Associate
^ Pretty insightful post, ta 
FAO PhD folk
- Thread starter Ricochet J
- Start date
Indeed. Hopefully you have learned from your recent enforced holidays.
You seem rather sensitive to something I had forgotten until you mentioned it. what low rank Universities has to do with anything or that I have given you any aggro in any academic threads is lost on me as well....you told me you were a masters candidate, so if you are a PhD/DPhil candidate fair enough, not that it matters as the earlier comment was a light-hearted reference to your recent shenanigans with [FNG]Magnolia and nothing to do with your education or any discussion we may have had...to which I have always treated you with good grace and respect unless you have lost the plot as you do on occasion.
You just need to chill out fella, don't take things so personally, particularly when they are not meant that way.
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Associate
FYI I was banned the second time for contravening a swear-word rule I didn't realise existed... not in any anti-social or 'losing it' manner. I used a casual 'soft' swear-word mid-sentence and only starred out one letter... = 1 week ban. It wasn't aimed at anyone, it was just used as a bit of demotic speech... so make of that what you will.
Also I saw the comments that DJ dude made when I was banned, and they were disingenuous in the extreme... and your enquiries into that matter were unsurprisingly one-sided. As a classicist and a historiographer you should know there's more than one side and truth to every story/historical account... me 'losing it' was not the case at all, nor was it me 'trolling'. But that's one for another time. Happy to clear that up with you over trust/private messages if you really care that much about getting a fair even-sided account (though I doubt you do).
Alas... cont.
Also I saw the comments that DJ dude made when I was banned, and they were disingenuous in the extreme... and your enquiries into that matter were unsurprisingly one-sided. As a classicist and a historiographer you should know there's more than one side and truth to every story/historical account... me 'losing it' was not the case at all, nor was it me 'trolling'. But that's one for another time. Happy to clear that up with you over trust/private messages if you really care that much about getting a fair even-sided account (though I doubt you do).
Alas... cont.
As for enquires, trust me I was not that invested in the argument between you and Shayper to have more than a cursory interest in what was said.....me being the old gossip monger that I am.
I am quite sure there is more than one side to every story....I just think you need to treat the forum like you would an evening in the pub with your mates, there is a bit of ribbing, a bit of philosophy, a bit of politics and a lot of nonsense, but at the end of the day it isn't really important and it is never worth getting in a tiswas over. You don't have to justify yourself all the time or take things so seriously.....it is after all, only the internet...
On topic: Your DPhil, what is your chosen field?
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Associate
Modernism/modernity; the avant-garde; after postmodernism; neo-modernisms; philosophy of history, history of ideas.
In short I will be trying to draw a line of literary, artistic and intellectual continuity between the 'high' Modernists and a select number of British, American and French writers of the later 20th century phase of artistic creativity (late capitalist, post-postmodernist, whatever you want to call it). A lot of big themes like new humanism, the waning/recursion of philosophic affect, irony vs. sentimentality, Romanticism and classicism, etc. Everything from Joyce/Beckett to Pynchon/Wallace. It's a large synoptic/syncretic (as you prefer) type research project. I'm rubbish at sustained pieces on single-texts/authors... my mind wanders, joining the dots, cross-disciplinary, etc. Both my BA and MA theses were on huge texts, consequently (Proust and Wallace, respectively).
Oh and trust me, I take it light-heartedly. I'm more sporting in jest/challenge than actually being an IRL strop. It's a diversion from Word-doc tedium, not a stress session.
What was your PhD thesis on? Again, forgive me but I can't recall specifically. I remember you had a non-traditional (or not?) entrance into academia?
In short I will be trying to draw a line of literary, artistic and intellectual continuity between the 'high' Modernists and a select number of British, American and French writers of the later 20th century phase of artistic creativity (late capitalist, post-postmodernist, whatever you want to call it). A lot of big themes like new humanism, the waning/recursion of philosophic affect, irony vs. sentimentality, Romanticism and classicism, etc. Everything from Joyce/Beckett to Pynchon/Wallace. It's a large synoptic/syncretic (as you prefer) type research project. I'm rubbish at sustained pieces on single-texts/authors... my mind wanders, joining the dots, cross-disciplinary, etc. Both my BA and MA theses were on huge texts, consequently (Proust and Wallace, respectively).
Oh and trust me, I take it light-heartedly. I'm more sporting in jest/challenge than actually being an IRL strop. It's a diversion from Word-doc tedium, not a stress session.
What was your PhD thesis on? Again, forgive me but I can't recall specifically. I remember you had a non-traditional (or not?) entrance into academia?
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I've read through that a few times now and not to sound insulting but what purpose does it serve?
Associate
It's actually part of a very big and very relevant ongoing discourse in literary/cultural/philosophical academia. Most departments are still obsessed with various Modernisms and find the postmodernist phase a bit of tired novelty and rebellion. It's very much on the 'forefront' of current research in the field. 'Serious' art has been in a bit of an identity crisis (aesthetically and politically) since about 1935. A lot of academia has the secondary purpose of looking over contemporary creative output and canonising it and arranging it into various sorts of history.
If you're asking for a utilitarian "what good is it to a man on the street?" answer... well, the same answer as any high-level theoretical maths or physics, really. Discussing the 'use' of academic research is a bit like asking for the 'speed' of a teapot. I don't have any illusions about my research (or any other academic's research) being interesting or relevant to more than about 5 people who are also in that cloistered field. This goes for the sciences and maths just as much as it goes for the arts and humanities. It's part of the postmodern episteme, old boy, don't you know?
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![[FnG]magnolia](/styles/overclockers/avatars/9.png){kind=avatar}
Caporegime
Less exciting than you're imagining.
Little purpose but to posture and preen whilst completely ignoring the OP.
You're phrasing of much of it is kinda hard to understand but is this kind of a "cataloging" (for want of a better word) exercise to try and group or order types of literature/ideas ?
Well that's not strictly true theoretical maths and physics gave us the foundation for lasers and transistors and many other things which have become very useful.
Which would actually be a very good question in relation to a tea pot if it was phrased to ask about how well it retains heat (whether the tea cools fast or slow)
Associate
Posture and preen? I was answering a question.
I'd be just as interested to hear what the OP is intending to do his in, as well.
I'd be just as interested to hear what the OP is intending to do his in, as well.
Oooh there's a can of worms you don't want to open
Sounds interesting though, best of luck with it. I hope it's a rewarding experience for you
Thread's rather taking a turn off topic, I'm guessing the OP's initial question has been answered though at this point?
+1
[FnG]magnolia;22509681 said:
Figured it would be relatively dull that's why i couldn't be arsed looking through the results of the search for "phd" (it seems people on here use that far too much).
But it's 1 am on a Tuesday morning and it's a choice between internet gossip or masturbation so figured it was worth a shot.
Associate
It's not simple cataloguing, no. It's more to do with the major philosophic ideas of our age and how they manifest themselves in art (namely, the modernist sensibility or the conditions of 'modernity': talking all the thought post- the second industrial revolution, post-liberal democracy, post-scientific technicism: the world of Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, Saussure, Marx, Darwin, etc). To say I'm just cataloguing a few books into an ordered hierarchy would be to simplify it - though I am arguing for several contemporary authors' place in the canon, yes. Essentially I'm trying to show how a bunch of late-20th century authors took up the mission and high ambition of a bunch of artists 100 years previous to them (Modernists), which is related to all sorts of wider philosophic-aesthetic debates about 'finding an artform suitable to modernity', and all the artistic, political and social revolutions that arose during that time (e.g. forms of populism in politics and taste and fashion, etc). It's quite a huge topic and hard to summarize neatly. At its most basic I'm drawing a line of continuity between the 19th and 20th centuries.
RE: high-level science and maths being just as abstract... I think you over-estimate the real practical use of a lot of high-level research. A lot of high-level maths and science is all about solving puzzles and problems that contribute to what you could call the 'grand scaffold' of the field. It's very abstract and they're more like puzzles/games than real-world practical research. Talking pure maths and sciences, here, not technical disciplines. If they do have a drip-down benefit, then so be it... but it is far from their aim, and funding is rarely awarded on that criterion. Besides, it's the same as arts/humanities research... if arts/humanities research can in some small way contribute to a greater sense of self-understanding or knowledge about our contemporary world/reality, then it has 'contributed' in some small way. That has always been the idea. It's the old addage about 'technical' scientific research and progress and liberal art/humanities 'knowledge' being two-sides of the same coin. They're both forms of human cultural progress. If you had one without the other it would be a very sad world indeed, don't you think?
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Associate
Haha, indeed. The internecine squabbles between science/maths and arts/humanities is based on a completely fatuous dichotomy, in my opinion. There shouldn't be a division in the first place - they're both aiming towards the same liberal-humanist ideals. A scientist that hasn't read any poetry or a historian that doesn't understand basic science/math are wholly incomplete human beings.
The problem with contemporary academia/research is that everything is so ultra-specialised that you cannot really sit astride both disciplines nowadays. This is what humanities and sociology-type buffs call the 'postmodern episteme'. It's just a fancy term basically meaning that human knowledge has advanced so far nowadays down the various diverging 'tree-branches' of knowledge that you can never have the time or brain capacity to master them all. You have to specialise. That's why arguments between biologists and philosophers are ridiculous. They're basically exercises in self-validation by insecure people. I never feel the need to belittle a scientist who has little knowledge of anything else... but I frequently find myself having to defend humanities research from showboating physicists, and so on. It's really silly.
If you wanted to get echt-philosophical about it and sehr-deep, you could say it's to do with the current cultural trend towards placing science in the place of religion in a secular society... we look to scientists for the answers now; they are our contemporary medicine men and scholastics. So they have an inflated sense of self-worth as the 'arbiters of the one ultimate Truth' etc.etc. But that's just a small thought.
Associate
Well for one specific 'set' there's a definite trend in 1990's Anglo-American fiction towards this concerted, conscious effort at returning 'affect' (to use Jameson's term) or various forms of humanism/feeling. A lot of books by young and extremely over-educated, literary writers like Foster Wallace, Safran Foer, Eggers, Zadie Smith, (with older antecedents like Morrison, Sebald, etc). Not all of whom do I personally think are first-rate, or even all that successful... but as a cultural and artistic 'trend' or whatever, I think they're very obviously trying to get past all of the ironic, schizophrenic, metafictional cleverness of the 1960's and 1970's, i.e. that period during the 'death of the author' and the debunking of the narrative text, which was incredibly rich for theory and Continental philosophy, but pretty much bankrupted fiction on the spot.
Anyway I'm really going on now (sorry, it just naturally interests me...). I hope the OP returns to give some of his own input, so that this thread in the morning doesn't just look like 3-4 of us hijacking it with talk about our own research interests.
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Soldato
I've always read that a PhD is the equivalent as working in the industry. Saying that, could you negotiate your salary before you start the PhD?
Or is every PhD person doomed to have as minimum stipend as possible?
Ta
As has been mentioned before, the stipend is linked to how the project fits in to the departmental funding and grants. For example, most Engineering PhD's have a tax-free stipend of £15k (ish) if it is funded under an EPSRC grant. My PhD pays more as it is funded by a mixed EPSRC-Industrial consortium as a salaried position (Research Assistant) - the flip side is that I have to pay tax (and student loan!
) which comes out of my payslip.I think negotiating is probably pointless as the funding for the position will have largely been dictated already, and there are probably a plethora of similarly-able candidates waiting in the wings
Yea it's unfortunate that I've been in that 'opposite side' before, in trying to understand what the whole "point" of humanities research is when we should "surely be sending all the money to the useful things like sciences!!!".
I completely agree with you about having a well rounded knowledge of the world, and I don't really want to get into a debate about whether there are any more justified fields of research, since I have no desire to belittle the work that you're doing, nor do you mine I'm sure.
I will concede however that there are certainly some fields in physics which at this point are pretty much meaningless. There are some fascinating theories being produced from an abstract, intellectual point of view, but insofar as their 'real world value' goes, at this point its very much a case that the only merit to these given fields is their internal logical consistency (intentional vagueness for the win ).I would disagree the whole idea about the 'arbiters of self truth' idea however. Yes it is a choice that many people in our modern society trust in the logical methodology and axiomatic basis of science to govern our learning over other means in theology. To put it in 'place' of religion you seem to be implying that it is an entire replacement. True to some extent if you're considering the 'faith' aspect to religious belief, false if you're referring to the beliefs themselves, just wondering exactly what you're meaning on that side.
Either way though, there is a distinctly unique humility to the scientific method, which makes it preferable to many people as a framework over religious faith, and in my opinion justifiably so. I would in fact argue that modern scientists are far less the 'purveyors of ultimate knowledge' than the religious leaders of old for that very reason.
One small thought that arises is that a strong exposure to modern 'pop-science' may lead to that sort of misinterpretation, but that's again just a small thought.
Either that or you've been talking to far too many string theorists..******s..
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