antihumanist

Oh lord, just got in off the Toronto waitlist.  These things do happen people.  Though now I have to make a choice, not sure how I feel about this newfound agency.

Oh lord, just got in off the Toronto waitlist.  These things do happen people.  Though now I have to make a choice, not sure how I feel about this newfound agency.

Oh lord, just got in off the Toronto waitlist.  These things do happen people.  Though now I have to make a choice, not sure how I feel about this newfound agency.

Oh lord, just got in off the Toronto waitlist.  These things do happen people.  Though now I have to make a choice, not sure how I feel about this newfound agency.

agreed

http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-Is-a-Means-to/131316/
 
Some very important things to think about in here, and a necessary antidote for the romanticized view of graduate school and academics.

I don't think anyone in the academy really looks to either set of rankings to decide on the viability of a certain candidate. Like, no one sits there with the NRC or USNWR rankings in their lap as they go over CVs.
 
Having said that, prestige matters for certain kinds of jobs. A lot. It's coded more as the "currency of your degree," and it is a chief concern of hiring committees. Your degree is as valuable as people think it is, and people still find a Brown PhD much more valuable than a UConn PhD. It's infuriating and tautological--Brown is good because it is Brown, and everyone knows it is good--but it's also the current reality that we all must deal with. A quick glance at the job placements for Brown and UConn bears this out.
 
I've seen my school vet and hire a lot of candidates over the years, and we really only ask people from certain schools to campus. We ask Brown and Yale to campus quite frequently, but I've yet to see us bring UConn, Kentucky, Arizona State, or UI-Chicago. In fact, I think it's safe to say that we would not be interested in a CV from UConn or Kentucky. Once in a while we might look at someone from a "peer institution," but we would not dip any lower than that.
 
I once asked a professor how she goes about reading applications for jobs. She said she looks at three things: 1. prestige of degree, 2. publications, 3. awards. One must have all three things to get anything but a glance.
 
I really don't think it's fair--in a way, I wish that state schools would perpetuating this nonsense, because really, it hurts their own graduates more than anything else--but I think it demonstrates the unfortunate importance of "perceived prestige" of the job market.

Thank you.
 
Also, for posthuman doubters, it's essentially marxist materialism on steroids.  The ultimate decentered subject that consists of networks, ecologies, and emergences.  Obviously, posthumanism is not necessarily somehow exterior or outside of humanism, rather, it's a critique of humanism that decenters the idea that there is any essential "human" kernel or seat of self.  In order to do so, you look at the agencies that objects, animals, things, and spaces provide for, interact and merge with, (and in some readings (That I like personally) literally produce) a subject.
 
If you take the axiom that there is no essential human, suddenly the designing and production of things that we make takes on important political and ethical contours that humanism can elide.  In fact, while posthumanism decenters the subject completely, it has a redeeming factor in that you can modify, enhance, or change things (and therefore your subjectivity and position).
 
It's actually a liberating politics, in a strange way.
 
I could go on about it, but that's the very quick summary of what it is and why it's relevant 0 @fishbucket and @rems)

>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.
 
Then where is the seat of consciousness?  It's not a theater of the mind - modern cognitive science suggests that it's only through the overall network that humanity/subjectivity/the mind even can exist in any recognizable form.  So, what "special neuron/section of the brain" houses you - there isn't one.  Additionally, the brain itself isn't the only factor - the embodied nature of the flesh and blood body combined with the tools we use (beginning with language as the first tool for cognitive scaffolding ending with smartphones) produce what we call the human.  However, historically, this is not at all what has been perceived as human and thus the "post" in the name.
 
And it's not simply projecting our consciousness onto other things - our consciousness is the things themselves.  To an extent posthuman theory might borrow from Plato, Heidegger, etc - but takes these things as natural and in fact positive (so it's an embrace of these things ).  So writing is no longer the debased form of speech that ruins your natural memory - it is an essential cognitive offloading that's part of a process we're always in the middle of and have been since we discovered language.
 
And like I've been saying - this is important because since our cognition is literally bound up in the things that we use and spaces we inhabit, this opens the door to designing new tools, spaces, etc that can effect actual change in both our subjective experiences and broader life world.
 
And in this post I'm simply cribbing Andy Clark.  Should I crib Agamben for my next post to explain it in another light?

The hottest thing in English today is a new club called Sylvia's Daddy. 

Exactly. Can we start a petition to ban Harold Bloom and his multiple gradcafe accounts?

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.

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.

Being human has historically limited our perception, bound it to the human. Recent works like Insect Media, Alien Phenomenology, etc. have really opened up interesting discussions. Posthumanism isn't new, of course, but I think there is a general trend toward removing the 'centrality' of the human in criticism itself...and I think that's a great thing. 

ALL OF THE KARMA!

Not because it is, apparently, a Lovecraftian nightmare where the living envy the dead?
 
Artist's rendering of emoryenglishphd's thesis defense.
 

All this pessimism, jeebus.
 
I'm waitlisted at two places, and both schools have not only been pretty darned nice when it comes to being available, but they have also told me the funding offers that they would make were I to get in off the waitlist.  Both are very generous, and one school is paying to fly me out to their prospective students weekend.  Obviously my case isn't indicative of every school, but still, the apocalypticness from fishbucket is a bit overwrought.
 
I mean, really, unless you've got some huge ego insecurity you should see a waitlist as a VERY good thing.  While obviously it sucks that you're not actually in (and it's more than a bit excruciating to hope that someone ahead of you bumps out), the fact is that the school sees you as a potential grad student.  The fact is, you made all the cuts except for the very last (likely arbitrary) cut.  A school wouldn't extend a waitlist to an "inferior" candidate or a second class citizen - if you're on the list, they want you.
 
<edit> 
 
Also, remember, part of the reason for waitlists is the musical-chairs nature of this process. Student A gets in at Harvard, Yale, Michigan, and Berkeley.  They can only go to one of the schools.  So all the schools need a waitlist since they need the grad students as labor, but don't know which students will take their offer, and which will decline cus they got in somewhere else.

These are things I have learned about literary studies Ph.D. admissions, and I do believe they are accurate:
 
Fit really does matter, though it is mysterious and difficult to gauge from the applicant's perspective, and it can mean a number of different things.
 
GRE scores and grades will not get you in, but they can keep you out.
 
Languages matter a lot more than you might think, especially for particular subfields; beware of applying to be a medievalist without Latin, for example, or applying as a transnational scholar without relevant languages. 
 
Letters of recommendation are very important, but not as important as the statement of purpose and writing sample. Your writing sample matters the most, followed closely by your statement of purpose (which is its own kind of writing sample).
 
The scariest truth of all: your writing sample may be very good, but that doesn't mean it's good enough to earn you a spot in any given year. In fact, your application as a whole may be excellent, but whether or not it's excellent enough is a different story. That's why you have to aim to be the best while hoping to land at "good enough." Sincere apologies if this makes anyone sad. It can be a painful thing, I know.

I hope not to sound redundant, but I firmly believe it's important to write about program fit. 
 
For what it's worth, I have to attend an annual conference for one of my undergrad programs (although there are several optional events throughout the year) and the majority of fellows in this region are from emory, rice, and wustl so we'll typically have graduate admission counselors from those schools, but we'll also have graduate admissions counselors come from other prominent fellow schools from other regions sometimes  (when I say "prominent" I mean schools who produce a large number of fellows) to speak and answer questions about admissions as well (mainly ucla, university of chicago and northwestern, but I've seen harvard, dartmouth, and stanford and a few others). Over the course of two or so years it's been explicitly stressed over and over again from admissions counselors from these schools to make sure to write about how you fit into a program, but here's where some people might err. Don't just pick out professors blindsighted -- ASK if professors are willing to work with more students during the next school year. ASK if professors are interested in your research. ASK if professors think your research aligns with theirs before you apply.
 
Writing about your fit means absolutely nothing if your POI can't work with you (they might already be advising more students than they can manage or  they might be on a sabbatical by the time you enter etc.), if your POI doesn't have interest in what you're doing (their research interests do change - one professor at OSU told me he wasn't doing something I inquired about anymore, BUT he was interested in working with some of my other interest areas).
 
This is why it helps to list 3-4 people you can work with in your letter (hopefully you've at least contacted the primary 1 or 2). If you can only name one person you want to work with and he's not taking any more students, then you're out. If you've convincingly written in two or three others you can see yourself working with then, if admitted, you'll have access to Professor of Choice and you'll prove that if something happens to Professor of Choice (they leave the school, they retire, they die... all realities), you'll still have other people in the program who can guide you. Appealing to 1 professor is like applying to the professor. Picking a few reveals your interest in the department rather than just one POI. 
 
A few other things I've taken away:
 
1. Write about why you want to study at the school; what resources does the school have that will contribute to your research? Is there a special collection or a special institute? Is the location particularly beneficial to your research? Are there local off campus resources?
2. Explicitly state what you want to contribute to the academy as a whole. What conversations can you join? What new are you adding?
3. Tell what academic experiences prepare you for graduate study (avoid too much extraneous personal information unless requested). 
4. Know what you want to research, but be sure to indicate that you are a young scholar so your interests are evolving (this illustrates your flexibility and makes those professors with changing interests more inclined to work with you). 

I think the problem isn't the tension between optimistic and pessimism in this process; the problem is that people come onto gradcafe in the hopes of discovering some "absolute truth" about the application cycle. The fact is, there are no absolute truths, and that makes applicants uncomfortable. Some of us benefited from connections; some did not. Some applicants loved their unfunded MA experience; others would never even consider attending an unfunded MA program. A handful of us had stellar GRE scores, but many of us had just above average numbers.
 
The awkward, uncomfortable truth is that there are no absolutes in our field, no one factor that will guarantee acceptance into a PhD program. Our experiences are our own truths, and they may not apply to everybody applying to grad school. 
 
So, what can one do to improve their chances? Make sure that every aspect of the application is strong. Work consistently with advisors on the statement of purpose and writing sample. Build the CV. Study for the GRE's. Talk to people at conferences. Research the hell out of potential programs. Pour every ounce of energy, focus, and time possible into the application. GradCafe is a great tool to build community, connect with potential colleagues, vent, and celebrate. But it is not the place where anyone will find the secret recipe to getting into grad school-- because no such recipe exists.

I obviously didn't sit in the adcomm meetings, so I'm not 100% sure what helped me get in. However, I will tell you this: each and every professor who has emailed me to congratulate me on my acceptance either mentioned my writing sample or my statement of purpose. "I especially enjoyed reading your writing sample about X, Y, and Z." "I'm excited to see how our interests in X, Y, and Z align!" No one mentioned my GPA, conferences, or GRE scores; even if those did help me in some minor way, they weren't what "got me in."
 
Also, when University of Arizona called, the director said, "during the first round of application screening, we can always tell who will be our top applicants based on how long the letters of rec are." I imagine they also read the letters themselves, but it makes sense that the top applicants would be the type of students professors are really excited to talk about.

Congrats!
 
Also, how does it feel knowing that you are a mythical beast on par with the Pegasus and Unicorn?
 
Like seriously, how often does this kind of thing happen?  Many congrats!

Congrats!
 
Also, how does it feel knowing that you are a mythical beast on par with the Pegasus and Unicorn?
 
Like seriously, how often does this kind of thing happen?  Many congrats!

Congrats!
 
Also, how does it feel knowing that you are a mythical beast on par with the Pegasus and Unicorn?
 
Like seriously, how often does this kind of thing happen?  Many congrats!

MY HUSBAND AND I WERE BOTH JUST ACCEPTED TO LSU WITH FULL FUNDING!!! I am BEYOND happy!!! We didn't think we would get in anywhere together!!!!!