Tutor profile: Anna B.
Questions
Subject: Writing
“Liberal Arts Education Is Not (Necessarily) A Waste of Time," “Don’t Panic, Liberal Arts Majors. The Tech World Wants You,” “Liberal Arts Majors Are the Future of the Tech Industry": what explains the preponderance of articles and books assuring students of the liberal arts that the tech world wants them (in other words, that they haven’t wasted their time on a self-indulgent degree)?
The liberal arts degree is thought to be impractical and silly, home to unemployable navel-gazers, not serious, ambitious adults. Against this cultural backdrop, guarantees about the value of the degree may strike potential English majors, for example, or their parents, as a novel way of thinking, refreshing and ultimately comforting. And yet the underlying assumptions of articles like “Don’t Panic, Liberal Arts Majors. The Tech World Wants You” (New York Times) may not be so divergent after all. Ultimately, these articles share the implicit belief that the value of a degree necessarily lies in its practical application; they just disagree on whether the degree in question possesses the potential for this practical application. Though we’d expect, and historically it has been argued, that the value of the liberal arts degree lies in its unquantifiable nature -- in the intellectual process itself, in the cultivation of the individual capable of critical thought -- we are now being told that its value lies precisely in its quantifiability, in its money-making potential and capacity to translate into career success. The gradual abandonment of liberal arts for liberal arts’ sake, in academia and in public consciousness, must have a more fundamental historical origin, and economic troubles alone may not be to blame. Students aren’t simply embracing pre-professional degrees: for decades now, they’ve been reassured that liberal arts degrees are pre-professional degrees, that studying, say, English, will allow them to compete just as well professionally. This phenomenon indicates a philosophical shift in approach towards the humanities, not merely a worsening of the job market. The rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s -- according to Dereciewiz, of “Reaganism, Thatcherism, economism, or market fundamentalism,” all denoting philosophies in which “the worth of a thing is the price of the thing” (Harper’s) -- may be responsible for this shift. In the neoliberal context, the utility-based argument for the liberal arts is nothing new, just an expansion of the logic equating value with money. The resurgence of interest in the humanities, veiled with tech-y language, merely indicates how much we’ve internalized this logic: ‘real life’ -- equated with the forces of production and consumption that dictate our economy -- has seeped into what was once thought to be a heterotopia, a space in which to imagine a different world. For when we say English degrees are valuable after all, but only because they lend themselves to moneyed careers in Silicon Valley, we’ve implicitly accepted the market as our metric of worth.
Subject: Literature
Why must Rochester go blind at the end of Jane Eyre?
On one level Rochester's blindness appears to enable Jane's preferred physical orientation and locus of perception, to give final expression to her tendency to seek out positions of lucid invisibility: before she reunites with him, for instance, she "stood to watch him - to examine him, myself unseen" (497). Romantic union with a blind man would seem to indefinitely extend the existential and perhaps erotic condition of "to examine... myself unseen." More to the point, Rochester's blindness is a sort of castration or diminution required for his ostensible spiritual reformation, an unsexing that allows him to turn his former "I'll try violence" (349) into the retrospective observation, filtered through Jane, that "violent as he had seemed in his despair, he, in truth, loved me far too well and too tenderly to constitute himself my tyrant" (507). Indeed, Jane and Rochester carefully negotiate this question of tyranny throughout their relationship. Though Rochester is older, richer, more powerful (and her employer!), their first encounter dramatizes his physical dependence on her: they meet when he's fallen off his horse and Jane must aid him, limping, to Thornfield house. This dynamic is repeatedly replicated throughout the novel and Jane, to be sure, saves his life on multiple occasions. Viewed in this light, his ultimate blindness is only the final entry in a series of plot machinations designed to ensure that Rochester not overpower Jane, that he will not disrupt a carefully calibrated balance of power, one that relies on the continuous curbing of his capacity for brutality. This state of affairs may be Jane's answer to the question of how to love without submission.
Subject: English
Why must Rochester go blind at the end of Jane Eyre?
On one level Rochester's blindness appears to enable Jane's preferred physical orientation and locus of perception, to give final expression to her tendency to seek out positions of lucid invisibility: before she reunites with him, for instance, she "stood to watch him - to examine him, myself unseen" (497). Romantic union with a blind man would seem to indefinitely extend the existential and perhaps erotic condition of "to examine... myself unseen." More to the point, Rochester's blindness is a sort of castration or diminution required for his ostensible spiritual reformation, an unsexing that allows him to turn his former "I'll try violence" (349) into the retrospective observation, filtered through Jane, that "violent as he had seemed in his despair, he, in truth, loved me far too well and too tenderly to constitute himself my tyrant" (507). Indeed, Jane and Rochester carefully negotiate this question of tyranny throughout their relationship. Though Rochester is older, richer, more powerful (and her employer!), their first encounter dramatizes his physical dependence on her: they meet when he's fallen off his horse and Jane must aid him, limping, to Thornfield house. This dynamic is repeatedly replicated throughout the novel and Jane, to be sure, saves his life on multiple occasions. Viewed in this light, his ultimate blindness is only the final entry in a series of plot machinations designed to ensure that Rochester not overpower Jane, that he will not disrupt a carefully calibrated balance of power, one that relies on the continuous curbing of his capacity for brutality. This state of affairs may be Jane's answer to the question of how to love without submission.