The Gnostic Pynchon

[Dave Monroe]

... yeah, I was going to point out myself that having a humanities
background doesn't necessarily seem to hurt one in the job market,
unless, of course, you're looking for a reasonable-to-high paying job IN
the humanities, which is why I imagine the PhDs are hurting--for better
or worse, they're in it for the long haul, perhaps the love of it,
even.  My guess is that the theory kids COULD go into advertising if
they wanted to cross over to the dark side (indeed, I remember reading
somewhere about Brown's semiotics program as having a mainline into
MTV), but, well, again, one might also believe that the point of such an
education is to hone a certain oppositionality to such things.  Go into
advertising, get a law degree, or become a Jesuit, those seem to be my
options besides just getting back to school and getting my doctorate,
and I'm not sure which is worse.  But I managed to do badly enough
without PhD, thank you very much, so ...

Vaska Tumir wrote:

> Intellectual capital and the bottom line don't necessarily coincide --
> which makes me wonder why all the citizens so keen on having their
> kids acquire the first don't make a bit of a stretch for it. But that
> aside, it's something like 14 years now since I first saw an article
> publicizing the results of a survey done across a number of US
> industries.  The point of the things was (and since then I've been
> seeing about one of these things every 3-4 years) that right across
> the board, employers were claiming that humanities graduates make the
> best managerial cadre.  Better, apparently, than kids coming out of
> business schools, for instance.   One could do a little archivial
> digging through The Wall Street Journal to find the first in this
> series of articles. One wouldn't think so, but it in the end seems
> that all the theorizing and all the rest of the stuff we do in our
> humanities departments ends up being pretty good for that old bottom
> line.  Sometimes it worries me, mostly it doesn't.  [BTW, the job
> market is dire only for the Ph.D.s, not for the kids with
> undergraduate degrees in humanities.] Vaska P.S. Just saw Mifune.  A
> great little Danish film well worth catching.  It picked up something
> in Cannes, but in Toronto, at least, it's playing only in the rep
> cinemas.
>
>      ----- Original Message -----
>      From: Terrance
>      Sent: Saturday, June 24, 2000 12:08 AM
>       [snip]It seems we
>      have turned our backs on the humanities and for very good
>      reasons: they aren't providing the intellectual and
>      professional capital to help students in the real world.
>      Here it is the money and the money and most citizens are
>      doing well in the new economy and would be more than willing
>
>      to fund English, or Comparative Literature if they felt
>      their children were accumulating intellectual capital.
>      Citizens aren't going to shell out their hard-earned money
>      for philosophy or even philosophy of technology, of science,
>
>      of mathematics, of computer science, and I don't think
>      gender studies, identity politics, and Pomo/Film/Pynchon is
>      high on their list either. Sorry, I simply do not think it
>      has anything to do with cross departmental
>      anthropology/myth/history/Pynchon classes. Pedagogically I'm
>
>      all for it, but what will all the young women do with Woman
>      Studies degrees if they can't pay the rent for a room of
>      their own? Pynchon will survive. I'm convinced of that,  but
>
>      I'm not so sanguine about the prospects for those that teach
>
>      his fiction, Pomo, Mo, Larry or Curly.  Until the humanities
>
>      can demonstrate that it has a positive content that
>      contributes to the bottom line, no one is going to take it
>      seriously.
>
>
>
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