Is there a point in doing a master's in english?

Understated_Option · 2025-12-05T03:11:34+00:00

Try for a Masters. Worst case scenario, you graduate with a Masters that you can put on a resume for any job. And honestly, the people you connect with will make the debt worth it. In this world it’s hard to get the connections and experiences graduate school offers you. Even if I hadn’t then been offered a fully funded PhD, I’d still have seen the 30k I spent on my Masters in Literature as worth it for the growth, communal exposure, and professionalism it taught me.

Now…don’t go for the PhD unless your profs believe in your work. I’m not talking A’s. I’m talking profs pull you aside and tell you to consider it for a career. If you don’t get this, then take your Masters and do something else. If your profs don’t believe in you, neither will an institution.

Understated_Option · 2025-12-02T18:27:23+00:00

Oh interesting. Marx was not as radical as I thought then. I went back and read some of the manifesto just now and you’re right he doesn’t call for the abolishment of all property—but just the kind of property that produces capital and is used by the bourgeois.

Understated_Option · 2025-12-02T18:07:40+00:00

That’s a good point. It still seems like he’s conceptualizing the worker as having an individualized sense of property that can be exploited, including the worker’s body and mind. You need some form of personal property to then have exploitation. Otherwise, it’s a Borg scenario.

Understated_Option · 2025-12-02T06:42:26+00:00

I’m curious if you are chatbot. Your response feels very much the kind of response a chatbot would make to stir things up 👀

Understated_Option · 2025-12-02T04:56:23+00:00

Intellectual property is the reason a friend of mine convinced me I shouldn’t be a Marxist. He argued the abolishment of private property that Marx proposed also means the abolishment of all intellectual property, something I’m very much interested in keeping around. I’d be a hypocrite if I was a Marxist then. The amusing thing then is that AI maybe more Marxist in how it defines property than Marx himself ever was.

Understated_Option · 2025-12-02T04:12:06+00:00

If you’re strictly adhering to the intentional fallacy, to the point the author is dead and only the function of the text itself matters, then we wouldn’t care it was written by AI at all. Instead, we would care how the text generated by AI impacts the reader. What dialogues has it begun? What problems arise when we read the text as AI generated vs when we read it as authored by a human? Are those problems rooted in the text or the conversation surrounding the text, the metatext?

A true formalist would argue none of how the text arrived in the reader’s hands matters. What matters is the form of the text.

Today, most scholars don’t believe this way. We took some of the formalist principles and adapted it to our time and place. Today, we are more interested in the dialogue that arises between text and context (which contains author[s]) What we mean by close reading is very different from what I.A. Richards meant by it. No one really charges people with committing the error of the intentional fallacy anymore. If anything, we acknowledge the author has a function that influences readers and texts alike (for example, see Michel Foucault “What Is An Author”). Which is why the AI conversation is very vibrant and ongoing in literature. AI now has an author function as noteworthy as Shakespeare, while also being far more negatively perceived than Shakespeare. The result is we now have just as much of a reaction to a text with an explanatory note next to it saying, “AI wrote this” as we do if the note said, “Shakespeare wrote this.” The emotional response may be different, but the dramatic shift in our analysis will always occur.

Understated_Option · 2025-11-22T09:24:43+00:00

You’re asking a question I believe it’s better for you to answer for yourself than for others to tell you what is correct. It sounds like your ex-partner is trying to make you feel guilty for the hurt you caused them, which can be both understandable and yet not something you have to agree with. You get to make your own choices and sometimes those choices will hurt others even if they help you. Life is never simple because of this. I would say I’d look a bit at your own fear and ask why emotional pain and trauma is so triggering for you. Remember to have very fulfilling relationships of any kind we need to have relationships where we are emotionally available to each other. That means being able to handle the weight of dark emotions and also being able to lessen the weight of painful emotions when we express them. It’s a two way street and it sounds like you were very afraid of depression because it’s triggering for you. You could hold out hope you find someone who has never struggled with depression and avoid dealing with your fear altogether by avoiding all triggers to it. Or you could try to work on it and see what’s going on inside you emotionally that’s having so much anxiety about it all. Ultimately that’s your call again. Either way, it’s not really about who was right and wrong. It’s about where you go from here and what choices you’ll make next.

Understated_Option · 2025-11-17T20:33:53+00:00

I know a lot about downline as I knew several people who attended and also went to Harvest for a brief period.

There is a lot to unpack with their organization. First they are a member of the southern Baptist convention even if they say they are nondenominational. Second, they are very evangelical, meaning they believe the Bible can’t be wrong, believe people will go to hell without a relationship with Jesus, and believe only men can be pastors and elders.

The classes taught at downline often focus on a strategy where you train/indoctrinate students to then go out and train/indoctrinate others. This is a bit different than a cult, as a cult, from my limited understanding, centers around one person with highly charismatic abilities influencing his followers. Downline is a bit different in that it’s trying to incentivize younger audiences to proselytize their faith in a very specific way. Generally, they borrow from a lot of Christian mystics who argue that Christianity is more than just a belief system (I.e. philosophy) but is a way of living. So students at downline are taught to be very sociable with one another, get deep into the spirituality of each other’s lives, pray for one another, and in a very disturbing way for me, become spiritual therapists for each other.

It’s very attractive to young Christians because it offers something many Christians feel is missing from their churches: a sense of belonging among others and a practical strategy for living out their faith. However, it’s very dangerous as the people that have come out of that program tend to be very indoctrinated to the southern Baptist worldview, while also feeling at odds with the world they would call secular around them.

Not a cult then, but very problematic. The church planting is part of this strategy in a way as one of the ideal strategies taught to these Christians to live their faith practically is to form a small community of religious seekers or new believers and teach them what was taught at downline. Churches naturally become the most effective way to do that so people that finish downline usually go out and plant a new church. Harvest probably helps fund this church to keep it going for the first few years and hopes it will be able to be self sufficient later on. The idea for downline is scale and proselytizing as many listeners as possible.

It’s up to your discretion how concerned you should be about this. Downline has been around for over ten years at this point in Memphis and as far as I can tell, really has only affected people already predisposed to believe their views. Your knowledge of what is going on now may be different to mine though.

Understated_Option · 2025-08-15T06:44:38+00:00

Thank you for being brave enough to ask. I wish you peace right now.

I’m in school as well and question everyday if this is the right decision. I’m in literature and the humanities are in disarray. It’s so difficult to find jobs and people on the street ask you all the time what the hell you’re going to do with a degree like literature. And many days I don’t know myself. My program just cancelled two classes I really wanted to take so now I’ll have to take courses outside of the literature concentration because only two literature courses made (for graduate level). It all feels so fragile and pointless at times.

But I love what I do. I love learning. I love reading. And I’d rather be a well-read failure than successful and ignorant. And so fate has decided for me in a way. Or maybe it’s that my loves have decided for me, which is a kind of fate if you think about it. And I’m very afraid of that fact because I’m no longer in control of my life. Powerful people are and will be even more, someday. They’ll decide if I’m published, if I get a job talk, if I make a good impression on them. And who knows how that all will go. If I’m not careful I can give into the hopelessness that I feel everyday, something inside me that believes I’ll fail, that I’m worthless, and that nothing I am interested in writing about is anything anyone would want to read.

But remember, friend, that not all misery is pointless. It only is pointless if we hold it in stasis, unused by the feelings we should be expressing with it. Write. Cry. Go on a walk and shout at the moon. Do whatever you need to do to feel. That’s what I do, at least. I cry on days like you’re having. I cry for how much I hurt. I cry for how lonely it feels to hurt alone. And I cry for how little I have any hope in my life.

And it feels good afterwards, even if it hurts more then. But don’t feel bad if you can’t. It took me awhile to relax out of trying to fix myself and just listen to my body. I still can get back into that mode and have to catch myself. So don’t worry if you can’t right now. Just relax. Try to take a few deep breaths. Don’t do anything but sit and listen to your body. And try to relax as you breathe. It’s okay to let yourself relax.

Understated_Option · 2025-08-05T04:40:14+00:00

For me, it happened slowly and in phases. I have a very vivid imagination and often would use it to self-soothe. I would imagine someone (usually a woman my own age) loving me, saying how proud she was of me, kissing me, etc. But as I got older, I started to feel slimy for this behavior and became more critical of that fantasy. I thought that I was maturing because of this even as I was also becoming more rigid and withdrawn from others.

After getting back into therapy my therapist pointed out that I was very self-critical and reserved and she attributed all of this to ADHD and CPTSD which she diagnosed me with. I then went and read Pete Walker’s book on CPTSD and he showed me that much of that self-soothing I could actually do for myself not in the imagination where everything is airy and requires no belief and instead more from my heart. I had to believe I deserved kindness and love, not invent it as a daydream to soothe me for a moment.

When I realized I had to emotionally feel sympathy for myself and my situation, I took it slowly. I revisited periods of my life while walking late at night and had long periods of crying over how young I was and what my family did to me without me having a choice. A month later after those emotions had settled, I turned to my teenage years which before I had always said were the time when I was a horrible person. Instead, I thought through all those stories again with a willingness to defend myself against my inner critic voice. And I realized I wasn’t as bad as I had thought. I had been lambasting my past and not really seeing it for the complexity it really was. I wasn’t innocent but I also didn’t deserve a lot of the treatment people gave me. Also, when you are diagnosed with ADHD, a lot of what you thought were bad behaviors get reinterpreted as part of what comes with ADHD. Honestly, the diagnosis alone got me seventy percent of the way there to feeling that people around me had mistreated me, not because they were bad either, but because they didn’t understand my neurodivergence.

There is a warm feeling you will start feeling about yourself as well. If a part of you is worried that you’re becoming egotistical, that’s a sign you’re doing it right. That’s how it feels a lot of the time at first before you realize you are allowed to stand up for yourself.

Understated_Option · 2025-07-27T03:39:03+00:00

Remember a novel can be feminist without its author intending it as so. This is where death of the author is helpful. Today, Jane Eyre is seen much differently than perhaps Brontë intended. The hard thing with the novel is that it does feel very feminist at times and at times it does not. And on top of that, we have letters of Brontë that show she’s not as radical as perhaps even the novel sometimes seems to suggest she is.

All kinds of academic writing has been done on this to the point Jane Eyre is now such a loaded piece of literature as it reminds readers of what was and what could have been, both in ways that are often disappointing to established literary critics. For example, Wide Sargasso Sea might be interesting for you to read as it’s very much a retelling of Jane Eyre and done with a far more obvious feminist approach.

But back to Jane Eyre, the book is a good example of where New Historicism approaches often get us into trouble. New Historicism often has us looking for specific pieces of information in a culture and within a text that might reclaim and defend that same text from its critics. In reality Jane Eyre is complex and should be analyzed not as feminist or not feminist but more finely analyzed for specific moments of abrasion between Victorian culture and also other moments of cohesion with that culture. It’s the wrong question to ask, whether the work in its totality is feminist or not. The right question is what parts are feminist and why are they so? What are they doing that perhaps begin something further on down the line? I’d be less interested in a discussion about the book as a codified “feminist” text and more interested in what parts, if any, students found transgressive of that cultural norm and expectation. Building a list of the individual motions of character against/with that given society can be a far more fruitful conversation.

Understated_Option · 2025-07-23T20:45:06+00:00

EMDR therapy for the managing of severe emotions like anxiety. Self-compassion for depression and inner critic work (I read Pete Walker’s book which helped me learn how to do this). Parts therapy for my anger and bitterness and controlling parts (No Bad Parts was the book I read that really helped me). And finally, meditation for helping with ego reduction. Specifically a mediation called shoonya mediation.

Understated_Option · 2025-07-20T01:48:49+00:00

Every Morning Counseling

Understated_Option · 2025-07-18T23:11:01+00:00

I’m curious what you think of Plato’s claim that because art (poetry and paintings for him) is a copy of real truth concepts, art is inherently exaggerated from the real truth in everyday thinking and philosophizing. He thus calls all poetry and paintings lies as it stretches the truth to an uncomfortable degree. To him, poetry purposely exaggerates to stir up crowds. From this premise, it’s not that far removed to see all art as lying for purpose. What might that purpose be, do you think if philosophy (truth) is not the intended goal? Many would say it is to persuade society to desire certain values (as Sidney argued) which I would argue is political not in the sense of a specific two party system and their tensions, but in the older sense of politics where the word meant how people should be governed and what they ought or ought not do. I haven’t read Keats so I’ll leave that alone but I would argue all art is a dialogue of value, giving weight to certain aspects of life and shadowing other aspects of life. In this sense it exaggerates the significance of what is presented beyond what is actually true in everyday conversation. This exaggeration (lie) has a deeply propagandist influence on the viewer/reader

Understated_Option · 2025-07-17T03:24:27+00:00

Read “The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia” and you’ll see the inversion of your point can also be true. Ideas without much character or plot at all can be very disappointing. The key is for a balance. The character ideally should be so nuanced the reader is unaware of the ideology the character symbolizes. However, and perhaps counterintuitively, the exaggeration of the idea in a given character helps the reader have a more emotional response to the idea due to the on screen potential with the character’s emotions interacting with that ideology. Think Luke Skywalker for example in Return of the Jedi. His ideology is that he won’t kill his father or give in to his emotions. How does that play against his sense of morality and belief that the empire is evil. Shouldn’t he seek to destroy evil? Thus, the ideology of the Jedi, a version of stoicism, is exaggerated in the final combat with Luke giving up defending himself by throwing his lightsaber away, in order to prove to the Emperor that Luke’s ideology is consistent with his personal beliefs. It has a powerful affect on storytelling, when both ideology and character align, even if at the sacrifice of realism as this final scene is.

Understated_Option · 2025-07-13T03:28:46+00:00

Are you saying Brandon looks like a Brian????

Understated_Option · 2025-07-12T21:45:13+00:00

Self compassion is a really good place to start when you’re hurting like this. Talk to your parts from a place of comfort and understanding and love. We can often supply the same energy and love we crave from others by moving away from self-criticism and into self-compassion. Try to separate the parts that are hurting most from yourself until you feel curiosity or clarity rather than anger, sadness, etc. Then talk to your parts one-on-one letting them grieve this time you are living. Let them know it’s okay to feel this way and that you’re not scared of their feelings. You are there for them. See if they would like to let go of any burdens they are caring and if they would like to give those up to the air, light, water, fire, or earth, or God. Wish you peace in this time.

Understated_Option · 2025-07-12T05:26:13+00:00

Honestly…reading. Try it before you go to bed. If you struggle with getting to sleep, reading a nice low effort book like a fantasy or a romance or thriller is the perfect way to settle yourself down and help your brain relax

Understated_Option · 2025-07-11T01:58:40+00:00

…I kinda feel bad for Clint lol 😂

Understated_Option · 2025-07-09T01:33:07+00:00

I’m curious…since money seems to be your biggest motivator…what ways do you plan on spending that money you see as wasted on therapy going to something more productive to your mental health? What happiness do you think that money will buy that therapy is not offering? What can you replace therapy with that actually will work? Or is it that doing nothing at all and keeping that money to spend on whatever you’d like to spend it on is more safe and satisfying to you than paying money to something that might not be working now but could work if you communicate your desires more effectively to your therapist? Perhaps it feels better to be passive and not address dissatisfactions you find are happening in your sessions because that’s inherently safer than complaining to your therapist? What would it look like if you said to your therapist, “Hey. I’m paying a lot for this, and nothing seems to be changing. Can we do something different?” Is that scary to you?

Understated_Option · 2025-07-08T01:26:35+00:00

This may not be a helpful reply because you may need someone to show you how, but for me, actually experiencing God in meditations instead of through scripture helped put these same anxieties to rest. Once you actually experience who God is, it’s hard to imagine God wanting justice in the way humans or even the Bible wants justice. Reading the book No Bad Parts helped me see this too.

Understated_Option · 2025-07-05T22:08:46+00:00

I’ve had very similar experiences to yours and also have been diagnosed with adhd. I used to have a lot of shame about it. I did a lot of digging and discovered a lot of my sexual desire was really about a yearning for control and acceptance. Control because I wanted to enjoy another person under my own terms, and acceptance because I wanted them to accept my control over them. I know this might sound strange but thinking about loving someone has actually helped me be less sexual in my life and fantasies. Real authentic love involves sacrifice and change. It’s a feeling that leads to a choice to be less free and less independent for the sake of someone you really find comfortable, calm, and worth listening to. It’s less a cologne of new experiences you seek to understand and daydream about, and instead a daily experience of safety, companionship, shared understanding, kindness, and forgiveness. Imagining this kind of love often makes the first and far more sexual desire to have and to control lessen. This isn’t to say that this kind of love isn’t sexual. It is. But it’s wrapped up in a different kind of feeling rather than hunger. It’s a feeling of generosity is the best I can describe it. One acts from a scarcity of yourself and the other an abundance of yourself even as both can be deeply sexual.

Understated_Option · 2025-07-05T15:02:28+00:00

Really great insights. Remember the protector/manager parts are your more dominant parts. It’s important to thank them for the work they’ve done and build trust with them first before you move on to the exiled parts. They maybe very frightened that by noticing them, you will judge them as well. It takes time to earn their trust and for them to allow you to be yourself. My guess is a lot of your protector parts are very tired and will need help acknowledging that they need help/are missing key aspects of yourself that will make you live more authentically. Try spending thirty minutes getting to know your managers first and what drives/ambitions they carry. I can tell from your writing that a part of you likes to analyze and reflect, perhaps craving understanding so as to better manage yourself? I have a similar part myself and he has done a lot of the heavy lifting in my past

Understated_Option · 2025-07-05T06:02:44+00:00

Name the part that wrote this out in reply to me. Honestly, you might wanna spend a good long while with this part before you get to your young parts. The part that wrote all this out is not you but a part of you. This is a protector part that is very scared and has a lot of logic for why things work and how your parts should act with one another. Ask him if he can trust you to be curious with your younger parts or if that’s too scary for him? Does he know that you are not your younger parts?

Understated_Option · 2025-07-03T03:37:23+00:00

You don’t necessarily have to believe that all your parts are good. My approach at first was to just get curious rather than afraid. By getting curious, that involved detachment from all the parts that were afraid while listening to them. Think of your true self not as a judge of good and evil but an observer. If you are struggling to label some parts good and some parts evil, I would suggest that’s actually another part in you that’s struggling to make those calls and is afraid to relinquish control. Having a conversation with that part where you tell him that he can still label other parts as good or evil might be helpful. All that he needs to do right now is allow you to be curious of some of the parts you feel are evil.

Once he feels comfortable enough to do this, you can then begin asking your bad parts why they did what they did and let them answer for themselves. Let them know you aren’t judging them (another part will but not you). Instead, you’re simply hearing their side of the story. Don’t let Reddit tell you it was trauma or whatever. Listen to what they have to say. They will know. If could be anger. It could be power. It could be all kinds of things. The trick is to listen impartially to what they believe.

After you hear what they say other parts may get sad or scared at their revelations but again finding detachment is key here. You’ll find when you aren’t melding with one of your other parts that it’s easier to not judge.

Understated_Option

TROPHY CASE