thestage

and you continue to be bad at reading that article did nothing to refute anything I said. it's framed in apology. its point is not "you can get a job at a research institution with a degree from a lesser school," its point is "hey, getting a job at a smaller school ain't all that bad." ok, sure. and how many people who try to get PhDs at lower ranked schools have no research aspirations? and as the job market becomes more and more flooded, who is to say that even positions at these schools may not go to the plenty of graduates from top named schools? given how abysmal the job market is regardless of who you are or where you went, frankly more people should only be bothering with top schools with a track record of placing people in positions that both pay money occasionally and also allow you to do more than act as a caretaker of overprivileged idiots flooding upper-crust liberal arts schools A, B, and Z. I don't care if you hate the ivy league, I don't care if you don't think rankings are worthwhile--frankly I don't think I care about anything you think--but there are people who obviously do care about those things, and those people happen to be in charge of whether or not you get a job. luckily for you, Buffalo is quite highly ranked. so you and your frankly annoying milquetoast regurgitation of every platitude of academia are more than on track to pollute our educational institutions with your mediocrity. fifteen years from now I'm sure you'll happily tell little suzy english about all the wonderful paths a PhD from Bumfuck McNamedafteraphilanthropistnoonehasheardof U will open up for her, so long as there are enough Bumfuck U's holding enough conferences and running enough journals to ensure that you will look busy enough to secure tenure while you encourage people to follow their dreams all the way to foodstamps and suicide. hey-o! the things you can say when you no longer plan on posting here!

Jobs as a fun exercise, go click through the bios/CVs of professors at any school you've heard of. see where they got their PhD's from.

$$, indeed

I hate my cat, though, so there's that. yeah, I'm that guy. is deadinthewater gradcafeguy or am I not keeping up on these things

sacrifice your cat to the academic gods

oh hey, seems they did send me a rejection letter. ten minutes ago.

so good that she failed to send you or anyone else a simple rejection letter

me toooooo high five

also appear to be rejected. I'm glad the school was so good at communicating with its applicants!* *they did not communicate with me at all, and I am, in fact, not glad

turns out they give you a limit. what will you think of next, internet

if there's any post more interesting than a series of endless dumb gifs, it is a post complaining about button clicking on the internet just to annoy you I am going to downvote every post on this page. serious repercussions. CAN YOU HANDLE IT!?

I thought they got rid of the Fulbright program?

please don't say hook 'em horns. sloganeering is like the worst thing

I don't really think you can turn down the PhD offer (should it come through) just out of deference to decorum

deep in the heart of a dystopian feminist Russia, St. Petersburg continues its fine tradition of political rebranding: Welcome to Clitgrad

and yet, I managed to read fifty pages of material yesterday on a whim. I somehow doubt all the YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND contingent has ever bothered to read something on account of what someone they don't like on grad cafe had to say.

I never said I wasn't one of them. I don't know who or what I am, or when or if I ever will chance upon that kind of knowledge. I only say that to be one of them, if I am to be one, would be, for me, a source of endless consternation. We are not owed anything in this life, miracle though it may be that we were born in this seat of consciousness, able as we are to delineate our relationship to our robo-insect compatriots.

roll wit dat skrill

it has been unbearably long, yes. and to think we will already have another one tomorrow!

Could easily make? It's something like the first possible tenet of cultural anthropology, and emerges as one of the organizing principles of, say, post-Renaissance thought, which had to reconcile a veneration of the Greeks with a fundamentally Christian perspective (a duality that first exists, I suppose, in the Middle Ages).

Which is another way of saying it is a specific permutation of general postmodernist theory. Which is interesting, because everyone working in X Studies is always quite fond of telling me that postmodernism is dead. You are describing a paradigm in which "post" is the key concept, not "humanism"--and certainly not "post-humanism"--and yet delineating a field in which certain foundational concepts are immutable, taken as the structure of a field simply by the act of naming the field (see: Derrida on "the proper," etc.). Whether or not this is a "contradiction" is irrelevant, because the philosophical backbone here does not admit of the immutable logical invalidity of contradiction, or, in fact, of the episteme that would privilege any or all of those three words. That is the entire point of the philosophy. I need neither animal studies nor posthumanism-in-literature to tell me about culture and enthnocentrism, relativity and the phenomenological human condition, transcendental philosophy and the episteme, because those ideas predate, preconfigure, and outstrip the bubble of scholarship to which you are appealing. Naming a field neither closes it nor makes its rules or its existence something that must be acknowledged as intellectually valuable. We have this thing in English, where actual thinkers, artists, or scholars come to a certain topic as a matter of course, as something that they treat along the road of their philosophical or methodological development, as a means of funneling or actualizing specific patterns of their thought; and then others walk down this now paved road, they see the scenery along the roadside--and they stop. They construct spectacular edifices around this scenery, and then they no longer move. While poor old Diogenes wanders around the countryside, they live in castles. The path is lost in the haste to codify some field around a specific instance of its development, and then that field is cultivated by serfs who do not have knowledge of or interest in anything but the crops they are pulling out of the ground. So that instead of looking at "how literature enacts questioning" at all, or what is even meant by that question, by literature, language, questioning, etc., as concepts or as principles that organize our intellectual being; in short, instead of developing scholars capable of living up to literature, we invent some little nook wherein we get to talk about animals in Victorian literature or what could possibly be gay in Dante: a theology, and turn our discipline into category bingo, into the work of finding X in Y, where the instances of those variables are deified--where it is possible to talk of "what is hot in English"--but the structure of the act, of X and Y qua X and Y, are treated as grotesque monstrosities. All the while, there is no intellectual common ground through which to see a forest as anything more than a series of trees--let people do as they like! We invent problems in the name of politics. Which is, you'll note, preposterously backwards.

I wish I could find the existence of a magical discipline between English, where absolutely everything and anything must be "respected" because people need to find something to work on in order to get tenure, and current Philosophy, which out of hand dismisses anything that doesn't boil down to algebra, to the point where they question their own analytic methodologies by apply analytic methodologies to them, and where scholars will literally spend their entire careers dreaming up instances of X that will make some equation involving X false.

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.

I study literature. Insects don't write literature humanities, dawg. I Believe In Human Beings. In terms of literature, this is actually the most nonsensical thing you could possibly put in print.

I dunno, I think being human is alright