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[abd_angst]

I hope you guys can give me advice.

I am an ABD and have to finish this year - got a TT job at a slac and must finish.

My adviser has been supportive, generally.  She is big in her field and has coached me for years, though I feel that she is growing weary of my project.  She has been direct and clear about my shortcomings (I have many), and I have worked very hard to overcome them.

I thought I had made a leap forward with my career when I was offered the job.  My dissertation committee has accepted my proposal (humanities) and I have been writing for a few months.

I got back the comments on my first chapter yesterday :(

My adviser said: "I spent more time on this chapter than I have ever done for any draft by any doctoral student... The chapter is wholly unaccptable for a PhD dissertation...The structure is weak...the argumentation is rudimentary at best...you wander from the point even in within a paragraph...I was wholly disappointed..."

My greatest fear is that if my next draft is not up to my adviser's standards that she will give up on me! 

I am at the lowest point ever, and am wondering if I should just hang it up.  I hate my dissertation. I hate theory.  I hate everything.  I have a job offer but feel that I am probably years away.

Have any of you been in my position?  How can I possibly move on?

[bacardiandlime]

Well you must be pretty good to land a T-T job when you've only written a chapter!!
I haven't been in your position. But I know writing a diss. is difficult. I don't think I can offer anything beyond just crank it out, and do the best you can to respond to your advisor's critiques. (and I had some harsh ones on the work I submitted while I was a grad student, so I feel for you there!).
You've been 'abd_agony' for a long time here on the boards, so if you haven't been writing for long you must have been researching and thinking about your dissertation for a long time. So have confidence that you have the material for a PhD. Just get it on the page and get out of there.

[sciencephd]

Had your advisor seen your writing before ?  What documents has she read previously that you have written ?  What field ?

[abd_angst]

Had your adviser seen your writing before ?  What documents has she read previously that you have written ?  What field ?

I have 4 peer reviewed articles in a humanities field, and have presented my work at 5 international academic conferences.  My adviser has seen it all and has been supportive in the past, calling my work unusual and important. In prepping my proposal, I had to produce hundreds of pages.

I still can't get over "wholly disappointed..."

[sciencephd]

That's suprising.

Has something in your writing changed ?  Or, has something changed with your advisor ?

I'm guessing that you should let it sit for a week or so, and then have a talk with her.  You would want to ask her, for example, if she feels that something has changed in your work between your previous work (which she obviously liked) and now ? 

[bacardiandlime]

I still can't get over "wholly disappointed..."

Get over it. I don't want to be all tough-love on you, but advisors can be harsh on you, that's their job. I once submitted a piece of work and had a supervisor just stare at it, and say 'What is this?!'. I wanted to crawl under the table and die. Maybe there's some disconnect here between you and your advisor on how polished things should be before you submit them to her to read.

But if you already have four articles, any way you could stack them up, write an introduction and a conclusion and slap a cover on that sucker? You've got (I'm guessing) 8 or 9 months to get this done.

Just reel off a couple hundred pages and be done with it. You've already GOT a job.

[verafrance]

But do you understand exactly what is the problem with the structure or the arguments in your chapter? In other words, was your advisor able to communicate exactly what the problems were? Or you also don't know what she finds problematic?

If you don't know what she was talking about, that would be my first suggestion, make sure you get clarification on what the problems are, then you can start brainstorming and rewriting, trying to solve them. Did you write outlines of the thesis and chapter  structure, didn't she see any?

On the other hand, if you understand the criticisms she made and you don't agree with them, that's a whole other issue.

Don't fret so much over the "disappointed," she had another expectation, didn't happen, time to invest your energy in tackling the problem in front of you and move on.

[greenman]

I think it's safe to say that you have nothing to worry about. You have multiple publications, a TT job--you must be the star of your department. She says she's spent more time on this draft than any other draft because she fully believes in your project and is more personally invested in you than any of her other advisees. The worst you can do is irritate her or slightly "disappoint" her (you're almost certainly the kind of advisee that many advisors would kill to have--she knows this, and I'm sure "disappointed" is a rather harsh way of putting how she really feels). I think the most important issue is how you felt about the chapter--if the criticisms are valid, then ignore her tone. If they weren't valid, ask someone else on your committee to give you some feedback. Keep moving along.

[betterslac]

I agree with greenman and bicardi-- your advisor likes your work and expected much more of you and you didn't deliver. This is not advisor's way of pulling the rug out from under you. It is advisor's way of kicking your ass and taking names.  Advisor wants more thought and effort put into this than advisor perceives you have given it and a more polished and sophisticated product than you have delivered.

So don't be so sensitive and (pardon the expression) snowflakish. Criticism happens.

[penguinator]

Agree with the prior responses. Advisers tend to turn up the heat toward the end of things, probably because they've gone through the experience of finishing a phd, moving to a job (at a SLAC you'll probably be the only one in your specialty) and then trying to teach and publish at the same time without a lot of outside mentoring. Your adviser may have shifted modes from "trying to help" to "acting as a future peer reviewer who reviews your work for publication." The latter is way less warm and fuzzy. Better to get some serious railing now than never have anyone ever publish your book.

I cannot imagine why someone would send a humanities student on the market without a substantial sample from the dissertation available to consider, but perhaps you are in a unique situation/discipline. Your adviser may also be concerned w/his/her own reputation and making sure you produce a sufficiently well-vetted diss.

I have a lot of meetings like this with my adviser, where it seems like everything I produce is junk, but then at the very end of the meeting there's the "of course, this is an amazing project, and I love your research, and you're a wonderful writer, and you should just keep going forward."

[shrek]

Keep writing, write every day. I think that an article-- which is typically succinct and focused, is very different from a dissertation, which has to be focused and well-developed at the same time. I think the tendancy then in a dissertation is to want to include everything even if it's off-point. I see this in my doc students when my expectations for a dissertation is what one would write for an article (or a series of 3 articles/experiments). Note that I'm not in the humanities so I may be totally off here-- so take it with a giant lump of salt.

[jackalope]

Keep writing and keep your communication open with your adviser. Find out what she likes and doesn't and do it. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and roll up your sleeves!

[the_honey_badger]

Keep writing, write every day. I think that an article-- which is typically succinct and focused, is very different from a dissertation, which has to be focused and well-developed at the same time. I think the tendancy then in a dissertation is to want to include everything even if it's off-point. I see this in my doc students when my expectations for a dissertation is what one would write for an article (or a series of 3 articles/experiments). Note that I'm not in the humanities so I may be totally off here-- so take it with a giant lump of salt.

I am in the humanities and I agree with this.  An article is very different than a chapter in some crucial ways. Get her to articulate the problems with the areas she mentioned. Then, do THAT.  You don't like some changes?  That is what the revision process from diss to book is. I can't wait until my advisor reads the largely *unfamiliar* book she will get next week.  It doesn't bear much resemblance to what she signed off on seven years ago! 

[msparticularity]

Keep writing, write every day. I think that an article-- which is typically succinct and focused, is very different from a dissertation, which has to be focused and well-developed at the same time. I think the tendancy then in a dissertation is to want to include everything even if it's off-point. I see this in my doc students when my expectations for a dissertation is what one would write for an article (or a series of 3 articles/experiments). Note that I'm not in the humanities so I may be totally off here-- so take it with a giant lump of salt.

I am in the humanities and I agree with this.  An article is very different than a chapter in some crucial ways. Get her to articulate the problems with the areas she mentioned. Then, do THAT.  You don't like some changes?  That is what the revision process from diss to book is. I can't wait until my advisor reads the largely *unfamiliar* book she will get next week.  It doesn't bear much resemblance to what she signed off on seven years ago! 

I also am thinking that focus is the problem--which is also indicated by your advisor's comment that you are wandering, even within individual paragraphs. Scope is an enormous problem in a dissertation. I think the source of this is the fact that we spend so much time on our research, and think so much about all of the possibilities and implications, it can just keep growing uncontrollably.

The truth is that the scope of a manageable dissertation is not really much greater than that of a substantial article. What makes the dissertation different from an article is the time spent developing and demonstrating the groundwork (the lit review and methods sections) and fully articulating the implications and their interactions with the broader field. In the case of an article one covers these points, but in a paragraph or two rather than chapters. For the dissertation, we are demonstrating that we are competent to enter the field, so we have to lay out our entire process in tremendous detail so our committee can see it and "certify" our competence based upon it.

There has been increasing consensus in academia across fields that the more compact dissertation needs to be the norm, in order to get away from the days of the 800-page 5-year humanities diss. You might begin by asking yourself if your contemplated dissertation is the kind of topic that would need 800 pages :).

If so, get out the pruning shears, and think about seeing someone at your campus writing center to help you identify where your "strong argument" really lies.

[bread_pirate_naan]

I still can't get over "wholly disappointed..."

Advice:  Grow up.