Want a job with terrible pay, long hours and in which 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?
Then become a professor in a literature department.
Don’t get that PhD in literature, just don’t, warns one in Slate. And she isn't trying to discourage potential competitors, but rather because "my doctorate ruined books and made me obnoxious."
Her thesis was on Kafka so it sounds plausible. I thought Proust was all the rage these days but maybe not.
It isn't just literature. A whole chunk of the humanities has given itself over to postmodernist nonsense and there aren't many jobs out there for that coming open every year. 10 or so in her field, the author says.
I would say get it if you have the money - if you are taking out student loans or sponging off your parents, forget it. If I had the money, I would absolutely get a PhD in military science - it's obscure, it's therefore cool and the field has always interested me. But I wouldn't bother trying to get a job teaching it.
Thesis Hatement: Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor By Rebecca Schuman, Slate
H/T Mark Changizi
