/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14022394]

How dificult is to write a college paper for a journal and maybe write a book that academia can take seriously?

[Anonymous No.14022396]

>>14022394
Just check all the boxes in the list and you're good to go. You don't even have to be creative.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !mxvabIoSIE No.14022397]

Kinda difficult

[Anonymous No.14022398]

>>14022394
Honestly not that difficult now-a-days academia is a joke. But if you go in writing something about Hegel, Marx, or Nietzsche your gonna have a lot of competition. It's not necessary IQ but how convincing you make an argument.

[Anonymous No.14022403]

>>14022396
>>14022397
>>14022398
I want to write some BS about gender, like the ethics of cuckcoldry and why white males should let black guys impregnate their wifes and have brown babies to end white supremacy.

[Anonymous No.14022414]

>>14022403
What would even be the point of doing that?
Some journals will publish anything, so have fun, I guess.

[Anonymous No.14022416]

>>14022403
JUST

[Anonymous No.14022419]

>>14022414
>>14022416
I want to write some intelectual shitpost.

[Anonymous No.14022425]

>>14022419
Whatever you say, lad.

[Anonymous No.14022427]

>>14022419
How original. Never heard of Sokal?

[Anonymous No.14022445]

>>14022427
nothing wrong with that, it sounds very fun to make.

[Anonymous No.14022459]

>>14022445
Are you underage? If yes, I do admit I kind of pity you.

[Anonymous No.14022463]

>>14022459
>no fun allowed

[Anonymous No.14022505]

>>14022463
I'll take that as a yes. It's ok, I really don't mean it as an insult. Have fun, I guess.

[Anonymous No.14022513]

>>14022403
>>14022419
horrifying

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !mxvabIoSIE No.14022690]

>>14022403
Write it, but then pull out of it and point out that this would not end the problems of the world as classism would persist no matter what color the populace is.

[Anonymous No.14022817]

>>14022394
It is a skill, which unfortunately graduate school doesn't teach very well. The gist is that you have to sell a story to the reviewers. You can say almost anything you want to, as long as you sell it well. This is much easier if you're trying to sell something the reviewers are already basically on board with, but even then it's important to convey that you're part of their clique (i.e., you have to use the right vocabulary). This also makes it difficult to pull this off if you actually are an outsider, unless you do an awful lot of boning up beforehand.
This is not just true of the humanities, by the way. I know an awful lot of STEM grad students who have trouble figuring out how to get shit published, just because they were never taught the dark art of salesmanship.

[Anonymous No.14022823]

>>14022690
Always do the opposite what this bug says.

[Bug Spray No.14022978]

>>14022690
Get the fuck off this board.

[Anonymous No.14023339]

I'm finishing up my PhD now and obviously the aim is to publish it. Not getting your dissertation published is a bad sign for employers and all that jazz. You should at least be in the works to roll it into a book when you get your first job, and they will expect you to do so. I know a professor who is still working on his, and he told me that they were leaning on him to make good on the promises he made during his hiring. It's very important for academic departments to have professors who are actively producing research and getting published. This is not just an abstract intellectual thing (nothing is in academia), but an integral part of their business model.

Point being, I'm near the end of the "perpetual student" cycle and will enter the job market in a year or two, if I choose to (try to) stay in academia. I don't know if that necessarily makes me qualified to speak, but at the very least, I do think and talk about this kind of shit on a daily basis.

Academia is really not about competition, mostly. It is about "checking the boxes" as >>14022396 said. If you can make it to this stage in the process, you are unlikely to be failed completely unless you are truly doing nothing, or truly way out in left field and outright refusing to play ball with your advisers. Once you make it past the several years of hazing rituals (coursework, comps, proposing and developing your thesis), that is once you are ABD, your institution shifts stances, from not really caring whether you progress or drop out with a mere MA, to having an incentive to get you to graduate in a timely manner. There are financial reasons and prestige reasons (which are ultimately financial reasons) for this, as above.

So, as long as you make it to ABD and don't totally botch things from there - a surprising number of people still do, though - you can finish a dissertation and get a PhD. You should have guessed that this means a lot of mediocre dissertations get passed. You can only do so much with some students, who may excel at being "professional students" while not having anything original to say, not having any capacity for deep insight, and/or not being able to hack long-term serious research, or all of the above.

When you get to the publishing phase, the same process repeats itself. A lot of dissertations get published as books simply because they NEED to be published. The authors have a strong incentive so they push hard, and plenty are better at networking than researching. Connections do help. Many topics are very niche, and most university presses are shit, increasingly so these days, so a lot of presses err on the side of publishing anything that came from a well-connected student or a student from a prestigious institution.

[Anonymous No.14023344]

>>14023339
Similar pressures exist for articles. PhD students are strongly pushed to publish before graduating. This leads to perfunctory work. Connections are also extremely important in journals. If you are at a major institution, where you already have lots of prestige, and even more important, lots of subtle training in how to present yourself as prestigious, how to roleplay as a junior academic, you will also likely have access to editors at major journals, either through your advisers directly or through the small world of your field and conference circuit. Most of the people I know who have published precociously simply met the editor at a conference after-party, and he was also friends with their adviser, and they were invited to "publish something with us." The key word being "something." Anything. Just submit it and we'll probably push it through if you're basically coherent.

All this being said, there are many people who are genuinely talented and rise to the top. There are people who are obviously born to do what they're doing, and who serially produce what are obviously extremely good ideas, or at least extremely publishable and trendy ideas. Some people seem eerily born to fill niches and you wonder whether it was luck that that niche existed for that person or whether the niche somehow pre-formed them in the womb to enter it 30 years later.

Independent scholars are mostly scoffed at. You can probably still publish, but there is a lot of snobbery. As I said, connections are surprisingly influential even in article publishing. The "world" you see into when you look at the list of authors for the latest edition of your favorite academic journal is a lot smaller than you think. Most of those people are either hot commodities already or they are graduate students of so-and-so who was so-and-so's roommate in college.

The real question is what you mean by being taken seriously. Hopefully none of the above sounds too appealing. If you are a genius researcher of some kind, academia can be a good vehicle, but you will have to learn to game it just as it tries to game you. It also depends on what field you're into. Certain scholars might be more interested in talking to anybody who can demonstrate interesting results, for example in something empirical, whereas humanities scholars are probably not even going to entertain someone outside their guild unless it's to their own advantage and they are kowtowed to. It's likely that such humanities guild members will be total mediocrities. Many of them produced downright terrible or embarrassing work and still got hired because of connections, timing, bluffing the system. For every one of them, there are ten who left academia, but that still means one in ten mediocrities gets through, and there are billions of mediocrities. So the question is, do you want to be "taken seriously" by this person?

Normally I'd edit this down since I'm really windbagging but hopefully it's useful to someone.

[Anonymous No.14023349]

>>14022403
Would unironically get published no matter how terrible the argument is

[Anonymous No.14023371]

>>14023339
>>14023344
As someone who does a PhD in STEM and is failing it mainly due to lack of interest and psyhcological hang-ups, I found that interesting to read. In what field do you work?
What you describe is close to my experience, though I feel my field (statistics) is currently somewhat less conformist and close-off that what you describe (only somewhat though).

[Anonymous No.14023463]

>>14023344
>Independent scholars are mostly scoffed at. You can probably still publish, but there is a lot of snobbery.

This is an issue I face. There's a particular subfield that I'd want to worm my way into which I'm highly confident I can make significant contributions to, but doing this relies on me proposing a framework that makes specific predictions that I have good reason to believe will bear out, but which I have little independent support for until there are already enough of the 'right' people willing to take me seriously and actually look into this. Given that is in a completely different field to what I actually have my degree in, what advice can you give?