GK Chesterton

Why would Mencken or Wilde come off as offensive in this context? With regard to Mencken - note that he is a large fan of Nietzsche, who obviously writes in a manner which mixes criticism and "art". I guess you would have to explain what you mean by "art" - it strikes me that most art is obviously criticism, in the sense in which criticism means responding to ideas. Style is important to all authors, and plays an integral role in their work. There's a tradition in Jamesonian Marxist interpretation of confusing, muddled language in a vein similar to Derrida and Lacan that tries to destabilize and denaturalize language as a means of supporting or emphasizing the points made in criticisms of the novel as "bourgeois" art or language as representative. For what it's worth, I think your affinity for the quote about the "difficulty being precise in a realm of imprecision" has more to do with your style of writing than anything else (or does it? [That remains to be investigated!])

Perhaps they meant that they would no longer be offering a terminal masters, and that all students with prior masters would have to begin their coursework over?

Well, now if they reject you, you have grounds for a lawsuit. So I guess that's a good thing?

Ah - I suppose that's possible, but it normally takes a bit longer. I didn't realize you had a car - my other concern would be whether you can find parking on campus or near campus, as that's often difficult. I suppose my general impression of Southern Village has been that it's more of a suburb/retiree/divorcee community and probably not one where you would have a lot of social interaction with other grad students. However, I realized that I don't know your age, so that is probably a factor. Honestly, it depends on if you want to live in an apartment or share a house. I would suggest a house in Carrboro if you have to walk, but if not, then I suppose Southern Village is a much more reasonable option.

Don't live in Southern Village - a long way away and mostly bougie divorcees. Would not recommend it at all.

Well then, in an effort to reboot: How far do you think a democratization in the academy is reflective of a broader "democratization" in society? Is the proliferation of top professors at multiple schools a diffusion of talent or an increase in talent (i.e. a spillover-effect of a vastly increased level of interest in subjects that were before 50 years ago not studied, e.g. post-colonial literature, women's studies, queer theory, etc.) Finally, is this the case for more disciplines than just the humanities? I wonder what effects a growing consensus on neo-liberalism will have on humanity departments; I have heard from a number of professors in German that schools no longer see it as a "productive" thing to teach, and when it gets cut in HS, you see a big drop in college majors. Will English also bear the brunt of an increasing instrumentalization of the liberal arts education?

http://tinyurl.com/yynke3h http://lmgtfy.com/?q=jameson+dialectic+of+opposition

"By qualititative vs. quantitative, I mean to find a field where I can ditch the calculator and relax on my GRE. I mean that conclusive statements are made with judgments and words rather than through empiricism and numbers alone. " I think that if this is your definition, you have made a straw man of social science. I don't know how this definition would apply to archaeology, (most)sociology, geography, history, linguistics, journalism, or communications, all of which are social sciences, or to any of the foundational texts of political or scientific theory. If one reads the foundational political theory texts - Kant, Mill, Locke, Hobbes, etc. or economic texts - Proudhon, Marx, Smith, one will not at any point find a need for calculators, and one will find judgments based solely on words. Further, even contemporary political science does not need to rely on calculators, nor does economics (there is perhaps math involved in economic theory, but as in Keynes, it's not the sort that you can do with a calculator. I hardly think that this is a result of a quantitative approach, but rather implicit in the field which it seeks to explain; claims about economic theories or hypotheses that didn't use numbers would basically come down to a shouting match, no?). Consider political theory: I just wrote a paper about the development of a robust pension system in Finland by analyzing the institutional structure of the Finnish government, historical relations with social actors (unions and employer organizations), and the strength of institutional veto points. At no point was a calculator necessary. There are some claims, to be certain, which one may supplement with empirical data to make an argument. But at their cores, English and Political Science are about making convincing arguments, and using whatever tools are at hand to do so. I feel as if you are painting with a very wide brush, and perhaps letting your personal distaste for International Relations extend over much broader fields. I think Sox was trying to show you that studying English in grad school is not about reading books and then writing on internet forums; you will have to develop a methodology, you will have to stake claims and explain how you intend to prove them. In the example of nationalist texts which you mentioned (which, I think, raises eyebrows with a number of people here; you are essentially asking a text-book social science question, not a literary one), you will likely need to demonstrate that a significant change HAS occurred in the way novels are written. This will involve picking tropes that you think are significant, arguing for why they're the most significant indicators, demonstrating that they did not exist in novels before globalization and that they do exist afterward.

@StrongFlatWhite.... What on earth? You're acting like a child and being deliberately obtuse. You have been asked several times to clarify what you mean by "qualitative niche" and have done nothing but mope about how no one is asking you directly. Sorry that the internet is not a role-playing game in which you are the main character? To respond to your comments/claims/questions that you have advanced here, quite concretely: First, the reason that people are talking about "methodological philosophies" is because that's how you figure out what quantitative and qualitative study means, what their uses might be, and why English might tend towards one or the other as a discipline. You can't just ask "Will I find my qualitative niche in English? I hate the attitude that drives quantitative study in social sciences" and expect to have someone say yes or no; as such, we've asked you to clarify what the attitude you're trying to get away from in social sciences is, and what SPECIFICALLY you are trying to do in a "qualitative niche". Also, since you wrote that you're upset that people are talking about methodological philosophies, here's a quote from you: And here's a quote from you just a little bit later, in which you complain that people aren't responding to you Soooo... which is it? Obviously you are going to have to tell us what you think qualitative methodology is. One cannot simply read books and call that graduate study of English in the qualitative method - you have to pick out what you're going to read, how you're going to interpret it, what toolkit you're going to use to interpret it, what your aims with an interpretation are, etc. These ARE methodological constraints that you MUST consider if you are going to try and be an English academic. To address your post at 12:56 OK, that's not what mutually exclusive means in this context, nor is it what your wife's quote means. You are fundamentally misunderstanding and, in my opinion, being naive and over-simplistic. It's not that they are separate, distinct methodologies. They are not oppositional in that they are imbricated in one another - there is no clear distinction between them because they are not discrete entities. Clear? That's what everyone has been trying to tell you. I cannot conceive of how one would have a strictly quantitative or strictly qualitative field of study or research. At the risk of infuriating you again with this loopdy-do theoryspeak, this is probably inherent in language itself - we define words negatively, things acquire meaning through difference from one another - you are ALWAYS comparing things when you use language, and you have to work in the abstract to communicate. Thus, it's not simply a matter of going to English and removing all abstractions or divisions or compartmentalizations - although again, I can't even describe to you how there are quantitative elements in English because you refuse to define either term. Again, your qualitative niche meaning what? I explicitly asked you to define these terms, and you're acting hurt in every post as if no one is responding to you. How could anyone answer this question without knowing what manner of texts you want to read, what interests you, what methods you would like to use? That isn't actually the same question, by the way - you first asked if English was the last field left that hadn't been penetrated by quantitative analysis. Again, my answer to that (using my terms, in which quantitative implies abstraction for the sake of generalization and comparison) is no. You tell me what you think qualitative means and what you think quantitative means, and I will tell you if English is strictly qualitative. Deal?

As a further thought on my response to S.F.W., the question more significantly I think is not "Is English the only qualitative field remaining?" but to import some sort of significance to that. Again, you seem to be concerned in your first post in this thread that there is a naive cult of number-worship that takes place in social science fields; I presume that you are not making the counter claim that naive cults should only worship certain authors or texts, but instead that naive cults are less likely to or don't at all exist in qualitative judgments. To this, I would ask you why opinions on authors seem to come and go with times, why Nietzsche is to some the terrible harbinger of Fascism and to others the affective anarchist, why some religious scholars read the Bible metaphorically and some read it literally, why some people think Derrida and de Man are brilliant and some think that they're the end of western civilization. As an amusing side project to this, I would ask how you would approach the problem that Derrida suggests when discussing a scrap of paper found among Nietzsche's effects, with a simple note scribbled upon it - it raises interesting problems for claiming that English is a discipline that deals strictly with non-dogmatic, universal qualitative analysis. I quote Rick Roderick on this one: Well, among Derrida’s… I mean ah – what a slip – some people will appreciate that… among the fragments of Nietzsche’s work, they found a slip of paper and on it was written the following brilliant, perhaps brilliant aphorism. It might have been Nietzsche’s most brilliant aphorism; it says “I have forgotten my umbrella”. So the issue arose, should this be included in the complete text of Nietzsche. Is this an aphorism that should be numbered and put in “The Will to Power” for example, or left as an unnumbered aphorism? In general it raises the issue of how should it be interpreted. Is it part of the complete text of Nietzsche? Well, if the complete text of Nietzsche means, in the straightforward sense – as some buffoons think – everything he wrote, then of course it should. But if a text is this special canonical thing that captures the truly lasting and enduring legacy of Nietzsche, then one might want an argument why “I forgot my umbrella” should be included, right? I mean, you’d expect to have such an argument. Well, this problem wouldn’t come up with a normal writer. I mean, otherwise it would be just “Oh well, it’s a fragment, throw it away” just a fragment. But because Nietzsche writes in fragments, aphorisms, and various styles, you have got to pause for a moment before throwing away “I have forgotten my umbrella”. Now how would one go about solving this puzzle about whether to interpret the slip “I have forgotten my umbrella” as part of Nietzsche’s text or not – part of his complete works – how would one bring his works to completion in that way. Well a famous argument here is in “Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles”, a book by Derrida, where believe it or not he writes… a small book on this one fragment. [crowd laughter] Now, the interesting thing about Derrida’s joke is this: by writing a whole book on this fragment, he has surreptitiously, sneakily, included within the text and the overlapping history of interpretations of Nietzsche this otherwise undecidable fragment, which has now become a fragment of his text, which is now part of the history, you see, of the interpreting of the text of Nietzsche, so there’s a little joke behind the joke.

So you begin to see the appeal of the dialectic Again, I think that if I had to make sweeping claims about the nature of quantitative and qualitative analysis, I think that quantitative structures are formed within the prevailing, broader discourses that frame qualitative thought - we create the Freedom House Index for democracy, for example, because we think that we know what democracy is and how to test it and how to interpret this and so forth. This could, in turn, depending on the data we use, be turned back on the paradigm that made it - we might realize that the US, which holds itself as the beacon on the hill or whatever, has much greater wealth inequality than most other western democracies. We might engage now in methodological debates about the best indicators of democracy, but a thousand years ago, it would have seemed dumb to select leaders based on anything other than divine right. However, as your example rightly shows, the Bell Curve was a quantitative analysis that operated within such and such a framework of quantity or of measuring test scores - and from that perspective, only its methodology is impeachable. But from a broader qualitative one, we can assess the underlying beliefs that structured the very questions that a quantitative method chooses to ask and what it finds significant - that is, to poke around the foundations. I do not make the claim that quantitative data is universally objective; only that it can make claims to objectivity relative to the framework it sets out for its investigation - e.g. If we say that GDP per capita is our statistic for wealth of a country, period, then the only debatable facts within this framework are what GDP is and what the population is. An examination of what wealth means, how this money is distributed, etc. would have to involve some qualitative assumptions; the line is not hard and fast, is what I'm trying to say, in most social science disciplines. So, I perhaps subordinate quantitative analysis to qualitative judgments, but I think that they are both capable of critiquing one another, and probably both necessary. With regards to your comments, Strong/Flat/White, at the risk of engaging in "lame-ass vitriol" or a "gang-bang", what precisely is your question? Are you still asking if English is the one qualitative field remaining? This is confusing to me, because you seem to be offering a great deal of evidence to the contrary - your wife's quote, for example. If you are continuing to suggest that English is a solely qualitative analysis, how would you explain the breakdown of literature into genres, the study of narratology, the various fads in interpretation, the categorization of authors into literary movements, the determination of what counts as "literature," etc. You don't see, in your frequent attempts to zone off "English" as "our field," the same abstracting quantitative drive to already establish categories and divisions? It strikes me that although you are reluctant to do so, you are going to need to make solid, hard and fast distinctions between quantitative and qualitative analysis, and I honestly don't see that project as being successful.

Sigh. Now I look like an immature brat. Well played, sox and strong. It always pleases me to be reminded of how effective maturity is in internet arguments. Edit: Missed a few posts. Apologies all around - obviously I come from a part of the internet where manners and the community are different, and I regret having been rude to people who are obviously much more open-minded than I gave them credit for. Sorry. In any case, Sox, I didn't mean to bash the thread in general - I thought there was some very interesting material in it. I agree that there is democratization, but I think that this is, to some extent, linked to the rise of the social and hard sciences in universities, in that people are offered relatively accessible statistical and mathematical tools to present arguments that contradict prevailing wisdom - that is to say, it defines a discourse in which argumentation relies upon a system that places less value on matters of taste (as, say, aesthetic or literary questions might) and more on an ability to produce significant observations (what does a T-test or an F-test say about this hypothesis? An interesting example would be that our question of democratization would be aided by a statistical analysis of this sort; if universities have democratized, then perhaps we could test this through looking at the concentration of Nobel prize, major research grants, distribution of GRE scores, significant research projects, etc. taking place at non-"powerhouse" universities and determining if there has been a significant change). However, in the area in which I suspect we do diverge is that I think perhaps the most important position to occupy is always that of the negative, to be in opposition. I tend to agree with the Frederick Jameson line on the dialectic - or even back to JS Mill, who in "On Liberty" wrote "If counter-arguments do not exist, it would be necessary to invent them" - and think that you have to have these sorts of arguments to make any advance in thinking. To that end, I am more skeptical of the role that praise plays in hardening patterns of thinking that should optimally be left pliable (or unstable - Rick Roderick has this great quote on Nietzsche, where he says the Nietzschean mantra is "If it's shaky, push it over!"). In a moderated defense of my post, although really my behavior was not very good in any case - the comments about TS Eliot and merit were directed at another poster, not you. In a further twist that no doubt makes me look like an asshole, I am graduating undergrad with two degrees in social sciences and I am trying to go to humanities grad-school to do something theory intensive (for many of the reasons you list), so I am perhaps (likely) a huge hypocrite. I just think it's especially important to be critical of oneself, and to be skeptical of the things one takes for granted or as givens - this was my somewhat cryptic reference to post-structuralism, in which I renounce claims to being responsible for my views/beliefs/accomplishments, at least in the sort of Cartesian subject sense. This is a somewhat radical view I think, in that for example I don't really believe that being capable "hard work" is a decision that one can make - I think it's much more contingent than that and related to one's environment. In answer to your question about the question I posed you (tongue-twister, phew): I think the benefit and the curse of qualitative thinking is that it operates in an "open field," so to speak - whereas quantitative analysis sets out very clearly the conditions for its investigations, what may be measurable as success and what findings are significant, qualitative analysis leaves its investigations much more open ended and less rigidly defined. This makes them susceptible to a radical critique on the one hand, but also to a radical orthodoxy, if we refuse to question our intuition on these things and simply go by what "seems" logical or common-sensical. What are your interests in rhetoric? I am interested in the rhetoric program at Berkeley (love Butler).

Again, it's not a matter of how "privilege" improves your chances, but how the very nature of the system is one that reproduces these systems of privilege. You note that 'merely possessing certain privileges is not a guarantee of success." You're precisely right here, but they are in most cases pre-conditions of success. Certainly not all people from the top 5% of income in the US get "in" to grad school - not all of them want to, nor are they all qualified. But I would make a significant wager that an exponentially greater percentage of people from the top 5% of the US get accepted, and at higher-ranked universities, than from the bottom 90% of the population (again, as a percentage.) There are a number of considerations that probably fall outside the daily thought-process of people here when considering grad school - if you came from a poor family, could you afford to basically sacrifice any reasonable shot at higher earning potential by attending graduate school? Neither my parents nor myself have any debts to pay off; all of my siblings will likely also be financially successful, so I can afford to indulge an interest in Nietzsche or whatever. This is probably not the case for others, especially in light of the opportunity costs - if I came from a poor background, got a 1600 on my GREs, attended a fancy-schmancy undergrad and got a 4.0, you know what I would do? Not apply to rhetoric at Berkeley, I would consult. I would do administrative consulting, make a few million in my first 5 years on the job market, and spend that money on my family. Whom are you quoting here? I didn't suggest this. and Huh? Bizarre on two levels - the contradiction and the obvious point that academia comes from the greek akademeia, which is decidely precapitalist both institutionally and etymologically. I haven't advanced the claim that academia is a capitalist institution, in part because that IS a simplistic conclusion - it overlooks a number of forces involved in the institutional history and linkages with the rest of society. Would this really be the case? I suspect that a survey of graduate students at Harvard, Princeton, UChicago and Yale would reflect mostly white students whose parents have an annual household income of over $150,000. Do you think that this is not true? Furthermore, I dispute the claim that "academia is a system in motion more so than others." How long do certain thought-paradigms exist in academia? The academy is a very conservative place, and there is little in the way of incentive (and much against it) for people to change their positions. Indeed, one does not advance quickly in a university by picking out sacred cows and slaughtering them, the way that one might be able to in a business environment. Again, as I think this rebuttal shows, this thread is decidedly NOT rife with self-awareness; rather, with something masquerading as self-awareness that either legitimizes or makes invisible the way in which systems of privilege and oppression are reproduced in higher education. I am advancing the claim that what mudgean calls "meritocracy" is basically a system in which the people who used to have all of the wealth and power by virtue of jus sanguinis had to legitimize this in response to growing complaint from the rabble (or middle class, as the case may be) in order to keep their heads. Thus, they developed a system in which they named as "meritorious" all of the things that they were in a particularly good position to do, and to do well. Note that "merit" generally means high GPA at a private high school and high standardized test scores, not "having grown up in a single parent household" or "beat up by other kids because you have a funny looking face." Consider that the reliance on SAT scores, nominally "meritocratic", tends to disadvantage women and non-whites and legitimizes their exclusion. Again, I refer you that paragon of higher-academic "democratization" Larry Summers, who justified inequality in female professorships with the claim that IQ tests may indicate that men are more intelligent than women in certain field and situations. Consider that the schools where "grade inflation" is significant are often those where people pay the most to get in - thus, a meritocratic evaluation of a candidate from Harvard and a candidate from UW would suggest that the Harvard student had a higher GPA, higher GRE scores, and better-known professors with a better understanding of the graduate field. These are all "meritocratic" criteria, and they conveniently continue to select the exact same group as before while justifying a total historical break with the histories of oppression and discrimination - against women, against people of color, against non-heterosexuals, against non-Christians - that have shaped American academia. Should it be surprising that those who often invoke the idea of a meritocracy are those who do so to argue against affirmative action? Full disclosure: I am currently on a merit-based scholarship.

It strikes me as indicative of the sort group circle-jerk taking place in this thread to create this opposition between quantitative and qualitative analysis and then congratulate your field for being the "only one" to resist it - a rudimentary investigation beyond the very superficial demonstrates that what you appear to be upset with is a prevailing orthodoxy of opinions that makes claims go unchallenged, and not a strict qualitative/quantitative distinction. Then, you make a straw man of quantitative data while freezing both "methods" in time. Look at the outrage that developed in the wake of reader/response theory in English criticism, or the manner in which people HATE deconstruction (which, not incidentally, undermines the claim you make about distinctions between qualitative and quantitative analysis). What do you see as the salient difference between qualitative and quantitative analysis? Cultures of reception and interpretation are just as rigid and just as empirically/epistemically grounded in humanities as in social sciences; indeed, many of the criticisms of "Canon" advanced from minorities have attempted to strike at the overwhelming blindness in the humanities' beliefs that they represent some sort of open-minded universal. Further, if we perhaps suggest that "quantitative" methods (again, how vague!) are characterized by their attempts to abstract or make representable individual or unique features, what, pray tell, is narratology? What is philology? English uses genres, plot motifs, literary devices, themes, etc. etc. as classificatory systems to abstract complex data in precisely the same way. What is an author? ask Foucault (and Barthes); more importantly, what is post-structuralism, and how has (or should) this inform your understanding of what it means to engage in "qualitative" analysis? Think of Terry Eagleton's famous comment about throwing the masses a few novels so they don't put up barricades. With that in mind, the general tone of this thread strikes me as perhaps all the more insidious, in its vague references to TS Eliot and the importance of noblesse oblige. A bunch of people moving from "prestigious undergraduate institutions" to "prestigious graduate institution" writing about their professors being on a first name basis and trying to pretend as if these are not only not class privileges but not the inculcation and extension of this very same system of class divide (and wealth creation). Believe whatever you want about Harvard and its support for poor students (the comment about not everyone being cut out for higher education is telling in this regard), but the fact remains that Harvard's endowment is large enough to send millions of kids to university for free, should they so choose. People who talk about the generosity of merit-based institutions often forget that merit is defined by the people who already have the money, and generally reflects their view of what "merit" is and how it will best serve them. In any case, I find that a number of people trying to objectively create a reason for the superiority of the schools they are attending (and schools which have long been dominated by wealthy white men, and only now seem to be opening the doors to wealthy people of other genders or colors) seems to be precisely the attempt to "speak from nowhere", that is, to take one's own subject-position and experience and treat it as a surmountable obstacle to objectively assessing the situation, that legitimizes these practices. Would it not be more significant (like Henry Louis Gates Jr. did when he called Duke "The Plantation", or when Cornel West left Larry Summers) for the people at these places to be actively criticizing them - to test just how far they were committed to being objective? I suspect there is still an extremely strong correlation between the assets of your parents at the time of your birth and your future graduate institution - but that, of course, would be falling back into that "cult-like fundamentalism" of quantitative analysis (which it should be noted was often used to support progressive arguments that the upperclass qualitative analysis resisted; namely, that they did enjoy significant material advantages).

<br /><br /><br /> May I ask how you made it to the US from a small 3rd world village?

Not to mention that someone else on this forum got 20 grand from them this year, so perhaps they aren't actually that crunched...

No offense, but you come off sounding a bit obnoxious in regard to your doom and gloom predictions for UNC's history department. UNC hasn't suffered terribly badly in the Economic Crisis - they did minor reshuffling in Romance Languages and Cultural Studies (!), but that hardly counts as the worst affected. Konrad Jarausch is one of the most prominent West German historians working in the United States, and he looked pretty happy when I saw him on campus a few days ago. I'm extremely skeptical that all those who were accepted here will turn it down. I'm an undergrad at UNC who has spent some time around the German Dept., History, and Political Science, and have been quite pleased with the school so far. Sorry your experience was so different - I can't decide if you've been really misled by someone, or if you're harboring some sort of resentment, as your displeasure seems drastically out of proportion.

Tell them, unless you think that theres a possibility you might get two sources of funding. That would be neat.

Well, consider Baltimore vs. Vancouver - one's beautiful (Vancouver) and one has one of the US' highest crime rates (Baltimore). As far as the schools go, I know nothing. May be different university climates as well; I'm not familiar with JHU, but UBC is a bit isolated geographically as a campus and also significantly pedestrian oriented, which I think probably makes it a bit more student-life centric. However, university in Canada is different than in the US, and you might see more people outside of the traditional US "student" demographic in Canada.

<br /><br /><br /> With the proviso that I know nothing about the topic at hand, from where I'm sitting it looks like someone just got owned.

You should have a native English speaker read this and offer suggestions. You are missing direct articles in a number of places and your wording is often quite stilted. Also, you should lose the first line entirely. Become much more specific.

Hmmm... interesting. I do like Ronell - have you seen "The Examined Life"? Also, what about Cornell?

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