planesandtrains
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Posts posted by planesandtrains
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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.
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Donna Haraway is emerita in their History of Consciousness department.
oh shit, the foremost scholar and pioneer of posthumanist and animal studies - i.e. fishbucket's worst nightmare. beware the cyborgs!
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UCSC will be less competitive, but they also don't have a comp lit program, per se.
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.
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I was recently admitted to UMass-Amherst with full funding.
The question now is: Umass vs. UW-Madison?
I was offered full funding from both. What do you guys think?
i know people in both departments, and say firmly: definitely madison. no question.
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It's a tone that suggests that, as the reluctantmidwesterner put it, we're incapable of coming to these conclusions on our own. It's totally snide and condescending to pretend like we can't understand law and politics without the help of someone on the Internet. And it's not about voting patterns, trust me, my entire undergrad department is speckled with these really cute hippie maps of the US that are totally purple and it's lovely and everyone is happy. Like, I get it. There are some people everywhere who are great and some who are not so great. And that is independent of red and blue too. But there are entire states that have laws that mean I can't even count on any sort of response/protection if I am attacked again. That's a factor, it just is. I'm NOT making decisions based on stereotypes, I'm basing them on well-researched understandings of law and law enforcement (which, again, I DO actually know some stuff about) and accusing me of being biased isn't really productive. We're all being selective in different ways, like I have already said. I don't have anything against the south or ANYWHERE (and I'm not offended by people who don't want to live in the Midwest either!) but location is a factor for me and, because I hate warm climates, the south has been largely crossed out for me even before I started thinking about laws. (Though, like I said above, there are some schools that I applied to in spite of location and there will likely be a couple of those next year too. Nashville seems great even if it doesn't really snow.)
Also, all of the well-thought-out stuff that reluctantmidwesterner said. I think some of you are responding to things that we just aren't saying and I think rm has a great response to that.
Eta, didn't really mean to up vote pepper or whatever their username is now (especially since they're clearly not actually responding to what I'm saying but rather the arguments they want me to be making) but bygones. I need to stop reading these boards on my phone.
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.
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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.
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Ok, this was my a-ha moment. The socially constructed definition of "human" has been utilized throughout history to oppress and marginalize groups of people:
- Women are merely less developed humans, compared to fully developed men.
- People with disabilities are more monster than human.
- Africans are animalistic, not human, which is why they need the care of guidance that slavery provides.
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.
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Please open up a book or an article and actually read some of this stuff because you're making a fool of yourself.
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!)
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Exactly. Can we start a petition to ban Harold Bloom and his multiple gradcafe accounts?
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.
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For all of you who keep saying the rest of us are ill-informed, and don't know enough to criticize the field, etc, nothing you've said has convinced me that this is a field at all worth pursuing. It still ignores the basic fact that we earthlings, or whatever you want to call us (perhaps not "humans") are all we have as reference -- our thoughts, our feelings, our intellectual interests which lead us to create our fields that we study. There is no getting beyond that. Quibbling with the semantics of what you want to call "human" isn't a profound shift. We're always, in the end, just projecting our consciousness onto other things. That is what phenomenology will tell you.
The only thing that you prove by saying "we have microbes in our bodies" or "our brains are made out of matter that reacts like other matter" is the depth of everything we don't understand, and probably can never understand, about OURSELVES. Not the depths of what we CAN understand about what life is like for objects or animals or microbes or machines.
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.
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But how can we (allegedly) define and execute those boundaries if we've never palpably been outside of them? Sorry if I sound misinformed on post-humanism. It's because I am.
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.
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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?
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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.in the writing and reading of literature, there is no non-human point of view. no non-human concerns, no non-human anything. I know we no longer like literature in our study-of-literature, but some boundaries are simply present in ways that you cannot theorize out of existence. literature is an expression of the being and non-being of humanity, actualized through linguistic technique, which is itself the irreducible core of humanity. good luck. you can argue for non-human perspective; you can say language is "non-essential," that in fact nothing is essential in humanity, whatever you would like. that is a philosophical treatment of a philosophical topic. within literature, it is not approachable, because literature is not an objective or externalized world, it is a spectacularly artificial phenomenological construct. it does not even exist outside of the human inter and intra-personal space. to equate the literary object or experience with some idea of reality in general so that one may apply whatever one may like from the latter sphere to the former is, in fact, as spectacularly "humanist" an action as you could possibly imagine. you are "working" on a problem that is fundamentally non-existent.
- Katzenmusik, pinkrobot, bfat and 1 other
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But it will always be a human's-eye-view of insects. So why pretend that we can have insect-oriented philosophy? It's just a person talking for an [insect/object/animal]
I don't think Philosophy is pointless. I think certain kinds of philosophical thinking are pointless. That's how you keep philosophy sharp, by thinking critically about how one does philosophy.
Sure, people can study different things from me. But if I think those things are fundamentally flawed in their methodology, gonna go right ahead and say so, thanks.
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."
- Fishbucket, intextrovert, bfat and 2 others
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ah i just looked at the box on the left and saw phd and freaked out. basically i should keep my mouth shut if i'm going to read so sloppily. for an ma prestige doesn't matter as much, and they don't fund in the same way phd programs do. i don't really know shit about ma programs. carry on! i might've had a few beers tonight...
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honestly? i've never even heard of any of those programs. they are not well-regarded. you need to do your research - are they even placing any of their graduates into tenure-track jobs?
while i am being blunt, anything but a 100% tuition waiver (or 95% at worst) is bad - like, makes me angry and i think is sort of unethical for programs to do. plus a $12k stipend is paltry, even with the normal full tuition waiver. here is a document that should give you an idea of what most respectable programs offer: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0Al9pLrYezRcSdGdUTk0zWk5QVUJFSGxVZ2FJQ1QwWFE&usp=sharing
i really don't mean to be a dick, but this post made me worry for you.
ETA: just realized it's 12k per semester, not year. okay that's much more reasonable. still, the other stuff i stand by, though it's a little less worrisome. definitely do your research about teaching load and especially placement.
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UT Austin's funding sounds to me like the opposite of competitive.
such is the fate of public schools in red states. hostile state governments that slash funding to universities but especially humanities + little to no union power + higher costs of living in college towns/cities than the rest of the state = funding noticeably worse than other programs of similar caliber.
considering all that, texas is actually doing pretty well - they do at least manage to fund all of their students, they don't have exploitative teaching requirements (it's never more than 1:1), and there are also some summer funding opportunities. not great, but not the worst, either.
you'll get a sense on your visit whether or not students are struggling financially, in a way that could affect their work. there are subtle clues you can pick up on, even if they don't say it outright.
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which of you smartasses added the university of phoenix entry?
really, though, bluecheese, this was a brilliant idea.
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Fishbucket = DontHate? Am I the only person who didn't get that until just now?i pride myself on my ability to identify people by writing style. it's my party trick. close reading ftw! if only identifying internet personas was transferrable (or monetizable) in any way.
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your poll is screwed up. if you try to answer "no" on the first question and leave the second blank, it gives you an error message and doesn't count the vote. that's why it's so skewed to "yes" - the people who would've answered "no" prob gave up. also why you have the same # of votes in the first poll as the second, which doesn't make sense - people answering no just picked a random answer for the second, which doesn't apply to them.
also i came in with a BA but i definitely didn't come "straight from undergrad."
- cicada123 and strawberryfrap
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pretty sure this thread was just created to start shit. don't take the "bait" people! I have a feeling that fishbucket's alter-ego shares initials with mr. lawrence, if you get me...
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Regardless of how you want to phrase it, getting in off a waitlist is often a longshot and it does mean different things than getting an outright acceptance. Generally funding is a very different story for waitlisted applicants, even the ones who manage to get an eventual spot in the program.
none of this is true in my experience. programs that fund all of their students, i.e. good programs, fund all of their students, regardless of how they were admitted (immediately or via waitlist). and how you got admitted doesn't mean shit once you're actually in grad school. no one knows, or cares.
- practical cat, damequixote, asdf123 and 4 others
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Determinism does not require that things are "predetermined" in the sense that they are predictable--things can be unpredictable and also determined. I think it's a bit rash to say "physicists believe" any single thing. Einstein did not believe in freewill (in the 20th century), and the small number of physicists that I know now aren't too keen on it either. Of course there may be many physicists who do believe in free will, and I've love to hear what they have to say.
you've switched from talking about ontology to talking about epistemology, which the term "predetermined" doesn't require, since it doesn't imply anything about predictability (which is an epistemological concern). quantum mechanics requires talking about things in terms of distributions and patterns and probabilities, but no one single outcome can ever be said to be predetermined (in an ontological sense). einstein thought bohr/quantum was straight-up wrong and couldn't reconcile it with his relativity, but most physicists now see it as fundamental and not some blip that will be smoothed out later.
my point is that scientific consensus in the 19th century cohered around strong determinism; that is no longer true, which even the article you posted acknowledges. making an appeal to science (asserting that people who are not determinists are assigning the brain a status different than they are other matter, and different than a scientific definition of matter) to support determinism doesn't make much sense.
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Well, I mean what I said... I believe in hard determinism. I don't believe that the human brain is the only thing in the universe that does not bend to the laws of cause and effect. I am by no means an expert, and I could be convinced of the existence of free will with the right evidence. I used to believe in it quite a bit (it's pretty much the default in our culture). Here's a decent article.
the world revealed by quantum mechanics is one of probabilities, not determined outcomes. physicists haven't believed in determinism since the 19th century. to believe in free will is not to assign the human mind a special status, but rather to say it acts like other matter - partly constrained and subject to laws of probability, but not predetermined.
- planesandtrains, bfat and Panabelle
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Final Decision Thread 2013
in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition
Posted
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.