jrockford27

I didn't reach out to too many.  In the case of the school I got into, at the time our English department had different "tracks," and I was confused about which one I should apply for given my split interests at the time. I e-mailed another to ask about their advertised "soft" GRE score cutoff. 
Formal questions, procedural questions. I think if you go beyond those, you're just putting people in a difficult position, and people hate being put in difficult positions. Examples of things not to ask would be, "what are my chances of getting in with [x] GPA?" "do you think the program would be interested in a project involving [ x ]" or [really more a comment than a question] "i just wanted to let you know that I really feel like I was born to study literature at Yale, and I just think you all are fabulous."
My first time around, when I was totally shut out, I e-mailed a few professors asking if they thought my project was interesting. Only one replied, and it was a very boilerplate, "I look forward to reading your application" type thing. I cringe whenever my memory of doing that pops into my head.

I was told, e-mail if you actually have a worthwhile question. Don't e-mail just to introduce yourself. I think worthwhile questions would be things like, are you taking advisees, what is the status of subfield [x] in the grad program right now, etc.  The same goes for emailing a DGS.  
 
As a general rule, e-mailing to introduce yourself probably wont help. In my experience, you probably won't get a reply to e-mails with legit questions, much less introductions. Most people have a hard time getting e-mail responses from professors who are actually on their committee, much less professors who are total strangers.  The only e-mail introduction I sent was to a school I didn't get into. I only got into schools where I didn't contact any professors, except the DGS.

I was told, e-mail if you actually have a worthwhile question. Don't e-mail just to introduce yourself. I think worthwhile questions would be things like, are you taking advisees, what is the status of subfield [x] in the grad program right now, etc.  The same goes for emailing a DGS.  
 
As a general rule, e-mailing to introduce yourself probably wont help. In my experience, you probably won't get a reply to e-mails with legit questions, much less introductions. Most people have a hard time getting e-mail responses from professors who are actually on their committee, much less professors who are total strangers.  The only e-mail introduction I sent was to a school I didn't get into. I only got into schools where I didn't contact any professors, except the DGS.

The "struggle" of graduate school is not always a noble, dignified one. It can be humiliating, morally debilitating, infuriatingly arbitrary, and intellectually limiting, especially (precisely?) because academic work is so much more personal than most other forms of labor. I encourage you to read this classic essay by Tim Burke. 
As they say, your mileage may vary, and I certainly have friends who love it and are having a blast, but trust me that you cannot anticipate the ways your sense of self-worth can be destroyed in graduate school, for no good reason and by people you assumed you could trust. You need to prepare to make some provision for your mental health, beyond just dealing with the stress of being busy.
 

I wouldn't start a PhD program without first finding a good therapist.

No, you do not need to justify it, not at all.
I applied to grad school with an SoP that said I wanted to study popular media during the late cold war.  My transcript included such lovely diversions as "Chaucer," "Transatlantic Modernism," and "Daily Life in Early Modern Europe."  If I were on the adcom I'd be more suspicious of a transcript that showed no desire to experiment.

You're not nuts, this is all - unfortunately - very typical and natural.  When I first started, I was convinced that I was the stupidest person in the room at all times, and that the admissions committee must have made some grievous error. Fortunately, my program spares us the anxiety of first year teaching on top of all the other first year anxieties, but nevertheless, things were daunting as hell.
You're adjusting to new experiences, a new position, and a new way of being in the world and in academia.  It's going to feel overwhelming, and there are going to be growing pains.  It never becomes easy, but as you become more familiar with the lay of the land, and a new body of expectations, things will become much easier to handle.  
If it helps at all, most graduate students I know also manage to have vibrant personal and social lives if they want them; and, likewise, grad school is isolating but also offers remedies to isolation. You're going to figure out how to make your life work.  Everything is going to be okay.

No need to apologize, and I think my post contains some generalizations (I apologize, I'm flipping between browser windows and my dissertation and that doesn't lend itself well to giving ironclad advice). You should be asking lots of questions, and this is a place to ask them.  Your questions are good and worthwhile. I didn't know any of these things when I was an undergrad.   
Some departments have working groups around things like ecocrit, childrens lit, etc., but within those you're likely to find a lot of diversity in theories and approaches.
My bit about the SoP may be a little over the top.  If you aren't interested in Marxism as a subject, there is absolutely no reason to include Marxism in your SoP. On the other hand, (and I'm being reductive again for the sake of ease and time) it is hard to imagine a strong statement of purpose that does not engage with prevailing discourses in some way.  As bumblebea said, a good scholarly project is going to have at least a little theory behind it. You show that you're potentially conversant in theory/scholarship by identifying what authors/critics/theorists influence your approach to close reading, and why you think that this approach is important.    A statement of purpose, I think, is (among other things) where you propose a starting point for inquiry.  What questions drive you? What contribution do you want to make? Why do you think [school x] is a good place to do it? It's hard to imagine forming a substantial inquiry without placing your work into dialogue with prevailing theories (be they cultural studies, critical theory, or aesthetic theory).  
I apologize to you, actually, because this is probably very confusing. Unfortunately, grad school applications are a very confusing process, and (speaking of relativism) you're going to get a lot of potentially conflicting advice!
 

A few things.
1.  Your in major GPA isn't bad.  People have gotten accepted to good programs with worse, I'm sure.  In any case, GPA doesn't even really rate in the top three most important aspects of an application. While you correctly cite that this board is filled with people who have 3.9 or even 4.0 GPAs, some of those folks get shut out (for example, I had a 4.0 and I was totally shut out my first time around).
2. You should consider all schools that genuinely interest you after thoroughly researching the subject (this number should be between 8 and 13).  There are people doing absolutely fascinating work at schools who aren't household names.  Off the top of my head, none of the major citations in my dissertation work at "Ivy/Ivy Equivalent" schools.  If you are casting a truly wide net, and really being diligent about picking schools that are a good fit, your list will likely contain a healthy mix of schools whose names will impress your aunts and uncles, and schools whose names contain "State" or at least are named after states. As you are likely to learn, the academic job market is largely a crap shoot, and a scholar's level of brilliance does not necessarily correlate with the prestige of their workplace.
3. Relatedly to #2, If your goal is to be a university literature professor, that should be the uncertainty that really terrifies you! However, specific prestige of school - I think - matters less in getting a job, than who your advisor is and whether you can make the case that your dissertation is compelling through your cover letter and a strong publication. People in the field are aware for example, that some schools lack a general prestige but have excellent reputations in sub-disciplines. This is not always apparent to outsiders or undergrads, but is (naturally) common knowledge within sub-disciplines. I attend an English program that is top 40 on USNews but well regarded in a pair of subdisciplines that don't get ranked, we've recently placed people at Stanford, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Cornell, among others.
4. Nothing is likely to cut down on uncertainty. I can honestly say that applying to graduate school was one of the top three most anxiety inducing and miserable experiences of my life. I spent most of that time attempting to struggle against uncertainty, the best thing is to find some way to embrace it.
5. One way to embrace the uncertainty is to realize that you have almost no control over the most important aspects of the application process (the makeup of the committee, their current needs/desires, the composition of graduate students already attending, and the pool of other applicants) and that your admissions results have nothing to do with your level of brilliance or worth as a human being (I say this because I wish somebody had been there to tell me this when my shiny 4.0 failed to secure me any admissions my first time around).
6.  Contained in all of this, is that the most important thing is to think really hard about the schools you apply to, cast aside all biases and preconceptions about the names of schools and the rankings of their department. If your list only contains "Ivy or Ivy equivalent," go back to the drawing board and look harder. 

It's very hard for you to know, for sure. I did not begin to have a real handle on reputation until I was in grad school for awhile. Which is why reputation isn't really a great litmus test for determining whether to apply to a school. I will tell you, my first time around I was focused much much more on prestige than fit in putting together my list, which is one of many explanations of why I was shut out.
I'll tell you what I did the second time around.  Maybe this sounds super tedious, but this is a major process and must involve some tedium: I went to the U.S. news rankings, and I just started going down the list, looking at the faculty in the programs, skimming their publication titles or their listed interests.  Some schools make this exceptionally easy.  If I could find 2-3 professors who really seemed to interest me, I put the department on the "long list." I stuck in the top 50.
Then, my "long list" established, I started looking a little deeper, actually skimming book chapters and articles, reading the department's grad handbook (if it was available), and that was how I constructed my short list. It contained programs from across the top 40.  After I'd conducted this process, in fact it emerged that all things being equal, my favorite two programs on the list were in the 20s and 30s. Indeed, in my first time around I had my head so far up my ass about prestige that I didn't even realize there were programs so well attuned to the type of work I wanted to do.  Those programs weren't even on my radar the first time around.
In determining fit, too, I'll go back to something I said in another thread last week, that no department is likely to contain a "dream team" of faculty working and actively publishing in your area.  My committee's work has very very little to do with the content of my dissertation.  Instead, I chose them based on a combination of how well I worked with them (which you wont know until you get there) but also how interested I was in their work, and if I sensed it had methodological or theoretical kinship with mine. Actually, I picked  my chair in part because her work differs so wildly from my own inclinations, and that I knew she could keep me honest and make sure I don't drift too far afield ("fit" is very complicated!).

It's very hard for you to know, for sure. I did not begin to have a real handle on reputation until I was in grad school for awhile. Which is why reputation isn't really a great litmus test for determining whether to apply to a school. I will tell you, my first time around I was focused much much more on prestige than fit in putting together my list, which is one of many explanations of why I was shut out.
I'll tell you what I did the second time around.  Maybe this sounds super tedious, but this is a major process and must involve some tedium: I went to the U.S. news rankings, and I just started going down the list, looking at the faculty in the programs, skimming their publication titles or their listed interests.  Some schools make this exceptionally easy.  If I could find 2-3 professors who really seemed to interest me, I put the department on the "long list." I stuck in the top 50.
Then, my "long list" established, I started looking a little deeper, actually skimming book chapters and articles, reading the department's grad handbook (if it was available), and that was how I constructed my short list. It contained programs from across the top 40.  After I'd conducted this process, in fact it emerged that all things being equal, my favorite two programs on the list were in the 20s and 30s. Indeed, in my first time around I had my head so far up my ass about prestige that I didn't even realize there were programs so well attuned to the type of work I wanted to do.  Those programs weren't even on my radar the first time around.
In determining fit, too, I'll go back to something I said in another thread last week, that no department is likely to contain a "dream team" of faculty working and actively publishing in your area.  My committee's work has very very little to do with the content of my dissertation.  Instead, I chose them based on a combination of how well I worked with them (which you wont know until you get there) but also how interested I was in their work, and if I sensed it had methodological or theoretical kinship with mine. Actually, I picked  my chair in part because her work differs so wildly from my own inclinations, and that I knew she could keep me honest and make sure I don't drift too far afield ("fit" is very complicated!).

A few things.
1.  Your in major GPA isn't bad.  People have gotten accepted to good programs with worse, I'm sure.  In any case, GPA doesn't even really rate in the top three most important aspects of an application. While you correctly cite that this board is filled with people who have 3.9 or even 4.0 GPAs, some of those folks get shut out (for example, I had a 4.0 and I was totally shut out my first time around).
2. You should consider all schools that genuinely interest you after thoroughly researching the subject (this number should be between 8 and 13).  There are people doing absolutely fascinating work at schools who aren't household names.  Off the top of my head, none of the major citations in my dissertation work at "Ivy/Ivy Equivalent" schools.  If you are casting a truly wide net, and really being diligent about picking schools that are a good fit, your list will likely contain a healthy mix of schools whose names will impress your aunts and uncles, and schools whose names contain "State" or at least are named after states. As you are likely to learn, the academic job market is largely a crap shoot, and a scholar's level of brilliance does not necessarily correlate with the prestige of their workplace.
3. Relatedly to #2, If your goal is to be a university literature professor, that should be the uncertainty that really terrifies you! However, specific prestige of school - I think - matters less in getting a job, than who your advisor is and whether you can make the case that your dissertation is compelling through your cover letter and a strong publication. People in the field are aware for example, that some schools lack a general prestige but have excellent reputations in sub-disciplines. This is not always apparent to outsiders or undergrads, but is (naturally) common knowledge within sub-disciplines. I attend an English program that is top 40 on USNews but well regarded in a pair of subdisciplines that don't get ranked, we've recently placed people at Stanford, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Cornell, among others.
4. Nothing is likely to cut down on uncertainty. I can honestly say that applying to graduate school was one of the top three most anxiety inducing and miserable experiences of my life. I spent most of that time attempting to struggle against uncertainty, the best thing is to find some way to embrace it.
5. One way to embrace the uncertainty is to realize that you have almost no control over the most important aspects of the application process (the makeup of the committee, their current needs/desires, the composition of graduate students already attending, and the pool of other applicants) and that your admissions results have nothing to do with your level of brilliance or worth as a human being (I say this because I wish somebody had been there to tell me this when my shiny 4.0 failed to secure me any admissions my first time around).
6.  Contained in all of this, is that the most important thing is to think really hard about the schools you apply to, cast aside all biases and preconceptions about the names of schools and the rankings of their department. If your list only contains "Ivy or Ivy equivalent," go back to the drawing board and look harder. 

A few things.
1.  Your in major GPA isn't bad.  People have gotten accepted to good programs with worse, I'm sure.  In any case, GPA doesn't even really rate in the top three most important aspects of an application. While you correctly cite that this board is filled with people who have 3.9 or even 4.0 GPAs, some of those folks get shut out (for example, I had a 4.0 and I was totally shut out my first time around).
2. You should consider all schools that genuinely interest you after thoroughly researching the subject (this number should be between 8 and 13).  There are people doing absolutely fascinating work at schools who aren't household names.  Off the top of my head, none of the major citations in my dissertation work at "Ivy/Ivy Equivalent" schools.  If you are casting a truly wide net, and really being diligent about picking schools that are a good fit, your list will likely contain a healthy mix of schools whose names will impress your aunts and uncles, and schools whose names contain "State" or at least are named after states. As you are likely to learn, the academic job market is largely a crap shoot, and a scholar's level of brilliance does not necessarily correlate with the prestige of their workplace.
3. Relatedly to #2, If your goal is to be a university literature professor, that should be the uncertainty that really terrifies you! However, specific prestige of school - I think - matters less in getting a job, than who your advisor is and whether you can make the case that your dissertation is compelling through your cover letter and a strong publication. People in the field are aware for example, that some schools lack a general prestige but have excellent reputations in sub-disciplines. This is not always apparent to outsiders or undergrads, but is (naturally) common knowledge within sub-disciplines. I attend an English program that is top 40 on USNews but well regarded in a pair of subdisciplines that don't get ranked, we've recently placed people at Stanford, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Cornell, among others.
4. Nothing is likely to cut down on uncertainty. I can honestly say that applying to graduate school was one of the top three most anxiety inducing and miserable experiences of my life. I spent most of that time attempting to struggle against uncertainty, the best thing is to find some way to embrace it.
5. One way to embrace the uncertainty is to realize that you have almost no control over the most important aspects of the application process (the makeup of the committee, their current needs/desires, the composition of graduate students already attending, and the pool of other applicants) and that your admissions results have nothing to do with your level of brilliance or worth as a human being (I say this because I wish somebody had been there to tell me this when my shiny 4.0 failed to secure me any admissions my first time around).
6.  Contained in all of this, is that the most important thing is to think really hard about the schools you apply to, cast aside all biases and preconceptions about the names of schools and the rankings of their department. If your list only contains "Ivy or Ivy equivalent," go back to the drawing board and look harder. 

A few things.
1.  Your in major GPA isn't bad.  People have gotten accepted to good programs with worse, I'm sure.  In any case, GPA doesn't even really rate in the top three most important aspects of an application. While you correctly cite that this board is filled with people who have 3.9 or even 4.0 GPAs, some of those folks get shut out (for example, I had a 4.0 and I was totally shut out my first time around).
2. You should consider all schools that genuinely interest you after thoroughly researching the subject (this number should be between 8 and 13).  There are people doing absolutely fascinating work at schools who aren't household names.  Off the top of my head, none of the major citations in my dissertation work at "Ivy/Ivy Equivalent" schools.  If you are casting a truly wide net, and really being diligent about picking schools that are a good fit, your list will likely contain a healthy mix of schools whose names will impress your aunts and uncles, and schools whose names contain "State" or at least are named after states. As you are likely to learn, the academic job market is largely a crap shoot, and a scholar's level of brilliance does not necessarily correlate with the prestige of their workplace.
3. Relatedly to #2, If your goal is to be a university literature professor, that should be the uncertainty that really terrifies you! However, specific prestige of school - I think - matters less in getting a job, than who your advisor is and whether you can make the case that your dissertation is compelling through your cover letter and a strong publication. People in the field are aware for example, that some schools lack a general prestige but have excellent reputations in sub-disciplines. This is not always apparent to outsiders or undergrads, but is (naturally) common knowledge within sub-disciplines. I attend an English program that is top 40 on USNews but well regarded in a pair of subdisciplines that don't get ranked, we've recently placed people at Stanford, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Cornell, among others.
4. Nothing is likely to cut down on uncertainty. I can honestly say that applying to graduate school was one of the top three most anxiety inducing and miserable experiences of my life. I spent most of that time attempting to struggle against uncertainty, the best thing is to find some way to embrace it.
5. One way to embrace the uncertainty is to realize that you have almost no control over the most important aspects of the application process (the makeup of the committee, their current needs/desires, the composition of graduate students already attending, and the pool of other applicants) and that your admissions results have nothing to do with your level of brilliance or worth as a human being (I say this because I wish somebody had been there to tell me this when my shiny 4.0 failed to secure me any admissions my first time around).
6.  Contained in all of this, is that the most important thing is to think really hard about the schools you apply to, cast aside all biases and preconceptions about the names of schools and the rankings of their department. If your list only contains "Ivy or Ivy equivalent," go back to the drawing board and look harder. 

A few things.
1.  Your in major GPA isn't bad.  People have gotten accepted to good programs with worse, I'm sure.  In any case, GPA doesn't even really rate in the top three most important aspects of an application. While you correctly cite that this board is filled with people who have 3.9 or even 4.0 GPAs, some of those folks get shut out (for example, I had a 4.0 and I was totally shut out my first time around).
2. You should consider all schools that genuinely interest you after thoroughly researching the subject (this number should be between 8 and 13).  There are people doing absolutely fascinating work at schools who aren't household names.  Off the top of my head, none of the major citations in my dissertation work at "Ivy/Ivy Equivalent" schools.  If you are casting a truly wide net, and really being diligent about picking schools that are a good fit, your list will likely contain a healthy mix of schools whose names will impress your aunts and uncles, and schools whose names contain "State" or at least are named after states. As you are likely to learn, the academic job market is largely a crap shoot, and a scholar's level of brilliance does not necessarily correlate with the prestige of their workplace.
3. Relatedly to #2, If your goal is to be a university literature professor, that should be the uncertainty that really terrifies you! However, specific prestige of school - I think - matters less in getting a job, than who your advisor is and whether you can make the case that your dissertation is compelling through your cover letter and a strong publication. People in the field are aware for example, that some schools lack a general prestige but have excellent reputations in sub-disciplines. This is not always apparent to outsiders or undergrads, but is (naturally) common knowledge within sub-disciplines. I attend an English program that is top 40 on USNews but well regarded in a pair of subdisciplines that don't get ranked, we've recently placed people at Stanford, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Cornell, among others.
4. Nothing is likely to cut down on uncertainty. I can honestly say that applying to graduate school was one of the top three most anxiety inducing and miserable experiences of my life. I spent most of that time attempting to struggle against uncertainty, the best thing is to find some way to embrace it.
5. One way to embrace the uncertainty is to realize that you have almost no control over the most important aspects of the application process (the makeup of the committee, their current needs/desires, the composition of graduate students already attending, and the pool of other applicants) and that your admissions results have nothing to do with your level of brilliance or worth as a human being (I say this because I wish somebody had been there to tell me this when my shiny 4.0 failed to secure me any admissions my first time around).
6.  Contained in all of this, is that the most important thing is to think really hard about the schools you apply to, cast aside all biases and preconceptions about the names of schools and the rankings of their department. If your list only contains "Ivy or Ivy equivalent," go back to the drawing board and look harder. 

No need to apologize, and I think my post contains some generalizations (I apologize, I'm flipping between browser windows and my dissertation and that doesn't lend itself well to giving ironclad advice). You should be asking lots of questions, and this is a place to ask them.  Your questions are good and worthwhile. I didn't know any of these things when I was an undergrad.   
Some departments have working groups around things like ecocrit, childrens lit, etc., but within those you're likely to find a lot of diversity in theories and approaches.
My bit about the SoP may be a little over the top.  If you aren't interested in Marxism as a subject, there is absolutely no reason to include Marxism in your SoP. On the other hand, (and I'm being reductive again for the sake of ease and time) it is hard to imagine a strong statement of purpose that does not engage with prevailing discourses in some way.  As bumblebea said, a good scholarly project is going to have at least a little theory behind it. You show that you're potentially conversant in theory/scholarship by identifying what authors/critics/theorists influence your approach to close reading, and why you think that this approach is important.    A statement of purpose, I think, is (among other things) where you propose a starting point for inquiry.  What questions drive you? What contribution do you want to make? Why do you think [school x] is a good place to do it? It's hard to imagine forming a substantial inquiry without placing your work into dialogue with prevailing theories (be they cultural studies, critical theory, or aesthetic theory).  
I apologize to you, actually, because this is probably very confusing. Unfortunately, grad school applications are a very confusing process, and (speaking of relativism) you're going to get a lot of potentially conflicting advice!
 

I'll start by saying that there is really no lack of current and ongoing humanities scholarship that does not address questions of social-justice, cultural studies, relativism, etc.  With regard to relativism, there is actually a growing sentiment that "postmodernism" is "over," whatever that might mean. What can be said is that projects revolving around the critical theories of the experience of marginalized groups is very "hot" right now because we're in a cultural moment where marginalized groups are increasingly gaining footholds within established structures, giving them a platform to critique those structures in ways that have not traditionally been done (or even allowed).  Those kinds of projects get a lot of attention because they respond to current events and changes in academia and culture at large in very important ways.  However, that does not mean that aesthetes and formalists are unwelcome in English departments, there are tons of them, and they're publishing all the time!  
This board gets a lot of threads that ask questions about programs that emphasize this or that. I think there was a thread last year where the OP asked people to recommend programs that had an "emphasis on psychoanalysis." While there is something really romantic and intriguing about the idea of a  department full of like minded Frankfurt School Marxists, or Lacanians, Deleuzians, or even formalists, regularly gathering in smoke filled chambers to hash out the specifics of their shared discipline, for better or worse the economics of the University prevent this from happening. 
The important thing to remember about academic departments when determining whether one is a good fit for you or not is that most (if not all) English departments strive for broad coverage. That means that you're unlikely to find departments where you have a ton of professors whose interests contain a lot of overlapping concerns. They may have particular areas of strength (for example, the Center for Psychoanalysis at Buffalo, or the Children's Lit concentration at Pitt), but will generally strive to incorporate a broad range of approaches, genres, time periods, etc.  
All of which is to say, you're not going to find departments that are totally eschewing one approach or another, especially, as @Bumblebea says, approaches that are central to the discipline. If you're a strict aesthete or formalist, you'll probably be in a department with Marxists or Lacanians or whatever who will find problems with your methods, and the opposite is true as well.  I'm a cultural studies scholar, and I had a graduate colleague who found the whole backbone of cultural studies based criticism to be of questionable worth.  We still get along, and we both have professors in the department who supported our work. 
Your concerns about the application process are valid, since (this is becoming my catchphrase on this board) the most important aspect of the admissions process is the one over which you have the least control: the composition of the admissions committee. @Bumblebea's advice is sage here, a successful application statement - I think - needs to have at least some theoretical and/or historical undergirding. Striking a balance between a statement that is narrow enough to show strength, and broad enough to show flexibility, is one of the biggest challenges of your application. You will want to show that you can become conversant in relevant issues of critical theory (you will be expected to do this) even if they don't find their way into your dissertation, because a well rounded scholar must be conversant in the major issues of the field. I had to read Kant and Cavell, and my aesthete colleagues had to read Adorno and Althusser!

I'll start by saying that there is really no lack of current and ongoing humanities scholarship that does not address questions of social-justice, cultural studies, relativism, etc.  With regard to relativism, there is actually a growing sentiment that "postmodernism" is "over," whatever that might mean. What can be said is that projects revolving around the critical theories of the experience of marginalized groups is very "hot" right now because we're in a cultural moment where marginalized groups are increasingly gaining footholds within established structures, giving them a platform to critique those structures in ways that have not traditionally been done (or even allowed).  Those kinds of projects get a lot of attention because they respond to current events and changes in academia and culture at large in very important ways.  However, that does not mean that aesthetes and formalists are unwelcome in English departments, there are tons of them, and they're publishing all the time!  
This board gets a lot of threads that ask questions about programs that emphasize this or that. I think there was a thread last year where the OP asked people to recommend programs that had an "emphasis on psychoanalysis." While there is something really romantic and intriguing about the idea of a  department full of like minded Frankfurt School Marxists, or Lacanians, Deleuzians, or even formalists, regularly gathering in smoke filled chambers to hash out the specifics of their shared discipline, for better or worse the economics of the University prevent this from happening. 
The important thing to remember about academic departments when determining whether one is a good fit for you or not is that most (if not all) English departments strive for broad coverage. That means that you're unlikely to find departments where you have a ton of professors whose interests contain a lot of overlapping concerns. They may have particular areas of strength (for example, the Center for Psychoanalysis at Buffalo, or the Children's Lit concentration at Pitt), but will generally strive to incorporate a broad range of approaches, genres, time periods, etc.  
All of which is to say, you're not going to find departments that are totally eschewing one approach or another, especially, as @Bumblebea says, approaches that are central to the discipline. If you're a strict aesthete or formalist, you'll probably be in a department with Marxists or Lacanians or whatever who will find problems with your methods, and the opposite is true as well.  I'm a cultural studies scholar, and I had a graduate colleague who found the whole backbone of cultural studies based criticism to be of questionable worth.  We still get along, and we both have professors in the department who supported our work. 
Your concerns about the application process are valid, since (this is becoming my catchphrase on this board) the most important aspect of the admissions process is the one over which you have the least control: the composition of the admissions committee. @Bumblebea's advice is sage here, a successful application statement - I think - needs to have at least some theoretical and/or historical undergirding. Striking a balance between a statement that is narrow enough to show strength, and broad enough to show flexibility, is one of the biggest challenges of your application. You will want to show that you can become conversant in relevant issues of critical theory (you will be expected to do this) even if they don't find their way into your dissertation, because a well rounded scholar must be conversant in the major issues of the field. I had to read Kant and Cavell, and my aesthete colleagues had to read Adorno and Althusser!

I would be incredibly shocked if any program listed in the top 40 or so of the US News rankings in English didn't fully fund every student they admitted.  I don't have an intimate knowledge of each of those programs that allows me to say for sure, but my jaw would drop if I met a grad student in one of those programs and they said they didn't have a tuition waiver and a stipend.
Most programs have a standard funding package.  Some have special funding packages they offer to applicants they find very desirable that have more money. That language you're describing is pretty boiler-plate. Grad school funding is full of things that departments are unable to "guarantee" because budgets vary wildly year to year, but that in practice everyone gets. If you're very concerned about that language and it's giving you anxiety about applying, e-mail the DGS of that program and ask them about it.  It's a very fair question.
Now, how far that stipend goes and how well it allows a grad student to live is another matter entirely.  It is a really important question to ask when you're talking to grad students attending programs you're interested in.

+1 for good info!
And, although I think the University of Oregon is a bit lower at around top 50~ish in the rankings, they don't guarantee first year funding either. It's a weird situation where they don't give classroom teaching appointments to PhD students straight out of a B.A. program if they don't have college teaching experience... and then, because you can't teach the first year, you have to compete for a "limited number" of "non-classroom" graduate teaching fellowships (essentially working as a writing tutor). This was why I ended up not applying though it was one of my top-choice programs. I couldn't risk moving across the country for a spot in a program that had a possibly unfunded first year. Too risky.
I think most people would be really surprised if they knew just how many of these patchwork funding situations exist out there. Also, keep in mind that a lot of these stipends are so low that you simply can't live off of them. I grew up near Eugene, Oregon (where the UofO is), and I guarantee that you can't live in Eugene on the stipend they offer (12k for 0.40 FTE). Guarantee. So you're gonna have to work a significant number of hours on the side. I'd posit that this same situation exists across the country. I wouldn't call a program "fully funded" if you can't eke out a living on the stipend. That's just my opinion.

You've answered your own question!  I bet you never knew you were this smart all along!
In all seriousness though, I came to grad school (BA - > PhD) with a broad idea of what I wanted to do. I discovered my dissertation topic over the course of writing several seminar papers.  Use your seminar papers to explore topics that are of interest to you. Try not to duplicate seminar paper topics.  Try to incorporate plenty of secondary sources into your seminar papers so that you use them as a tool to become more widely read. While my dissertation is wildly different from what I proposed in my SoP, I can definitely trace the trajectory between the two through various conference and seminar papers.
You will always be discovering new things, because the literature on literature is voluminous.  Every month or so I have what I perceive as a minor catastrophe where I see a citation to some book that I'm sure in that moment contains the argument of my dissertation, and feel that my life is over.  Then I read that literature, and figure out how it relates to my own, and incorporate it. Your dissertation is not going to be, and is not expected to be, a revelation that turns your field or subfield upside down. All academic fields, humanities and otherwise, proceed by minor nudges and trial and error. 

I didn't propose a dissertation in my SoP, no. I did propose, I suppose, a slate of interests.  "My interests lie in [x] influenced by [x] and [x] theories." My thought on the statement of purpose is that it's less important to articulate a coherent research plan than it is to show that you have definable and well developed interests that can develop into a coherent research plan.  Indeed, my amorphous early interests set me on a trajectory that eventually led - however mystically - to my dissertation topic. 
What I think that means is that you definitely want to avoid proposing a dissertation (after all, some prospectuses are 20 pages long!), but want to demonstrate that you've used your pre-PhD time to become conversant in a field of interest. In mine, I explained that I was interested in issues surrounding popular culture, ideology, nationalism, and masculinity in the Cold War era (which was also the subject of my writing sample). I made sure to mention a few theorists who were essential to my work. What I think this showed, at least to the 5 out of 13 programs that either accepted or waitlisted me, was that I had developed enough as a scholar to begin a program. It sounds like you've already done this to some extent and are in better shape than you think you are.
Therefore: I don't think there is any expectation at the application stage that you know what you'll end up researching.
I imagine that the expectations applying out of MA might be different, but I can't imagine they're that different. 

You've answered your own question!  I bet you never knew you were this smart all along!
In all seriousness though, I came to grad school (BA - > PhD) with a broad idea of what I wanted to do. I discovered my dissertation topic over the course of writing several seminar papers.  Use your seminar papers to explore topics that are of interest to you. Try not to duplicate seminar paper topics.  Try to incorporate plenty of secondary sources into your seminar papers so that you use them as a tool to become more widely read. While my dissertation is wildly different from what I proposed in my SoP, I can definitely trace the trajectory between the two through various conference and seminar papers.
You will always be discovering new things, because the literature on literature is voluminous.  Every month or so I have what I perceive as a minor catastrophe where I see a citation to some book that I'm sure in that moment contains the argument of my dissertation, and feel that my life is over.  Then I read that literature, and figure out how it relates to my own, and incorporate it. Your dissertation is not going to be, and is not expected to be, a revelation that turns your field or subfield upside down. All academic fields, humanities and otherwise, proceed by minor nudges and trial and error. 

I would think beyond the WS about reasons to attend conferences. Here are the main reasons, imo.
You get to meet with potential advisors in person and discuss your interests with them. This also gives you a chance to learn about their personality and get some insight into whether that personality is compatible with yours.  At the graduate level, your class papers can be the background for your conference papers. The conference papers, in turn, can form the early stage of your publications. Thus, the feedback you get in a conference presentation can help you refine your ideas for future publications, which will make them stronger. You might also learn the names of people who you can suggest as referees when you do send it out. If you have any interest in becoming someone who does co-authored publications, going to conferences is a great way to meet others with similar interests who you might be able to write or organize panels with in the future. It's a great way to stay current on what's going on in your field and subfield. It'll help you learn what is up and coming and where the field is headed.  The way you become a better presenter is by presenting. And ultimately you'll have to present your work to finish your degree and get your work out there. Sure, you can hate the term "professionalization". But, if you aren't willing to engage in some, then you may want to reconsider your plans.

That depends on what you want to do with your life. Disclaimer: I've never done an MFA but have friends who have/are.
 To state the obvious, and something I'm sure you already know, the expectations between writing a dissertation and writing an MFA thesis are wildly different.  While it might depend on your committee, a dissertation isn't likely to satisfy your appetite for memoiristic writing (I had a bit of that in dissertation initially, but had to cut it to make room for... you guessed it, more theory and analysis). The dissertation form traditionally does not allow for a lot of stylistic experimentation or inventiveness, as its purpose is (generally speaking) to be a work of lengthy, rigorous, and original research that makes a contribution to, and is in dialogue with the field.  For better or worse, that has generally come to mean a very specific kind of work and specific kind of writing.  
Of course, if/when I get to convert my diss into a book, I intend to restore the more personal, memoiristic touches, if my hypothetical editors approve. Fortunately there is a wide (usually very wide) gap between your dissertation, and the book you'll ultimately publish. But you may be delaying the gratification of realizing that goal for 4-6 years after you defend your dissertation. PhD time is glacial, it seems to me, compared to MFA time.
Likewise, if you don't like teaching English comp, then you're going to have a rough go at most English grad programs. That said, I know many grad students who vocalize their dislike for teaching comp, and even teaching generally, and still seem to be successful in their programs.
Based on your interests, it really sounds like the MFA is the way to go.  The best thing about the MFA in comparison is that it usually takes less than half as long as a PhD, and so depending on your age you'll still have plenty of life left to pursue a PhD if you want it. My PhD program is chockablock with MFA holders.