What grad school assumes you've ALREADY read!

Discussion in 'Education and Academia' started by fischerw, Oct 5, 2007.

  1. fischerw

    fischerw Member+

    Sep 15, 2004
    Joplin, MO
    Club:
    Colorado Rapids
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Hey Folks,

    I'm in my third month of grad school now. I'm in a PhD program in Latin American history. I'm really enjoying it so far, although I'm drinking far more coffee than I think is healthy, and having far less free time than I thought I would.

    But I can't help feeling that I'm not well-read enough to even BEGIN grad school! Don't get me wrong-- my undergraduate education was fantastic. But I think that SO MUCH of what is written in academic contexts these days, especially in the humanities, assumes that its readers have read a certain canon of western literature, philosophy, theory, and criticism.

    So, weigh in: what are the works that grad school assumes you've read, even though very few of us actually have?

    I'll start it off (and beware that much of what I say will have to do with my being in history. I'm sure for people in English, or philo, or poli sci, or even in the natural sciences, there are certain "foundation texts" that you have to at least pretend to be well-versed in):

    Marx, Capital
    Derrida, Of Grammatology
    Foucault, various works, including Discipline and Punish
    Other authors, like Walter Benjamin, Gyorgy Lukacs, Raymond Williams, Hobsbawm
    And classics like Plato's The Republic, Works by John Stuart Mill, Rousseau, Montesquieu, the list goes on and on...

    When will I have time to read all of those authors when I'm spending all my time reading works that REFERENCE those authors?
     
  2. uclacarlos

    uclacarlos Member+

    Aug 10, 2003
    east coast
    Club:
    FC Barcelona
    Nat'l Team:
    Spain
    Freud,
    Lacan
    Kant, the essay about the master/slave dialectic; plus others
    Jamison's famous post-modernism book
    Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition
    Judith Butler, anything
    Fanon's "mask" book (don't recall title)
    Foucault's sexual history
    Edward Said, Orientalism
    Homi Babha, The Location of Culture and other books

    Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil
    Wagner, any opera. In fact, you should go see operas as a way of "studying" while taking a breather. Get the student rush rate, go to the hour long lecture beforehand and freaking learn about intellectual history and aesthetics converge.

    For Latin America, Divergent Modernities, Julio Ramos. A book on 19th century lit, but very applicable to many disciplines.

    This is a brief list composed while avoiding my dissertation.
     
  3. fischerw

    fischerw Member+

    Sep 15, 2004
    Joplin, MO
    Club:
    Colorado Rapids
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I actually just read Said's Orientalism and Bhabha's The Location of Culture. Said is actually something close to a "good read", but Bhabha's book is...wow. The most difficult thing I've ever read. My professor was able to make sense of it for us, though, and I now see why it's an important work. But reading it is a very taxing task.
     
  4. Ismitje

    Ismitje Super Moderator

    Dec 30, 2000
    The Palouse
    Club:
    Real Salt Lake
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I have a Ph.D. in Latin America and have several friends who do as well - and I don't know that any of us have read what you listed, or use anything like it in our professional meetings etc. So I would instead figure out what the professors in your program expect of you - ask, even - and take that as relevant for your degree, as opposed to what I or my friends and colleagues experienced.

    It also sounds as if you do not have an MA in history, as you listed preparation from your undergraduate education but nothing from the master's level. I don't know many programs in the US where you can get a Ph.D. without first earning an MA. How has this worked for you (or did I misunderstand)?
     
  5. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    Slight revision needed, but this has potential for some good signature material ;)

    Most people assume that reading the references to said authors is the same as reading those authors.

    I would add to Carlos' list Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Luckily, pretty much everything you need is in the first long chapter, about 50 or 60 pages, IIRC. Hegel comes in handy because most of the more imperialistic ideology is derived from (or embedded in) Hegel's thought.

    But basically, grad school assumes you've read everything. But it also knows that you haven't, so you spend your time building up an awareness of that always-shifting context which defines your discipline. This has benefits (it gives you the opportunity to get used to making discoveries and having insights on your own, in the context of a particular discipline with particular research fields) but it also has drawbacks (some people develop the facility to SOUND like they know what they're writing about, when they've really just mastered a few rhetorical formats).
     
  6. bungadiri

    bungadiri Super Moderator
    Staff Member

    Jan 25, 2002
    Acnestia
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I would take a different tack, albeit one that might very well include all the books listed here. For a PhD you're almost certainly going to do qualifying exams, which almost certainly will include a massive amount of reading. I recommend that you do not start a list and then try to read it from beginning to end. Instead, keep track of key questions in your field that are fair game for a qual exam, and then develop an outline/annotated bibiography built around answers to those question.

    For example, an anthropologist prepping for qualifying exams on SE Asia would be better off reading about the role of cognatic kinship in gender construction than an exhaustive list of descriptions of SEAsian social systems.
     
  7. uclacarlos

    uclacarlos Member+

    Aug 10, 2003
    east coast
    Club:
    FC Barcelona
    Nat'l Team:
    Spain
    There are programs at UC Berkeley that are doing away w/ prescribed reading lists on major and minor fields altogether and having students comprise an exam based on themes.

    The MA is to study the canon, so you develop your "Intro to X" courses that you'll teach to undergrads from your MA exams.

    But the PhD is starting to evolve so that you build upper division course syllabi that reflect the cutting edge research you're doing and taking the canon to another level.


    Ah yes... PhD programs are de facto Professor Factories.
     
  8. bungadiri

    bungadiri Super Moderator
    Staff Member

    Jan 25, 2002
    Acnestia
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    The supply is outstripping the demand, however.
     
  9. fischerw

    fischerw Member+

    Sep 15, 2004
    Joplin, MO
    Club:
    Colorado Rapids
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I'm earning the MA "along the way"; that is, I will be given an MA after about two years and then just proceed along towards the PhD in the same institution, unless I decide that I want to go somewhere else, which I'm not planning on at this point.

    You're right that my list didn't have a Latin American focus. Obviously there are foundational works in that field, but I tried to make a general list so folks from other disciplines could weigh in. My major adviser is very committed to theory, though, so with him I'll be encountering many works that, at least on the surface, have nothing to do with LatAm.
     
  10. Michael K.

    Michael K. Member

    Mar 3, 1999
    There or Thereabouts
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I smell an academic version of the Hamlet game comin' up!
     
  11. fischerw

    fischerw Member+

    Sep 15, 2004
    Joplin, MO
    Club:
    Colorado Rapids
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Ummm, you might have to explain that...
     
  12. Friedel'sAccent

    Friedel'sAccent Member+

    Jul 7, 2006
    Providence, RI
    Club:
    Reading FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Ismitje, I've yet to come across a PhD program that actually requires an MA for an applicant to be considered. Were you talking only about history programs? Usually, as pointed out above, a given program offers an MA along the way. This doesn't stop people from getting an MA elsewhere, but it's by no means a prerequisite for admission from what I've encountered. Out of all the grad students at Duke I know, probably more than half entered without an MA--hell, my program doesn't offer an MA at all! PhD or nothing, baby. ;)

    Back on topic: my program pretty much assumes everyone's read Deleuze's entire corpus. Heidegger, too.
     
  13. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    In order to make the academic version realistic, the issue wouldn't be whether we've read or not read a particular book. It would be whether we have pretended to have read a particular book or not.
     
  14. Ismitje

    Ismitje Super Moderator

    Dec 30, 2000
    The Palouse
    Club:
    Real Salt Lake
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Here's the key, then, and what I meant by figuring out what the professors in your program want from you and going from there. It becomes what your grad school assumes you've already read. And you have, so you're way ahead of the game.

    Yes, my query was based on history specifically. I was admitted into a program in 1994 that included a promise to continue funding up to six years en route to a Ph.D., but I never considered myself in the Ph.D. program until I finished the MA at the end of year two, as they never funded work past the fifth semester without the MA in hand, and even the fifth semester was a rare thing. So until I was really "in" the Ph.D. track, I always called it the MA track, as did most of my peers.

    I knew people in some fields - accounting for example - who were not required to earn an MA and then entered three year Ph.D. programs. This means that while we were all "on time" in our progress, the accounting folks started two years after us and finished a year earlier. Of course, my friends in the sciences may still be in grad school eight years later, so playing comparative years spent on a degree is perhaps not how I ought to spend my time!
     
  15. striker

    striker Member+

    Aug 4, 1999
    At many places, it is more like TA and RA factories.
     
  16. needs

    needs Member

    Jan 16, 2003
    Brooklyn
    I'd agree. And as Dr. Wankler suggests, "read" becomes a very flexible category, especially in history where you're trying to use theory to suggest questions that can be used to underpin narratives (because we essentially argue by telling stories and use theory to help us figure out how to structure the stories we tell and the questions we ask). Personally, the only theory I read closely for my history PhD were those texts fundamental to my dissertation project (lots of David Harvey, smatterings of Foucault to think about power and how it works). I don't see where intensely reading Lacan or Derrida in order to "get it" helps much in the kind of thinking you need to do in history, unless you're doing some kind of project that involves heavy duty discursive analysis, like what Hayden White does, but lord help the phd student who sets out to do that. They both seem almost anti-narrativistic. I'd think you'd be better served to just spend time reading Marx, but then again, I'm a materialist, so of course I'd think that.

    In general, if you're able to sit down and write a page about what major questions a particular theorists asks and how it begins to answer them, you'll be fine. No one will ever ask you to understand much more than that. PhD students in cultural studies, english and comp lit will think you're a philistine, though.

    Michigan, where I got my PhD, handed out a masters after the completion of 30 credits, but I don't think I ever even picked mine up. It was totally meaningless in the context of the program, given mainly to people who decided to leave after 2 years. So I guess it differs everywhere. I've had MA students recently ask about applying to the department I currently teach in, even though their schools are PhD granting, and tell me that they have to apply internally to move from the MA to the PhD.
     
  17. StrikerCW

    StrikerCW Member

    Jul 10, 2001
    Perth, WA
    Club:
    Manchester United FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Eek! I hope this is just for humanties and etc. For graduate school in Geotechnical Engineering do I need this stuff? ;) Or just Terzaghi and Seed's dissertations?
     
  18. prowazekii

    prowazekii Member

    Jun 21, 2008
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I'm working on a PhD in Pharmacology, and while I've read a few things listed none of these are expected. We just read current research papers that relate to our particular field.
     
  19. Friedel'sAccent

    Friedel'sAccent Member+

    Jul 7, 2006
    Providence, RI
    Club:
    Reading FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    What?! Nah...never....

    Really. ;):D
     
  20. minorthreat

    minorthreat Member

    Jan 1, 2001
    NYC
    Club:
    Real Madrid
    Nat'l Team:
    Spain
    Maybe someone should have included the caveat that this is for the humanities or the social sciences. Obviously a reading list of philosophers isn't going to apply much for someone going into the biological sciences, physical sciences, or a professional school.
     

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