It's every researcher's nightmare.  S/he is putting the finishing touches on the much-belabored dissertation, does one last check of the MLA Bib to see if there's any important research s/he's missed, and voilà, there it is, the article that was written a few years ago that does close to nigh on exactly the same thing s/he did in one of his/her chapters.  What to do now? 

The section is finished; it needs no more revision... or rather, needed no more revision until said Spanner-in-the-Works was found in the wee hours of the morning while poking around online.  Now, if s/he leaves the section untouched it will look like either plagiarism or ignorance--take your pick as to which is worse; but time is of the essence, and there's no way to start from scratch with the now-redundant part of the chapter and still have "ready to file" as the descriptor of the dissertation on faculty recommendations for academic jobs, and that is key.

Suddenly, the dissertation, so heathly, is both limp and limping, deflated by the knowledge that someone else out there had the same idea, and wrote about it, and published it, before our budding scholar even had a chance to reveal their "Original Thinking".

Dammit.

"Originality," so vital in the arts, is vital in academia as well, even if said originality consists of putting a minor twist on an established body of scholarship.  Originality is prized so highly that graduate students spend most of their time looking for their "angle"--that unique and particular vision that will be both expressive of their personality and their literary Weltanschauung.  When it turns out that someone's already been there... and recently... well, only rather unsavory analogies leap to mind for that particular feeling.  I would go into detail, but I think the results would be close to pornographic.

When this happened to me yesterday, a small portion of my academic world imploded, taking a part of my dissertation with it.  And I'm still agonizing about what to do to resolve the problem.  In the end, I have to acknowledge the article, and I will do that.  But this is registering as both loss and ego-blow.  Someone saw the same thing I saw.  So much for my "unique angle".  

It seems to me that originality in interpretation is the only thing keeping academics in the humanities afloat; that and an influx of new writing whose long-term durability remains to be seen.  But in days when writing about literature from 10 years ago is no longer seen as studying the contemporary moment--1999 was a different world, if you think about it--one simply must cling to the illusion that one is original, and sell it, if one is really intent on getting a job.

After some thought, some deliberating that happened at the back of my mind while writing this entry, I am now off to delete 10 pages of my dissertation and start from scratch.  I am too proud to simply "acknowledge and incorporate."  For the sake of my own sense of self, I must preserve my angle, even when I know it also belongs to someone else out there.

Someone with a tenure-track job, no doubt.