thestage

They're probably being productive, which is absolutely something I cannot bring myself to even approximate these days.

Guys, I was/am also a creative writing concentration! But then again I used every elective possible on literature classes (on top of the lit requirements), including finagling my way into classes barred to non lit concentration people. Then I split my apps between MFA and lit PhD programs, thus absolutely ensuring I'll end up at neither. So basically if you are not an idiot you are ahead of me.

bro (or, uhh, broette), if you want to "pursue life as a academic" you are already doomed, so you might as well just file that part of your life away in the Suffer Unto Truth folder and stare the thing in the face. your "super safety MA" is better than "absolutely nothing," which is what a large amount of us have to say for the years of undergrad we completed. the MA exists specifically to repair the damage wrought by the foibles of youth, and that is specifically what you are after--so you, specifically, should attend if you are as serious about the academic life as you want to think you are (which is not an insult, but a truth: we all must learn to decouple the romantic notions of applying to schools from the dirty work involved in actually doing something).

my undergrad school (I use the term loosely) graduates 20% of its students. don't think you are going to beat that.

yeah, well. I'll do it, but I'm too old to stuff another wasted year under my belt. as things stand right now, there are zero prospects between today and fall 2013. too long a period of time to resign to nothingness, but not long enough to do anything about it. maybe I'll pretend to write a book.

Yeah, I mean, uhh, I don't want to shit on anyone or anything, but the "0% confidence" thread has become the "I wish I could get into more than 3 top 20 programs" thread, and I don't think that's helping the 0-fer class a whole lot.

I'm pretty sure the 0-fers (hi, join the club) aren't getting into Yale or Harvard anyway

I don't think your first argument and your second argument have anything to do with each other. Yes, the process of applying to grad school is a little broken, mostly as a result of volume of applicants vs. funding, which is the result of a whole slew of other problems within the English discipline, within academia in general, within the socioeconomic realities and tendencies of the world we live in, and, yes, within us. I'm not going to get in anywhere this cycle, and it's going to be largely because I was under the impression (enforced elsewhere) that direct knowledge of what field or topic or niche or what-have-you is not very important to the application process. But these are research institutions, and they are investing somewhere north of $100,000 in each admitted applicant. Can you justify someone paying you those sums of money to entertain caprice and/or intellectual curiosity? When there is another person right there with a tightly defined (largely synonymous for "stupid") niche and a plan to produce something applicable to it? We all know that the academy has changed in the world of undergrad, but I think we lose sight of how much it has changed in the graduate realm as well. Regardless, this has very little to do with the ill-defined concept of "pretension." Academic language exists for a reason, and if you or I or the rest of the members of this board cannot always use it with precision and purpose (which I'm not even sure is the case), that doesn't excuse a dismissal of it. Practice makes perfect, as they say, and language influences thought as much as thought influences language. You don't talk to your parents or your friends the same way you talk with your professors, and you don't write a graduate paper or proposal in the same way you write an email to the aforementioned people, or even in the same way you write a blog post. Command of language is perhaps the chief intellectual tool, if not a goal in itself (it is), and part of that is being able to shift from one mode to another ("code shift" as the comp/rhets would say). You could charge that academic language is a power play, a means of stratification and barrier creation. And that charge has been leveled--but it is a weak one if the work the langauge supports is of any legitimate merit. Language is hard work.

The modern university is in fact the means of social control in a world that supports its power structures via appeal to freedom. Wait for the educational bubble to burst and you'll see what I mean.

Stephen Dedalus, there is yet a place for you!

I've tried to be careful to avoid that, specifically. I think "truth" might in this scenario be one of those wittgensteinian terms that impede productive debate or thought by virtue of their inability to be properly defined. Apart from all notions of objective/subjective discourse, social and historical influences and determinations, or the malleability, ambiguity, or impermanence of text, there is a sense that when we talk about non propositional "truth," we are chasing phantoms. Maybe what we can say is that a text is capable of producing propositional truths within the careful, capable, and interested reader via non propositional presentation, but I remain unconvinced that this is a useful definition of literature, or, indeed, a purpose or goal that, when taken entirely by itself, is enough to drive either the interests of the discipline or of myself personally. All I do mean to say is that attempts to throw out the skill, nuance, force, and nobility of great works by saying "ehh, value is unreachable, one text is as good as another for the purpose of the intellect, quality is illusory, and great artists are nothing but purified slaves of the zeitgeist" are to me extremely misguided.

well it is absolutely controversial in that it can, has, and will be argued one way or another. But it certainly should not come as a shock to anyone that such a position is possible, particularly as it has been, historically, more or less the dominant position of western intellectualism since its inception.

Because a line must be drawn. Even trip, who earlier evinced the quite radical (and I do hope you appreciate that it is radical) opinion that all texts contain within themselves, in and of themselves, the means of imparting worthwhile knowledge; even he would have to draw a line, primarily by defining the word text in these circumstances. It is simply not the case that all written things bear fruit by virtue of what they themselves say, that they hold some truth value, present some visible aesthetic form or conclusion, or otherwise permit of the inclined reader some intellectual space with which to work. Your other questions are questions of determination, but this one is fundamental. If texts do not have literary value, or if all texts have literary value (you will note that these two things are one in the same), then the discipline itself is just a shadow of philology or a particular branch of cultural studies that can only be viewed as the application of privilege to largely historical entities. We have a quite firm belief, as a discipline, in the idea of the possibility of a text rising above those factors to the extent that it contains some value not as a means (ie, as a sort of key to the moment in which it was created), but as an end too. This is, I think, even implicit in theoretical models that stress the social relevance of a text, in as much as they find a given text worth investigating under certain auspices in the first place. Shakespeare might tell me some things about Elizabethan England (whatever kinds of things I leave up to you), but so too would the newspapers of the day. And we don't read those newspapers. There are people that do, but we house them elsewhere, so to speak.

No Country for Old Men

so length and demographic are now inextricably related?

I guess (hope) today wasn't really Yale day.

But literary worth is what was up for debate in the first place. The argument (such as it was) was expressly not "Harry Potter is more worth teaching than Ulysses," it was "Harry Potter is a better book than Ulysses." You can certainly teach Harry Potter in a meaningful setting. One of those settings, he said with smirk, is one in which poor writing is examined. Another is one in which the root of the series' popularity is examined, which would necessarily fall on literary techniques and subject matter that in some fashion appeal to popular sensibilities. You could look at it through the prism of archetype theory. You could look at the effect of the books on a sociological level, and then in turn examine how that has affected our relationship with reading in a broader sense, which then folds into hermeneutics or social theories or....I mean we could go on. But what forms the basis for any worthwhile approach to teaching and Harry Potter or teaching and any inferior text or cultural artifact, is that it is not the text itself that is imparting any worthwhile knowledge, but the particular theoretical prism through which the text is being viewed. Which is, incidentally, the main point of contention in regards to subsuming English under cultural studies, or cultural studies under English; and, not so incidentally, one of the main points of contention surrounding the place of literary theory within advanced literary education and scholarship.

part of the job of being an intellectual is guarding and promoting intellectualism

there are actual productive ways to talk about canon/the idea of a canon (see: large portions of literary theory in the last fifty years, works on aesthetics, etc.). two ways that are not productive: "different strokes;" harry potter.

you don't really want to have this conversation

from what I hear, Yale humanities interviews, for the programs that have been following the mandate, are formalities.

If the last few years are anything to go by, tomorrow is Yale Day. I have a few too many eggs in this particular basket at this point, so I kind of feel like I'm on my last day on death row hoping for a pardon from the governor. And I live in Texas.

aarrrgghhghghgh people hating on joyce and faulkner itt :( that's it everyone meet me out back I would like to engage in a healthy round of fistcuffs at least there's a guy named after a Ulysses character here

Moby Dick

Frustratingly difficult? just bumped it up a few notches on my to read list, bro