It's beyond dismal. Try "nightmare". I'm in Year Four of the Post-PhD Unemployment Zone, despite being a published author with mad translation/theory/teaching/media skillz.
I'm trying to get into a high school credential program this spring. We'll just have to see how it goes.
> Does anyone know of any writing about the use of graduate teaching
> assistants in English departments (to teach the dreaded freshman
> composition and literature survey classes, where the volume of student
> writing to grade is often greater than in other subjects) having a
> direct, demonstrable effect on flooding the Ph.D. market?
CGE and the MLA have crunched some of these numbers, I think, and the problem isn't jobs being converted or overproduction of PhDs, it's that full-time jobs are disappearing for good. At the same time, the total number of students keeps going up. I put some of the jobs data for the humanities in the charts in a rant of mine:
http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/CompLitFuture.html
-- DRR