poliscar

I wouldn't nix them. Especially not Berkeley. I know people who went to Berkeley who bragged about how low their subject test scores were. 

You're right--philosophy and literature is not mainstream. In fact, it's well-known for its conservatism and anti-theory bias. The major journals in our field for theoretical work--and they may not accept unsolicited work--are: New Literary History, boundary2, Public Culture, Representations, differences, Critical Inquiry, October, and Social Text (tho that last one has not really recovered from the damage done by the Sokal Hoax in the 90s). There are others, such as Mediations and Critique, that are less well-known/more niche. 

Oh, I guess I'm an appropriate person to respond to this. Different programs have different specialties, yada yada. Berkeley and Chicago, for instance, have a ton of 20th century american lit offerings. My program is having a banner year with 6 20th century courses overall, and 4 of those being American. The number of Americanist courses being offered, like the number of anything being offered, will waver depending on who is up to teach a grad course in a given year.  

As I get toward my comps, I now realize that my knowledge of the discourse of the field at the time I applied was miniscule (part of why you go to grad school, at least in the U.S. model, is to learn what the state of the discourse is).  I think that if you articulate your interests clearly, if there are folks well suited to advise you on the adcom that they'll know whether it has the potential to make a meaningful contribution.  My feeling is that you're much better suited telling them what your interests are, rather than using up precious space discussing the state of the field.

Sadly, no. What happens typically depends on the current institution, the new institution, the advisor, and how far along you are in the program.

Period matters more than theory, period. Since you'll be on the market as a Victorianist, you should privilege programs w/ Victorianist scholars. You can be the person to bring back Husserl, or whoever, but the market will care much more about your grounding in your field as such, since that's what you'll be teaching. Also, a lot of advisors will let you do the work you want to do--the dissertation phase, for better or worse, is a lonely place. 

To chime in—there are scholars working right now whose work could be seen as having structuralist aspects. People like Caroline Levine, Alex Woloch, Sandra Macpherson, even Franco Moretti, all seem to have their own moments of structuralism. I've also noticed what seems to be a renewed interest in Propp and Greimas, which I find intriguing. 

In this vein, echo449 is completely right about the necessity of engaging with contemporary work. Even though there's a lot of divergent work falling under the umbrella term of New Formalism, you might find some of it to resonate with your interests in structuralism. Likewise, if your thesis is on Medieval lit, Julie Orlemanski at UChicago is doing really stellar stuff that you might want to look at. Specifically, her article "Scales of Reading" in Exemplaria is really wonderful, and covers a lot of ground in terms of glossing different approaches. 

Not even most people from Harvard or Columbia find work at a "top school," so aim as high as you can. Most PhD programs are funded, at least for five years; do not go to a non-funded program. Unfortunately, there aren't too many people who specialize in Baroque art at top programs, but they some people out there. Keep in mind you could also work with Renaissance specialists. As you decide, think about these questions: Whose work do you admire? Whose methodological perspective and theoretical concerns align with yours? Are you interested in Northern or Southern Europe? Check out the faculty pages at various programs. See whose work speaks to you. Read a lot, and be ready to articulate a coherent research program in your personal statement. Do you have any languages? If not, begin asap, in whatever area you're most interested. Most importantly, talk to your current professors. They'll be able to guide you. 

Skim it, learn character names, plot-lines, details regarding meter & poetics, etc. You don't need to read in detail to succeed on the Lit GRE; the identification questions are generally quite shallow. 

That being said, I am a little puzzled as to why you're applying to English programs. Whether you feel the material is worthwhile or not, all of the programs you seem to be interested in will also require you take to graduate coursework in pre-modern lit. Princeton, for example, only allows you to opt out of a single period from Medieval - Modern lit. Likewise, the program at Berkeley has all PhD students take a graduate course on Shakespeare. If the cursory knowledge required by the GRE is potentially a deal-breaker for you, are you going to be ok with working with the material at a more advanced level? 

I also have to say that I think you're doing yourself a disfavour by avoiding Shakespeare/Milton/etc. To play the devil's advocate, I'd point out that Homi Bhabha has written on Milton. In the same vein, you'd be hard-pressed to avoid The Tempest in Postcolonial & Critical Race studies. There's also a lot of imporant recent scholarship that continues to draw on this work—Feisel Mohamed's Milton and the Post-Secular Present, for example, or Fred Moten's reading of Shakespeare's sonnets in In the Break. Whether you enjoy it or not is really beside the point, because you're going to have a hard time getting away from it, even if it isn't your primary research focus. 

I agree with all of that, but I don't think anyone's saying don't even apply to UWM. Right, @poliscar? By any criteria for which you shouldn't apply there, there's a whole lot of other universities, especially public ones, to which you shouldn't apply. I am in favor of giving places the benefit of the doubt during the application phase, and then making decisions based on more detailed research conducted after admittance. But things at UWM seem serious enough—and maybe not now, but likely to become serious by the time new students might graduate, eight or nine years after this all started going down—that it seems worth flagging so that prospective students know to weight it as a decision-making factor. Personally, unless UWM had a) my perfect POI and b ) I had had the awkward conversation with my POI about whether they were job searching, the institutional considerations would mean I'd lean pretty heavily toward my other options, if I had them.
@betsy303 I wish it were only rural universities that were separated from their communities because their communities see them as elitist snobs, and that some other category of university had figured it out! Cf. Yale's community relations. But I absolutely agree it's an important challenge.

Oh come on.

There are a number of material facts at hand here. 

1) As Governor, Scott Walker has made significant cuts to the state budget, particularly in relation to public education. Because of this, funding has also been cut from the U Wisconsin system, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. It's no secret that Walker holds public education in contempt, and it's unlikely that this will change. These cuts are part of a more general wave of privatization, in which education is seen as a profit vehicle, rather than as a public asset. 

2) The U Wisconsin Madison Board of Regents, in response to state policy, is making significant changes to how tenure works at the university. These changes make it so that tenured faculty members can be fired for budgetary reasons, or due to the nebulous reason of "educational considerations." Basically, tenure becomes merely symbolic. If the Chancellor and Regents want to reallocate funding from one program to another, they're able to do so by detenuring faculty, and moving the related funds to another program. This completely undermines the role played by tenure, and you can bet—because the motivations here are completely ideological—that those stripped of tenure aren't going to be the business/engineering/econ professors. They are going to be the professors whose work isn't sufficiently "profitable" or "justifiable." 

3) Because of the above reasons, the UW-Madison faculty reached a vote of non-confidence in the Board of Regents and the University President. Reaching back to my first point, their vote reflects a lack of faith in the Regents' and President's commitment to the public good. The budget cuts and changes to tenure are pretty clear indications that the governance of the university is more or less on board with Walker's agenda—i.e. the privatization of public assets. As far as I'm concerned, the faculty acted by rejecting that agenda. 

4) The university is bleeding faculty. I can think of faculty—some of them big names—who have fled to Minnesota, UT Austin, Princeton, and Cornell. Walker signed the state budget in July 2015, so this has happened within just over a year. Some tenured faculty with reputations may have been able to get out quickly by bargaining with other institutions, but I imagine as things progress, we'll see other faculty leave as well, through public job searches, etc. To be blunt, this is the beginning, not the end. As I said earlier in the thread, you can bet that there are still faculty members looking for other opportunities, and I don't see why Art Historians would be the exception. What is the upside to staying at a university where you can be arbitrarily stripped of tenure? 

Here's the deal: it's possible that a student at U-Wisconsin Madison would be able to confirm all of the worst. It's equally possible that current students will be relatively untouched, and that the weight of these changes will fall primarily on future students. The point is that it's absurd to rely on the experiences of current students to make a decision, assuming you're event getting the full story from them. This principal applies to grad school applications, and to future academic endeavours, like job searches. If you can't make your own judgement calls based on the available information, you're going to end up in a bad spot. It's pretty clear that UW-M is not a very healthy institution at the moment, and I think it's fair to state that in public. I also think it's fair for potential students to be able to make decisions based on information like this before they find themselves experiencing the dysfunction from within. To suggest that only enrolled students can make knowledgeable judgement calls is a pretty bizarre statement, IMO. 

PS I was taught to read secondary sources critically, and to be equally critical of primary sources. Not sure what sort of research you're conducting, but it seems sort of off-base. 

I feel like there should be some sort of warning on every English department website, that says "you can't specialize in Theory." 

You need some sort of historical & geographical specialization; that's how you professionalize. When you prepare for your qualifying exams, they will be rooted in a specific area, even if you choose subfields in Feminist Theory or Marxism, etc. All programs, regardless of theoretical intensity or involvement, will have students ground their work in a concrete area/archive.

"Theory" is not a concentration—it's a massive body of work, with an incredible range of approaches. Saying you want to specialize in it is akin to saying you want to specialize in Literature. Moreover, it won't get you a job; departments very rarely conduct job searches for "theorists." That doesn't mean they don't hire or employ them, but that the scholars in question were almost always hired as Romanticists, or Modernists, or 20th Century Americanists (etc). 

My advice would be to find an area you want to work in, write your thesis on something relevant to it, and then apply with the intent of focusing on said area. You might end up with something like "American Modernism, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Affect" as a rough outline of your interests. However, I can't stress enough that Theory is not, not, not, not enough. 

She won't lower your grade (she can't, if it's already been submitted). 
However, I strongly urge you to take advantage of her offer. Anyone who makes comments like this on a paper and urges you to revise is invested in your success. She probably thinks that this paper could be publishable if you work on it. She definitely doesn't think it's crappy. Crappy papers just get a crappy grade and the student gets a B+ or B in the class, end of story. 
Trust me, grad professors do not pressure students to revise papers if they aren't interested or invested in some way. I wouldn't read too much into the fact that she hasn't gotten back to you--it's summer, and you told her you were taking a month off. Go to her office hours when school starts again. 

Also, it's one thing if your advisor leaves during the years when you're writing your dissertation. It's quite another if they leave just before your second year of coursework, and thus before your comprehensive exams, your dissertation development, your fellowship applications etc.
http://www.citypages.com/news/scott-walkers-budget-cuts-drive-wisconsin-madison-professors-to-minnesota-8280152
BTW, the exodus of faculty is just the tip of the iceberg. The deeper problem is that the governor has gutted the UW system's funding across the board (not necessarily reflected in graduate student stipends), and many departments/programs are being (or are in danger of being) significantly reduced if not cut completely.

Would you really want to pick a PhD committee at an institution and then to have all of its members leave before you graduate? That's still not probable at Madison, I think, but at any other institution it's probably impossible unless a meteorite comes plowing into a departmental meeting.

I think you're focusing on the wrong issue. Did you read the Chronicle article linked to above? The issue is not stipend funding, and no one is proposing that one should profit off their graduate education stipend. In Wisconsin, the university system is being undermined by the political climate and faculty are suffering because of it. Talented faculty members are being denied tenure and those who already have it are leaving because it effectively is meaningless there anymore. Ultimately, art history professors will leave for brighter, more secure pastures like their peers in other departments, and their advisees will be stuck. It sadly seems like a really easy way to permanent ABD.

I feel like there should be some sort of warning on every English department website, that says "you can't specialize in Theory." 

You need some sort of historical & geographical specialization; that's how you professionalize. When you prepare for your qualifying exams, they will be rooted in a specific area, even if you choose subfields in Feminist Theory or Marxism, etc. All programs, regardless of theoretical intensity or involvement, will have students ground their work in a concrete area/archive.

"Theory" is not a concentration—it's a massive body of work, with an incredible range of approaches. Saying you want to specialize in it is akin to saying you want to specialize in Literature. Moreover, it won't get you a job; departments very rarely conduct job searches for "theorists." That doesn't mean they don't hire or employ them, but that the scholars in question were almost always hired as Romanticists, or Modernists, or 20th Century Americanists (etc). 

My advice would be to find an area you want to work in, write your thesis on something relevant to it, and then apply with the intent of focusing on said area. You might end up with something like "American Modernism, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Affect" as a rough outline of your interests. However, I can't stress enough that Theory is not, not, not, not enough. 

To chime in—there are scholars working right now whose work could be seen as having structuralist aspects. People like Caroline Levine, Alex Woloch, Sandra Macpherson, even Franco Moretti, all seem to have their own moments of structuralism. I've also noticed what seems to be a renewed interest in Propp and Greimas, which I find intriguing. 

In this vein, echo449 is completely right about the necessity of engaging with contemporary work. Even though there's a lot of divergent work falling under the umbrella term of New Formalism, you might find some of it to resonate with your interests in structuralism. Likewise, if your thesis is on Medieval lit, Julie Orlemanski at UChicago is doing really stellar stuff that you might want to look at. Specifically, her article "Scales of Reading" in Exemplaria is really wonderful, and covers a lot of ground in terms of glossing different approaches. 

That's normal for undergrad! It's useful to try out different ways of thinking, for sure. And, also, you can always write something and then re-purpose it--in other words, you can write this paper on structuralism, then, when you are applying, do some extra tinkering to insert yourself into dialogue w/ current people. My tone in the original post was a little too dismissive--you should totally pursue this line of inquiry if it's the road you want to go down. If you have the time to do so, it might be interesting to take a look at the first part of Cusset's French Theory, which really usefully lays out the historical reception of structuralism in the United States.

Take two Advil and post again in the morning.  

I did a structuralist reading of a text once in sophomore year.

I feel like there should be some sort of warning on every English department website, that says "you can't specialize in Theory." 

You need some sort of historical & geographical specialization; that's how you professionalize. When you prepare for your qualifying exams, they will be rooted in a specific area, even if you choose subfields in Feminist Theory or Marxism, etc. All programs, regardless of theoretical intensity or involvement, will have students ground their work in a concrete area/archive.

"Theory" is not a concentration—it's a massive body of work, with an incredible range of approaches. Saying you want to specialize in it is akin to saying you want to specialize in Literature. Moreover, it won't get you a job; departments very rarely conduct job searches for "theorists." That doesn't mean they don't hire or employ them, but that the scholars in question were almost always hired as Romanticists, or Modernists, or 20th Century Americanists (etc). 

My advice would be to find an area you want to work in, write your thesis on something relevant to it, and then apply with the intent of focusing on said area. You might end up with something like "American Modernism, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Affect" as a rough outline of your interests. However, I can't stress enough that Theory is not, not, not, not enough. 

Everything poliscar said is correct. I just want to offer some (admittedly unsolicited) advice on your thesis: you will not be showing your awareness of critical debates in literary studies or contemporary theory if you do a structuralist reading of a text unless you demonstrate why structuralism should not have been superseded by other approaches, and what it has to offer today in our "post-critical" climate. This doesn't need to be a major part of your thesis, but structuralism is not considered current & it doesn't really reflect current approaches to theory. This is not to say "if you write on this, you will not get in," but it is to say that, if you go ahead with this approach, you need to do extra work to justify its application.  

I feel like there should be some sort of warning on every English department website, that says "you can't specialize in Theory." 

You need some sort of historical & geographical specialization; that's how you professionalize. When you prepare for your qualifying exams, they will be rooted in a specific area, even if you choose subfields in Feminist Theory or Marxism, etc. All programs, regardless of theoretical intensity or involvement, will have students ground their work in a concrete area/archive.

"Theory" is not a concentration—it's a massive body of work, with an incredible range of approaches. Saying you want to specialize in it is akin to saying you want to specialize in Literature. Moreover, it won't get you a job; departments very rarely conduct job searches for "theorists." That doesn't mean they don't hire or employ them, but that the scholars in question were almost always hired as Romanticists, or Modernists, or 20th Century Americanists (etc). 

My advice would be to find an area you want to work in, write your thesis on something relevant to it, and then apply with the intent of focusing on said area. You might end up with something like "American Modernism, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Affect" as a rough outline of your interests. However, I can't stress enough that Theory is not, not, not, not enough. 

I feel like there should be some sort of warning on every English department website, that says "you can't specialize in Theory." 

You need some sort of historical & geographical specialization; that's how you professionalize. When you prepare for your qualifying exams, they will be rooted in a specific area, even if you choose subfields in Feminist Theory or Marxism, etc. All programs, regardless of theoretical intensity or involvement, will have students ground their work in a concrete area/archive.

"Theory" is not a concentration—it's a massive body of work, with an incredible range of approaches. Saying you want to specialize in it is akin to saying you want to specialize in Literature. Moreover, it won't get you a job; departments very rarely conduct job searches for "theorists." That doesn't mean they don't hire or employ them, but that the scholars in question were almost always hired as Romanticists, or Modernists, or 20th Century Americanists (etc). 

My advice would be to find an area you want to work in, write your thesis on something relevant to it, and then apply with the intent of focusing on said area. You might end up with something like "American Modernism, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Affect" as a rough outline of your interests. However, I can't stress enough that Theory is not, not, not, not enough.