Everyday PhD: Literary Theory For All

A PhD in the humanities is not generally considered “practical,” and those of us who have studied the humanities are all too familiar with questions such as, “how is that useful?” My goal with this blog is to resist the ever-increasing commodification of a college degree, its transference (to borrow from Marx) “to a [student], whom it will serve as a use value, by means of [tuition].”

That is, I hope to share specifically how my graduate training in comparative literature has profoundly affected the way I think about and experience the world by demonstrating the practical application of advanced theoretical and philosophical concepts — concepts often only encountered in graduate school — for our everyday lives. To enrich experience, to foster empathy, to inspire reflection, to grapple with meaning, to seek diversity: this is the “use” of studying the humanities. Some doctors strive to prolong life at all costs. With my doctoral degree, I want to foreground and emphasize life’s extreme richness for those of us already living in relative comfort, health, and safety.

What motivated me to start this blog is the unfortunate reality that, for most people, it is no longer feasible to pursue an advanced degree in the humanities. While I passionately believe in its value, the material difficulties associated with pursuing such a degree cannot be stressed enough, and I find it ethically imperative for anyone who has gone through the process to make this abundantly clear.

First, it’s incredibly costly, both in terms of time and money, even if your tuition is paid for. Graduate students teach courses, contribute scholarship and research, develop programs, and serve as ambassadors for their university. And yet they are subjected to degree requirements that demand upwards of nine or ten years to complete. Whereas tenure-track faculty formerly comprised around 70% of the professoriate, that number has shrunk to 30% since the late 1960s. Now, 70% of all professors are contingent faculty, working on a contract basis, often with no benefits, for near-poverty wages. New positions in the humanities are being created at an alarmingly slow rate, whereas universities continue to admit as many graduate students as possible, resulting in a flooded job market where freshly-minted PhDs must compete for entry-level academic jobs with people five, ten, or more years their senior.

This is to say, if you don’t want to get a PhD in the humanities, I don’t blame you (you can check out this blog for even more reasons). The structural problems with higher education are myriad, and it will take the hard work of activists, politicians, professors, and bloated university administrations (that contribute more to the problem than they help) to repair. In the meantime, such problems present all the more reason to distribute the content of advanced humanistic inquiry (without oversimplifying its complexity) as broadly and democratically as possible to everyone who has an interest.

I stand firm in my conviction that studying the humanities makes the world a better place. Why? Because we are all human, and if we reduce the human condition to our net worth, or to working what David Graeber (who coined the phrase “we are the 99%”) calls “bullshit jobs,” then we are missing out on the thrilling, terrifying, and profoundly awesome nature of simply being alive. This is what connects each and every one of us, and the more immense our toolbox for reflecting on this fact, the more capable we will be of truly appreciating and loving the earth we share, the people with whom we share it, and the rich tradition of human accomplishment that surrounds us everywhere.

I therefore plan to offer some concrete examples of how studying the humanities has enhanced my experience of being alive, examples grounded in actual thoughts and feelings that I never would have had if I didn’t complete my PhD in literature. My goal is to intertwine the everyday — from pop culture and current events to basic human emotions and experiences — with the “high theory” that seems to be locked away in graduate programs. My intended audience, I should clarify, is anyone outside the academy who has cultivated (or wishes to cultivate) an interest in the relevance and urgency of humanistic inquiry but has never been able to study it at an advanced level.

I hope that you can take some or all of these concepts with you and allow them to take up residence in your mind, and I sincerely hope that they have as great of an impact on you as they have had on me.