anyone else disillusioned with humanities?

[queenbee69]

I'm currently in an MA Humanities program at a college around the west coast, and just stated in Sept. Over the past few weeks, I've done an enormous amount of reading and teaching of primary texts, as well as articles and theoretical stuff. I've noticed two things about humanities scholarship: 1) everyone uses big words to convey relatively simple ideas and/or to compensate for menial points. It's almost like academics are having a battle to out-write/outsmart each other. 2) There are barely ANY practical implications for ANYTHING these people study and write about. For example, they'll write a 10-page journal article critiquing the misuse of a term to signify something, but seriously you think this is going to change anything? You think anyone, besides grad students and academics, is going to read this?? Why don't you just publish a news article that people might actually read, and while you're at it why don't you write in language that doesn't take 10 minutes to decipher...?

I am, however, determined to do well in my classes and on my thesis. I admit that I secretly enjoy writing and contributing to this pointless type of analysis. I do want to transfer to law though, and I'm actually quite determined to be a lawyer, because YOU CAN ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING WITH A JD.

[chalkboardsonata]

YOU CAN DO SOMETHING REGARDLESS OF DEGREE.

I get it. You're concealing your career anxieties in some banal complaint about the academic study of the humanitites. You're not the first, won't be the last.

Go get your JD, become a lawyer, and put your middle-class financial worries to rest. But don't try to justify your decision by attacking the importance of humanities research.

[Two Espressos]

I'm quite certain that QueenBee69 is just a troll, but for the sake of visitors to this forum, allow me to say the following...

I'm concerned for your intellectual fortitude, considering you make such obvious errors of reasoning as overgeneralizing *all* humanities research ever written. What the fuck? That entirely disqualifies your post as far as I'm concerned. As for proxlity in the texts you're reading, I agree with you that many authors--especially the postmodernists!-- can be charged with obscurantism. Thankfully, most people have come to understand that much postmodern jargon is fancified bullshit, a conflation between sophisticated ideas and needlessly complex prose, so we're moving past that phase.

Also, most academic research has little direct applicability to the outside world: this is not unique to the humanities, and it doesn't invalidate their importance whatsoever. Restricting my focus to the disciplines of philosophy and English: language obviously forms the foundation of human life and modern thought, so studying language and texts is inherently valuable. A lot of fluff appears in many academic disciplines, not just the humanities, but every so often work appears that shifts the intellectual paradigm and betters our understanding of the world and ourselves and makes us approach them in a new way. I want to be a part of that milieu, so I'm applying for Ph.D. programs in English.

Oh and as far as the J.D. thing goes, good fucking luck. The competition is brutal, and unlike Ph.D. students in the humanities, most law grads approach their shtity job market with $100,000 in debt.

Edited October 9, 2012 by Two Espressos

[georgestrait1982]

I have similar feelings as the OP. Like it or not, humanities research is only read by an esoteric community of upper/upper-middle class scholars. Also, a lot of it is pretty banal. Who cares what you think of Beowulf? I certainly don't. I only ever read lit crit with an eye to what I can disagree with in my own papers. I understand that a lot of you are super passionate about the study of English and I think that that is great and that you should pursue those interests, but don't pretend like it has any practical application or helps anybody else out.

And I have to take exception to this: "language obviously forms the foundation of human life and modern thought, so studying language and texts is inherently valuable." While I, as an English person, obviously feel that the study of lit is valuable, I do not condescend to assert that its value is "inherent." Plenty of people place no value whatsoever in what comes out of their mouth at any given moment, let alone in the "study of language"--who am I to say that they are incorrect or naieve for not valuing what I do? Also, shouldn't our "study" and "student-ness" be leading up to some action?? What's the use of study if you remain forever a student?

Obviously, teaching is something most of us do and the obvious way in which we "contribute." A longer post than this would be necessary to explore the ways in which teaching college kids to analyze literature is or is not beneficial to the rest of society, but regardless teaching is only one portion of the professor's job, and the rest is, well, (I believe) pretty useless.

[comp12]

Yes I know, the OP is a troll, but I'll take the bite and respond anyways.

I don't buy the whole "practical application" approach to criticizing academia and humanities. Guess what, 99.99% of all those things going on in labs in the STEM departments have zero direct effect on the average person either. Go scan latest journals in computer science or biological science or physics; how much of that do you think has any effect on any given person you see walking down the street? You think they should quit living in their bubbles and stop doing those studies? I sure hope not! Same goes for humanities and social sciences. You might THINK that they work in such a bubble, but the existence of their body of work proves super valuable nonetheless.

I personally work with music, which has zero intrinsic tangible worth whatsoever. But yet, for some reason, just about every single society in the history of humankind has placed supreme value in their music. Oh well.

[Two Espressos]

I have similar feelings as the OP. Like it or not, humanities research is only read by an esoteric community of upper/upper-middle class scholars.

Like Comp12 notes above, you have to realize that most research in all disciplines has little direct applicability. Isn't knowledge its own good? Why is utility the gold standard?

I understand that a lot of you are super passionate about the study of English and I think that that is great and that you should pursue those interests, but don't pretend like it has any practical application or helps anybody else out.

Again, why is practical application so important? I don't think that anyone honestly believes that English or other humanistic fields have as much utility as, say, medicine, but why is utility a necessity? What about the more abstract goods that a humanistic education cultivates, such as reasoning, critical thought, and argumentation? Since when are those skills not needed, irrespective of what one decides to do with one's life?

And I have to take exception to this: "language obviously forms the foundation of human life and modern thought, so studying language and texts is inherently valuable." While I, as an English person, obviously feel that the study of lit is valuable, I do not condescend to assert that its value is "inherent." Plenty of people place no value whatsoever in what comes out of their mouth at any given moment, let alone in the "study of language"--who am I to say that they are incorrect or naieve for not valuing what I do? Also, shouldn't our "study" and "student-ness" be leading up to some action?? What's the use of study if you remain forever a student?

I'm afraid that you've misread me. Language does serve as the basis of all human thought. I didn't say that literature served the same function. Literature is merely a form of language.

As for remaining forever a student: everyone should and does remain lifelong learners. No one is ever finished with their education, whether they continue in academia or not.

The most hilarious part of this whole discussion is that we're arguing over values, and the study of values--alongside other things-- is a humanistic endeavor.

Edited October 12, 2012 by Two Espressos

[Two Espressos]

I've already invested too much time in this thread, but I want to add the following.

I think it's a huge mistake to single out the humanities from other disciplines. It's partly the fault of the strict social constructivists' critique of science that this is the case: we've done this to ourselves, to an extent. If I'm fortunate enough to begin a Ph.D. program in English next fall, one of the things I want to work on is the interdisciplinary potential between the humanities and the sciences. It's anachronistic for me to talk about "my research," but I see my work as being continuous with the sciences. If I am to commit myself to this position, of course, I'm necessarily opposed to certain cancerous segments of humanistic research that prevent such from being the case...

[rems]

Again, why is practical application so important? I don't think that anyone honestly believes that English or other humanistic fields have as much utility as, say, medicine, but why is utility a necessity? What about the more abstract goods that a humanistic education cultivates, such as reasoning, critical thought, and argumentation? Since when are those skills not needed, irrespective of what one decides to do with one's life?

Well put, and I fully agree with you.

Edited October 12, 2012 by rems

[practical cat]

Get it, Two Espressos.

[thestage]

I'm currently in an MA Humanities program at a college around the west coast, and just stated in Sept. Over the past few weeks, I've done an enormous amount of reading and teaching of primary texts, as well as articles and theoretical stuff. I've noticed two things about humanities scholarship: 1) everyone uses big words to convey relatively simple ideas and/or to compensate for menial points. It's almost like academics are having a battle to out-write/outsmart each other. 2) There are barely ANY practical implications for ANYTHING these people study and write about. For example, they'll write a 10-page journal article critiquing the misuse of a term to signify something, but seriously you think this is going to change anything? You think anyone, besides grad students and academics, is going to read this?? Why don't you just publish a news article that people might actually read, and while you're at it why don't you write in language that doesn't take 10 minutes to decipher...?

I am, however, determined to do well in my classes and on my thesis. I admit that I secretly enjoy writing and contributing to this pointless type of analysis. I do want to transfer to law though, and I'm actually quite determined to be a lawyer, because YOU CAN ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING WITH A JD.

The only reason you even have an idea of what practical means is thanks to the humanities. Your entire frame of reference—including the ideas that “change” is valuable, desirable, and the idea of the import of social significance—comes from what we now call the humanities.

Let me try to work by way of analogy—which, you’ll note, is a linguistic device, and thus fair game for the humanities: the JD. What is it? You get to be a lawyer, maybe a judge, a politician? And what will you do—read and write things that will only be read and written by other lawyers, judges, politicians? “Yes, but what they write directly affects the little guy!” Put down the vodka tonic and come back to me, love, we’re not finished. Specialized work is specialized, and if you’ve any thought that the work done by people in any field is for something called “change,” trickles down to the general public, then you simply haven’t been reading your humanities very well. Take a law, or a legal agreement, generally just bureaucratic nonsense, so much obfuscation and red tape, more a hindrance than a help, really. The system perpetuates itself systemically, it alters not just the lawyers into wanting to be lawyers, into existing in enough bulk that we unconsciously, systematically create the work for them to do; no, it also alters you into believing in your heart of hearts that this is for the better, that their work is proper and yours (mine, lets be honest) is not. Plenty of people will tell you all about this, have written marvelous tomes and lurched us forward an inch a decade if we’re lucky, hard work, true work, disastrous, messy, heart-full work. But we can just label it humanities and throw it aside because it doesn’t produce something of commodified value oh wait we’re back in theory again, back in the way humans and their societies operate, back in the structures and presuppositions that the humanities govern. So much work, so little time.

If anything in society trickles down, it is not governance, it is not the promise of the explication and avoidance of a system that is propped up in perpetuity by those dangling the strings of escape, and it is certainly not wealth—the answer is knowledge, undistilled and genuine, the product and driving force of a honed and natural curiosity, an incisiveness that can draw upon anything and direct itself anywhere. Systems can be felt out. They can trick or rot or beat down, but the only true way to affect anyone or anything for the better is to do so as a human. And guess who we study!

Language. “Big words” that express “little ideas.” Not every scholar is Shakespeare, sometimes they fail or struggle a little, but every one of them operates in a field with terminology, and the idea of terminology is to encapsulate certain known quantities, certain signifieds (or, indeed, certain signifiers) so that everyone isn’t running in a circle unaware of what the other means. Sometimes jargon or form overwhelm the writer or the reader and collapse, great, sometimes cars crash into trees and explode, what are you going to do. You can’t win until you try, and you can’t try until you build a framework willing to support the effort. I get it, sometimes you read about the movement of a sentence in a 17^th century French play you’ve never heard of and it’s three in the morning and you start to daydream about what it would be like to wake up one day in 2032 and realize that all of a sudden that’s you, that the play itself could burn tomorrow and the kids in Africa are still dying and the students in row three are still using their terrible brains to stumble into ways to de-legitimize the entire enterprise you’ve submitted yourself to. Well, that’s not just life, but your shitty situation is in fact one of the few capable of producing a third of a ticket out, because the second you see the system around you, you have some license to poke around at its edges, see how it works—and hell, that French play, the words you wrote about it, read about it, the methods you used and created, the fact that you’ll think and talk about these things, these structural things, the machinations of human thought and experience—that’ll you’ll engage them every day you’re willing, that’ll all come into play. And now you’re prepared for another direction. Because human intellect and work are not zero-sum games, you aren’t compartmentalized, you don’t start over. It’s an endless, endless horizon, that of human experience and creation, and I promise it’ll only work out for you the second you want it to.

Take it from me, I mean this to be nice, lord knows it’s rare enough: if you aren’t happy doing this, you won’t be happy doing that either, whatever “that” might be. As much as I do not believe society as it exists is something we should even be bothering to benefit, seeing as it has no desire to benefit any of what you might try to define as “us,” unless “us” is “rich white people,” the only way to benefit it as an individual, on an individual level (the only level), is to be happy and content and quite alright with the boundaries that define who you are. One more sodding JD who has tricked herself into thinking that tricking people that are not herself into thinking that she’s worth it will make her worth it doesn’t have anything on the poor English sap reading his books and genuinely believing that someone somewhere once wrote something that was worth preserving, that might in some way provide a scrap of what it means to be human.

If you think academics is supposed to be about however you define change, and if you think that your “pointless analysis” is only ever worth doing because it proves that you are alive and better than someone else, then you’re doing it wrong. And not “doing it wrong” because you’d be the only one in that club—no, there are quite a large barrel full of You at every school in the world, believe it—but because this talk of “change” and “practicality” and “usefulness” and “determination” to hold this or that series of letters after your name is endemic, it is socially inscribed, it is everywhere, it is indicative of the kind of social loss that one might find a home investigating in the humanities from any number of perspectives, including new ones. If you’re looking to see the tricks and falseness and the “success” here you will also see it there, because the problem isn’t us or them, it’s you.

I’m done apologizing. Save it for the people who created the culture that expects it.

I'm concerned for your intellectual fortitude, considering you make such obvious errors of reasoning as overgeneralizing

...

Thankfully, most people have come to understand that much postmodern jargon is fancified bullshit, a conflation between sophisticated ideas and needlessly complex prose, so we're moving past that phase.

Irony. You're not helping.

Edited October 13, 2012 by thestage

[Stately Plump]

The only reason you even have an idea of what practical means is thanks to the humanities. Your entire frame of reference—including the ideas that “change” is valuable, desirable, and the idea of the import of social significance—comes from what we now call the humanities.

Let me try to work by way of analogy—which, you’ll note, is a linguistic device, and thus fair game for the humanities: the JD. What is it? You get to be a lawyer, maybe a judge, a politician? And what will you do—read and write things that will only be read and written by other lawyers, judges, politicians? “Yes, but what they write directly affects the little guy!” Put down the vodka tonic and come back to me, love, we’re not finished. Specialized work is specialized, and if you’ve any thought that the work done by people in any field is for something called “change,” trickles down to the general public, then you simply haven’t been reading your humanities very well. Take a law, or a legal agreement, generally just bureaucratic nonsense, so much obfuscation and red tape, more a hindrance than a help, really. The system perpetuates itself systemically, it alters not just the lawyers into wanting to be lawyers, into existing in enough bulk that we unconsciously, systematically create the work for them to do; no, it also alters you into believing in your heart of hearts that this is for the better, that their work is proper and yours (mine, lets be honest) is not. Plenty of people will tell you all about this, have written marvelous tomes and lurched us forward an inch a decade if we’re lucky, hard work, true work, disastrous, messy, heart-full work. But we can just label it humanities and throw it aside because it doesn’t produce something of commodified value oh wait we’re back in theory again, back in the way humans and their societies operate, back in the structures and presuppositions that the humanities govern. So much work, so little time.

If anything in society trickles down, it is not governance, it is not the promise of the explication and avoidance of a system that is propped up in perpetuity by those dangling the strings of escape, and it is certainly not wealth—the answer is knowledge, undistilled and genuine, the product and driving force of a honed and natural curiosity, an incisiveness that can draw upon anything and direct itself anywhere. Systems can be felt out. They can trick or rot or beat down, but the only true way to affect anyone or anything for the better is to do so as a human. And guess who we study!

Language. “Big words” that express “little ideas.” Not every scholar is Shakespeare, sometimes they fail or struggle a little, but every one of them operates in a field with terminology, and the idea of terminology is to encapsulate certain known quantities, certain signifieds (or, indeed, certain signifiers) so that everyone isn’t running in a circle unaware of what the other means. Sometimes jargon or form overwhelm the writer or the reader and collapse, great, sometimes cars crash into trees and explode, what are you going to do. You can’t win until you try, and you can’t try until you build a framework willing to support the effort. I get it, sometimes you read about the movement of a sentence in a 17^th century French play you’ve never heard of and it’s three in the morning and you start to daydream about what it would be like to wake up one day in 2032 and realize that all of a sudden that’s you, that the play itself could burn tomorrow and the kids in Africa are still dying and the students in row three are still using their terrible brains to stumble into ways to de-legitimize the entire enterprise you’ve submitted yourself to. Well, that’s not just life, but your shitty situation is in fact one of the few capable of producing a third of a ticket out, because the second you see the system around you, you have some license to poke around at its edges, see how it works—and hell, that French play, the words you wrote about it, read about it, the methods you used and created, the fact that you’ll think and talk about these things, these structural things, the machinations of human thought and experience—that’ll you’ll engage them every day you’re willing, that’ll all come into play. And now you’re prepared for another direction. Because human intellect and work are not zero-sum games, you aren’t compartmentalized, you don’t start over. It’s an endless, endless horizon, that of human experience and creation, and I promise it’ll only work out for you the second you want it to.

Take it from me, I mean this to be nice, lord knows it’s rare enough: if you aren’t happy doing this, you won’t be happy doing that either, whatever “that” might be. As much as I do not believe society as it exists is something we should even be bothering to benefit, seeing as it has no desire to benefit any of what you might try to define as “us,” unless “us” is “rich white people,” the only way to benefit it as an individual, on an individual level (the only level), is to be happy and content and quite alright with the boundaries that define who you are. One more sodding JD who has tricked herself into thinking that tricking people that are not herself into thinking that she’s worth it will make her worth it doesn’t have anything on the poor English sap reading his books and genuinely believing that someone somewhere once wrote something that was worth preserving, that might in some way provide a scrap of what it means to be human.

If you think academics is supposed to be about however you define change, and if you think that your “pointless analysis” is only ever worth doing because it proves that you are alive and better than someone else, then you’re doing it wrong. And not “doing it wrong” because you’d be the only one in that club—no, there are quite a large barrel full of You at every school in the world, believe it—but because this talk of “change” and “practicality” and “usefulness” and “determination” to hold this or that series of letters after your name is endemic, it is socially inscribed, it is everywhere, it is indicative of the kind of social loss that one might find a home investigating in the humanities from any number of perspectives, including new ones. If you’re looking to see the tricks and falseness and the “success” here you will also see it there, because the problem isn’t us or them, it’s you.

I’m done apologizing. Save it for the people who created the culture that expects it.

Irony. You're not helping.

Brilliant.

[antecedent]

Take it from me, I mean this to be nice, lord knows it’s rare enough: if you aren’t happy doing this, you won’t be happy doing that either, whatever “that” might be. As much as I do not believe society as it exists is something we should even be bothering to benefit, seeing as it has no desire to benefit any of what you might try to define as “us,” unless “us” is “rich white people,” the only way to benefit it as an individual, on an individual level (the only level), is to be happy and content and quite alright with the boundaries that define who you are. One more sodding JD who has tricked herself into thinking that tricking people that are not herself into thinking that she’s worth it will make her worth it doesn’t have anything on the poor English sap reading his books and genuinely believing that someone somewhere once wrote something that was worth preserving, that might in some way provide a scrap of what it means to be human.

If you think academics is supposed to be about however you define change, and if you think that your “pointless analysis” is only ever worth doing because it proves that you are alive and better than someone else, then you’re doing it wrong. And not “doing it wrong” because you’d be the only one in that club—no, there are quite a large barrel full of You at every school in the world, believe it—but because this talk of “change” and “practicality” and “usefulness” and “determination” to hold this or that series of letters after your name is endemic, it is socially inscribed, it is everywhere, it is indicative of the kind of social loss that one might find a home investigating in the humanities from any number of perspectives, including new ones. If you’re looking to see the tricks and falseness and the “success” here you will also see it there, because the problem isn’t us or them, it’s you.

I’m done apologizing. Save it for the people who created the culture that expects it.

Irony. You're not helping.

YES. Thank you.

[comp12]

[NowMoreSerious]

Yes, I am disillusioned with the humanities.

If only there was a space, somewhere in society, where I could talk about this disillusionment. If only there was somewhere I could analyze and write about that disillusionment and general disillusionment, and it would even be a part of my job to do so. Somewhere I could gather with others and talk about the types of cultural references to disillusionment, such as literature and film.

If anybody knows of such a space like this, please let me know, especially if it even holds the possibility that I could gather with others and have discussions and maybe even PROFESS my own questions or beliefs.

We could call this space, Peopleology, or Person-anities.

[agjenkins20]

two shots overgeneralizes ( right after criticizing for the same)and speaks from a position of authority without experience in the field. the stage makes an impassioned plea which equally overgeneralizes and metaphysicalizes (read: abstracts) though not without expressing some genuine good points. queen bee makes an assertion of disillusionment with a hope towards a show of empathy from the very persons (in part...humanities grads) she somewhat maligns. absurdity abounds though sanity still runs through it.

[1Q84]

Yes, I am disillusioned with the humanities.

If only there was a space, somewhere in society, where I could talk about this disillusionment. If only there was somewhere I could analyze and write about that disillusionment and general disillusionment, and it would even be a part of my job to do so. Somewhere I could gather with others and talk about the types of cultural references to disillusionment, such as literature and film.

If anybody knows of such a space like this, please let me know, especially if it even holds the possibility that I could gather with others and have discussions and maybe even PROFESS my own questions or beliefs.

We could call this space, Peopleology, or Person-anities.

You earned it.

[thestage]

two shots overgeneralizes ( right after criticizing for the same)and speaks from a position of authority without experience in the field. the stage makes an impassioned plea which equally overgeneralizes and metaphysicalizes (read: abstracts) though not without expressing some genuine good points. queen bee makes an assertion of disillusionment with a hope towards a show of empathy from the very persons (in part...humanities grads) she somewhat maligns. absurdity abounds though sanity still runs through it.

abstraction and theory in my post about abstraction and theory in defense of the study of abstraction and theory. for shame.

[Vertigo23]

The OP has a valid concern. I'm just not sure how we're defining "DO SOMETHING" such that it excludes working in the humanities.

[ProfLorax]

I'm a little nervous about jumping into the fray, but here it goes: queenbee, I felt very similarly during my first semester in a literature MA program. Frankly, I simply chose the wrong classes; the texts didn't speak to me, and I started to feel disillusioned with literary study as a whole. However, during my second semester in my MA program, it clicked for me. I found a niche that I felt profoundly passionate about (feminist disability studies), and I saw the real world applications on a daily basis.

At the same time, I realized that all of my professors felt the same way about their chosen field of study; they were able to see how it connected to the material world. For example, one of my professors is a Spenser scholar. I took her seminar, and we spent about twelve weeks reading The Fairie Queene. Through those weeks, my professor revealed that she was fascinated with postcolonial themes in the text, specifically allusions to Ireland. This professor is from a postcolonial culture, and she often expressed that she was drawn to Spenser because she saw how his writing relates to the everyday struggles of postcolonial peoples.

If you truly love the Humanities, once you find your niche, you'll instantly begin to see how that field has real world repercussions. I was amazed at how quickly I fell back into love with literature once I discovered my academic interests, and then I began to see how all sorts of studies in the humanities are deeply connected to the material world. Even though I am attempting to switch to rhetoric and composition, I will always carry with me the analytical, critical thinking, and rhetorical tools I developed as an undergraduate and graduate student in literature.

[Two Espressos]

two shots overgeneralizes ( right after criticizing for the same)and speaks from a position of authority without experience in the field. the stage makes an impassioned plea which equally overgeneralizes and metaphysicalizes (read: abstracts) though not without expressing some genuine good points. queen bee makes an assertion of disillusionment with a hope towards a show of empathy from the very persons (in part...humanities grads) she somewhat maligns. absurdity abounds though sanity still runs through it.

I'm certainly aware of what I said about postmodernism and the context in which I said it. I stand behind it.

I'm not an expert, no, but postmodernism is dead and has been for a while. This shouldn't be news to anyone?

[chalkboardsonata]

I'm certainly aware of what I said about postmodernism and the context in which I said it. I stand behind it.

I'm not an expert, no, but postmodernism is dead and has been for a while. This shouldn't be news to anyone?

"Postmodernism is dead"? Stop while you're ahead, man.

[practical cat]

Long live the post-'s!

(Well, except for postfeminism.)

[rems]

Have we not picked up on the fact that queenbee69 is a troll, as two shots pointed out immediately? Instead of tearing each other apart in a community that is meant to support one another, why don't we all decide to stop posting here..? This tread is out of control, and it's turned into everyone flexing their English muscles to show how much we know about the field of English studies. Since we're already feeling self conscious and like we're not "worthy" during application season, it's easy to pour salt in those wounds like queenbee69 has done here.

Queenbee69, if you are not a troll and simply trying to express a concern for your chosen field and life path, then I'm sorry you are encountering such discontent with your decisions in life. Please take some serious time to reflect if you want to carry on in your studies. Graduate school is a major decision not to be taken lightly, and if any one of us tries to deny for a minute that we also encounter doubt along the way we're lying to ourselves and this community.

Queenbee69, if you are a troll, you have successfully Molotov-cocktail-ed this forum. Congratulations.

Edited October 16, 2012 by rems

[thestage]

All is occasion. I don't care who Queenbee is, and I certainly don't care about her intentions or motives. Her post was an opportunity to say something about the way the humanities are perceived, and so I said it. Next time, I'll be able to say it better.

[Merik7]

I'm currently in an MA Humanities program at a college around the west coast, and just stated in Sept. Over the past few weeks, I've done an enormous amount of reading and teaching of primary texts, as well as articles and theoretical stuff. I've noticed two things about humanities scholarship: 1) everyone uses big words to convey relatively simple ideas and/or to compensate for menial points. It's almost like academics are having a battle to out-write/outsmart each other. 2) There are barely ANY practical implications for ANYTHING these people study and write about. For example, they'll write a 10-page journal article critiquing the misuse of a term to signify something, but seriously you think this is going to change anything? You think anyone, besides grad students and academics, is going to read this?? Why don't you just publish a news article that people might actually read, and while you're at it why don't you write in language that doesn't take 10 minutes to decipher...?

I am, however, determined to do well in my classes and on my thesis. I admit that I secretly enjoy writing and contributing to this pointless type of analysis. I do want to transfer to law though, and I'm actually quite determined to be a lawyer, because YOU CAN ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING WITH A JD.

Wow. I came to GradCafe today to post this exact same thing. I just spent three hours reading an Enda Duffy article and now I want to blow my brains out (if I have any left).

Edited October 18, 2012 by Merik7