A couple of days ago, somebody forwarded me a link to a new career's website for Arts and Humanities PhD graduates, called
Beyond the PhD. The site seems quite useful, offering advice and experiences from recent graduates, who have gone on to careers inside and beyond academia. Unlike many other careers websites, this is actually targeted at, and relevant to, this particular audience.
Seeing the website reminded me of my own experiences a couple of years ago, back when I was in the middle of my PhD research. I am a socialist and utilitarian at heart, which means I find it necessary to justify taking public money by explaining what benefit the society which distributes those funds gets out of it. Given that I was lucky enough to be fully funded throughout my studies, I was always conscious of the need to put something back into the public domain, as I explained in a series of posts labelled "
The Idea of a University."
It was out of
one of these posts that the issue of the "value" of an English PhD arose. Picking up facts and figures from various reports circulating at the time, I worked this post into an essay, which I presented as a seminar paper in my department. However, since I am now at the end of my PhD studies, I thought it appropriate to revisit this piece and put it up on The Pequod. Since some of the employment figures may be slightly out of date (especially given the current recession) it is not an authoritative case study, but will hopefully be of interest to some readers, particularly those currently undertaking PhDs in the Arts and Humanities, and wondering for themselves whether and why their studies are worthwhile.
The essay can be found here:
The Value of an English PhD.
Labels: English Literature, PhD, the idea of a university
Last week, I attended the annual
British Society for Literature and Science conference in Reading. As in the previous two BSLS conferences I've been to, this was a fabulous event, an opportunity to renew old acquaintances, chat about common interests, enjoy sumptuous breakfasts...oh, and to hear some excellent panels and plenaries.
However, thinking broadly about the weekend's papers, there seems to me - and I stress that this is my general sense, or thought-in-progress, and may well turn out to be misguided or making a false accusation - to be something of a crack emerging in the interdisciplinary approach to the field of literature and science.
On the one hand, there are those who treat literature and science in an essentially conventional historicist vein. Often focusing on Romantic poets and Victorian novelists, they explore the ways in which particular writers were influenced by scientific ideas in circulation at the time. Which scientists was George Eliot reading when she wrote
Middlemarch? How was
Wordsworth influenced by
Humphrey Davy? Often drawing on archives or letters, scholars in this vein connect ideas or metaphors at work in the creative text with scientific enquiries. This is very interesting and worthy work, but it uses an essentially conventional model of English literary studies, showing the influences upon a writer in an attempt to make better sense of their oeuvre. In this case, scholars look at science, but they might just as easily refer to an author's tour of Venice, or their reading of Milton.
On the other hand, others in the field see the confluence of science and literature as an opportunity to rethink the models of knowledge with which literary scholars work, asking what are (to me) very interesting epistemological questions. What is "science"? Can a scientific "fact" about the world be conveyed to readers via creative works, such as science fiction, or does a fact assume a different status the moment it transfers into a genre other than the scientific journal article? To what degree does scientific writing draw on narrative modes, employing devices such as metaphor, plot, drama, rhetoric in order to produce a stable and persuasive body of knowledge? What sort of knowledge is made available by literary fiction, and can fiction itself therefore be said to be a science of sorts? How can we use recent discoveries in science, such as neuroscience or evolution, to inform our interpretations of literary texts? Without invoking that outmoded postmodern belief that science has no greater claims to reality than any other way of looking at the world, when these sorts of questions are raised they trouble the "two cultures" boundary, broadening the remit of "knowledge" as construed by the sciences and the arts.
It seemed to me that very rarely did the two approaches come together. Presenters were either theorising science and literature, or historicising, but not really making connections across the parallel approaches. This is particularly odd because the matriarch of science and literature (and President of the BSLS),
Gillian Beer, stood in the shoes of both the historicist and the theorist in both of her seminal works.
Darwin's Plots shows how Darwin's language and rhetoric was essential to the way his argument operates and convinces, and
Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter shows how science and literature interplayed in the late Victorian period in a way which makes the "two cultures" differences of the twentieth century seem quite arbitrary. For anyone working in science and literature, these works are founding manifestos of sorts, but in a sense the fact one of the most formidable (but charming) scholars of the present moment wrote them reminds how difficult it is to do this sort of interdisciplinary work in a way that makes best use of science's introduction to literary studies to create a new paradigm for the latter.
If it is to be conducted in the fullest way, I would argue that science and literature must avoid doing two things. On the one hand, it cannot simply seize on scientific texts as just other examples of influential historical documents through which to understand a poem. On the other, it must avoid turning to science in order to claim some positivist legitimacy for literary studies, as if to say that literary criticism is a science just like physics, when in fact if there is a scientific knowledge encoded within literature and literary studies, it is a science of a different sort to that encoded in molecular mechanics. The latter is precisely what the current hot topic of the moment,
evolutionary literary criticism risks doing, when at its worst it appears to say that reading Jane Austen can somehow improve your evolutionary survival in society - which is simply to give a gloss of scientific kudos to what is essentially an old Arnoldian argument that reading literature is a moral activity (see Joseph Caroll's
Evolution and Literary Criticism).
Labels: British Society for Literature and Science, English Literature, Science and Culture
When I started this
Postgraduate Diary back in 2005, my work load was somewhat lighter than it has been over the past year. This has meant that over the past few months in the run up to submission and then preparing for the viva, when one would have thought I would have most to say about the unique experience that is doing a PhD, I have had least time to blog about it. As a consequence (and further cutting the cover of my pseudonym and coming closer to revealing
my real identity), I joined the
Twittering masses.
If you
follow me on Twitter, or look at the most recent updates in the sidebar on the right on The Pequod, you will see that my thoughts in the run-up to the viva, which took place yesterday, went something like this.
To explain a bit less succinctly, after the end of term, and having spent the first week of the vacation sending out overdue book chapters and a couple of reviews and preparing a paper for the
British Society for Literature and Science conference, I managed to go down with flu, which meant that the week I had allocated to preparing for the viva was spent mostly in bed, with the thesis on my knee and me asleep or buried in tissues.
Eventually, I did plough through the thing, at which point my anxiety kicked in - hence the second expletive. Apart from noticing several typos and clumsy sentences, which I always resignedly knew (and knew my examiners understood) would creep through, my opinions on my thesis became utterly distorted. The problem was that at no point did any of my ideas make me sit up and say, "Oh, how interesting." This is because by now my interpretations of the literary works, or the arguments I strung together, were so familiar as to seem self-evident. I simply could not place myself in the position of a naive reader who would be attending to what was there afresh.
As
I have commented previously, the art of learning to write well is, in a sense, the art of learning to read naively, understanding what new readers are going to take from a work, rather than what you as the writer believe yourself to have put in. But whilst this may be an art I have more or less mastered at the level of the essay, obviously writing a book-length study was entirely new to me. A book entails a different dynamic, because by virtue of its length a reader's concentration ebbs and wanes, and one often reads with less attention to style and structure (and hence to problems in that style) and responds more to broad ideas as they emerge from the fog of the whole. However, as a writer I am not experienced enough to conceptualise my ideal book reader. Consequently, in my own re-reading of my thesis, I focused intently on the elisions, the errors, the bits of structure that I felt could be improved; in a way my experience of reading my thesis was the experience of reading the thesis I did not write. So many times I wondered why I had not added another critic, or why I had not covered a particular angle of potential argument. I knew the answer - lack of time - would not really wash in the viva, but I convinced myself that these absences were all that the examiners, my first proper readers, would notice, rather than them attending to the things I had written.
When I finally emerged from the fug of flu, then, I ended up wandering around our local countryside doing rather perverse versions of some silent movie mannequin. There I would find myself, walking through the woods, waving my arms about and muttering to myself. What I was doing inside my head was holding mock vivas, imagining all the questions that might be put to me, and constructing idealised answers. If I was a cartoon, I would be Homer Simpson, with his monkey homunculi inside his skull, only in my case two of the monkey-examiners would be wearing figurative grey beards and I would be a small child chattering in the corner.
So in the run up to my viva, I went around in something of a nervous state, not quite a wreck but certainly more anxious than I had expected I would be. I think part of the issue with a viva is that in a technical sense it matters little. Unless a supervisor has been utterly useless, there is no way any student could submit a thesis that was going to fail outright. So the viva really only determines whether one will pass with a few typo corrections, or provisionally pass with the need for substantial rewriting over the coming months, a prospect no PhD student relishes, being no doubt sick of the sight of their thesis by this point. So instead of being like an exam result, with the mark passively waiting on a piece of paper, the viva is a sustained, active confrontation with two academics who are going to either look down on you, or treat you as (more or less) their equal. Especially for someone considering an academic career, like myself, this sets a tone, rather than being a final determinant of the future. Am I an academic, or am I a person who just happens to have a PhD?
So, then, to the thing itself. At which point my examiners broke all the rules by strongly implying that there was not much risk of me doing anything over the course of the exam that could see me fail, or having to go back to the drawing board. This immediately set me at ease, and meant that all the questions to follow took place within a framework in which the issues were less deconstructions and more in the same spirit of academic enquiry that follows any reading of any published book. After all, very few of us have ever read an academic monograph, no matter how good, without thinking certain aspects were weaker than others, or certain things merit further study, without this devaluing the nature of the work as a whole. Like science, studies in the humanities only chip away at the understanding of the universe. When it comes to the human world, there is no theory of everything.
And so the viva was more like a broad ranging conversation than the detailed picking apart that it had been during my internal monologues in the previous week. We talked about things in wider cultural studies beyond the scope of my thesis - including, bizarrely, a discussion of the Nintendo Wii. There were a few technical points which my examiners picked up on, including my use of the term "the viewer" in my discussions of films, as if film goers are all idealised Platonic entities who respond in the same way, rather than a diverse crowd, some of whom fidget, and some of whom pay the attention the director desires. This was quite awkward, as it was an entirely legitimate point which I myself had already spotted as a flaw, but I had to find some way to justify my use of it (in this case, it was a handy shortcut). As it was, I sort of wriggled my way around and then - because I knew that I had already passed - admitted that it needed changing. We chatted a bit about how to rework certain aspects for publication, and which publishers to aim for. And then it was all over. They stayed behind closed doors to draft their final report, and I drifted off for a celebratory lunch with my supervisor.
The whole event seemed, in the end, a bit anti-climactic. Did three years of hard slog really come down to this two hours of fairly gentle academic chatter? Rather than the elation I felt when I finally submitted "the thing" before Christmas, I now just feel a gentle kind of relief. One of the odd things is that there is not really a definitive moment when you pass a PhD. Unlike other exams, there always seems to be one more hurdle to go through before graduation. I have a few corrections to do, then have to get it hard bound, then have to fill in some more forms. And, in a peculiar way, with hindsight I had already passed the moment I submitted, and those words irrevocably printed on the page were just waiting to be read by the examiners who would confirm it. Then again, had I actually passed the moment about eighteen months ago when the chapter structure finally became clear and coherent? Or did I pass the moment when I came up with the original concept for my thesis, an originality which thrilled the examiners? Was it really always going to happen, and all those troubles of writing just going through a necessary motion?
Alternatively, looking ahead, if I want an academic career, the epithet "Dr" really means very little. I have little hope of an academic job without one published book, and a few more journal articles. The thesis is just one necessary, but ultimately minor, step on the road. Neither of my two examiners, nor my supervisor, had ever got their theses published, as it was just the launchpad to something else.
In a peculiar kind of way, this blog mirrors this effect. Over the last year or so, my Postgraduate Diary has got less and less regular, and I have started instead thinking and talking about other things, like
the historical novel, or
Renaissance science. So I suppose it is appropriate that this will be my final post in the Postgraduate Diary - though that only frees up opportunity for more diverse thoughts in the future.
Labels: Postgraduate Diary, viva
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