defensiveness; on failure; backdated

I have been busy for the past few weeks preparing for my first year oral exam, which was on Thursday. The exam is the one that I think I may have mentioned to some of you, whereby I submit a list of texts broadly representative of British and American literary history and a panel of three (plus one observer) quiz me on it for twenty minutes each, so that the three time periods that they represent occupy an hour. I failed all three sections of this exam. When I got feedback from the examiners, (and all that follows is a melange of direct quotes) I was told that I came across as being very witty, charming, urbane, intelligent and glib. That I was all style and no substance - that in many cases they simply didn't believe that I had read the texts that we were talking about. Of course, because I am not stupid enough to believe that my examiners are stupid, I had read every text on my list. I got the DGS to admit that the impression that I gave to the committee was that I thought that I was a clever Oxford boy who could slide through this exam on his charm. That I was so charming that I had never really been pushed on anything before. Everything had simply fallen into my lap and I'd not had to really work for anything before. Frankly, said the DGS, they just wanted to see me sweat a little. But it is important that I understand that this isn't political, it really isn't, and everyone thinks I'm fabulous and golden and noone is out to get me, and it really isn't political, but they just want me to do it again. Discursive, bluffing, bullshitting, throwing questions back with modifications rather than just answering them: my style is parrying, apparently, and superficial - and evaluative rather than analytical. I seem to have been trained, they say, in a softer, more pastoral tradition.

On this last remark, which is, perhaps, the only substantive criticism that was levelled, I have been thinking a bit. And it occurs to me that I think that in general discussion, rather than in a context in which you actually have the text in front of you and are talking about what a sentence means and why, or what a particular piece of punctatuation is doing, I believe that a simple aesthetic judgment is almost always more defensible on the spot and therefore a more rigorous mode of discussing a text than to make some assertion about a text or body of texts without the ability to provide textual substantiation for that assertion. By which I mean: without recourse to textual empiricism for an evidential debate, I think that aestheticism coupled with a very flexible relativism and circumspect openness to other, differing aesthetic judgment, will always be the most valid, interesting, useful way of talking about a work.

So - I will be retaking the exam in the next month. I will knuckle under, suck it up, kiss the ring. I am not going to leave Stanford over this, and nor will it go on my record. But it is an instantiation of hierarchy that serves no end other than itself. No other student in my cohort failed this exam, and I hope that I do not flatter myself that I am not so distinctly the worst of my peer group that such a clear, nay, qualitative line can be drawn between my knowledge, manner, and intelligence and theirs. So I do, I confess, wonder: to what extent did I fail this exam because I have two degrees from Oxford? To say that I am unhappy, crushed and disappointed would be litotic. But there is nothing I can do about that. It might be a hoop to jump through, but if I don't jump through it I will not be able to jump through other, more meaningful hoops down the line, to whit passing my orals proper in two years, getting a PhD, or getting a job.

The irony of it all is that I was not trained in anything remotely resembling a softer, more pastoral tradition. I was trained in a way that, despite its flaws, attempted to imitate the Socratic tradition. And perhaps on top of that I simply ingested Blindness and Insight too deeply - took its epistemological lessons too very much to heart, and have attached too much importance to de Man's exhortion not to "confuse the rigour of the analytic procedure with the epistemelogical authority of the ensuing results." But soft it wasn't, and pastoral it wasn't. By which I mean, intellectually lazy it wasn't. And intellectually lazy I am not.

Re: Thoughts on a rejection list for schools

This is very interesting indeed for a couple of reasons. Firstly, what happened last year was that once people had got into their top programs they would tell the message board when they had turned down subsequent offers; this was by and large a popular thing to do, especially considering the tact with which it was done, by and large.

Secondly, I think that it is fascinating that you suggest that we centrally co-ordinate something. Just as our efforts to professionalise are to some extent efforts to preempt the requirements of graduate school, as if to say "I'm ready for this because I have already undertaken some of its steps" or "My committment is shown in my willingness to do this (conferences, article submissions, whatever it might be) even without the assurance of doctoral candidacy behind me”, so too I think our efforts to be exemplary at the admissions procedure, in everything from statements and samples to this board, we’re demonstrating competence (if only to ourselves) as far as we can, and possibly even in excess of what’s required.

I’ve been thinking about the hurdles and hoop-jumping of the admissions process, and I think that it is in a way a self-selecting series of inconveniences, as though by making it that much harder to apply correctly, departments try to get only the most committed applicants. And so we are trying to show ourselves to be at the very top of that bracket. There was some chitchat about this on last year’s board, about pre-professionalisation (and what one ex-applicant refers to as prepreprofessionalisation), and what I think is especially interesting is that applicants are using the internet to apply ever more cannily: whilst departments are (we can only imagine) at most, just beginning to think that boards like this might be worth looking at, and if only in a voyeuristic way, for some of us the suggestions, support and information we share here are actually kind of important (and will only get more so as things get going in February).

I’m sorry for this rather boring screed. (Screed is my new favourite word.) In its own way, your idea of unionising on school priorities (which would in itself be fascinating – a kind of demand-side set of rankings – we could classify by area of interest and argue about criteria – it’d be great) is a great idea. But it needs to happen outside of this message board, somewhere both collective and private. I like that it would represent a collective movement; it think it would say something about how we feel about admissions boards, that we’re ourselves unionised against and need to compensate for that.