Two Espressos Posted February 20, 2012 Posted February 20, 2012 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. This is awesome shit right here. First the post about the virtue of the "uselessness" of an academic career, and now this. I hope you don't mind, but I'm totally saving some of these quotes and adding them to my awesome-quote-collection.
TripWillis Posted February 20, 2012 Posted February 20, 2012 This is awesome shit right here. First the post about the virtue of the "uselessness" of an academic career, and now this. I hope you don't mind, but I'm totally saving some of these quotes and adding them to my awesome-quote-collection. "Uselessness" is after all a major merit of the Beckett ethos. #pretentiousness
Two Espressos Posted February 20, 2012 Posted February 20, 2012 "Uselessness" is after all a major merit of the Beckett ethos. #pretentiousness
perrykm2 Posted February 20, 2012 Posted February 20, 2012 That reminds me of the Elcor in Mass Effect. The all-Elcor production of Hamlet.
koolherc Posted February 20, 2012 Posted February 20, 2012 It's his Malcolm X avatar. I think you're on to something. No one gave a hoot about my posts before.
DorindaAfterThyrsis Posted February 20, 2012 Posted February 20, 2012 (edited) I completely understand and echo what many have been saying re: the need for rigour and seriousness in the way we approach our field, and the important role that language plays in constructing/creating the space in which intellectual activity can happen. However, I'm a bit less convinced of arguments that Grad School is entirely vocational (with no room for exploration/learning as an end in itself), or the sentiment that seems to be lurking under many of these responses that one needs to, essentially, be an expert already before setting foot into a graduate program. Yes, one needs to be focused in order to pursue this path; yes, one needs to be committed and driven; yes, one needs to be passionate and filled with the conviction of their ideas (and ideals)....but one also needs to be open, ready, and willing to receive new information, and possibly paradigm-shifting/world-altering information. Otherwise, what's the point? If I already knew everything I needed to know about my interests (and all the tangentially related things that are bound to come up in my research), than I wouldn't need to be in a program. I'm not entering grad school as a formality designed to reinforce my own convictions and provide me with a pretty framed certificate at the end. I'm entering grad school because I want to have my world rocked, and the foundations of my beliefs and ideas questioned, and examined, and (quite possibly) blown apart. I believe in my research, I believe in my ability to do it, but I also believe that I have only scratched the surface of what I want/need to know in order to progress as a scholar. Grad school will (hopefully) provide me with those tools, and introduce me to those earth-shattering questions. If I emerge on the other end of this process with my interests and ideas essentially intact, I will consider my grad school career a failure. I'm not going to Grad School to reinforce what I already know, I'm going to LEARN what I don't. I don't think that makes me less of a candidate. EDIT: on re-read, this sounded a little more strident/grumpy than I intended....therefore I added this smiley face to make all the grumpiness disappear...... *poof* Edited February 20, 2012 by DorindaAfterThyrsis Aubergine and wreckofthehope 2
perrykm2 Posted February 20, 2012 Posted February 20, 2012 Is anyone else applying to grad school to protect herself from herself? Because that is what I'm doing. To be honest, I'm could be 100% okay working retail, playing video games all night, and watching the Food Network. It's so seductive, but I hate that aspect of my personality. An advanced degree and [potentially] a job in academia feels like the only way to stave off my latent tendency to never think about or produce anything meaningful for the rest of my life.
spasticlitotes Posted February 20, 2012 Posted February 20, 2012 Is anyone else applying to grad school to protect herself from herself? Because that is what I'm doing. To be honest, I'm could be 100% okay working retail, playing video games all night, and watching the Food Network. It's so seductive, but I hate that aspect of my personality. An advanced degree and [potentially] a job in academia feels like the only way to stave off my latent tendency to never think about or produce anything meaningful for the rest of my life. Thanks for being honest - I'm there. Just to make sure I didn't want to, I DID work in retail. I just annoy the hell out of myself when I'm not doing something related to reading and writing. It's like I turn into Superficial Barbie.
perrykm2 Posted February 20, 2012 Posted February 20, 2012 Yep. I work in retail now and as a contractor for a bank. A lot of nights, I come home and just do nothing and fall asleep. When I get caught up in my wage laboring and just trying to get along, I never really feel bad about anything I'm doing. When I sit down and think about what I want, though, and the person I want to be, I realize I'm very unfulfilled.
ComeBackZinc Posted February 20, 2012 Posted February 20, 2012 I agree 100% with what Dorinda just said. I myself have so much to learn. As my research interests have evolved, they've led me in a direction that is pretty far afield from the typical English and philosophy undergraduate education I got. I'm here to fill up with knowledge and skills. Sometimes I get frustrated with how slow it seems to take. What I mean about pretension is that I detect a certain self-undermining attitude from a lot of English grads. Sure, the language of postmodernism or discourse analysis or decon or whatever can be used in a way that's pretentious. But there's often a default stance of apology towards using them, from exactly the people who are saying that they want to use them for the rest of their career. And I just don't detect a similar attitude towards relevant subject matter in most other fields. When I talk to people in education, nobody apologizes in advance for talking about z-scores. They understand that sometimes you need to use specific methodologies and specific language. Since applying to grad school means that you're essentially asking a university to subsidize your learning, research, and teaching, you should feel confident about the value of your project even though we're all necessarily beginners. That's all I mean. DorindaAfterThyrsis 1
girlmostlikely Posted February 20, 2012 Posted February 20, 2012 (edited) @ Dorinda: Sounds like you'd be a good match for Chicago then. Or, atleast, a match for what Chicago are selling themselves as to me! Edited February 20, 2012 by girlmostlikely
koolherc Posted February 20, 2012 Posted February 20, 2012 (edited) I completely understand and echo what many have been saying re: the need for rigour and seriousness in the way we approach our field, and the important role that language plays in constructing/creating the space in which intellectual activity can happen. However, I'm a bit less convinced of arguments that Grad School is entirely vocational (with no room for exploration/learning as an end in itself), or the sentiment that seems to be lurking under many of these responses that one needs to, essentially, be an expert already before setting foot into a graduate program. Yes, one needs to be focused in order to pursue this path; yes, one needs to be committed and driven; yes, one needs to be passionate and filled with the conviction of their ideas (and ideals)....but one also needs to be open, ready, and willing to receive new information, and possibly paradigm-shifting/world-altering information. Otherwise, what's the point? If I already knew everything I needed to know about my interests (and all the tangentially related things that are bound to come up in my research), than I wouldn't need to be in a program. I'm not entering grad school as a formality designed to reinforce my own convictions and provide me with a pretty framed certificate at the end. I'm entering grad school because I want to have my world rocked, and the foundations of my beliefs and ideas questioned, and examined, and (quite possibly) blown apart. I believe in my research, I believe in my ability to do it, but I also believe that I have only scratched the surface of what I want/need to know in order to progress as a scholar. Grad school will (hopefully) provide me with those tools, and introduce me to those earth-shattering questions. If I emerge on the other end of this process with my interests and ideas essentially intact, I will consider my grad school career a failure. I'm not going to Grad School to reinforce what I already know, I'm going to LEARN what I don't. I don't think that makes me less of a candidate. EDIT: on re-read, this sounded a little more strident/grumpy than I intended....therefore I added this smiley face to make all the grumpiness disappear...... *poof* I think you're 100% right. The problem is that these grad schools insist and convince us that we need to have a project already planned out beforehand, despite the fact that they very well know that these projects will eventually be scrapped. Not sure why they bother. I get that they want to make sure we're not a flakes, but... really, if anything, the grad programs are the ones being pretentious*. *noting point about the traditional def. of the word. Edited February 20, 2012 by koolherc
veniente Posted February 20, 2012 Posted February 20, 2012 I think it also has a lot to do with expectations and that it is, perhaps, a humanities- and, I'm even tempted to say, slightly English-specific issue. You tell (the perennial) Joe Shmoe that you're studying English or Film or French, let us say, and Joe, if he doesn't immediately tell you to stop wasting your time and get a real job, or, ask how the heck anyone can study those so-called 'subjects', might respond, "Oh cool, I've read the first part of Twilight recently and also watched Grown Ups, and have actually been thinking it would be ace to visit France" (which is in no way to belittle our fictional Joe). People feel that they 'know' books, they 'know' film, they 'know' culture (and of course they do, however, often they seem not to know that there is no end to knowing) thus there is no need to think further upon such areas. They (and forgive me if i generalise) don't see their knowledge of these cultural forms reinforced in the academic output of scholars in the fields which purportedly study them, nor do they typically view such output as 'useful' or 'of value', as we see when we tell our Joe that the post-Foucauldian interpretation of Steve McQueen's Hunger we are writing offers vital insights into the biopolitical character of sovereign power and the forms it may take, or, that a reading of Infinite Jest through Derrida's conceptualisation of différance is germane given the fractured nature of contemporary self and language. I would suggest that there is a general aversion to thinking critically, theoretically, and conceptually (which are of course skills the humanities foreground) about culture. Hence the common claims that academics are over-thinking and over-interpreting texts or situations which are, or should be, *obvious* to everyone. Hence these same people would never question the validity of scientific or juridical fields, for example, nor the language - the 'academese' and 'legalese' - that such fields employ. When was the last time a physicist or a neuroscientist was told that her views were pretentious? (I wonder if in many ways this anti-intellectualism can be construed as specifically Anglo-Saxon.) asleepawake, veniente, poeteer and 1 other 4
the international Posted February 20, 2012 Posted February 20, 2012 "Uselessness" is after all a major merit of the Beckett ethos. #pretentiousness Do you all as well imagine each other looking like the avatars?
ComeBackZinc Posted February 20, 2012 Posted February 20, 2012 Do you all as well imagine each other looking like the avatars? Yes. I'm considering re-reading Go Tell It On the Mountain by TripWillis. bdon19 1
the international Posted February 20, 2012 Posted February 20, 2012 Yes. I'm considering re-reading Go Tell It On the Mountain by TripWillis. hhahahahah
antecedent Posted February 21, 2012 Posted February 21, 2012 This whole thread has made me want to laugh, cry, and hug you all. It's also made me feel a bit belligerent about wanting to go to grad school, goddamit. It turns out that saying fuck the haters is easy when my main concern is fuck the price tag.
turtlepower Posted February 21, 2012 Posted February 21, 2012 I think it also has a lot to do with expectations and that it is, perhaps, a humanities- and, I'm even tempted to say, slightly English-specific issue. You tell (the perennial) Joe Shmoe that you're studying English or Film or French, let us say, and Joe, if he doesn't immediately tell you to stop wasting your time and get a real job, or, ask how the heck anyone can study those so-called 'subjects', might respond, "Oh cool, I've read the first part of Twilight recently and also watched Grown Ups, and have actually been thinking it would be ace to visit France" (which is in no way to belittle our fictional Joe). People feel that they 'know' books, they 'know' film, they 'know' culture (and of course they do, however, often they seem not to know that there is no end to knowing) thus there is no need to think further upon such areas. They (and forgive me if i generalise) don't see their knowledge of these cultural forms reinforced in the academic output of scholars in the fields which purportedly study them, nor do they typically view such output as 'useful' or 'of value', as we see when we tell our Joe that the post-Foucauldian interpretation of Steve McQueen's Hunger we are writing offers vital insights into the biopolitical character of sovereign power and the forms it may take, or, that a reading of Infinite Jest through Derrida's conceptualisation of différance is germane given the fractured nature of contemporary self and language. I would suggest that there is a general aversion to thinking critically, theoretically, and conceptually (which are of course skills the humanities foreground) about culture. Hence the common claims that academics are over-thinking and over-interpreting texts or situations which are, or should be, *obvious* to everyone. Hence these same people would never question the validity of scientific or juridical fields, for example, nor the language - the 'academese' and 'legalese' - that such fields employ. When was the last time a physicist or a neuroscientist was told that her views were pretentious? (I wonder if in many ways this anti-intellectualism can be construed as specifically Anglo-Saxon.)
TripWillis Posted February 21, 2012 Posted February 21, 2012 hhahahahah If only I had written that book. I would've made it 50% gayer. girlmostlikely 1
turtlepower Posted February 21, 2012 Posted February 21, 2012 This is amazing. You almost recreated my SOP. Beautifully articulated.
Aztecson23 Posted February 21, 2012 Posted February 21, 2012 If only I had written that book. I would've made it 50% gayer. Ah, but could you have made "Giovanni's Room" gayer?
TripWillis Posted February 21, 2012 Posted February 21, 2012 Ah, but could you have made "Giovanni's Room" gayer? Well, I certainly wouldn't have blanketed the sex in such heavy coding. That said, it's a remarkable novel.
girlmostlikely Posted February 21, 2012 Posted February 21, 2012 (edited) The question is not making Giovanni's Room gayer, but giving more narrative subjectivity to Giovanni. I once tried to write a paper about Giovanni's personhood, failed, and wrote a paper about how different marginalized figures--Giovanni, all those scare queens hanging around Guillaume's bar--destabilize David's personhood. Speaking of pretension (or lack thereof), that book may have been the anchor of the Queer Studies class I took as an undergrad, and queer theory might be the example people use to make of the esoteric excesses of the humanities academy (grrr), but that doesn't change the fact that "man, when I first read this book, I HATED David" was my point of departure for intellectual discussion. Edited February 21, 2012 by girlmostlikely
TripWillis Posted February 21, 2012 Posted February 21, 2012 (edited) The question is not making Giovanni's Room gayer, but giving more narrative subjectivity to Giovanni. I once tried to write a paper about Giovanni's personhood, failed, and wrote a paper about how different marginalized figures--Giovanni, all those scare queens hanging around Guillaume's bar--destabilize David's personhood. Speaking of pretension (or lack thereof), that book may have been the anchor of the Queer Studies class I took as an undergrad, and queer theory might be the example people use to make of the esoteric excesses of the humanities academy (grrr), but that doesn't change the fact that "man, when I first read this book, I HATED David" was my point of departure for intellectual discussion. All of this. First of all, that first paragraph is part of my thesis; David's sort of inclusive/exclusive relationship with this ragtag gay "community" (if it can be called that); second, his increased status as masculine gay male. There's more, but I can't really go into it. But yes, I also hated David. And Hella. Edited February 21, 2012 by TripWillis
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