<p>Last week I was digging through old files, looking for a paper that I could use as an example for my students&mdash;students who needed to be shown how to insert a note into a Word file (WTF?!*). Looking at my old papers made me feel very dumb. I used to be smart. I wrote papers with titles like "The Politics of Naming African American Language," "'I am student of the brain': Figures of the Psychiatrist in Bram Stoker's <em>Dracula</em>," and "Ethics of Writing and Reading History 
in Andr&eacute; Gide’s <em>The Immoralist</em>." Now I grade papers with titles like "Paper 4," "Annotated Bibliography," and "Problematic Paper."** When I've tried to talk to a couple of English profs about courses they're teaching or research they're working on, I've come away feeling hopelessly stupid and out of the loop.</p>
<p>Being smart in this particular area (the study of literature and literary theory) has always, in my adult life, been important to my self-image. Feeling dumb in this particular way is a crushing blow. Teaching is fun, sort of, and challenging in a Sisyphean, masochistic way, but it doesn't lead to a great deal of sophisticated thought or intellectual stimulation. To be fair, it leads to a certain kind of intellectual stimulation, but not the kind that keeps your lit crit chops up to speed. To really feel smart in the way I'm talking about, you need to read and discuss this stuff all the time (at least I do), which is something that doesn't happen if you aren't either in school or working in the field.</p>
<p>It's kind of strange for me to feel this way. One of the reasons I had so few reservations about bailing on my PhD was the abysmal state of "scholarship" in my field. The "publish or perish" dilemma means that lots of absolute shit gets published, and I grew weary of reading articles filled with pseudo-scientific jargon, written only to enhance someone's tenure file, and published because everyone knows that people must have publications to keep their jobs. And yet, I still feel that these things are worth thinking and talking and writing about&mdash;especially thinking and talking&mdash;and I like to feel that I can do so intelligently. Recent evidence is all to the contrary. It's rather demoralizing.</p>
<p class="note">*I could easily fill the WTF?! files with student stories.</p>
<p class="note">**Yes, my students mostly refuse even to give their papers proper titles.</p>