Can you remember why?
It makes me sad to think how little those motives will be acknowledged if they go on to graduate school. They will probably go for the wrong reasons: to continue their experience as undergraduates. They are romantics who must suddenly become realpolitikers. Maybe that's why most drop out before they complete their doctorates. Those who stay have political commitments (and probably come from undergraduate programs where those commitments are encouraged early), or they develop them as graduate students, or they feign or exaggerate them to get through.
For me, it's strange and wonderful, after receiving tenure, to be able to rediscover my undergraduate self, to nurture in my students the motives that drew me to graduate school in the first place.
The problem is you can't get to where I am now without going through a decade or more of immersion in a highly politicized and anti-literary academic culture. You have to spend so many years conforming that, by the time freedom presents itself, you don't know why you became an English major in the first place. You might even have contempt for your seemingly naïve students, who represent the self that you had to repress in order to be a professional.
It is not that I want to privilege some form of literary dilettantism as a substitute for professionalism. I simply want to demonstrate that the reasons most people get into English are different from the motives that will make them successful in graduate school and in professional life beyond that. They must, ultimately, purge themselves of the romantic motives that drew them to English in the first place - or pretend to do so. If you want to be a literary professional, you must say goodbye to Mr. Keating.
You may be teaching English, but in many academic positions (and certainly in the mainstream of academic publishing), you'll have to fulfill your emotional life in other ways, probably in secret, the way some people sing along with Barry Manilow in their cars.
Or, by the time you get there, if you get there, can you remember how?
Via Dan Drezner.
Posted by binky at July 20, 2006 03:43 PM | TrackBack | Posted to The Academyi have pangs about so many roads i didn't follow, but not about declining to pursue an advanced degree in literature. it seemed like a bad idea then -- for me, to be clear; to those who have the intestinal fortitude, i bid godspeed -- and in over a decade i haven't yet seen anything to convince me i was wrong, or misapprehended the circumstance i was avoiding at all.
and the conceit of the narrative rings true -- i did measure the prospect of grad school against my undergraduate experience -- reading books because i loved to read books, talking about books because it enhanced my pleasure in reading books, then reading and re-reading other books in light of what i'd learned. it seems like there's precious little book-reading that goes on in the literary academy, until about four months before comps.
Posted by: moon at July 20, 2006 05:47 PM | PERMALINK