planesandtrains

yeah - most people who tried to vote "no" probably gave up after getting the error message which means their votes weren't counted, and all the people who successfully voted "no" had to just randomly pick an answer for the second, so that part is skewed, too.

that poll is bogus. it won't let you vote "no ma" since if you answer no on the first question the second question isn't applicable, but there's no "not applicable" option and it gives you an error message if you leave it blank. so it's probably way skewed towards "yes." in my program, more people come in without mas than with, but there are a number of people who have them.

oh shit, the foremost scholar and pioneer of posthumanist and animal studies - i.e. fishbucket's worst nightmare. beware the cyborgs!

eh, i got into a handful of top-10 and top-20 English programs, and was rejected from santa cruz. they have a really interesting, nontraditional department, so fitting their ethos is prob more important to them than most.

i know people in both departments, and say firmly: definitely madison. no question.

i think it is a problem to call attention to what you perceive to be "tone" when that interpretation is not actually coming from their words. someone is not being rude just because they don't agree with you or because you feel that they are telling you something you already know. it derails the conversation by turning it into a tone argument (as you see here!). doesn't it make sense to model the tone you'd like to see by responding evenly to the substance instead of accusing others of rudeness based on an uncharitable interpretation of their implicit meaning and then proceeding to do the very thing you're accusing them of yourself, explicitly, through sarcasm? the conversation was started by someone who said "hell no i would never live in the south," because of their perceived culture of the south. the map i linked does not, in fact, show the whole country as purple, as you sarcastically dismiss it as showing, but is rather quite uneven - just not in ways that correspond with the normal stereotypes we tend to have, including the one expressed about the south. some of the deepest blue (not purplest!) streaks are in the south. i have experience living in both red states and blue states; my experiences really were far more determined by local cultures than regional ones. like i said, location is fine to let weigh into your decision, but it's not rude to remind folks not to hastily pre-judge or paint places with a broad brush. no need to get defensive.

what? how was squire_western being rude? i thought the point was politely articulated. i understand the concern and think location is a perfectly legitimate thing to let weigh in to your decision, but i really do think the blanket bias against entire regions - which is largely based on stereotypes - is a problem. some of the bluest populations in the country are in the south, and they have local laws and cultures to match. here's a map of voting patterns from 2012 by county (and in one of them, shaded by population density) to illustrate the point.

totally! it tries to think not just about how to "properly" draw those boundaries (let's just make sure we move "women" and "africans" definitively into the "human" category) but how thinking of those categories as naturally stable and not socially, culturally, historically constructed, and as a justification for the exertion of power and violence, is itself untenable.

for real. i mean i bet when i first heard the term "posthumanism" i thought, "well that sounds crazy!" but not having read it, had the most basic level of self-awareness required not to think i was qualified to critique it. that shit doesn't fly when you're a professional (or on applications to be one - as you've discovered this season, fishbucket. zing!)

too funny. appropriate because the yale english dept did in fact find harold bloom so insufferable that they kicked him out and gave him his own department so that he could quit bothering them and live alone in his own solipsistic bubble isolated from the modern world where he was free to rant against it. it let them get back to what grown-ups do.

what's making you sound uninformed about posthumanism is that you keep using arguments against it that don't contradict anything in its premises, or anything about what others are telling you it is. you've decided that posthumanism means we are no longer concerned with humans. everyone keeps telling you that's not the case, but you continue to argue that posthumanism is dumb because it disregards the human. no, it just thinks about how "human" is continuous and not separable from things we have traditionally thought of as "non-human." it's not deep to say everything we know comes from our own perspective, that we perceive from our own bodies. i've read phenomenology from the '40s, too. posthumanism goes a step beyond that and asks what that means to perceive from a body, and doesn't take all those categories for granted. it says we can learn things about ourselves from things we can perceive about other matter. you're also forgetting that as literary scholars, we have to draw our methods from the literature we study. writers have been challenging the boundaries of human, and thinking about how we can think about otherness, for ages. that's all posthumanism means. thestage, i'm not making an argument for this being a new mode of thought. if it were totally new and had no historical precedents, it wouldn't have much use for me as a literary scholar, since i study pretty old literature and have an historicist bent. but it's a new, useful way to name a mode of thought that it is possible to trace through history, so that we can have a conversation about it (and have a way of tracing it and talking to each other). you can trace it back to rome! it is especially interesting now ("hot") because new technology, environmental disaster, globalization, etc. have posed interesting new dilemmas about the boundaries of the human. we're always interested in the past for how it speaks to the present. that's why, for example, "intellectual property" is a hot field right now - it's not like that as a fraught category hasn't always existed, but it's especially interesting now because the internet has made the question especially pressing. so we name it and have conversations about it. basically, both of ya are flinging invective against posthumanism without actually coming up with a critique that touches it. fishbucket, if you don't get why it's interesting, take another poster's suggestion and engage with it, instead of trying to get posters on an internet forum to define and defend it for you and taking a hostile position against it (and them) from the beginning. you can't learn that way.

the point is that that sort of absolute, non-socially-constructed boundary between "human" and "non-human" does not exist. how do you define "human"? our bodies are made of microrganisms. we use technology in a way that makes it an extension of our selves. our minds behave in ways other matter does. the more we learn about animals, the harder it becomes to nail down ways we are different. writers have noticed these things throughout history, and represented them in literature.

agreed: absolutely. funded over unfunded, every time. out of curiosity, what do you want to do that an ma in english will be useful for?

it's not called "non-humanism," it's called "post-humanism," and is generally acknowledged to be within the humanist project. if you think that sounds contradictory, that's a signal that you don't know what it is, and should maybe do some basic reading before getting all haughty about it. you're using "human" like it's an unimpeachable, natural category, when in fact the way it's defined and where its boundaries are placed is far from stable and is actually quite culturally and historically specific. posthumanism is about questioning those boundaries and thinking about how literature enacts that questioning.

gawd i love when people who have absolutely no knowledge of what a given subject even is take it upon themselves to fearlessly proffer that they think it's "fundamentally flawed," based on their own radically uninformed, strawman version of it, instead of the real versions of some of the most respected and established scholars in the field they are ostensibly trying to enter. it's exactly the sort of lazy, hubristic thinking i combat in my undergraduate students. posthumanism is not about "transcending the human perspective." that's like deep ecology, which went out as fast as it came in the '90s. it's about interrogating the category of "human."