Heer scribbeln sie qua?
After two and a half weeks away from home, I'm not sure exactly what I'm missing. The library? Certain cafés? My bicycle? (I hardly ride it these days.) A sense of proprietorship? My time being my own? Conversations? (I can hardly talk these days, either.) I keep fixing on the library— by which I guess I mean several different libraries— because it's concrete: I can go in, grab a stack of books, borrow and return them along with their contents, which I often do return, lightly used, forgotten after a year or so. It helps. But I think what I'm looking for is just creative potential, the free exercise thereof, pure and simple; and in light of its formlessness I obsess over particular stupid insufficiencies.
Such as this: I need to choose a third language for my comparative literary studies. So many options! So many languages! So little certainty about the job market! What should I do? Some candidates:
Italian
Pros:
- is beautiful
- I can already half-read it
- Dante, Leopardi, Svevo, a ton of modern poets
- adds depth to European studies
Cons:
- few jobs
- material is somewhat limited, except a few major authors
- would get addicted to living in Europe, not want to leave ever, alienate family and friends
French
Pros:
- would not run out of material
- have to learn it anyway
- favorite book is in French
- not too hard to learn; can basically read it now
Cons:
- every comparatist studies French
- no idea about the job market
- but it's probably glutted
- might get fat, tie scarf badly, lose job
Latin
Pros:
- relieves guilt of not knowing Latin
- I <3 Vergil
- can become pleasantly obsessed with Rome
- no one would fault me for it
Cons:
- dead
- but studied incessantly anyway
- would need guidance towards interesting projects
Ancient Greek
Pros:
- could write that dissertation on Musil and Greek philosophy
Cons:
- hard
Portuguese
Pros:
- bonus for Spanish hires
- Pessoa!
- Brazil!
Cons:
- might run out of things to read/study. But maybe not.
- feels irrationally like a cop-out.
English
Pros:
- I am fluent in English already
- among greatest literary languages on earth
Cons:
- would have a hell of a time coming up with original research.
- probably couldn't use it as a third language anyway— would be ridiculous
Russian
Pros:
- know alphabet, some words & phrases
- no shortage of materials
- redeem lost undergraduate honor
- Tsvetaeva! Tsvetaeva!
Cons:
- job market sucks
- slavists seem cliquey
- have an irrational fear of daily life in Russia
- as with French and English, everyone else seems to know more about it than I do.
various languages spoken in Middle East (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, etc.)
Pros:
- interesting cross-cultural projects
- long varied literary traditions
- philosophically/religious-ly eclectic
- languages are beautiful
Cons:
- probably can't deal with politics (geopolitics, not culture-war politics)
Korean
Pros:
- Korean/Latin American comparative work would be great fun
- have generally had positive experiences with Korean literature
Cons:
- jobs? interest?
- white(American-)ness may be a disadvantage, or perplexer
- no one to work with at my university (but could visit another school for a year, and/or go abroad)
Chinese
Pros:
- would be awesome
- many interesting internal/comparative projects
- possible early modern/postmodern massive comparative dissertation project too heady even to think about, like five ice creams: if scaled back, could be productive
Cons:
- insanely hard language, so hard that I hardly dare mention the idea to people
- see "white(American-)ness" above
- canon is riddled with hair-raising misogyny, but I'm not much good with women's lit/gender studies. People must find ways past this, but I'm always less desensitized than I think I am.
An invented language of my own design
Pros:
- no trouble with identity politics
Cons:
- would also have to write own literature; am terrible critic of own work.
What do you guys think? Am I leaving anything out? Am I screwed?
Comments
Hungarian???
I guess I'll disagree with Moox and say that if you're going to go ancient, you might as well go all the way and learn Greek. This may be my philosophy bias speaking, but I think you'll exhaust Latin a lot more quickly. Greek tragedy and comedy and philosophy--well, you never do escape them.
I suspect the effort-reward ratio for the far east languages isn't worth it, and they risk becoming black holes. Russian is a language I'd love to know, but yeah, I hear it's tough.
Hungarian is a should-have-gone-to-Berkeley language, as are a lot of others not taught where I'm going. (On the plus side, not going to Berkeley means I run a lower risk of doing that to myself.) The biggest issue is, I guess, what the third language is good for: occasional work, papers, reading knowledge of scholarly articles, but not teaching or applying for jobs or such. So I could slowly teach myself Greek or Latin (or both!), or I could knock myself out learning Chinese or Russian solely in order to write a few cool papers, without any expectation that I be able to teach people Chinese or Russian, which I clearly will never be able to do. So really, Latin or Greek or French or Italian: those are the obvious candidates. But I could do something else.