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there is alot that could say about this, but i have no time at the moment.
a couple quick things:
1. i would not be surprised, zar,if it turns out that you are as much fried from being a senior as you are disillusioned with the literature major that you pursued. not that i doubt the content of your criticism of litcrit modes of interacting with texts--i am just saying that by the time you crawl to the last semester of your last year in univeristy, you are probably kinda burned out.
i was.
so i would allow for that possibility and, on that basis, see if your relationship to your academic training changes over time.
2. there are limitations to the procedures/assumptions particular to literary studies programs--just as there are limitations to the procedures/assumptions in any discipline. my background is in history and english (undergrad majors)--i decided to go to grad school--my marxist background combined with a sense of limitation like you outline to push me toward history--i learnd alot from literature/theory etc. but i did not want to have to route all arguments about all aspects of the social world through literary texts and their analysis.
3. contra ustwo, i do not think the "hard science"/"fuzzy" thing is worth much.
the hard sciences in the main do not address philosophical prblems, including epistemological questions, which is strange given the kind of claims about knowledge of the world generated by pracitioners. in the humanities, you can get the epistemological models, but their application to the sciences is often arbitrary.
the problem is the division of intellectual labour built into univeristy organization--the seperation of modes of knowing about the world from each other, the discouraging of meaningful dialogue across disciplines, etc.
an example: from a philosophcal viewpoint, much of what ustwo says about the sciences appears to be naieve.
no doubt, from his viewpoint, much of what i would say about that would appear arbitrary.
i dont think there is a question of principle involved in this-more a function of the seperation of ways of thinking.
it seems that you are talking about your encounter with this kind of limitation, whch follows from how the academic disciplines of literary studies define themselves as over against other, closely aligned fields (like history---and this process works the other way as well for historians, say) and the way in which the humaities define themselves as over against the sciences, and vice versa.
unless you are thinking of going into academics, there is no requirement for you to actually think within these limtations--they are bureaucratic functions. give yourself time, keep posing questions about the world in whcih you find yourself, keep learning, keep moving, produce the kind of work that pleases you, that fits with the ideas you have about what constitues political action, what constitutes art, etc.
the ultimate fiction of acadmeic work is that analyzing texts provides the folk who do the analysing with some kind of mastery--over the analytic objects first, over the processes whereby those objects are created second, over the problems that one encounters with trying to figure out how to do creative work etc. you read a text per week in each seminar, each of which took a ong time to write--they turn up one after another as if they required no particular duration to be produced. at the end of the seminar, you are expected to write something that works on the same order as those texts that you encountered in the class. that is insane.
i hope this makes sense--i am writing it very quickly and have to go now to do stuff in 3-d land.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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