Are we all just a tad too pretentious already?

[Sad Hatter]

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to laugh at myself pretty hard. I mean look at us, we’re all so damn pretentious. We’re not even in grad school yet and we talk like we’re the next Ed. Saids. Is it just me, or do we (English students, especially) tend to be a lil’ too cocky? For starters, we’re all applying to the same top 15 schools (lol)—surely some of us (hey, I’ll volunteer to go first if you won’t) think a little too highly of ourselves, no?

And it's not just that; it's how we refer to our interests. We've all picked up these heavy academic accents; we talk about "discourse" and "conversations" and " examinations" and "readings." Not that these are bad things to talk about, but maybe we do it too much in ordinary situations? Ughh, it's almost like there's too much pressure to become academics before we can be students. Whatever happened to wanting to learn things in grad schools. (Don't get me started on how ridiculous SoPs have to be these days; and matching writing samples? Gimme a break! If I knew exactly what I wanted to study I wouldn't need to explore anything in grad school; and if I knew everything about what I wanted to study, I wouldn't need to study it). Hey, I have an idea, why don't we all just write our dissertations right now? Who needs grad school? We already know everything ...

I was talking to my friend the other day, and I asked her if she thought it was unhealthy that we take ourselves so seriously…I can’t remember her answer exactly, but I think she agreed. Should we sometimes remind ourselves that grad school is not all there is in life? That it’s a process? That we need to have other interests and not let our love of literature and criticism overtake our lives and turn us into a cult (we don’t want to be like the theater kids, now do we?) We’re always analyzing everything and talking about different readings or different contexts. It all comes back to postcolonialism, lol....

Oh well, just sharing a thought on the beast that is this crazy process and the little monster grad students-elect that it creates…

Sorry, maybe I'm just frustrated by these schools that haven't called me yet. Um, ok, ever...

Edited February 20, 2012 by Flan's My Gal

[ekant]

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to laugh at myself pretty hard. I mean look at us, we’re all so damn pretentious. We’re not even in grad school yet and we talk like we’re the next Ed. Saids. Is it just me, or do we (English students, especially) tend to be a lil’ too cocky? FOr starters, we’re all applying to the same top 15 schools (lol)—surely some of us (hey, I’ll volunteer to go first if you won’t) think a little too highly of ourselves, no?

And it's not just that; it's how we refer to our interests. We've all picked up these heavy academic accents; we talk about "discourse" and "conversations" and " examinations" and "readings." Not that these are bad things to talk about, but maybe we do it too much in ordinary situations? Ughh, it's almost like there's too much pressure to become academics before we can be students. Whatever happened to wanting to learn things in grad schools. (Don't get me started on how ridiculous SoPs have to be these days; and writing matching samples? Gimme a break! If I knew exactly what I wanted to study I wouldn't want to study it). Hey, I have an idea, why don't we all just write our dissertations right now? Who needs grad school? We already know everything ...

I was talking to my friend the other day, and I asked her if she thought it was unhealthy that we take ourselves so seriously…I can’t remember her answer exactly, but I think she agreed. Should we sometimes remind ourselves that grad school is not all there is in life? That it’s a process? That we need to have other interests and not let our love of literature and criticism overtake our lives and turn us into a cult (we don’t want to be like the theater kids, now do we?) We’re always analyzing everything and talking about different readings or different contexts. It all comes back to postcolonialism, lol....

Oh well, just sharing a thought on the beast that is this crazy process and the little monster grad students-elect that it creates…

Sorry, maybe I'm just frustrated by these schools that haven't called me yet. Um, ok, ever...

This. Thank you. I completely agree.

[xfgdfrmgpo332]

Well there's more to life than books, you know, but not much more...

(Morrissey fans anyone?)

[ekant]

Well there's more to life than books, you know, but not much more...

(Morrissey fans anyone?)

Big fan of The Smiths... Morrissey himself, not so much.

[andsoitgoes161]

I'm really glad to hear someone else voice this opinion. I've been complaining to anyone who will listen how unfairly weighted this whole process seems in regard to SoP's, a la your point that if we already knew what exactly we wanted to study and had a course of action we could write dissertations or teach our interests effectively at present. Not that I am not totally impressed by the outpouring of precise academic courses of action and immense knowledge of scholars in our respective subfields that people on these boards voice, but I have to admit I've felt alone in the fact that my whole point in applying to a PhD program is to take my nebulous (but graduate-level) knowledge and expand it with advanced, in-depth study over the next 2-3 years IN ORDER to fine-tune my academic direction. I feel like this places me entirely behind in the game, and I'm weighted down by my how "vague" my purpose seems in comparison to others (as evidenced by zero current offers to programs). Maybe I am just delusional and I'm really not prepared to enter into a PhD program (most likely the case).

Edited February 20, 2012 by andsoitgoes161

[JeremiahParadise]

I don't think people on this board are pretentious at all. Really! And I'm sure I'm not alone, either. I think you just might not be used to how grad students talk to each other about their interests/work. All the stuff you indicated as being somehow problematic/annoying/unnecessary is pretty much par for the course. Hm. I think something that's lost on many applicants to MA/PhD programs (and I include myself in this group because I was the same way) is just how far along you're expected to be, both academically and professionally. Sure, it's great to be excited about literature, but that excitement can't be the end of it. As a grad student, you DO need to have an idea of why your work is important and how you plan to develop it. Remember, we're not applying to "school" in the sense that we are going just to learn. We're expected to produce. Our professional scholarship starts day one, if it hasn't already. This fall, you'll no longer be a student, really -- you'll be working a job (albeit as a "student") in one of the most demanding fields in the world. That's why they're paying you to go. And in this field, your work sort of does need to be your life, and you sort of do need to take it seriously, in spite of how pretentious it might make you sound. I do think it's good to be critical of how we communicate with one another, though, so I'm glad you posted this topic. I'm sure others will want to chime in, too. Good luck with the rest of your apps!

Edited February 20, 2012 by JeremiahParadise

[user_name]

it's everyone not on this board who is pretentious

[thestage]

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.

[vordhosbntwin]

i do tend to talk about my interests in ordinary situations....but i can say honestly that there's nothing i care about more than the work i do. i'm not interested in the pissing contests, but i am interested in the books i read, the articles i write, and the conversations i have about my ideas and those of others. it seems to me that to survive and to get into a top ten school, an obsessive relationship with your work and interests is a necessity. why enter a world where this will be all that you do, if indeed it isn't something you want to consume your life?

you'll probably criticize me for posting this, but i think it's worth quoting anyway:

"Few things separate more profoundly the mode of life befitting an intellectual from that of the bourgeois than the fact that the former acknowledges no alternative between work and recreation. Work that need not, to satisfy reality, first inflict on the subject all the evil that it is afterwards to inflict on others is pleasure even in its despairing effort. Its freedom is the same as that which bourgeois society reserves exclusively for relaxation and, by this regimentation, at once revokes. Conversely, anyone who knows freedom finds all the amusements tolerated by this society unbearable, and apart from his work, which admittedly includes what the bourgeois relegate to non-working hours as 'culture', has no taste for substitute pleasures. Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline." - Theodor Adoro, Minima Moralia

i honestly feel like the kind of work we get to do is the best kind of all, if simply because, as adorno says, it is a unique thing in this world: the perfect intertwining of pleasure and work. i realize that i'm obsessive, but i would say that this 'cultish obsession' that we all share is one of the greatest pleasures in the world. if you find it annoying, or you see it as a tedious job, i don't know, i'm tempted to say get out before it's too late. there's a converse to its greatness, and i think that's the fact that for folks who might not be as interested (and there's nothing wrong with that), it can be terribly painful; i can't imagine having to spend seven years or so investing myself in something that is so intense while feeling that it is some burdensome task i have to complete in order to get a job.

[andsoitgoes161]

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?

Well said, and something I also failed to take into account/that was somewhat advised against when I was completing applications.

[Stately Plump]

I don't think people on this board are pretentious at all. Really! And I'm sure I'm not alone, either.

I've been really pleasantly surprised at how unpretentious this forum is.

I told my advisor about this place and how it has been nice to get to know some other people who have similar interests/are going through a similar process. She frowned, then cringed, then warned me about people trying to be intimidating via a shadowy and pretentious internet personality. I think she was thinking of her own days in graduate school, when intellectual "sophistication" and cut-throat attitudes were predominant. I'm sure all of us will encounter the pretentious jerks of PhD programs (including some professors), but I've found the environment on here overwhelmingly positive and refreshing, and I'm excited about meeting a lot of these people as we become the next generation of scholars.

I'm especially excited about becoming the next generation of scholars together.

[rawera]

Interesting thread, I do feel like this community is surprisingly unpretentious. That said, if I see/think "I am interested in period or theory, specifically x application of y with respect to z" I think I may cry or laugh or throw up possibly all at once.

[perrykm2]

I don't take anything seriously, even if it is deadly serious.

[ComeBackZinc]

It's a bit different for me, because my research interests are so different from most people here. I'll tell you, though: I reject entirely the idea that there's something more pretentious about talking about discourse or examinations than there is talking about standard deviations, or factor analyses, or control grouped studies. I work with people involved in that kind of research all the time, and there's nothing more legitimate about them, or more serious, or more scholarly. Also, this idea that we need to apologize for the research that we do, or the specialized language we use to speak about it-- that doesn't exist in most other fields. Nobody in education research is going "pardon me for being pretentious, but we should be using a Spearman rank order coefficient instead of the Pearson r."

Part of ensuring that your field is taken seriously is taking it seriously yourself.

If there's one thing that I've learned as a grad student, it's that imposter syndrome will just kill you. You can't apologize for valuing your own research, and you can't listen to the voice in your head that says you aren't smart enough or serious enough to be a real academic. The process is too draining and too long to survive that way. And really: if you don't value your own research, why should any university pay you to conduct it?

Edited February 20, 2012 by ComeBackZinc

[girlmostlikely]

Well there's more to life than books, you know, but not much more...

(Morrissey fans anyone?)

Well, I live for the written word, and people come second or possibly third....

[TripWillis]

I'm gonna back up everyone else on here and say that I find the forum pleasantly unpretentious. Except for that debate about the state of literary study and humanities overall in the "Books NOT to Read Thread."

[girlmostlikely]

It's a bit different for me, because my research interests are so different from most people here. I'll tell you, though: I reject entirely the idea that there's something more pretentious about talking about discourse or examinations than there is talking about standard deviations, or factor analyses, or control grouped studies. I work with people involved in that kind of research all the time, and there's nothing more legitimate about them, or more serious, or more scholarly. Also, this idea that we need to apologize for the research that we do, or the specialized language we use to speak about it-- that doesn't exist in most other fields. Nobody in education research is going "pardon me for being pretentious, but we should be using a Spearman rank order coefficient instead of the Pearson r."

Part of ensuring that your field is taken seriously is taking it seriously yourself.

I agree with this completely. I think using such specialized jargon shows an acknowledgment that literary studies is a field, with its own debates and ways of thinking (often through things such as "discourses," or, perhaps debates about "humanism," or what have you). To use such language shows that you are trying to make your analysis of a given cultural object legible to other readers so that they can then respond to your work. To say, "Jude the Obscure is so radical because Sue Bridehead likes to read books and doesn't want to be a wife and stuff, she's so great!" doesn't give the audience as much to respond to "Sue Bridehead illustrates the impact of discourses about women's education and the New Woman concurrent with Hardy's writing of the novel." (This is some paradigm-shifting reading of Jude I have going on right here.)

I also think that one can be incredibly passionate and erudite about their research--and, as vordhosbntwin says, have these interests carry into the day-to-day conversations in one's life--without being pretentious. Isn't pretension more about how we relate to others rather than ourselves anyway? My undergraduate adviser's work is some of the densest, theoretical jargon-heavy scholarship I've read, yet "in real life" he's the sweetest, most down to earth person to earth person ever who is always willing to engage me in some camp give-and-take about how on a given day I'm dressed like Liza Minnelli circa 1963.

That said, I am SO AFRAID of being one of those grad students who can't talk about anything BESIDES grad school and their research. I'm hoping that wherever I am, I have access to my friends/family who, though very intelligent and educated, aren't academics.

[HunkyDory]

Pretentious?

The key part of being pretentious is that there is no merit to back it up--presumably at this level you should have some merit.

So you can be delusional, self-important, elitist, condescending, douchey, sycophantic, and so on. But you shouldn't be PRETENTIOUS.

Regardless though, it's always good to keep a sense of humor about what you do.

[marlowe]

I'm especially excited about becoming the next generation of scholars together.

How embarrassing is it going to be in twenty years when we meet at a conference and conclude, "shit! we met on GradCafe back in the early 2000s"? Awesome.

[spasticlitotes]

How embarrassing is it going to be in twenty years when we meet at a conference and conclude, "shit! we met on GradCafe back in the early 2000s"? Awesome.

Haha, I think I'm really looking forward to this, and I'm hoping it won't take twenty years. I wonder, sometimes, if pretension is in the eye of the beholder. Doesn't everyone think that what they do is important? Otherwise, why would you do it? It's up to us to take something and put value in it - I value the changing world, and the way it manifests in narrative and hybridized literatures in English. I'm sure, however, there are plenty of people out there who would say, Really? Is that worth throwing around a hundred thousand dollars at? And at this point, at the risk of sounding pretentious, I would throw a copy of Atlas Shrugged at them.

[marlowe]

Somebody mentioned it briefly already, but it is all about responding appropriately to your audience. For someone in our position, "code switching" is an effective way to build rapport with peers outside of the Academy, while still speaking intelligently about your interests with colleagues.

Pretension, in my opinion, is speaking about the exoteric in the same manner that you would address your research.

However, there is no shame in elucidating your ideas clearly and logically if 'common' speech' is not going to do the job properly.

[koolherc]

I like what a lot of people have said here, but I'll add this in response to a couple of lines in the OP's comments:

In regards to figuring out what you want to do before getting to vs while in grad school... I think that one should just get a normal job (or other less legal way of supporting oneself) and read books or articles or whatever by oneself until one does know what one wants to do. Get a reading group together, or, if you must, do a (cheap) MA somewhere. I'm so glad that I didn't go into a PhD program straight out of college, or at any other point in the 5 years between then and now. I could have and I might've gotten in somewhere, but I wouldn't have had the drive and desire to just straight wreck shit that I have now. Holding off as long as I did and being convinced by all the garbage online that tells us not to go to PhD programs helped me really focus my mind, my energies, and enhance my self-confidence and confidence in the fact that I want to be a nerd who gets paid to be a nerd for the rest of my life, while also hopefully making my colleagues shit their pants.

Edited February 20, 2012 by koolherc

[TripWillis]

How embarrassing is it going to be in twenty years when we meet at a conference and conclude, "shit! we met on GradCafe back in the early 2000s"? Awesome.

I'm going to wear a nametag that says "Trip Willis" on it.

[DorindaAfterThyrsis]

I want to be a nerd who gets paid to be a nerd for the rest of my life, while also hopefully making my colleagues shit their pants.

You're my new hero.

[losingeffingmarbles]

[...] the drive and desire to just straight wreck shit [....]

That's how you've gotta do it.