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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think it’s partly that academia no longer seems like a viable path. It used to be that if you majored in anthropology or comparative lit or philosophy you could get a PhD and teach (or it seemed like you could). But now almost everyone knows those jobs don’t exist.

But also—I was a humanities major and believe the humanities are dying in part because of the orientation of the disciplines themselves. Where is the study of English going?[b] Literary theory is not a productive direction, imo. [/b]What exciting new developments are on the horizon?

[/quote]

Why not? Care to explain, PP?[/quote]

To be honest, because much of it is BS. (I had a professor, a very admired one, say essentially this in a seminar once, so ). Applying literary theory, as far as I could tell, was about learning to write in tortured, complex language about what would be obvious if expressed simply and clearly. Plus, it was the hot direction for the study of English literature in, what, the 1950s? And feminist theory became big in English departments in the 1970s. And that was essentially what I was studying 30 years later at a top English department. What has happened since? Digital humanities? What are the big breakthroughs and knowledge gains of the past half century in English literature? Can you think of a single new idea?

Meanwhile, the social sciences have moved the other way. Even philosophy, which used to seem like the quintessential "useless" major, has a lot of connections to cognition and AI and human computer interactions--it has become more and more relevant to our present day.[/quote]

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