Monday, 10 November 2008

SEK and the Case of the Disappearing Jobs

Three of the jobs I already applied for disappeared last week. 

Two of the jobs I was about to mail applications to went poof today.

[Insert something witty here.]

[Try to think of something witty.  We'll wait.]

[Surely there's something more to this than rank despair.]

[Or not.]

[Can't anyone save us?]

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[What's that?]

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[Now aren't you a clever one.]

[But not helpful.  Not one bit.]

Nov 10, 2008 11:13:24 PM | Academia

25 Comments

Mike S

Sisyphus, I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong, but within the last five years, I've known six lit phds, who came out of the UC system, that got tenure-track jobs at California CCs. So while the comp/rhet phds may have a slight advantage at the CC level, the lit phds are somehow still finding gigs at these schools.

Perhaps this is due to the fact that there are simply fewer comp/rhet phds out there than there are lit. I'd guess that the number of comp/rhet phd programs in the U.S. is dwarfed by the number of lit programs.

Posted by: Mike S | Wednesday, 19 November 2008 at 01:17 AM

Adam Kotsko

Batman has already faced off against Deconstructo.

Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Friday, 21 November 2008 at 06:54 PM

Miriam

UC Irvine's English dept. actually has a solid track record of placing its Ph.Ds in community colleges.

Posted by: Miriam | Friday, 21 November 2008 at 10:59 PM

Mary McKinney

Does anyone know if post-doctoral fellowships are being canceled? Those little plums are going to be even more competitive...
It seems to me that the only "solution" to the disappearing academic job situation is to hang tight and keep publishing. Easier said than done, of course.
My coaching clients who are on the job market are proceeding with their searches but trying to simultaneously work on manuscripts. Understandable pessimism makes this approach heroic.

Posted by: Mary McKinney | Thursday, 27 November 2008 at 07:11 AM

Mary McKinney

Does anyone know if post-doctoral fellowships are being canceled? Those little plums are going to be even more competitive...
It seems to me that the only "solution" to the disappearing academic job situation is to hang tight and keep publishing. Easier said than done, of course.
My coaching clients who are on the job market are proceeding with their searches but trying to simultaneously work on manuscripts. Understandable pessimism makes this approach heroic.

Posted by: Mary McKinney | Thursday, 27 November 2008 at 07:13 AM

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"I have no literary interests; something else: I am made of literature." So wrote Kafka on LF 304 and BrF 444. No, I don’t know what those mean either. Princeton only posted Stanley Corngold’s introduction to Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, so the citations function as cryptic references to private files collected, collated, duplicated and made available to people in the employ of a vast bureaucracy.* (Apt, ain’t it?) Corngold likes to pair the titular quotation with nonce word from Br 384 and L 333: Schriftstellersein, which he translates here as “the being of a writer,” but elsewhere [.pdf] as “the condition of being a writer."** His intention, here as at that elsewhere, is to create a continuum between Kafka’s Schriftstellersein and his Beamtensein, or “official self,” that is, between the literature he scratched out between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. and the sanctioned documents he produced at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. Intuitively, this seems as sound as “Petition of the Toy Producers’ Association” sounds like it could adorn one of his short stories. There’s a catch: Kafka didn’t write “Petition of the Toy Producers’ Association,” but “Petition of the Toy Producers’ Association in Katharinaberg, Erzgebirge,” a title whose specificity ruins its effect. It’s a document Kafka never distilled, never labored over as he did his literary work. Not that he wasn’t an able lawyer: on 26 November 1912, he won a settlement of 4,500 kronen on behalf of the Institute, but he did so on a “maddening trip to Kratzau” (LF 64). Why “maddening”? Because it’d interrupted the proper composition of “The Metamorphosis”: This kind of story should be written with no more than one interruption, in two ten-hour sessions; then it would have its natural spontaneous flow . . . . But I haven’t got twice ten hours at my disposal. So one has to try to do the best one can, since the very best has been denied to one. (LF 64) Obviously, Kafka’s emphasis is formal, not rhetorical here--the flow of the story shaped by experience of its composition--but that’s my point: when Kafka stood before the District Court of Kratzau in November 1912, he read a document he’d written to persuade the Court to settle in his favor. It’s no more literary than the fifty-three letters he’d written Felice Bauer in November and December 1912 to persuade her that he would visit, couldn’t visit, wouldn’t visit, must visit, will visit never mind won’t visit her that Christmas. (That’s undecidability in action, folks.***) Not that it isn’t important. As an historicist, I value the documents in the same way I value the letters. But I don’t understand the desire for equivalence here. Kafka may’ve written about and on behalf of bureaucracies, and there’s no small amount of interest in the intersection, but that’s no reason to collapse one into the other. This isn’t like David Foster Wallace’s notes for The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, which are aimed at writers composed in his signature stylistic quirk. Or is it? Talk me down, people,...
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About that agon . . . In the comments to ari’s post, Martin G. noted his fondness for Bérubé-style agon. I couldn’t agree more. That is, after all, the point of the copy-pasta post everyone incidentally linked to the other day. But a proper political agon requires some ground rules: first and foremost, a commitment not to Rorschach your interlocutor with a Godwin to the balls.* Such strictures are, however, unmanly. Manly men—real Men—cede every ounce of their intellectual authority to the Man who wrote The Most Important Book Ever: [A]s Jonah showed us in Liberal Fascism . . . I recommend Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism . . . Why worry about people using it to invoke “Godwin’s Law”? As if that is anything more than an internet convention used as shorthand to dismiss arguments like those made in Liberal Fascism. Goldberg’s book has opened a door to enlightening . . . And when Really Manly Men are challenged, they choke back the tears, tighten the gasket on that whine, and project, project, project. To wit: The man whose posts regularly range in 4,000 word pastures writes “[a]s for SEK, he just likes to hear himself talk[.]“ The man who valiantly complains that others “want to freeze me out from their linkfests” writes “[SEK's] entire blog is predicated on traffic.” Really Manly Men don’t care about traffic. Not one whit. The people who care about traffic are the ones who never mention it. We’re all about listening to ourselves talk, ignoring the “self-” of our importance, and guilting our readers into giving us money.** Once upon a time, I thought it possible to discuss things with Manly Men whose Knowledge and Foresight allow them to see The Coming Socialism. Then the Manly Men drunk deeply of the Manly Book, realized the Womanly Challenge before them, and told their less Manly compatriots to ____ ___.*** All of which means I was as right as I was wrong: whatever you might say about the boorishness of Manly Men, they were once far less stupid. Now that Goldberg’s spoon-fed them Kool-Aid, they feel history vindicates their abject paranoia. The Democrats won this election cycle, certainly, but we ignore idiocy at our own peril. I’m not saying all our time ought to be devoted to slapping the sluggish—that’d leave no time to marvel at the spectalurness of our failure—but as stupidity trickles down, we can’t rest on Obama’s laurels. (x-posted.) *Rorshach’s “power,” for those unfamiliar with Watchmen, being raw brutality of the Pol Pot variety. **Because, you know, we’re “important,” i.e. the only ones who can “break away from partisan cheerleading and closely examine the kernel assumptions of the several mainstream political ideologies in order to tease out how and why those ideologies either conform to, or break with, our founding principles.” ***And despite their hate-hate affair with their own voice, they only linked to themselves five times while doing so.

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