hi everyone, its jojo here. no excuse for being away for ages. i took time off to recover from the post-traumatic stress of my experience last year. am starting work on my thesis again today...

my thesis is a comparative case study of two countries. am finishing up the theoretical framework chapter this week and then working on the comparative chapters.

is anyone else doing a comparative thesis? any writing up tips? what must be evident in the chapters? any helpful books?

my new supervisor is really nice and gives me some breathing space... he's part time tho and that means he's not there to answer all these questions.

all suggestions will be appreciated.

Hi JoJo

Hope you're feeling better after your break. I'm not doing a comparative thesis myself but I did read one last month. The way it was written was around a problem... so Intro chapter sets up the problem - boundary structures in literary texts and puts forward two authors - Bakhtin and Lotman as examples of people who have theories about these, together with a rationale about why they're useful to look at. The thesis then used alternative chapters to separate and compare different themes around the notion of boundary... so ch1 - dialogic boundaries - M thinks this (key thrust of chapter), L thinks this... some examples to show similarities/differences to M's thinking. ch2 - L thinks this (his substantive theories)... some examples to show how same/different from M... and so on. I think there were 2 or 3 paired chapters like this, then a discussion and conclusions. Not sure if that helps at all.