English 203

Graduate Readings: Prospectus Workshop

Description

This will be a hands-on writing workshop intended to facilitate and accelerate the transition from qualifying exams to prospectus conference, from prospectus conference to first dissertation chapter, and from the status of student to scholar. The workshop will provide a collaborative critical community in which to try out successive versions of your dissertation project and to learn how your peers are constructing theirs. Weekly writing assignments will structure points of entry into these projects. Beginning with exercises to galvanize your thinking, the assignments will map increasingly onto the specific components of the prospectus. We will also review a range of prospectuses from the past to demystify the genre and to gain a better understanding of its form and function. The goal is to insure that by the end of the semester, every member of the workshop will have submitted a prospectus to his or her committee. For students who complete a draft of the prospectus early in the semester, we will reserve time to consider it fully and to structure assignments relevant to the writing of the first chapter (including the question of which chapter should be written first). We will also discuss the dissertation in relation to the job market, conference papers, scholarly journals, and publishable articles.

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