5

 5. Thesis. This is what MFA students and their professors call the collections of poetry or novels that the students are working on for their degrees. Technically, this is correct: the rules of the academic institution require a “thesis” for a Master’s Degree. Yet by letting the institution name the very genre of their creative work the students are symbolically relinquishing any claim to be working in their own genres, whether lyric poetry or fiction. The thesis, however “creative,” must be named according to rules governing the granting of other academic credentials. 

 

I am very proud of my insightfulness, when I react to this use of word thesis so violently. I am undergraduate student, looking down on students older and more experienced than I am. But now, I think, why not call a group of oil paintings, or some choreography, or a book of poems, a thesis or a dissertation? Doesn’t that add an oddly poetic penumbra to these quintessentially anti-poetic words?

 

I imagine trying to explain both of these ideas to an MFA student and getting a puzzled reaction. He doesn’t understand either my initial reaction or my second, more subtle insight.