As far as my committee goes, I think my advisor will likely push me the hardest, but that the most flummoxing questions will come from my other departmental reader. If past experience is any indication.

Their motives are not sadistic or cruel. They know that they will be able to come up with a question that will stump you. You know that they will be able to come up with a question that will stump you. Assume that moment will come; and if it does, react with grace.

For my dissertation (which was about 20th C drama), my stumper was a question about 19thC poetry. I couldn’t comment with any particularity on Blanche DuBois’s reference to Edgar Allen Poe in A Streetcar Named Desire, even though I had quoted her Poe line and I had made a relatively big deal out of how her literary knowledge contrasts with Stanley’s network of male friends.

I said something like, “I could take a stab at that if you want me to, but I’d feel more comfortable looking it up.”

At that, the committee members sat back, smiling, and clicked their pens shut; I knew that they were finished.

Of course I was nervous as I waited in the hall outside, but I knew my adviser wouldn’t have let me schedule the defense if he wasn’t confident, and I figured that a dissertation defense is like the Kobayashi Maru of Star Trek — a scenario that masquerades as a puzzle to be solved, but that’s really a test of how you handle a no-win scenario.

Bourdieu’s approach to class demonstrates that among individuals, similar cultural practices take on differing cultural values depending upon who performs them and the performers’ relationship to economy. Consider the composition of New York City audiences who might pay roughly equivalent prices for tickets at the same-day Times Square TKTS booth for two different performances: the Broadway “Chicago” revival at the Ambassador Theatre on West 49th and the off-off-Broadway performance (though only a few blocks away) of Vaclav Havel and Samuel Beckett’s “By and for Havel.” One understands that these audiences will comprise differently diverse modes of dress, go to differently diverse arrays of restaurants before and after the shows, and even have radically different sorts of comments about the shows they saw. The “Chicago” audience may be more likely to note with delight the choreography of Roxie and Billy’s ventriloquist act in “We Both Reached for the Gun,” and the “By and for Havel” audience more likely, perhaps, to comment on the sublime inscrutability Beckett’s sole explicitly political work inspires in the performances of the actors. Even these seemingly inconsequential differences, however, point towards a question regarding classed practices about whether a night at the theatre constitutes “an occasion for conspicuous spending” (Bourdieu 270) and the experience of a pleasant spectacle, or an opportunity to intellectually experience the cultural juxtaposition of the uncomfortable works of a Nobel laureate author and a Nobel-nominated political dissident. Furthermore, one should also consider that those differently diverse audiences share (as is likely obvious) individual members, who are differently classed in different environments and in their relationships to others in those environments.