Doctoral Dissertation Prospectus Example

A sample prospectus, written recently by Angela Silva, appears below. Students should note, however, that in the humanities, different projects require different kinds of description ---Angela's approach suits her needs and may not work for yours. 

Be advised: prospecti do not need to be "arty," with fancy introductions and quotations. The point is to be clear and describe the project in its simplest terms: thesis (or framing question); justification of the project (describe its relevance); and describe each chapter's basic structure and purpose. (Note: due to web publication technicalities, the bibliography may not appear in exact MLA format.)

Doctoral Dissertation Prospectus
Angela Silva
Professor Ganter, Mentor
February15, 2005

Title
From Metaphysics to Commodity: Transformations of Boredom from Brontë to West

A statement like “I’m bored” may elicit responses ranging from the defensive to the empathetic – but rarely would the statement, today, warrant serious concern for the well-being of the complainer.   In fact, the term boredom, as a signifier of psychic suffering, has had a relatively short-lived existence, enduring a very swift deterioration to the status of cliché.  This is why it may seem surprising when scholarship maintains that boredom is the collective condition of our time.  Because of its profitable application in marketing a wide variety of commodities, services, and entertainment, or because of its frequent articulation as the cause of everything from bungee jumping to substance abuse, it is easy to miss that boredom is often proclaimed as the universal cause of the violence or death that ranges from teenage delinquency to retirement age suicide.  But because of the term’s contemporary trivialized dimension as a brief malaise with a foreseeable end, the severity of an often-tragic reality is usually overlooked.

Boredom theory encompasses fields such as psychology, sociology, pedagogy, philosophy, theology, economy, and of course, literature and cultural studies.  This dissertation proposes to draw from some of these fields in order to examine the relationship between boredom and the gender, geographical, and cognitive issues that emerge in several important texts of the mid-nineteenth an early twentieth century.  It engages with scholarship by Siegfried Wenzel, Reinhard Kuhn, and Seán Desmond Healy on the shaping of a cultural perspective from which to view literary texts.  In particular, it builds on the scholarship of Patricia Meyer Spacks, whose influential work Boredom: A Literary History of a State of Mind, focused on the literary expression of boredom since its predominance in the eighteenth century.  Drawing on Spacks’s insights, this project examines a different set of texts by English, Russian, and American authors in order to engage in the enduring controversies surrounding their works by using boredom as an alternative category of interpretation.

This will be a literary examination of a cultural phenomenon.  One of the polarities of the boring – “the interesting” – for example, is in a similar aesthetic realm with “the beautiful” or “the sublime.”  Discussions of “the interesting” in literature can feed much scholarship, especially as it is implied in the act of writing, in the author’s aesthetic choices, and in the artist’s obligation to interest the audience.  But it can also say much about art as a forestalling of boredom and the artist’s reluctance – or intention to bore.  However, discussions of boredom are not only limited to the aesthetic as Reinhard Kuhn explains:

"Any attempt at writing what is commonly known as ‘history of ideas’ that is based to a large extent on the analysis of works of literature runs the risk of seeing in the very matter under analysis nothing but a vehicle for ideas […yet the critic] is perfectly justified in using literature as a mirror of man’s problems and of his attempts to come to terms with them."  (4)

And so, this project, too, will look at literature as a “vehicle” and “mirror” of humanity’s confrontation with boredom, at some expense of the aesthetic, in an attempt to contribute to the growing academic work of cultural studies.  It is my hope that a cultural emphasis will demonstrate how the western world articulated its boredom through the literature it used to express itself.  On a more ambitious level, however, a literary study of this cultural phenomenon may “provide a new key for the interpretation of literature” (Kuhn 4) especially in elucidating the resolution of age-old literary debates.  Thus, following Kuhn, Wenzel, Healy, and Spacks, I hope that boredom ultimately emerges as a “new key” for unlocking some of the enduring debates surrounding Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1848), Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1901), and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939).  My intention will be to see if boredom theory can inform and elucidate the controversies surrounding these three canonical texts, which, to my knowledge, have never been seen through the lenses of boredom.

In the preface, I will briefly trace the development of boredom as a term and concept and validate its importance as a literary category of interpretation.  The verb to bore, which only came into existence in 1768, generated, by 1864, the noun boredom, with all the psychological ramifications that rapidly disappeared into the obscurity of today.  This is not to say, though, that the English-speaking world was not bored before the eighteenth century.  It was; although to a lesser extent, and it expressed its boredom with words such as tedium, spleen, and ennui.  However, even though there are glimpses of western humanity’s boredom since antiquity, as Reinhard Kuhn has demonstrated in his pivotal book, and in the context of early Christianity, as Siegfried Wenzel has identified in his work, boredom erupted as a widespread complaint only in the eighteenth century.  And although Patricia Meyer Spacks and Seán Desmond Healy illustrate examples of the modern concept in the Renaissance with writers such as Petrarch and Donne, and later with Pascal and La Rochefoucauld, boredom, they insist, did not become a ubiquitous complaint until the eighteenth century where it found its modern voice through writers such as Madame du Deffand, Goethe, and especially Samuel Johnson who expostulated on the concept’s ethical dimension.  By the nineteenth century, the despair and destruction resulting from boredom had been normalized in the western world, not only, as I will show, by Emily Brontë, but also in the works of such writers as Byron, Austen, Dickens, James, Melville, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Chateaubriand, and especially Kierkegaard who wrote that “boredom is the root of all evil” (qtd. in Healy 25).  Others, like Nietzsche, in contrast, recognized the creative and constructive value of boredom:

"For thinkers and all sensitive spirits boredom is that disagreeable “windless calm” of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds.  They have to bear it and must wait for its effect on them.  Precisely this is what lesser natures cannot achieve by any means."  (qtd. in Spacks 2).

According to Nietzsche, boredom leads to “a happy voyage” for higher natures that can bear its effects.  In the early twentieth century, boredom is not only explicitly discussed by writers such as Elton Mayo, Martin Heidegger, and George Bernanos (Healy 34-35), but it also emerges as an assumed condition with writers such as T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein (Spacks 234-248), and of course Anton Chekhov and Nathanael West, as I will demonstrate.

The prevalence of boredom in the eighteenth century, according to Healy, was caused by a growing metaphysical void.  Spacks agrees that boredom’s pervasiveness in the eighteenth century had to do with the decline of Christianity in the western world and proposes a few more contributing factors; namely, capitalism and the emergence of leisure as a separate sphere; the rise of the individual and her inner life, rights, and entitlements; and a shifting morality positing blame away from a narcissistic self.  On a cognitive level, boredom according to Healy is caused by the weakening of a human skill that Spacks identifies as attention (a post-sensory faculty) and perception (a meta-cognitive skill).  Ethically speaking, boredom has to do with what the eighteenth century considered a moral insufficiency of the individual; what the nineteenth century deemed a social fatality; and what the twentieth century attributed as a blame residing with the various forms of “other.”  All four scholars of boredom in literature agree that the cultural result of boredom is the loss of personal meaning.

Also, because of the concept’s new but rapid development, because of its confusion with its contemporary trivialized dimension, and because of the issues that have impeded scholarly agreement on a literary definition, it will become necessary to reconcile scholarly differences, by defining boredom as a chronic disquiet or despair, arising from the incapacity of the individual to discover personal meaning or challenge, and manifesting as “hyperboredom” (Healy) i.e., immanently or externally induced kinetic or static manifestations.  Finally, I will provide a brief examination of a very rudimentary articulation of boredom in the theater of antiquity so that I will be able to diachronically demonstrate the psychic progression of boredom and briefly bridge the distance to the first chapter on Emily Brontë’s response to what she can only describe as “an aspect of abstracted sadness” (Brontë 227).

By the time Emily Brontë writes her novel, a gendered response to boredom is apparent in nineteenth century England.  A contemporary subjectivity examining nineteenth century British women may read the socially attributable imposition of boredom in the female condition; but nineteenth century women did not understand their boredom as such.  Although they understood boredom as a problem threatening their sex, they perceived it as resistible by individual effort and imagination.  Thus, Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse, for example, defies her boredom by inventing imaginative plots, according to Patricia Meyer Spacks.  A similar imaginative resistance can be identified with the younger Cathy, in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.  However, an alternative, more impulsive response to boredom is represented by Catherine Earnshaw when she dramatizes the nineteenth century fear of the “excitable” woman who is susceptible to passionate temptations.  I will be engaging with the 150 year old controversy over Brontë’s ethical vision in order to suggest that the novel should neither be defined as Romantic nor Victorian because Wuthering Heights recognizes both the passionate and the reasonable and makes the tension between the two forces the central subject of the novel.  I will be arguing that, in so doing, it not only dramatizes the destruction that can befall an “excitable” woman, but also reveals the boredom that necessarily envelopes the woman of reason and restraint.  This is not the case for nineteenth century men, on the other hand.  Their boredom was not the normal condition of their existence and so was perceived as a sign of the deteriorating times.  For Victorian male novelists, boredom was rendered as a critique against a frivolous society.  Ultimately, for both sexes, even though the “exciting” and the “interesting” are dangerous, the boring is hardly welcomed.

In the next chapter, I will examine the Russian confrontation with ckyka that may have contributed to the innovations of Anton Chekhov’s play Three Sisters in turn of the century Russia.  It is no surprise that much Chekhov scholarship over the last hundred years has emphasized his pessimism.  In the much analyzed ending of what many critics call his masterpiece play, the characters, whose desires for happiness end in frustration, call for an explanation, a revelation of their purpose, the meaning of their existence.  The humanist promises to which the characters cling at the end of the play are of little consolation as they prepare to endure an even more profound boredom they are to face in their immediate future.  They hold on to each other, determined – not to live – but to stay alive – and to suffer defenselessly the boredom of their present.  However, as Anton Chekhov reveals in his letters, his artistic intention was to make his audience “look at [themselves]” and “see how badly and boringly [they] live” (qtd. in Tufts 65).  His purpose, thus, encourages an analysis of his play from the perspective of boredom as a literary category of interpretation.  Boredom, for Chekhov, is not the human doom as it is later for postmodern writers.  For him, it signals an elevated subjectivity threatened by the oblivion of ignorance.  A world devoid of boredom implies for Chekhov oblivion as the human condition; a topic much better suited to a truly pessimist writer, which Chekhov is not.  Thus, Chekhov puts boredom on stage in Three Sisters to suit his realist goals in announcing boredom as the cause of the suffering of his time.  But, as his early penname, “Man without a Spleen” suggests, there is some recourse for humanity from the boredom that it suffers which a careful unpacking of his play reveals.  Despite the brooding “dreadful boredom” (Sisters 1430), a remedy does emerge.  Can alleviation from boredom lead to happiness and ontological purpose?  That is another question; one Chekhov carefully poses to himself in order to ensure, as he asserts “the correct formulation of a problem” (qtd. in Matlaw 272); but which he has no artistic interest in answering.  I will try to challenge the criticism that presupposes negativity in Chekhov’s “actionless plot” by suggesting that Chekhov was inventing a realistic device that was closely tied to the themes that concerned him, as it was not in the “dramatic” events of his plays, but in the physical actions of his characters that their mental inaction was revealed.  I will be arguing that a close reading of Three Sisters from the perspective of boredom as an interpretive category reveals glimpses of the importance of mental industry as a weapon against the kind of boredom that is not symptomatic of Seasonal Affective Disorder; a disorder that usually begins in October and ends by March, and common in extreme northern latitudes in which the winter is longer, harsher, and darker.

Whereas the claim of boredom in the eighteenth century signaled spiritual deficiencies to be combated by individual spiritual effort; and whereas in the nineteenth century boredom was deemed a consequence of social deterioration requiring secular effort, responsibility for remedy lay, for both centuries, with the individual. A nineteenth century subjectivity, for example, could remedy the affliction by exerting self-discipline toward the achievement of proper feeling and the discovery of communal interest (Spacks).  Individual responsibility for remedy is still apparent in the early twentieth century, even though remedy is more elusive as boredom is now a consequence of a fragmented and alienated subjectivity.  Boredom remains an ethical category of interpretation even though responsibility is not assigned to an emotional incapacity for proper feeling as it was in the previous century; instead, boredom figures as an assumed and trivialized condition for its sufferers who do not recognize its condensed ethical implications.  It no longer reveals and emotional inability but a mental one.  Boredom registers the incapacity to discriminate.  It reveals mental limitations that impede the adequate perception of an ethical problem.  As such, an individual may be immoral because of improper feeling but not because of insufficient perception or awareness as it had been in the past.  What is more, an immoral individual may not be bored as is the case with Gilbert Osmond, according to Spacks who recognizes modernist qualities in Henry James’s novel A Portrait of a Lady, and who identifies Osmond’s feigned boredom as merely an aristocratic pose.  In short, boredom, in the early twentieth century, remains an ethical category of interpretation for modernist writers, signaling an ethical crisis and suggesting the urgency of individual mental effort for its remedy.

This is the cross-cultural concern that I hope to demonstrate in the final chapter of this dissertation within the context of Nathanael West’s America.  While moral figures are just as vulnerable to boredom in modernist literature, immoral characters, like Osmond or Chekhov’s Solyony, and amoral characters, like Homer Simpson in West’s The Day of the Locust are not necessarily bored.  Although Homer is morally inadequate, he is, nonetheless, the only character in West’s novella explicitly described as not bored.  I will be arguing that Homer is not bored because he, unlike the bored masses, possesses “the mental equipment for leisure” (West 177), revealing West’s specific understanding of boredom as a condition exacerbated by the weakening of cognitive skills which do not recognize interest or personal meaning in a world perceived as boring.  Homer employs the mental effort to struggle against boredom, making those around him ethically accountable for the remedy and alleviation of their boredom.  I will be detracting from the criticism that posits Nathanael West’s novella as a postmodern work.  Homer is not doomed to the irremediable boredom that will soon plague a powerless postmodern world to which West does not subscribe; a world with which I will briefly conclude my project, as I point to areas for future boredom research.

In postmodern works, according to Spacks, humanity is not only doomed to suffer the boredom of an alienated world, but it is also powerless to affect any kind of remedy.  Inner resources, nature, and art no longer hold any power or remedial force for humanity as they had in the past.  Boredom may function as an aesthetic, intellectual, or emotional category of interpretation, but not an ethical one, as individual attempts at combat are thwarted.  It is no longer the fault of the individual living in a decadent society; rather, it is an indication of society’s insufficiency in nourishing the individual who vainly struggles.  However, although Spacks analyzes texts that are explicit about postmodern boredom, it is also important to consider the discourse that cannot recognize boredom as the cause of suffering.  As it seems inconceivable that “I’m bored” could be the cause of so much destruction, boredom, again, searches to name itself, often fallaciously as “madness” like in Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl.”  The poem and the Beat movement would make more cultural sense if the first line of Ginsberg’s poem would be read as “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by” boredom.  John Clellon Holmes tries to “isolate” in his essay “the common element” and the “peculiar quality of mind” that he and the Beat generation had in common.  He recognizes their distinctness in their immediate attraction to “madness, drugs, religious ecstasies, dissipation and amorality” but admits that they could not explain why they were so attracted to these experiences (628).  Perhaps the most striking feature of American society in the 1950’s and early 1960’s was the miraculous economic growth that resulted from WWII.  According to Alan Brinkley, the economy grew nearly ten times as fast as the population in the thirty years after the war.  Even though that growth was not equally distributed, it affected most of society.  The average American in 1960 had over 20 percent more purchasing power than in 1945, and two times more than the 1920’s.  Brinkley maintains that Americans “had achieved the highest standard of living of any society in the history of the world” (779).  This complacent generation, which came to be known as the “silent generation,” for the most part, conformed to the values of its society.  However, there was the restless minority represented by the Beats – and not only.  If post World War II American society was the most prosperous society in the history of the world, why, then, were some of its members, and especially some from affluent, suburban neighborhoods, so compelled to destroy and self-destruct?  That is precisely the question that director Nicholas Ray and writer Stewart Stern asked themselves after reading the newspaper headlines that inspired the 1955 film Rebel without a Cause.  Ray’s intention was to identify the cause of the unprecedented adolescent rebellion that was not political, social, or intellectual as it had been for the Beats.  When Jimmy in Rebel asks “Why do we do this?” meaning the chicken run, the answer is “We have to do something, now don’t we?”  The film just cannot find a cause other then Albert Camus’s “I revolt, therefore I am” according to Bernard Eisenschitz (233).  The causes, in fact, have much to do with boredom theory.  The times are, indeed, reminiscent of Nietzsche’s “windless calm” that seeks the storm.  This is a predicament that circumvents not only youth, but also maturity when it practices the adolescent liberty of exercising minimal mental effort not only for work but also for leisure.

This is one area of inquiry that future scholarship in boredom discourse might address.  Another is pedagogy, as there is more research on classroom boredom in overachieving students than there is in boredom as a result of attention deficit or as the cause for teenage delinquency.  Furthermore, it would be interesting to examine the way postmodern boredom is perpetuated in the current educational system in the US, as it seems to forsake the inner resources of our youth by replacing them with alien expectations.  It communicates the impotence of self-reliance while reassigning accountability and blame to the various forms of “other,” as educators are encouraged to replace boring cognitive work with fun sensory activities.  It perpetuates the myth of education that promises salvation from poverty by deriding and stigmatizing personally meaningful – and often lucrative – interests that do not require college degrees.  But most importantly, it places an unprecedented elitist value on “education” at the expense of personal growth.  However, any study of boredom, in any field, can only help to bring into awareness a problem shrouded in cliché; a problem threatening our youth, our senior citizens, and our hyperbored society, which camouflages its boredom in frenzied activity, or in the stasis of withdrawal and apathy.

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