Stingermania

Hello everyone. I'm finishing my MA thesis in Iran right now. The scope of this thesis is rather too wide, and I feel it's the summarized version of something really longer. I spend a paragraph on something I can write an entire chapter on. I have to choose 2 sources between the eight I have read. I feel this thesis has the potential to be a PhD thesis and my advisor agrees with me. Is this possible? I want to apply to American/Canadian universities and migrate to one of these countries. Would it look cheap if I put that on my SOP? ------------------------------------------------ If you're interested to know my thesis is a comparative study between Alice in Wonderland novels and American McGee's Alice video games, but the comparison runs much deeper than that, I have a chapter on structuralism and the formal comparison between gameplay and plot which deals with many aspect and a chapter on reader-response theory which compares gamers and readers. If this becomes a PhD thesis I plan to expand the two chapters a lot and bring many more examples, so it'll be a comparative study of the two genres and Alice would only be one of the many examples and not the focus of the thesis.

1. I am almost finished and everyone at my class is just starting. Starting early is advised.

I can say that for comparative and interdisciplinary studies translation is of utmost importance, whether a novel or research or even freelance translation for money, because it is a further proof of your proficiency in the languages, and also the fact that you have worked across the cultures.

When did you realize you loved literature? I honestly don't remember. I loved literature when I was a child. I was born in a literary family, my father is a writer. He can't publish anything because of the regime censorship. I should've hated it but I loved it. Maybe we have a literature gene. Maybe it's an acceptable form of madness. I don't know. How did you know it was going to be your life? I can't do any other thing. I can't sing, or run for office, or shoot myself into space. As a small child I imprisoned myself in my room and did nothing but read. I didn't develope any useful skills. I never had any other options I guess. Why do you need it to be your life? I like living. I know it sounds stupid but I am really grateful to be alive. I love all the little pleasures, pains, things like that. But I'm unable to experience it myself. I'm socially inept, physically weak, and a coward. I can't go to parties and woo the girls. I can't go to tours around the globe. I can't pick up a gun and fight a tyrannical regime. So the only way for me to experience life is second-hand, and the way to understand life is to analyze literature. What would you like to see in your obituary, if you achieve all your career goals? "Here lies silent another voice of the cacophony of 21st century. We find most of his ideas stupid, but nevertheless he taught us a lot through his mistakes." Also, I'm not sure if joining academia will mean we're not in a corporation. It's also a church. People have dialogues in an inner circle with an incomprehensible jargon, and they will hide the result behind a steel wall of expensive books and journal articles. Of course, you might ask me "then why are you so desperate to get into this system", well, poverty, the ability to get out of Iran, and also (and mainly) because I highly respect the people involved - I'm just not a fan of the overall system.

You only have to rearead half of it.... I wonder where the season break is going to be.

Thanks a lot sebastiansteddy and thanks a lot for the advice

Let me also add that I'm a rabid fan of A Song of Ice and Fire. It's the only book that I'm a member of a fan forum of. I just love it.

I'm on a schedule to read all novels by Roth and McCarthy, the novel I finished today was The Road. But I'm taking a little time off and reading Beloved by Morrison. I'll read All the Pretty Horses after Beloved, and then I have to choose between The Crossing or The American Pastoral or The Great American Novel. I'm also writing my MA thesis, and I have reached the third chapter which deals with reader response theories. I'm reading Luoise Rosenblatt's Literature as Exploration and Jauss's Toward an Aesthetic of Reception now.

Thanks a lot for the kind words

Do you know the name of this professor by any chance?

Thanks everyone for the replies I'm looking into them right now.

Hello everyone. I am an Iranian student of English literature. I want to apply to a PhD comparative literature program and I wanted to ask all of you what you think of my chances. I want to ask you some specific questions as well. But before that let me get to the main point: full funding is mandatory for me. I don't know if you have followed the Iranian news or not but let me tell you that in the previous two years the sanctions and incompetent trynaical regimes have worked together and now our currency is less valuable than toilet paper. I was always in a lower middle class category but now I'm deep under the poverty line. So, I will never afford paying tuitions ANYWHERE. Not only that, it will mean paying application fees and travel costs and things like that will also be a massive pain in the neck. Apart from that we need to pay a lot of money to the government to have access to our BA and MA certificates. GRE and TOEFL are going to be really expensive too. I will need to work for a year or two just to earn the money needed for application costs. So let me give you a little information about myself. Good things about me: - My graduate school is one of the top 2 in Iran and it's internationally famous (and sanctioned, hehe). - My graduate professors love me and I'm sure they will write me shining letters of recommendation. They are internationally respected too, I guess. - I have only As and my GPA is 4.0 in graduate school. - I don't have any publications yet, but I am sure I will have one or two papers published before my application time comes. (They're under review now). - I have worked as an English teacher for 5 years now. But even better, I'm in negotiations with some schools and I'm positive I will have some academic teaching experience too before applying. I might also become a faculty member somewhere but that's a 50/50 chance. Bad things about me: - I have some Cs, Ds, and Fs in BA. All of them except one are the grades of stupid lessons unrelated to the English literature forced on us by the government - Islamic thought, family values, things like that - or teaching or translation lessons. My only F in literature is a lesson I didn't take the exam out of protest to the teacher. At that time I was reckless and stupid and didn't think ahead. - I'm only fluent in two languages, English and Persian. I can also read Arabic but I can't write or speak or listen to it. I can take classes but I don't think I would be able to study so extensively to be able to be fluent in a third language before the time comes. - I'm a bit controversial. I'm a radical atheist and I am against social institutions like family and marriage, I politically support WikiLeaks and things like that. I have extreme liberal views. So if someone searches my name they might some angry comments on the internet from me they might deem too radical and crazy. I can stand by the content of those comments and defend them but the tone was angry. Again, I was reckless and stupid. - Grammar errors- ugh. No matter how many times I proofread and revise my writings I will still find errors in them the next time. Now, my main interest is the comparative study between video games and literature. My MA thesis the comparison between Alice in Wonderland books and their video game adaptations. I am knoweldagble in both fields and I have been a freelance video game blogger for years. I think I can prove my competence in both areas. I am also very competent in Persian and Islamic literature so I can go down that road too. So this is my situation. Now I want to confess something: the main thing that I want is to get out of Iran. If I could use any other way I would, but I can't because literature and politics are the only things I know how to do. So getting accepted is the main thing I want. So these are my questions: 1) How do you assess my chances overall? 2) No matter how hard I google comparative literature, I find only the best universities. Can you suggest some universities which are lower in rankings? I will have more chances of acceptance and the application fee is lower and funding is guaranteed. 3) The country I want to go to is the USA. Are the universities in that country too good for me? I also love to go to Canada and any other English speaking country except Australia, or European countries (that I unfortunately don't speak the language of). I know this was a very long post and thanks a lot for reading it.