ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Disappointed

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Disappointed

Two very bright students have just failed to get in to study OOO with me at UC Davis. One tried for English Lit., the other for American Studies. I've taught about 500 graduate students and currently I'm supervising about 15 Ph.D.s, and have a 100% success rate with those scholars getting jobs. In other words I know what I'm doing.

These applicants were awesome. But somehow what they did was not visible to the powers that be.

I'm hoping that in the next few years there is a tectonic shift in how humanities Ph.D. work is thought. In particular, people had better get used to the speculative realism explosion. For now I'm pretty sad.

I encountered some obstacles when I first started out. I remember my Ph.D. qualifying chapter was rejected because it “wasn't English literary criticism.” Terry Eagleton (bless him) went to the mat for me on that and I got past the censor, having submitted a chapter that another professor (Stephen Gill) said was the best qualifying chapter he'd ever seen. It was a tough week—yes that's right I had to write a chapter in a week!

There are very real very ideological roadblocks in this business.

1 comment:

Clarissa Lee said...: I can very well identify with that. I got accepted and rejected from different places based on the same writing sample, though I did change my personal statement somewhat.; February 21, 2012 at 11:46 AM

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton has written All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.

“Outstanding.”
—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”
—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”
—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”
—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”
—Vince Carducci

ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Disappointed

1 comment:

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