A scholar of Continental thought

Graduate School
1

<p>I am currently an undergraduate freshman at the Metropolitan State College of Denver. It's a crappy commuter school that I'm going to for my freshman year because I had a fairly unconventional high school career, which resulted in a GED.</p>

<p>Next year, I will transfer to the University of Colorado at Boulder to major in the humanities, which is an interdisciplinary major consisting of two concentrations. I will most likely choose to concentrate on philosophy and English literature.</p>

<p>The reason I am posting this on the graduate school forum is because my main concern is this:</p>

<p>I desire a good graduate education culminating in a PhD, and my ultimate goal is to teach at the university level.</p>

<p>My area of interest is Continental philosophy and Postmodernism, and Literary Theory as a result as well. I've studied, and I would like to study in more depth philosophers like Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Husserl, Foucault, and Derrida, to name a few. To name a few schools of philosophy, I have in mind German Idealism, Phenomenology, Existentialism, Marxism, Structuralism, and Poststructuralism.</p>

<p>What should I study? Philosophy or Literature?</p>

<p>Where should I study? One of the rarer American universities that have a strong Continental faculty, or a university with a humanities department that emphasizes Continental thought?</p>

<p>As far as preference goes, I would like to live in New York City, but that probably cuts it down quite a bit.</p>

<p>Any advice anybody?</p>

2

<p>You could study this area in a philosophy dept., in an English dept., or in a dept. of comparative literature. You also could major in French or German since you would need languages anyway to pursue these interests at the doctoral level. Several German depts. offer a track in German intellectual history. Finally, you could study intellectual history in a history dept. </p>

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<p>[About</a> Undergraduate Programs | OSU Department of Comparative Studies](<a href=“http://comparativestudies.osu.edu/undergraduates/default]About”>http://comparativestudies.osu.edu/undergraduates/default)</p>

<p>[Undergraduate[/url</a>]</p>

<p>[url=&lt;a href=“http://www.washington.edu/students/crscat/chid.html]COMPARATIVE”&gt;COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF IDEAS]COMPARATIVE</a> HISTORY OF IDEAS](<a href=“http://www.princeton.edu/german/undergraduate/]Undergraduate[/url”>About the Major | Princeton German Department)</p>

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3

<p>Your interests are all over the place, even within Continental. You are just a freshman and you have time to figure out what you want to study. Definitely take German as soon as you can.</p>

<p>I really would like to caution you that the job market for philosophy is one of the worst in the humanities. Philosophy departments are small in nature, meaning there aren’t a lot of job opportunities anyway. One of my friends wanted to get her PhD in philosophy and be a professor but just suddenly realized, after actually researching opportunties after the PhD, that there are now no jobs. She then switched to politics and is now appyling for a master’s in economics. She still uses her philosophy training to get where she wants to go.</p>

<p>Study philosophy because you love it, not to make a career out of it. It’s true for many disciplines in the humanities anyway.</p>

4

<p>To my ear – which is not completely up to date in its tuning – your list sounds like a Literary Studies list, not a Philosophy list, at least at most institutions in this country. Most Philosophy people I know would scoff at the notion that Foucault or Derrida belonged on a list of philosophers, or that structuralism or post-structuralism had anything to offer them. On the other hand, if you added Heidegger, Adorno, Bakhtin, and Benjamin in there you would have a pretty good canon of European literary interpretation theory. </p>

<p>You may change your mind, of course. But if that’s really your list, it’s a lit list.</p>

<p>And I second what tickleme says. Studying literary theory OR philosophy can take you lots of places. A university teaching job is only one of them, and probably not the most common. And you want to live in New York City? Walk into any bookstore in New York, and you can have an intelligent conversation about those thinkers with any of the stock clerks.</p>

<p>I don’t think you need to look for a Continental faculty. You are not talking about obscure interests in the literary world. Anyone with an interest in theory is going to be well grounded in those people’s work.</p>

<p>And, yes, by all means learn German and French.</p>

5

<p>I really appreciate the input.</p>

<p>To be honest, it’s not about the career at all for me; I want to study this because I love it, and I’ll be happy with wherever it takes me.</p>

<p>And I suppose that while my interests originated in philosophy, my exposure to Existentialism and subsequent French intellectual movements have taken me further and further away from academic philosophy, though I do still have a desire to gain a basic understanding in the Analytic tradition.</p>

<p>What I’ve gathered, excluding the cautionary comments about the state of the job market, are that my interests fall within literary theory (so probably a comparative literature program) and that it is crucial that I get up on my learning French, German, or both.</p>

<p>With that in mind, what are some good grad schools for lit. theory?</p>

6

<p>While I applaud your planning ahead for graduate school as a freshman, it is far too early to start looking at specific programs. What you think you want to study now may not be what you choose as a rising senior. You should concentrate now on keeping your options open by taking French and German, giving yourself a solid knowledge base through courses, getting high enough grades to qualify to write a honors thesis – even doing an independent study research project, if your university allows it. </p>

<p>Next, because “literary theory” is rarely, if ever, an academic department of its own and is instead applied to the study of literature, I hesitate to recommend that you look into the few degree-granting programs that exist. Instead, when the time is right, seek out English or Comparative Literature programs that have faculty specializing in the niche that you will eventually choose. Right now, because you haven’t yet delved into upper level study at the college level, you might be more interested in the breadth of the field instead of the depth of a particular time period, literary school, or author. That will come. </p>

<p>But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take philosophy courses. In fact, you might even find that you want to minor or major in it. Students of philosophy are trained to think both logically and abstractly, one reason why law schools seem to love them. It’s not a major for wimps. :slight_smile: I suggest that you look at the Boulder course catalogue to see what philosophy courses are offered, just so you can see what the field covers. If I remember correctly (and I might not), U of Colorado’s philosophy department is known in particular for the study of ethics and morality.</p>