it is somewhat well-known that new professors, perhaps especially women, experience the feeling of being a fraud. this feeling is characterized by realizing that you don't know everything, followed quickly by leaping to the most distant conclusion that perhaps you actually don't know anything. it is prompted by frequent persistent encounters with people who did not come from your own graduate program, and so therefore have both knowledge content and knowledge quality heretofore unimagined.
there are different ways of dealing with fraudian stress. you can run home and buy and read a bunch of books you can't afford, money- or time-wise, only to find yourself in the exact same position. you can sort through what people are saying, and realize that some are actually saying something that sounds substantive and interesting, while some are just babbling on in something they think is jargon. (then, if you are pathologically self-reflexive to the point of narcissistic, you can wonder if your encounters with the former mean you are aren't Critical enough, and if your encounters with the latter mean you aren't Smart enough.) you can drop some names and run away, hoping that people will be too dazzled to ask you what you mean. you can cultivate the impression that you invented différance. hopefully you can still be in love with your own work.
me? i cling desperately to the tiny corner of the world that i do know about. probably sometimes a little too desperately. but i can now see the outlines of my grad training quite distinctly. and i can do triage in conversations more efficiently than ever before. but also perhaps there is a cost to being less porous or to being, like, determined?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
The fraud theme is (as you know) a staple in fiction about academics. Don Delillo and David Lodge have each written novels that capitalize on an academic's shame at not knowing what they're supposed to know.
My sense is that the sensation comes less from academics feeling inadequate to their colleagues, than in the persistent cultural suspicion of academics in general. Isolated from the conventional market pressures to sell our goods, the whole industry carries a stink of fraud about it.
Me? I’ve taken comfort in knowing that I know some things and not others (just like everybody else), and I do a job that some people appreciate and others do not (just like everybody else).
Post a Comment