in a dissertation. This has come up because the student has been overly-thorough. Rather than describing the literature underlying the ideas of the dissertation by drawing from a few key sources and, perhaps, alluding to and citing others, this student is trying to fully flesh out every single argument and all of the ideas that argument entails. This leads to an intro + lit review that is more than 150 pages long. This is not typical in my field. At all.
So, this raises questions. What is the purpose of the literature review? What is the proper approach to providing feedback when the review is too thorough (as in, I keep losing the line of argument and have long ago forgotten the research questions)? Do we encourage this because it shows a high level of rigor and careful analysis of the existing literature or do we discourage it because it is in no way authentic to the work of a scholar in the field? I am torn about how to make sense of this...
2 comments:
hot mess. You should not have to read all of that!
I just submitted a lit review to a journal and it was 50 pages double spaced, so a literature review for a dissertation should be way shorter than 50 pages!!!! And definitely not 150.
Part of the goal in learning to write a dissertation should be learning to make an argument relatively concisely in balance with being thorough, right?
BrightStar, that is how I think of it and the standard that I hold my own advisees to. However, I am not chairing this dissertation which leaves me less freedom. Also, the chair has already insisted that it be cut from its original length (It was apparently MUCH longer in earlier drafts, if you can imagine.) So, I question how much of the norms of the field should drive the lens through which I view this and how much we should let the students "own it". I'm not sure I have a lot of leeway in this dissertation - but I think it is making me much more deliberate in my efforts to focus my own doc student whose entire proposal will be less than 80 pages (which is still pretty long, in my opinion).
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