Posted on 04/05/2013 6:57:46 AM PDT by Borges
Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor.
Who wouldn’t want a job where you only have to work five hours a week, you get summers off, your whole job is reading and talking about books, and you can never be fired? Such is the enviable life of the tenured college literature professor, and all you have to do to get it is earn a Ph.D. So perhaps you, literature lover, are considering pursuing this path.
Well, what if I told you that by “five hours” I mean “80 hours,” and by “summers off” I mean “two months of unpaid research sequestration and curriculum planning”? What if you’ll never have time to read books, and when you talk about them, you’ll mostly be using made-up words like “deterritorialization” and “Othering”—because, as Ron Rosenbaum pointed out recently, the “dusty seminar rooms” of academia have the chief aim of theorizing every great book to death? And I can’t even tell you what kind of ass you have to kiss these days to get tenure—largely because, like most professors, I’m not on the tenure track, so I don’t know.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
I haven’t read any Morrisons or Walkers or Haleys. I read Harlem Renaissance writers in college, and some authentic African writers on my own. But the White Guilt Award recipients, no thank you. I do pick up bestselling books when I visit bookstores, from Tom Clancy to Hairy Potty, and probably the above mentioned as well, read a page or two, put them down, and head to the john to wash my hands and face.
“fellow travelers”
they’re satanists?
humanistic renaissance == hateful liberal
at least how i see it.
You ignore the issue and obfuscate. You used the word “scholarship”, and then switched to “research”. Which is it?
That’s what scholars do. They research their field and provide new scholarship.
So does the clerk at Home Depot.
I’m sorry! I thought you were serious!
No. Scholarship isn’t for losers. Expecting a well-paying job for life is for losers.
One should not go into the humanities expecting to be wealthy.
To me, In my life, I have found teaching the most difficult thing in the world. My hat is off to those whom this comes easily. That said, I find the author’s whining tedious.
I don’t know if I just had one beer too many or not. What the Hell did I just read? I got a Master’s in another field and never got to use it. What is this weenie complaining about?
“It’s actually “shoo-in,” as “all I had to do was say shoo and the cows walked right into the barn.” “
Thank you. I’ve always been interested in the origin of words and phrases.
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