heliogabalus

There are full-time writers, but there aren't many outside the Czech Republic--and really only a few here--that are full-time writers writing on Czech Literature.

Řezníček, I'm trying to think of any departments with faculty doing work 1920's and 30's Czechoslovak lit--Bristol or Glasgow maybe? Harvard has 2 really good people but they focus on 70s and 80s' underground stuff, I believe. Maybe Michigan, Paloff looks like he works with it tangentially and Toman has worked on that time period. I think the only place to do Slovak is Pitt, right? Medieval Czech stuff is really only handled in the US by a guy in the English dept. at UIC and a historian at Oregon, but I think she just works with Latin. It sounds like you have some time to figure out what you want to specialize in, but you will probably want to before you apply. Also, you should take into account the job situation--whether it's a concern to you now or not. It will be in 7 years. There just aren't enough academic jobs in Czech lit--that is my real interest too--to have a decent chance of getting one (since a fair amount of the US Czech scholars are lecturers instead of professors, you may very well be competing with your teachers for academic jobs), so you might want to think about whether you really want to do a PhD or something like an area studies MA which will be faster and prepare you better for non-academic jobs. At the very least, if you apply to PhD programs and say that you have no real concerns about what you will do with your degree, the ad comms may pass over your application. (The first week of a grad program for Czech, my advisor pulled me aside to put together a game plan for transferring to a completely non-Slavic field where there might be a job.)

So what are the top Russian and Slavic programs these days?

Well, good luck--the well known MFA programs are notoriously tough to get into. I have a couple friends who did Michener and a some who went to Iowa. and Columbia. I feel like Iowa still has the best chance of helping someone get an agent or a book deal, then Columbia, but that may be because they're large and have been around for so long. I got an MFA from a no-namer, and it was a decent experience.

Those aren't your safeties, are they?

Shoot--this is old, but I'll just say that being a native English speaker who knows Latin I have an easier time understanding the gist of a page in Spanish than I do figuring out anything in Old English.

If you want to do more teaching, my guess would be go for the strong public schools in Classics. UNC, UT, Michigan--probably the UCs. Prestigious fellowships actually keep grad students from teaching as much--they're their to enable you to finish faster and spend more time researching. At public schools there will be a few of these, I think, and the rest of the grad students will be teaching/TAing for financial support. At the private schools, most/all students will be on fellowships.

"If you don't have enough attention to detail to put commas where they need to go, what have you overlooked in your critical edition of this important text?" Is that really true, though? I've heard this argument before, but I'm a bit skeptical. I can't imagine thinking, "This person doesn't know when to use a semi-colon; I bet they don't know when they're plagiarizing." I'm a huge fan of using proper grammar and punctuation--you don't want to give anyone any reason to discount your writing--but I think the reason for some professors being highly critical of grammar and punctuation is because of something entirely different: classism. As a college professor (especially a lit prof), you are supposed to be the most educated person around in terms of English and writing. By making grammar mistakes you are showing that you did not attend the type of elite schools/programs that concentrate on teaching you when to use who or whom and when to use the subjunctive. It makes sense, but it's also more than a little snobby.

"Maybe you will be a great high school teacher or novelist or whatever you want to be." Great high school teachers and novelists should be excellent writers too, in my opinion. I'm afraid high school teachers often aren't good writers, but students usually spend more time learning to write from them than college professors. The best writing guide I've read--it did wonders for me as a writer--is Writing With Style by John Trimble. It's pricy, so you may want to get a used copy/older edition (they might be better, actually), but it is more than worth it. Whether you go on to get a PhD or just write emails, it's worth becoming a good writer.

Would Cervantes be more like reading Middle English or early Modern English? Because I would think Latin is closer in many ways to Modern Spanish than Beowulf is to Cormac McCarthy. With Latin, though, you aren't really learning the way people spoke in their contemporary context--there already seems to be some archaic aspects to the literature (influenced by classical Greek models)--it is like learning Spanish only in order to read the classics of Spanish literature: especially Golden Age stuff. A Russian class whose goal is only to read Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Pushkin would probably look very different than a class where you expect to interact with Russians.

I'm a middle school/high school Latin teacher, and this is an interesting discussion. The ideal situation--which has occurred at a couple schools I've worked at--is that around 2 years of Latin and a modern language are both required. In those situations, it was surprising to me how many students wanted to continue with both, being reluctant to give up either of the languages. Latin is a language and as such should definitely count towards a language requirement. As a dead language, though, the approach to it is different and offers as many advantages as it does disadvantages. When you learn Latin or Classical Greek or, I'm guessing, Sanskrit, Classical Arabic, etc. you learn as much about how language works as you do the specific language you are studying. (Only an anecdote, but: I remember taking an Intro to Linguistics class as an undergrad right after doing Greek I with Drew Keller, and feeling like the Linguistics class was a watered-down Greek class without getting to learn an actual language.)This comes in handy, and I'd say the top Latin kids in a high school tend to understand English better than the top Spanish or French students. As a result, I think Latin students are in a good position to learn other tricky languages--it certainly helped me learn Slavic languages, which have a remarkably similar approach to grammar as Latin (no surprise since they tend to be conservative IE langs). It's to strange argue their practicality, because I don't like to advertise Latin in that way, although there is truth in it. Mainly, by learning Latin or Ancient Greek, after a few years a kid can read some of the greatest writers the Western world has ever produced--Vergil, Homer, Cicero, Plato, et al. That rarely seems to happen with other languages (German with Kafka maybe?). My impression is that to read Cervantes, you need a lot more than two or three years of Spanish because so much time is spent on speaking (as it should). If someone believes that the reason to learn a foreign language is only to communicate with the people down the street who don't speak English, then learning to read canonical lit may not seem worthwhile. But to those who believe in the value of a humanistic education (and it's ok if you don't), then being able to read Caesar can be as important as being able to ask directions in Paris.

Sheez, I was responding to one part of one post--that doesn't mean I fundamentally disagree with the advice that was given. I never thought that to comment on something on Gradcafe, I needed to address the entire thread. In my first post, I even quoted the remark I was responding to. Look, the field I work with is translation, so Walter Benjamin is crucial, valuable, and fascinating, if somewhat impenetrable. While I am not a fan of political Marxism--I work in Central-Eastern Europe--I think Marxist theory is a great lens to read literature through. So, yes, I know that methodology does not equal politics and I know that you can work well with people whom you disagree with politically--as you should be able to. Also, I do indeed lean more Democratic and I did support Obama. But instead of dismissing me as a troll, consider that maybe I was actually trying to draw attention to something--that often in the liberal arts, liberal political leanings are expected, and conservative students can feel/be spurned. As Lifealive said of the Republican classmate: "his political views were a topic of discussion among grad students and professors alike." I think that is troubling. In the last election, 47% of the voters voted Republican. Taking the stance that "not all political views are equal" risks alienating a sizable percentage of the students you teach. I don't think it's a good approach. I also think that there is something to the fact that the departments that are imperiled are often the ones that tend to be more hostile to conservative students. I think it makes it easier for universities to slash the budgets of those departments, when a large constituency feels unwelcome in them. It's certainly not the only reason. But I think that in addition to being seen as more employable, Economics and Engineering students are also a little less shocked about finding out that a classmate has a Romney (or Obama) bumper sticker than English and Comp Lit students. Again, not a die-hard Republican, but I do think that teachers and professors should be understanding of students whose views are outside of the departments' norm.

Right, and I was addressing the parenthetical.

Ha, I was actually pro Obama in the last debate, and was not a fan of Romney. I just can't stand the political hypocrisy so often found in academia, where everyone is accepted--as long as they vote Democrat. He may have sounded obnoxious, but what you focused on were things as innocuous as having a Republican bumper sticker. And so no mention of politics were made during an election year, except by this lone Republican, while you were trying to discuss Paul de Man? Forgive me for not believing you. And what type of person are you who pronounces, "Not all political views are created equal"? People are allowed to have their own beliefs.

But let me guess, it was fine to talk about Romney's idiocy and have bumper stickers for Obama. Turning literature classes into political echo-chambers is a major reason why mainstream America doesn't mind universities slashing humanities departments.

Try clicking on view as list, that seems to bring everything back.

I wonder if graduate humanities in the US wouldn't be better served by adopting a model more similar to the British system, where there aren't so many teaching and course requirements. While ostensibly these requirements are to make the grad students better prepared to become professors (which fewer and fewer are actually becoming), they certainly provide a cheap labor force while also filling seats for small graduate seminars taught by the tenured and tenure-track professors. If humanities grad students only spent 3-5 years getting their PhDs (as they do in Britain), instead of 7-10 (which is probably closer to the norm), I think they'd be less outraged about having to find work outside of academia. Doesn't it seem a bit silly that on average it takes more time for someone to become qualified to work in the field of Victorian literature at a university than it does to work in biochemistry? Or to practice law or medicine? And do Cambridge PhDs really seem less prepared to teach Jacobean drama than NYU PhDs because they weren't required to TA or teach intro comp courses (while being overwhelmed by their own coursework)?

Yeah, I'm not sure which professors are saying this. It would be really irresponsible for people to tell students that. My background is in a rarely taught language and literature, and I bumped into one of the more notable professors who teaches it (he's at Penn). He mentioned he was going to retire, and when I asked who they would bring in, he just said that they weren't planning on bringing in anyone. It'll just disappear there. Pretty sad.

Whose TT jobs will be eliminated and replaced with adjuncts and VAPs.

What made your MA program so horrific?

Try Writing with Style by John Trimble--I find it much more accessible than Strunk and White, and it basically goes into the 'why' of writing techniques. It's the best book on writing I've ever seen. Here is a sample: check out page 8-9: http://facweb.northseattle.edu/cscheuer/Angel/Engl%20101/1%20Trimble%20Thinking%20Well.pdf Also, it can be expensive, but go for a used, earlier edition (I think the later ones are starting to get a bit bloated) and you'll have a cheap and effective writing guide. I got more out of it than I did from any class I took.

Congratulations, and good choice.

This post on the topic from a few years ago might be worth looking at:

Right, I meant that even Harvard has a Master of Liberal Arts, and even that isn't prestigious. Why they aren't prestigious: high price/no funding; nearly open enrollment (no GRE, correct?); less stringent program requirements (any language required?); etc. It's fine for what it is--a program for teachers to earn additional qualifications, hopefully paid for by their employers, but it isn't a traditional departmental graduate program. Really, these things seem to be a way for prep schools to add credentials to their websites and trick unsuspecting parents. Sorry, if I'm being harsh, but I do get irked when people get blindsided by a name instead of the reputation/quality of a program. I've worked in prep schools for years and seen administrators fall for the glamor of a Columbia MA in fields where an MA from Arizona or a BA from Cincinnati would be more impressive. The people who do this for real--the professors on adcoms--know the field and know that an MAPH from Chicago is different from an MA from Chicago. (And I would say an MAPH is probably more respected than an MALS.)

An MALS will not be regarded as particularly prestigious to PhD programs--even if it's from Harvard. A fellowship or stipend from BC will be viewed much more positively.