Making it Matter: Choosing a Thesis Topic
In English classes, we often talk about the stakes of a text. This is a way of getting at the questions that drive the author or the characters, and then moving beyond those questions to understand why the answer matters, why the question itself matters, and what kind of critical analysis can connect the two. Thinking about stakes is a useful exercise when considering a thesis topic, too.
To stake means to assertively define and defend a position. A stake, as a noun, is a share or an interest in a situation or business. A stake can also be a strong post, something that supports or marks a boundary. A thesis topic needs to be something with stakes. In other words, the subject has to matter, to implicate and be implicated by big questions and ideas. A thesis topic must assertively defend a position (or multiple positions), and it has to encompass a territory large enough to sustain continued interest. And I, as the thesis writer, must have a stake in the stakes of my topic.
As I brainstormed ideas and worked on my English thesis application last fall, I was thinking a lot about Marina Keegan, a writer who died tragically young in 2012. She had just graduated from Yale, and her book, The Opposite of Loneliness, was released after her death. There’s a quote from Keegan that I think of often. It expresses how sure she’d been about what she wanted to do, even though the way to do it remained unclear. “I’ve decided I’m going to be a writer,” she told one of her friends. “Like, a real one. With my life.” At the same time I was brainstorming thesis topics, I was also in the process of deciding to be a writer — a real one, with my life, even if I didn’t (and still don’t) know exactly what that meant.
Deciding to write a thesis
When I first thought about writing a thesis, I was fresh off a summer of doing things I didn’t really want to be doing (namely, catering at nights and an internship in media relations that cemented my desire to do journalism). As I settled back into the rhythms of life at school, the idea of doing a thesis grew in my imagination as an antidote to the lingering dissatisfaction I’d felt in Boston. A thesis, I thought, would be a project whose scale and depth were almost unimaginably large. It would be something I could hold up at the end of college, proof that I had focused my energy to create new ideas. Most of all, I imagined that a thesis could be a commitment to myself, a tangible way to enact my decision to be a writer.
Writing a thesis felt like a good way to test my resolve, to see if I had what I thought it took to become a writer: the self-discipline, the resiliency, the technical skills, the sort of mind that could create a bounty of new ideas and articulate them all. Maybe it was unfair of me to make my thesis the litmus test for qualities I was just beginning to develop. But I was eager to push myself, and I wanted to take on a big project. When one of my favorite professors suggested I apply to the English Honors program, not knowing it was already on my mind, I felt even more certain it was something I should do. For me, the intrigue of writing a thesis was what drew me to apply, not a vested interested in a particular topic. I knew what the basic framework would be (research, write, submit to committee), but it was just a skeleton. I had no idea what the content of my project should be, what the flesh and bone and muscle of my thesis would be composed of.
Finding a topic
The process for applying to write a thesis in the English Department at the University of Michigan requires a writing sample, two faculty references, and a statement of purpose outlining a thesis proposal. As the deadline to apply approached, I began a brainstorming document that eventually became filled with possible thesis ideas. I drew from English classes I’d taken, from book reviews that caught my attention, from themes in movies and television shows that made me want to do research, from episodes of This American Life I couldn’t stop thinking about. I looked through old papers and short stories I’d written and tried to decide what made me most excited about writing and reading. I knew it wasn’t enough to find a topic that seemed fruitful and interesting — I needed to find something that was interesting to me, fruitful because I was eager to make it so.
My brainstorming file was a mish-mash of interests and influences. I was in a Modernist poetry class when I was working on my application, and some of the Depression-era poems had really caught my attention. I was also drawn to the connections between science writing and literature found in many nineteenth century British works, a topic I’d learned about in an English class I took winter of my freshman year. As I was going back through my assignments in the various classes I’d taken up until that point, I was most intrigued by the papers I’d written for a course about the Rust Belt. I’d found nearly every book and short story from the class totally intriguing. We read Crooked River Burning by Mark Winegardner, Look At Me by Jennifer Egan, Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon by Dean Bakopoulos, and The Turner House by Angela Flournoy. Even though we didn’t read Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, a quote from the book adorned the syllabus.
I’d loved the class, and I remembered how much I enjoyed the material as I re-read my old essays. Identifying my interests was a logical first step toward figuring out what I wanted to write about for my thesis, but I knew I needed to keep pushing myself. What did I find interesting about Midwestern literature? What themes and conflicts make the material important? I wanted to understand why I was so drawn to this genre, because I knew I needed that information to figure out exactly what I wanted to focus on for my thesis. After doing some reflection, I realized that part of what I liked about Midwestern literature was the pleasure of reading about familiar places and people. I grew up in Philadelphia, but my mom is from Michigan and I grew up visiting relatives in the Detroit area. After my grandfather died, when my grandmother moved away from Michigan to live with my cousins, she ordered chocolate-cherry bread from Zingerman’s mail-order catalogue and bought cases of Vernor’s to make Florida feel like home. Michigan accents remind me of my mom and my aunt. When I graduated from high school, my mom moved back to Michigan. Even though I’ve only lived in Michigan for three years — and even though I still feel that Philadelphia is my hometown — I like reading about the state that my family has called home for nearly a century.
When I chose to write about Jeffrey Eugenides’s books Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides, I was aware of the ways both books reflect certain aspects of my family’s experiences in Michigan. The Virgin Suicides tells the story of five sisters growing up in a suburb of Detroit in the 1970s; my mom was one of three sisters and they, too, grew up in a suburb of Detroit in the 1970s. Middlesex centers around an immigrant family living in Detroit and then a suburb; my family lived in a Polish enclave when they first moved to Detroit. The narrator of Middlesex is about the same age as my mom, growing up in a suburb just a few miles from the one where my mom and her family lived. I realized that my personal connection to the books wasn’t just a fun coincidence — it was an integral part of why I was so interested in studying these texts.
Making the choice
I’m sure I could have found myself swept away by another topic, one that had less obvious parallels or connections to the easily available facts of my life. Having stakes in the stakes could have manifested in a variety of ways. It could have meant emotional attachment, or persistent curiosity fed by a childhood memory, or a fascination sparked by a movie or a dream. Regardless of how and why it emerged, my connection to my thesis topic has helped me stay interested and motivated. I know how this sounds: I love my thesis! I’m so motivated to write about it! And I am, usually, but this isn’t the story of how I found the perfect topic. As I started writing my thesis, I realized there was no perfect idea — there was only the one I chose, and what happened from there was up to me.
Sometimes, when faced with a choice that has many possibilities, I get into a rut of thinking that there is one right choice — a right college to attend, a right major to declare, a right person to ask out on a date, a right class to take or friend to make or thing to cook for dinner. I always want to make the correct choice. What will make me into the kind of person I want to become? What will teach me the things I need to know to open my mind to new possibilities? But my logic is flawed, because often there are many right choices. The truth is that choosing a thesis topic was a little bit of a shot in the dark. Even though I did all the right things — consulting with professors, making sure the topic was broad enough to support months of research, testing my emotional waters to see if I was excited about my proposal — there was still no guarantee my topic would continue to be engaging to me, or that it would branch out and then narrow in ways that would be conducive to thesis work. I had a better chance at satisfaction and success than the imaginary version of myself who’d done no prior preparation, but my fear that I’d get bored or stuck was (and is) legitimate. Sometimes I’m bored. Often I’m stuck. Even when it’s not particularly thrilling, writing a thesis is still something I’m glad I’m doing. In a weird way, the bad parts don’t make me want to write a thesis less — they make me want to write one more. If it was easy, I don’t think I’d be learning as much.
Reader, if you’re in the process of choosing an English thesis topic, I’d ask you to think about what books you just love. The writing, the characters, the setting — what books have something that makes you crazy about literature every time you read them? I’m talking about the kind of book you could read over and over, each time finding new things to obsess over. The kind of book you want to talk about forever. Now, when I’m neck-deep in my thesis, remembering my initial fascination with The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex helps me stay engaged with my work. That means going back to the source material and re-reading for pleasure, not for quotes or connections.
Staking out my stakes
The last few sentences of The Virgin Suicides, for example, are really heartbreakingly beautiful, the kind of writing that makes you sit down and take a deep breath after reading: “It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.” Which, well. Wow.
Finding out what pieces of writing I wanted to center my thesis around seemed like an impossibly intimidating process last fall, but only because I’d overlooked the fact that my own investment in a project didn’t have to be something I could easily explain. In fact, I think it might even be better if it’s slightly hard to articulate why I find Eugenides’s writing is so moving and compelling. I could say it’s the setting or the characters. I could say it’s the way he constructs time and identity, or the liveliness of his dialogue. I could say it’s because I love commas, and he uses lots of them. It’s all of those things, but it’s also something else — it’s the enigma of why I like these books so much. I’m interested in finding out why I’m interested. My stakes might be a little selfish: I want to learn more about myself by learning about the things that grab my attention. When I think about how I chose my topic, what strikes me is not the memory of my first interactions with the texts, but my unknown future with them, which stretches on and on, driving me forward into all the delicious contradictions and intricacies of literature that made me want to write an English thesis in the first place.
