“Some prefaces are pure poetry; you don’t have to do anything with them at all.” Wout Waanders reads aloud from the preface of the dissertation by anthropologist J. M. Schoorl from 1979: “I have by no means been an impassive observer. I tried to separate the people who were attacking each other with axes and machetes; I smelled death many times; I danced for nights at a time; I felt very lonely; my best informant was killed by a wild boar (...); I had every possible doubt about the values of my own culture, including science.”
Waanders was approached to contribute to the university’s centenary celebrations as an “artist in residence” of the Faculty of Arts. This led to him browsing 100 PhD theses—one from every year—of which he used excerpts to compile a collection of new poems. Selecting the 100 theses was more or less random. “I paid attention to the spread of years and disciplines.” Some years are incidentally missing from the anthology of 100: no PhD theses were completed in 1923, 1924 and 1944, for instance.
Gems
The outcome of Waanders’s research is 10 new poems, one per decade. These sometimes include gems from the dissertations, forged together by lines from Waanders himself. “It really involved searching for original and well-written dissertations. Especially as time goes on, you can see more business-like texts cropping up; they become interchangeable, almost factory-like. In any case, I have made sure that something from all of the 100 selected theses is reflected in my new poems.” The 10 poems are part of the Radboud Art & Science festival, to be held on campus on 19, 20 and 21 October.
Waanders already presents a few gems that will definitely be given a place in his new poetry collection: “Whoever wants to reach the most personal depths of all people must speak the vernacular” (from a 1930 dissertation). Or: “It is a very rare occurrence for fairytale and reality to come together” (1936). According to Waanders, the poetry is sometimes already ripe for plucking from the subjects themselves. “Take one of the first dissertations, from 1926, on Italian magic wands. What a fantastic subject.”
Check carried out by AI
It was not Waanders’s job to analyse the texts along a historical yardstick; at best, his poems lift a tip of the veil. For instance, it cannot be concluded that the current rapid succession of dissertations leads to more matter-of-fact texts. “This differs per field,” says Waanders. “In the field of law, for instance, dissertations used to be very boring, but in recent years, you can see them actually becoming more lively.”
The 100 dissertations selected by Waanders were also subjected to a check carried out by artificial intelligence. With the help of AI, PhD student Mesian Tilmatine searched for the most poetic and remarkable sentences in the dissertations. The question remains whether the poet himself would have chosen the same fragments as the AI did. “I am very curious about that,” says Waanders. “The treatment of texts across a hundred years of dissertations is a subject in itself for a yet another dissertation. Who knows, maybe someone will write that thesis one day.”
A hundred years of PhD theses in 10 poems. Composition: Wout Waanders. Radboud Art & Science festival. Location: Grounds around the Maria Montessori building. To see the full programme, click on this link: https://www.ru.nl/en/about-us/radboud-100-years/radboud-art-science-festival