Away from the Cambridge bubble yesterday, I encountered people whose lives centre more on going-to-work than going-to-the-library. So, while everyone's attitude to me was relatively benign, I received the usual set of 'but what are you going to do when you've finished?' questions. The response 'I hope to carry on researching and teaching in a university' leads to blank stares.
One man, when I'd outlined my topic to him, told me that the problem he has with PhDs is 'everyone picks something so specialised that no one can tell them they are wrong'.
On one level he's correct: you can't have a multiple choice literature examination; subjectivity is crucial to the effective critical response to a text (and just as a point of comparison, trainee vets and medics sit multiple-choice exams throughout their course).1 But we are working from primary texts and everything must return to them. If a critic creates an argument which depends more on imagination than on the text discussed, there are plenty of other critics willing to tell him so. I did suggest that this man come to the 'question time' after a seminar or a conference paper.
Sometimes people are only too happy to tell other scholars that they are wrong
1. The GRE subject test in literature is the exception that proves the rule. It is the single most ridiculous exam I've ever taken. Apparently my score placed me in a high percentile and all I had to do to prepare for this exam was glean 'cocktail party knowledge' on any authors I hadn't already covered during my degree. It only took about 20 minutes to complete after which I left the exam hall to have a nice coffee and a chat with my mum. A physics student sitting his subject GRE in the same room as me was worried that I'd had a disastrous experience but the two tests were so entirely different: he actually needed to work things out; for the lit test, you either know the answer or you don't. If you didn't, sitting there looking at the paper for another 2 hours wouldn't help.
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musings from the driptray of an espresso-fuelled PhD
1 comment:
I didn't do particularly well on the English GRE. There is a heavy bias on 20th century American lit, and I did not get much of this in college as you might imagine. Many excellent English graduate programmes in the States do not require this test at all. Likely, for the same reasons you enumerate. However, other programmes use them, I believe, to streamline the applicant pool.
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