u/silverlockbrowndoor

my\_qualifications MA in English language and literature

Have been trying to get into a PhD for two years. Only been applying to IITs and NITs and a couple of central Unis. Only got one call letter from IIT K and bombed the written test. I genuinely want to know if employers will go for an IITian over a PhD candidate who got theirs in a private uni when it comes to assistant professorship. Any advice on this will be appreciated, really. Thanks in advance.

In Hegel, Marx and Weber there is an attempt to understand the entirety of worldly experience (law, labor and social systems and so on) through one key idea, be it the movement of history through worldly transformation, the discovery of labor as value, or the institution of everyday work as a form of active involvement in the world but in an ascetic mode. Literature on the hand seems to refer not to a total understanding of the world but tries to see the latter from the perspective of a fragment, an aphorism, a host of minutiae, etc.

How does one compute this massive orientational difference between the thinkers mentioned earlier and the literary theorization of the fragment (as in for instance the work of Schlegel)? What is the relation of literature not to society or history but to social and political thought in terms of the persistence of literary framing in the realm of that which lies far on the other side of the total social fact, which is to say the ineffable, the singular and so on?

This is an entrance PYQ I came across and I don't know how to go about answering it. I started writing on it, but whatever I write comes off as if a toddler structured it.

my_qualifications MA in English language and literature

Wanted very badly to get into a PhD program. Worked very well on my proposal, vetted it with a prof at iist who kindly helped me though she did not have a vacancy, cleared two qualifying exams. But I didn’t get any calls. People are getting calls as easily as breathing. I don’t know what that says about me. My confidence in a last couple of things I was sure of is slowly being stripped away.

I have to work with my mental health struggles and I have to work twice as hard. Cannot have even a small success as encouragement. Everyone else seems to have what it takes but me. I am devastated. I am responding to this rejection with grief. The sadness is truly unbearable. Cannot be conscious without crying.

This will be my second year of unemployment, floating around with nothing to do. Hope is draining away as well. I love research, but I don’t know now if I am good enough or not. I have no other choice than to be alive, so I need to get over the sadness. I have been told that I should focus on the path and not the destination, but idk how one even makes that possible.

I feel truly dejected. My life is just a continuous string of trying for things and not getting it. I am venomously jealous at people who got calls. I asked if I could see their writing (not to plagiarise, but to see what I am missing in my work) and they refused (fair enough) but I am humiliated. I don’t see how this is going to end. I don’t know if there is something better for me at the end. I am finding it very hard to try, try and never win. I am not thinking straight and I have made this into a race between my contemporaries.

I don’t know what to do next, how to do it and what to feel. No one is going to offer jobs for a Masters grad in Literature. Every job demands a PhD. My prospective career in academia depends on it.

Has any applicant to the HSS Department recieved the call to attend test/interview at IIT Kanpur? The website shows that the test is to be on the 11th of May, asking to see if anyone got the call because other IIT departments do not show a non acceptance in the portal or via email. Thanks in advance.