"Talking the Talk: the M.A. and Academic Language" MAE Alumn John Pendell continued. . .

. . . I hope it will prove useful to provide a small taste of what I’m talking about—what you can find if you listen closely to the voices of students, especially in a fall semester. I will be taking some minor liberties to make the following points, conflating some moments, paraphrasing to the best of my memory, and meaning no harm to the unnamed people involved. At one end, a student in a graduate class, with no previous M.A. work, had this exchange with a linguistically adept professor early on: The Student, commenting on Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, says: “I think it’s interesting that there are a lot of men in this book, and not many women.” The Professor (who’s especially skilled in taking in linguistically mundane statements, working through them quickly, and re-presenting them as solid points of discussion), replies: “Yes, the text does seem burdened by an overabundance of masculine subjectivity.” That’s clearly not part of the language in any other register but our own—but the move of translation into lit-crit speak both demonstrates a respect for the ideas of the newcomer and acts as a subtle, effective tutorial. And at the other end of the scale, there are students positively brimming with high-level bits of linguistic mastery, just dying to inject into the discussion their thoughts on “the precepts of neo-Hegelian historiography” on the first day of class—whether or not it seems germane to the discussion. We call that “coming out gunning.” Some new speakers of this language will wield it like a blunt instrument—always choosing “aporia” over “gap” and never settling for “phallocentric” when “phallologocentric” is an option—they also quickly mark themselves, by their eagerness to be intentionally obtuse to the point of being exclusive. The key is subtlety, a lot of which is obtained through immersion—a process an MA program is perfect for. The language in which professionals converse with one another in the fields of literary studies, film, communications, and rhetoric, for instance, unquestionably enables us to speak with clarity and to think with precision, but it risks being even more annoying and less helpful than seeming non-starters like the “so many men in this book” comment. And when it spills over from the academic setting into others, watch out. Does it ever really advance conversation to explain away your dislike for a particular film, as recently a friend of mine did, as a function of it being “empty, diegetically” when “the plot seemed a little thin” would do just as well?

So what is the MA for, and what does this talk about language show? Well, in my experience (and I think statistics from my program would demonstrate), having taken an M.A. doesn’t ultimately work as an indicator of success in or even speed through a PhD program (and as someone who went through a terminal M.A. and straight on to a PhD program, I’m of little help in imagining other possibilities), but it does seem to serve the useful function of being a proving ground, of sorts, for testing out one’s skills. On a purely pragmatic level, studying in a terminal M.A. program and then going elsewhere for a PhD means working through the ugly kinks in one place, then leaving the linguistic mess behind to move on to where the word about what you sound like in class will (hopefully) never spread.

As in picking up any new linguistic register, learning to talk the talk of the profession does provide entrée to the heart of its discussions. Picking up just a few terms, such as “agency” or “organic” that are used in a previously unknown and very specific way in literary/critical discourse, helps. For the initiated, key phrases from theorists can explain quickly, in shorthand, what the beginner to the language can fumble about for minutes attempting to describe. Because the “keywords” are so packed with meaning, they can also rapidly invoke an entire theoretical framework that, rightly or wrongly, the speaker is then presumed to be conversant in. To return to the classroom setting at Iowa, and its mix of students with and without MAs, the best facilitators of discussion are those faculty members adept enough to lift the comments of the newcomers up to the level of the initiated, through a process which begins by assuming “this is what you would have been able to say, if you could,” and should and does end up making the un-M.A.ed student hear “this is what you will soon be able to say.” For a professor less skilled in this area, it simply looks like they are having two different conversations in one room, with two sets of students. Although I’m sure many of us will recall cases where the initially impressive language of a student simply masked a merely surface-level command of the underlying content, or else proved to be the coping strategy of someone not confident at all in competing with others in class discussion, in general the ability to converse at what appears to be a level approaching that of the faculty is notable, and noticeable to the professor and to all the other students. Gaining the respect and attention of your faculty will inevitably be on the mind of new PhD students, and while in retrospect we know that that relationship will usually play itself out over an extended period of time, it won’t always feel that way in the beginning.

So, while my perspective on the MA is limited to those who used it primarily to begin a longer pursuit in academics through the PhD and beyond, I hope it will provide a sense of the language training MA students, regardless of what they go on to do, have undergone. I began my MA program having only the vaguest notion of what a career in academics looked like (or sounded like), but it was beginning to learn the language that fed my interest in going further. So unwieldy at first, so inscrutable, it certainly became a much more workable set of codes during my years in the MA program, and one of the things about the profession I’ve found interesting ever since. I also hope that this talk will leave us with more to say about the value of the MA rather than less; or to translate that to another register, I hope I haven’t “closed the hermeneutic circle."