young werther

Hahaha. I guess you could go to Yale and only take classes w/ Bloom. Not to pontificate, but don't you think you might benefit from engaging in a dialogue with the so-called School of Resentment folk rather than avoiding them?

Formalism is a theory insofar as any approach to studying literature must necessarily have a methodology, but it is exclusive rather than inclusive. I've had professors point blank tell me that it's inappropriate to read Hamlet through a psychoanalytic lens because 'there is nothing about Freud in the text'. Grades become a punitive reflection of how close your paper comes to the particular prof's conception of what 'responsible criticism' is. Eventually I stopped writing papers that I thought had merit and resorted to psychoanalysing professor CV's to determine what kind of paper would be judged most favorably. Ph.D. from Harvard in 1996 and a recent publication on The Cultural Poetics of Marlowe? Guess I need to make sure I cite Greenblatt. Ph.D. from Yale in the late '60s and no recent publications? Hmm, that's tough, he could have been an acolyte of de Man or Bloom and their views have famously diverged. I'll name drop both just to be safe. It's honestly quite comical because I double-majored in a hard science, and the juxtaposition of the schismatic obstinacy of English departments with the scientists who sought to unify their specialized knowledge to strengthen their discipline further elucidated the vain petulance of literary academe. I'm not calling for a scientific or dogmatic approach to studying literature, but the academic narcissism and snipery within the field really needs to be resolved.

I hate that there is this chiasm between theory and formalism in English departments. The centre cannot hold and things fall apart among this dissension. I go from one class where the professor prates on Badiou while disregarding anything about the novel we 're supposed to be studying, to the next where the professor scoffs at the mention of Derrida asking "where is an aporia mentioned in the text?" While a foolish consistency may in fact be the hobgoblin of little minds, I don't think it can be denied that English departments have become precariously moribund due to this lack of unity. Sometimes I wonder why I'm pursuing graduate work in a discipline that, well, lacks any accepted discipline. Maybe I should just give up and go to law school. *I realize this is flame and I apologize, but I needed to get this out of my system.*

The DGS at a flagship state univ. told me his department doesn't even look at GRE scores for determining acceptance (specifically he said "we're not looking for idiots-savants who can score 800s"), but that they are used by the university at large to determine the funding level received if admitted. Also, quite suprisingly, he said that it was the aggregate score that determined one's funding category, rather than just the verbal score. For example, a score above 1500 placed one at the higest level of funding, a 1350 the next, and so forth. This department is notorious for its liberality regarding test scores (lit gre is not required and not even looked at if submitted), so YMMV in terms of the GRE's use an admission's yardstick, however it is very interesting that the quantitative score came into the equation re. funding. I think at some schools--mainly larger state universities--department's themselves are not really given control of funding allocation, and the university at large sees combined GRE scores as an IQ surrogate and a valid and predictive metric for future success. It can't hurt to do well on this pesky exam, but I don't think a less than stellar score will get you dinged.