---
layout: post
status: publish
published: true
title: Speaking plainly

wordpress_id: 947
wordpress_url: https://www.martineve.com/?p=947
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categories:
- Literature
- Thomas Pynchon
- Philosophy
- Michel Foucault
tags:
- PhD
- Research
- Plain English
comments:
- id: 6275
author: ailsa
author_email: ailsa.haxell@aut.ac.nz
author_url: http://amusingspace.blogspot.com
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content: ! "Thanks for sharing your research. I can follow it and know nothing about
your area, so you have succeeded in your purpose. In the 2nd sentence which 'they'
is a tiny bit ambiguous. That books could be subversive threats draws me in.\r\nLanguage
level is still deeper than 'plain'- guess this depends on whether you want it
plain enough to anyone at a University level of reading, or plainer than that.\r\nIt
could be plainer, these are 'big' words to reconsider:\r\n critically acclaimed,
provocative, \r\nnotoriously, enabling constraint... esoteric...portable.\r\nSentences
could be plainer:\r\n\"They are provocative works in which no obvious interpretation
is forthcoming.\"\r\nMight be written as \r\nThey are provocative works with no
obvious interpretation.\r\nBut its about writing to an audience, and I'm guessing
yours are fellow university level readers.\r\nBest wishes,\r\nailsa."
- id: 6276
author: Martin Paul Eve
author_email: martin@martineve.com
author_url: ''
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content: Thanks for this feedback - really helpful. It's so easy to forget and just
slip into phrases such as portable methodology, which require explanation. On
the other hand, is esoteric really a word which requires simplification? There's
definitely a murky area between discipline specific phrases and offbeat but valid
vocabulary...
- id: 6278
author: lizit
author_email: e.thackray@sussex.ac.uk
author_url: ''
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content: ! "I think most of us are finding this a much more challenging exercise
than we anticipated. I know I did. \r\nI must admit to struggling with this Martin,
but I think I understood it in the end, but am still not quite sure. I looked
up 'tropes' in the dictionary and that helped somewhat.\r\nWhat I would love to
know is whether Pynchon is a good read..."
- id: 6279
author: Carly Tetley
author_email: carly.tetley@btinternet.com
author_url: http://virtualdoc.salford.ac.uk/cheetahphd
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content: ! "Hi Martin,\r\n\r\nThanks for sharing your research. You are in a completely
different field to mine and whilst I did have to go back over certain sentences,
I feel I have a pretty good understanding of your research. Since I deal exclusively
with quantitative data, I'm interested to know what form your thesis will take
- how you will present your findings?\r\n\r\nThis exercise has been great for
learning about people's PhD research in more than 140 characters!"
- id: 6280
author: Martin Paul Eve
author_email: martin@martineve.com
author_url: ''
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content: ! 'Thanks for the feedback, Liz. It''s really fascinating to see how people
outside the discipline respond and it shows me that I''ve still got a way to go
towards accessibility. I intend to read yours as some point in the near future.

Hmmm, is Pynchon a good read. Well, I''m fairly keen, as you can probably tell,
but if you want gripping fiction with a clear engrossing narrative, it''s probably
not for you. It''s extremely strange fiction designed to make you think. That
said, give it a go!'
- id: 6281
author: Martin Paul Eve
author_email: martin@martineve.com
author_url: ''
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content: ! 'Thanks for the feedback, Carly; much appreciated.

My thesis takes the form of an 80,000 word argumentative dissertation. As in the
sciences, I have to conduct a review of the (extensive) existing critical literature
on the topic and cite the most appropriate selections from these pieces. I have
opted for three chapters, each containing multiple sections, corresponding to
the historical phase of the philosopher to which that chapter is devoted.

A friend of mine once put this to me well: "so what you do isn''t finding something
new, it''s finding and testing the validity of new ways of thinking about things".
In essence, it''s an exercise in assessing the limits of hypothetical thinking.
The "evidence" I marshal is selected and never concrete and yet it is extremely
clear in the discipline when a fallacious argument emerges. I well appreciate
that this seems strange to those in the sciences, but I assure you that it is
by thinking through these issues that we achieve the mission statement of the
humanities: "to create and constantly renew interest in the arts".'
- id: 6283
author: Sam Knowles
author_email: sam.b.knowles@gmail.com
author_url: ''
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content: ! "Hi Martin,\r\n\r\nI feel I should thank you: not for explaining your
own research, necessarily, although that is in itself interesting, but for both
doing exactly what your title says -- 'speaking plainly' -- and highlighting the
importance of doing just that. So thanks!\r\n\r\nAs a PhD literature candidate
myself, these latter points are what I've found most difficult over the past three-and-a-half
years -- much more so, in fact, than actually writing the d@mn thing..."
- id: 6284
author: Sarah-Louise Quinnell
author_email: sarah.louq@gmail.com
author_url: http://www.sarahlouq.wordpress.com
date: !binary |-
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content: My question is about how you have chosen to structure your thesis you have
3 chapters, are you going to call them chapters or sections or themes? I completely
understand how you are structuring it. i just wondered as i was told that if i
had bigger chapters than 10'000 words i should think about themes or sections
as a descriptive way of talking about the presentation. its interesting to see
how different disciplines present their work.
- id: 6285
author: Martin Paul Eve
author_email: martin@martineve.com
author_url: ''
date: !binary |-
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content: ! 'Hi Sarah,

My chapters are approximately 25,000 words each as it simply becomes impossible
to cover the material, which is on a unified subject, in a smaller space. That
said, each chapter is then subdivided into three sections of approximately 8,000
words. I suppose that these correspond to digestible size chunks and the criteria
is that they should be discrete for a reader. I should probably point out that
this is not usual in my discipline and most have shorter chapters.'
---
Following on from posts by <a href="http://lizit.me.uk/2011/04/06/my-research-in-plain-english/">@lizith</a> and <a href="http://orgmotivation.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/my-phd-in-plain-english/">@ORGMotivation</a>, this is a brief post to explain my current research in plain English.
A quick precursor. In many research projects, communicating what you are doing involves making a justification for the research. If that is not immediately obvious, then often the explanation in "plain English" involves making that rationale perspicuous. I'd just like to make it clear that I do not intend to attempt to justify esoteric literature studies in this post. I have done so elsewhere and truly believe that better understanding of cultural artefacts contributes a great deal to our society, but there are people who think otherwise. It would be too distracting to table this topic here.
<img src="https://www.martineve.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/70889810_d7a2dba99c_o.jpg" alt="Explain" title="Explain" style="width:750px;" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-948" />
<h2>Thomas Pynchon and Philosophy</h2>
Why have governments feared fiction to the point of burning books? Is it because they are powerless and shallow, or can the novel conceal subversive depths? How would we find such depths? My research addresses these questions in fiction through side-by-side readings of the fiction of Thomas Pynchon and various schools of philosophy, and how the two interact.
Thomas Pynchon is the "reclusive" author (no photos of him for almost 50 years) of several critically acclaimed masterpieces, from V. through The Crying of Lot 49, to Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. These are not works of fiction which merely tell stories. They are provocative works in which no obvious interpretation is forthcoming. In short: they require a great deal of thought to appreciate.
They are also notoriously wide-ranging. Gravity's Rainbow, for instance, has over 400 characters and spans so many topics that a totalising interpretation would be impossible. It seems, therefore, that we need some manner of "enabling constraint" -- meaning: a rationale that limits, but therefore allows us to say something limited, as opposed to nothing -- to get anywhere.
Taking my cue from the presence of Ludwig Wittgenstein in Pynchon's V., I propose philosophical readings as such an enabling constraint. There is, however, a certain resistance to such an approach in many institutions who prefer the other pole of literary studies, history (ie. studying the interaction, and place, of works with, and in, history). I attempt to reconcile these poles of philosophy and history through readings of philosophers at each stage in their career, so for Wittgenstein, there are three distinct phases and I am reading each one alongside Pynchon for differences and similarities. To be clear: I am not looking to work out whether Pynchon had read these philosophers; that would be historical. I am also not looking for explicit engagement with surface imagery; that would be a crude "application" eg. "Wittgenstein talks about ways of seeing, and SO DOES PYNCHON!!" Instead, I attempt to look at the context in which Pynchon embeds philosophical tropes and work from this.
While this may appear highly esoteric, it yields stunning political and ethical insights into Pynchon's works and also provides, I feel, a new more rigorous and (dare I say) portable methodology for philosophical readings of literary works.
Featured image by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mafleen/">mafleen</a> under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.