Fishbucket

I cant believe you posted that picture. I'm not wearing any pants!

The best schools don't really even do funded MAs in the humanities though. And an MA is a great introduction to graduate studies that helps you to figure out if you want to do a PhD, what you want to focus on in your studies, and a million other things. I don't think debt is good, but it really depends on your situation. One or two years of debt that pave the way to a lifelong career isn't an unreasonable thing to choose.

It depends what your financial situation is, and if you can get any help financing the MA. But I wouldn't entirely rule out unfunded Masters degrees, just in order to categorically avoid debt. If you really want to be in academia, an MA from a good school can help you get into a PhD program. I know Swagato got an MA at Chicago and is now headed to Yale, for example.

I'm in an unfunded MA program right now. I suggest you talk to your professors right away about your desire to go for a PhD. They are an amazing resource for mentoring and advice and eventually letters. Basically the mentoring I've received during this expensive year is how I justify the loans to myself.

Ok guys, here's a list of schools for comp lit. I like modernism, 20th century continental philosophy, Europe & Latin America. Tell me what you think Princeton Cornell Stanford Berkeley (RLL) Brown WUSTL (Dual Comp. Lit) Chicago UPenn Duke (Literature) UNC Irvine USC (Literature) Maryland NYU Santa Cruz Columbia UVA UCSD UCSB yeah ok that's all. i want to apply everywhere next round.

he really did steal my upvotes. He posted a picture of my cat

oh wow, way to steal my upvotes dead

And I make my cat read about "plants as persons" Teaching my cat to read was the one concession I made to the "human"-ities

Just give me a list of schools that are good to go to. Like 30 schools. Thanks

Over what? My answer is: depends how tall it is

Yeah seriously people stop being nasty trolls just cuz your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of underfunded stipends

someone please just tell me where to apply. I like, um, new stuff.

Exactly eleventy-three years

I'm taking this class, subtly titled Post-Humanism. Wonder what it will cover.

You guys are making me so hot right now

Is the feeling mutual? Everyone who says that has yet to prove this to me. If I am "making a fool of myself" then show me how. You should be able to do that, given the depth of your knowledge, right?

And that is exactly why the humanities has such a bad reputation. I think an articulate person actually SHOULD be able to describe why their field is interesting to outsiders. It shouldn't be an impossible, or monumental task. We need a better sort of language if we are only able to convey what we value to the people in our immediate vicinity who already share exactly our background and our interests. And asleepawake: something can be both novel (as in, the new name evokes a sense of excitement) and a rip-off of an old idea (the name is actually just a way of labeling thoughts from a philosopher of a different epoch). There is no contradiction in that, it happens all the time. The fact is, it's hard to come up with something really profound to say. It's much easier to take things that have already been said, gather them together under a catchy title, and call it a new field of study. If we interrogate what about these fields actually makes them new, we find that Montaigne was playing around with these ideas in the 16th century. Show me one thing about post-humanism that is TRULY new, and I will give you a cookie.

I realized the other day that, as an English major, I never interacted with a Rhet/Comp professor my entire time in undergrad. I figure this must be the case for a majority of English majors who came into school with AP Language & Composition credit and never had to take a University writing course. Also I don't think my school gave degrees in Rhet & Comp, so we had no grad students in that field anyway. In conclusion, studying rhet & comp feels like it's actually miles and miles away from studying literature. It's kind of like going to school to be an electrician vs. an electrical engineer. Completely different things at work there, right?

creativity is its own reward. said no one ever

Probably right around the time you decided to go to Purdue, amiright amiright? The thing I don't like about these "hot" "new" "fields" is that they aren't new, they are only hot because people are attracted to what they perceive as novelty, and they have every appearance of weak minds taking a point made by (for example) Heidegger, and trying to spin off a brand of theory from it. I think I'm going to specialize in puppy studies, because puppies have so much to teach us about literature. And about life, people. Puppies understand what it means to live. OMG i love puppies.

Thestage, that was such a beautiful metaphor. Seriously why aren't you writing books already?! Leave these serfs to post on their forums, and go crank out your novel! It really does seem like a lot of these "new" movements are just rebranded, renamed, slightly dumbed-down versions of old theories and concepts.

For all of you who keep saying the rest of us are ill-informed, and don't know enough to criticize the field, etc, nothing you've said has convinced me that this is a field at all worth pursuing. It still ignores the basic fact that we earthlings, or whatever you want to call us (perhaps not "humans") are all we have as reference -- our thoughts, our feelings, our intellectual interests which lead us to create our fields that we study. 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. The only thing that you prove by saying "we have microbes in our bodies" or "our brains are made out of matter that reacts like other matter" is the depth of everything we don't understand, and probably can never understand, about OURSELVES. Not the depths of what we CAN understand about what life is like for objects or animals or microbes or machines.

I propose we call this new field "Studies Studies", and have an anything-goes policy, and dump all the dreck out of English and into there.

Hey, give me some credit. That's exactly why I'm posting on grad café!

Are you a butthead? In both cases, the answer is THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ABSOLUTE TRUTH.