Postgraduate Colloquium
Research in Literary Studies
Ruzy Suliza Hashim
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
1 4 August 2009
Assumptions
• In English studies it is common practice to
assume that “in the end it’s about reading,
about text. Provided you know your way
around a library and how to find things out, it
is a case of knowing your texts …” (William
2003: 14).
• But English studies is, and can be, much more
than textual analysis. (Griffin 2005: 4).
What to Expect When you are Writing a
Thesis
• AT UKM:
– PhD thesis: 100,000 words or 350 pages
– MPhil thesis: 60,000 words or 200 pages
– MA thesis (9 units): 30,000 words or 100 pages
• Evaluation: For MPhil & PhD: Original and significant
contribution to Knowledge
• Ability to do research
• MA: Systematic procedure of doing a significant
research
• ability in reasoning and conducting research that is not
dependent on others.
PhD thesis
• Represents a significant contribution to the field,
displays the candidate’s ability to situate study
within a discipline’s framework, and the findings
of the research are worthy of publication at the
international level
• Provides evidence of contribution to the field
with a consistent level of originality
• 100,000 words / 300 pages
Zalina Mohd Lazim
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Possible research areas
• Postcolonial Literatures
– Subaltern, Diaspora
• Malaysian Literature in
English
• Children/Young Adult
Literature
• Comparative Literature
• Gender Studies
• Literary Stylistics
• Creative writing
• Literature in Schools
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Biographies/Memoirs
Oral Literature
Occidental Literary Studies
Literature as performance
Literature and Multicultural
Studies
Literature and Translations
Literature and
Interdisciplinary Studies
Literature and Popular
Culture
Literature and ICT
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Research
• Focus on theory
– Archetypal/Myth approach
– Feminist/Gender approach
– Cultural studies
• Focus on text/genre
– Novel, short stories, drama, poetry, Children’s/Young Adult
literature, popular fiction, historical fiction, chick lit,
biographies, travel writing, blogs, youtube, emails, social
networks, etc.
• Focus on area/issue
– Comparative/interdisciplinary studies, translations,
– Identity, nationalism, representations, ‘otherness’, exoticism
– Literature in education
• Creative project
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Types of research
• Qualitative: Using library research and textual
analysis based on selected theory/ies or
framework
• Quantitative: Using statistical data gathered
from texts or respondents
• Quasi: Using a combination of qualitative and
quantitative tools or methods
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Textual Analysis
• You deal with a text/ texts (depending on the scope of the
research)
• Choose conceptual frameworks as your tools of analysis
• Added dimension – using software as your method of
gathering data
• Eg frequency of certain images in a poet’s body of works
• Frequency of rural images in Muhammad Haji Salleh’s poems
• What the images show about his state of imagination
Research on Archives
• Study letters/ diaries/manuscripts/old printed
materials
• Eg you want to study the changing format of
women’s magazines
• Manuscript that has never been published
• This requires you to spend time in
libraries/galleries
Numbers and Words (Quantitative
Research)
• I’m sorry to say that I’m no use to you
whatever. To my undying shame, I don’t even
know what quantification is. And my
computer is no more a word processor, but
faster. I’m so sorry. I don’t even know who to
refer you to. (Pat Hudson, 2005: 132)
Numbers and Words (Quantitative
Research)
• Surveys : to study reading habits of youth
• To study learning styles
• To study blog patterns
You would have to find surveys on similar topics
and adapt accordingly
Need for pilot to see the statistical significance
Sample must be representative of the
population (30%)
Other quantitative research
• Dates, incomes, prices, wealth or inheritance
prevalent in many literary texts (but so little
research)
• Some of Jane Austen’s works look like cash registers
(who is earning how much)
• These numbers can be tabulated in a graph from/
histogram
• A study of annual profit of Mills and Boons from
1945-1971
Possible topic
• To study of popularity of chick lit (Survey of who buys
them, what are the sales like)
• Profiles of readers - teenagers, profesional women,
middle-aged women, grandmothers?
• Status of Income/marital status
• Correlate with the issues in the texts: Why is the
story of a woman who is successful, beautiful,
sexually liberated who consequently becomes love
sick and fulfils the stereotype of a conventional
woman?
Interviews & Focus Group
• Research on self-narratives/ perceptions towards certain issues
• One to one interview ( study 5 women’s experiences of domestic violence)
– interviews carried at some length
• Views of certain groups to a particular book/movie/ issue
• Eg Construction of gender:
• Focus group: Male/female 12-15 (rural); males/females 12-15 (urban);
Indian /Chinese/ Malay males (12-15); Chinese males
• Reaction to Sepet (based on reviews which show Malays being shown as
“not very Malay”)
• Get 3 groups of different components : Malay men/women (age
group/status/location)
Ethnographic research
• Qualitative strategy that relies on participation
observation and interpretation of cultural behaviour
• Eg war narratives in Makassar
• Printed form of Makassar war vs how it has been told
orally
• The researcher spent a few months in Makassar to
familiarise with the people and customs and to get
sloe to the gatekeepers of the tradition
Creative Writing
• If you have a creative streak or you have had stories published
in some reputable anthologies – you may want to expand on
this.
• Creative writing thesis: 3 parts
• 1. The processes of literary production
• 2. Your product (novella, short stories, poems, a play)
• 3. Reflection/review of 1 & 2
• See example: Noraini Md Yusof : “History into Fiction: A Study
of the Transformation Process in Literary Production”
Re-visioning/Intertextuality
• You look at the influence/ echoes of an older text/texts on
another (new text)
• How? Sometimes there are epigraphs at the beginning of
books
• Sometimes names of characters are familiar
• Sometimes the titles of books are almost similar
• Eg Si Tenggang’s Homecoming (original Si Tenggang, Pulang si
Tegang); Reading Lolita in Tehran; Jane Eyre & Wide Sargasso
Sea, revisions of folk tales; revisions of Greek myths (eg Wong
Phui Nam’s poems; Tuesdays with Morrie & Tuesdays with
Bapak)
Comparative Literature
• Several parameters of comparison
• Compare two texts that cross geographical
boundaries ( Malaysian text & American text
that deal with similar issues) –
• Compare a text with other disciplines
(anthropology/psychology/theology/music/film)
• Compare original text and translation (you
must know the two languages fluently)
Action Research
• Action research is a term which refers to a
practical way of looking at your own work to
check that it is as you would like it to be.
Because action research is done by you, the
practitioner, it is often referred to as
practitioner based research; and because it
involves you thinking about and reflecting on
your work, it can also be called a form of selfreflective practice.
Methodology
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Reflect on current scenario
Plan of action
Review of plan of action
12 action research projects at PPBL
Where to start? How to start?
• What are you interested in? e.g. Genre? Book? Theory?
• Review topics/issues covered in MA courses
• Relook your presentations and essays
– Can they be further developed/explored?
• Look at past research done at PPBL, as well as those
from Malay Studies, even Media and Communication,
other Universities.
– Establish state of research; Ensure no replication.
– Inclusion as part of literature review.
• Talk to literature lecturers – tap into on-going research
at PPBL
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People and expertise/current
research interests
• Ruzy Hashim – self-narratives of women (auto/biography, memoirs, blogs),
chick lit, gender in literature
• Dr Noraini Md Yusof: re-visioning, narrating the nation, Occidental studies
• Dr Zalina – translation, young adult literature
• Dr Shanthini – Indian diaspora, multiple intelligences (ways of reading
literature)
• Dr Raihanah – multiculturalism/ 1-Malaysia (MLE)
• Mr Nackeeran – web-based learning, literature and ICT, teaching of
literature, language through literature)
• Mr Ravi – Cognitive poetics (literature and nation building – MLE)
• Cik Shahizah – Science as Narratives, Media Studies
Some tips
• You must be able to sustain your passion/ interest in
the subject matter
• There is a supervisor who can guide you
• There are enough materials at hand
• You make the time and you have the energy
• You can take criticisms/brickbats/input constructively
• You do not mind the solitariness /confusion that
accompanies thesis writing
Too Big? Too Small?
1. An analysis of the relationship between coloniser and
colonised in Embun the movie.
2. Male-female relationships in the translations of selected
children’s literature
3. From conflict to insight: A Zen-based reading procedure for
the analysis of fiction
4. Producing a fiction reader for adolescent literature for KBSM
Form Four
5. The trickster figure in selected Malay and American folk
tales: A comparative study
6. Orientalism from Within: A Critical Study of Pandering and
Catering to the West in Three Contemporary Indian-English
Novels.
7. An analysis of the protagonist’s dream of home in The Clay
Marble by Mingfong Ho.
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PhD thesis at the Literature Dept, Harvard
University
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Poets of the Crossroads: Politics and the Deliberation of Poetry in the 1930s
Susan Elizabeth Barba
"Morals of the Story" and Narrative Demand: a Study in Yiddish and Hebrew
Literature
Dara Horn Schulman
Speakers in the Latin Historical Epics of Twelfth-Century Italy
Henry Carl Bayerle
Rethinking Truth After 'The Age of Extremes': An Analysis of the Chronotope of
Anamnesis in Autobiographical Narratives by Pak, Kluger, and Kogawa
Seung-Hee Jeon
Tongues Untied: Metaphors of Multilingualism in the Writings of Vladimir
Nabokov, Jose Donoso, and Augusto Roa Bastos
Esther LibermanJuan Pablo Lupi
Representation of the fat black woman’s body in literature of the Black Diaspora
Articulating the Sexual Subaltern in the Caribbean Narrative
Examples from the Uni of Harvard
• 2003-04
• Narratives of Collecting: Collecting Narratives
Raul Delgado-Rodriguez
Evolving Memories: Narrative Habits and Strategies of
Survival
Emmanuela Kantzia
Between Women: Desire in Caribbean Literatures
Keja Lys Valens
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Examples from the Uni of Harvard
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2002-03
The Birth of the Author:
Oral Traditions and the Construction of Authorial Identity in Ancient Greece and
China
Alexander Jamieson Beecroft
Rhetoric, Experience, and Identity in Frontier Writing and Mapping of the
Americas
Mark Kevin Burns
A Nation on Display:
Russian Museums and Print Culture in the Age of the Great Reforms
Ekaterina Dianina
Allegory, Allegoresis, and the Hermeneutics of Social Networks
Daniel Alan Fried
MA: Just right!
1. Harry Potter and Young Malaysian Readers
2. Western representations of the Arabs after the 9/11 Acts: A
critical analysis of Lorraine Adam’s Harbour
3. Promoting multicultural understanding through teambuilding in Scorpion Orchid
4. Patriarchy, female resistance and the many facets of Indian
women in Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupe
5. A study of male intimacy in Karim Raslan’s works: ‘Heroes’,
‘Go East!’ And ‘Neighbours’.
6. Construction and deconstruction of Iranian women in
Reading Lolita in Tehran
7. Female representation in two contemporary Young Adult
texts
8. An explication of images and cultural roles of female
characters in Yeap Joo Kim’s Of comb, powder and rouge
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Scope of MA thesis
• Keep it small and manageable!
– Textual analysis: Analysis of one or two novel(s) or
play(s)/ a collection of short stories or poems
using appropriate theories
– Focus group: Analysis of text(s) looking at a
particular issue e.g. depiction of multicultural
society/symbolisms in identity creation
– Comparison of Pride and Prejudice and its
adaptation into Bride and Prejudice.
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Prior to Writing Your proposal
• A systematic REVIEW of published works on the
topic of your study
• Helps explain how, where and why your
research fits into the bigger picture
• It exists to show other readers how you
incorporate the work of others into your own
work, and how your work fits into the
established research and/or theories in the field
Zalina Mohd Lazim
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Literature review
• Articles/books reviewed – relevant to the
problem being investigated?
• Coverage of previous empirical and theoretical
studies – thorough?
• Issues related to the problem
– Clearly explained?
– Discussed in a logical progression?
• The number of articles cited – is it fully
sufficient for the task?
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Formulating a research problem
• A research problem is expressed in the form of
a question or statement that focuses on the
precise factors that are to be observed
• Say exactly what you mean and say it in as few
words as possible
• Be prepared to rework and reword your
research problem until you get it right