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[bookish101]

The question of whether or not I feel I am doing good work is one I have been asking myself lately and I'm not 100% sure what to answer.  I would say my chapters are not finished work but not first drafts either.  I have focused on writing chapters that have an original argument, situating my argument within broader discourses, and developing some good core ideas and a sound logical structure.  I have written four chapters and am working on my fifth and last one now.  My plan has been to finish decent drafts of all the chapters, sort of step back and look at the dissertation as a whole, and then revise each one.  At the point I am at now, in my third year of ABD I can see that my first and second chapters are probably the weakest and the latter ones the strongest.  In the early chapters I tended to use more general theory and apply it to the texts I am working on, this is partly because there was less scholarship on the novels I am concerned with when I first started.  I am working on contemporary novels, recently a few books have come out on the authors I work on which is both exciting and irritating!  In any case, there is still a lot of research I have done, especially in the past year, that I feel I can incorporate into the drafts without having to rework them too much.  I think it will be more along the lines of expanding on points I have already made, relating them to a debates, adding more context with regards to scholarly opinion or historical fact.  Basically fleshing it out more.     

Regarding my committee, one of my committee members has seen two of my chapter drafts.  She taught a professionalization class that my department sometimes holds for Phd students which they take at some point during ABD.  Her comments were helpful but I could sense a slight tension between her and my supervisor, or at least she seemed a little uneasy, which I think is due to the fact that my supervisor was the chair and she perhaps didn't want to contradict him. Also, I realized that I have been keeping my committee abreast of my progress vis-a-vis funding applications which I usually apply for at least one a year and which usually entail a detailed description of my project.     

Thanks again for the responses and advice. 

[dr_prephd]

recently a few books have come out on [stuff] I work on which is both exciting and irritating!

Here, too. It's great for my field, but so irritating for someone who just wants to finish and defend.

[infopri]

recently a few books have come out on [stuff] I work on which is both exciting and irritating!

Here, too. It's great for my field, but so irritating for someone who just wants to finish and defend.

It could be worse.  On the day of his final defense, one of my doctoral colleagues was confronted by his advisor with a brand-spanking-new article in one of the premiere journals, which had arrived in the mailbox that very morning, in which a well-known scholar completely bashed the methodology my friend had used for the dissertation he was about to defend.  Guess what question got a lot of play during his defense two hours later?  ("So, Unlucky Candidate, Dr. BigName says this methodology is fatally flawed because of blah blah blah.  What's your response to that?")

But--just so you don't get too discouraged or worried or freaked out--Unlucky Candidate passed the defense with flying colors and the revisions were almost entirely editorial, not substantive.

[seniorscholar]

  My plan has been to finish decent drafts of all the chapters, sort of step back and look at the dissertation as a whole, and then revise each one.  At the point I am at now, in my third year of ABD I can see that my first and second chapters are probably the weakest and the latter ones the strongest. 

It looks to me as if you are exactly on track -- as a dissertation supervisor, I like to see each chapter draft when finished, but always reassure students that people learn how to write a scholarly work by chapter 3: inevitably the first two need a lot more revision than the rest, for the reasons you mention. Before you get too deeply into the revisions, however, I'd urge you to have the supervisor or one of the other readers who is familiar with the area in which you are working read the entire manuscript. I've heard from colleagues about students who went seriously off-track by revising unseen chapters badly. I never let my own students do that, and I also tell them to ASK all the other committee members if they want to see the full draft before you begin revisions.

Why? Not only for the advice and help you may get (which you can generally take or ignore, because by the end of the complete revision this will be your project and not their's) but because this is the moment, leading up to the defense and the job search, that you want all your mentors to be quite familiar with your work, able to talk enthusiastically about it to people they see at conferences over the next year or so, and aware of opportunities you should know about.

[kron3007]

In my field I think it would be time to have a committee meeting.  The chapters would be sent out to the committee members a few weeks before it is scheduled so they could be prepared.  At the meeting you would present a brief summary of your work and your perceived time line.  Then they would ask questions, suggest any needed changes, and tell you that your time line is impossible (unless it really is reasonable).  At the end of the meeting you would have a list of items each of them would like to see, and a better idea of your real time line.  It is never good to leave them out of the loop until the end, communication now will prevent headaches later.

That being said, I am in a STEM field, so this approach might not work for you.