Swagato

Just curious: has anyone here received information regarding Pittsburgh's waitlist? For English, I mean.

SSD all the way. Seriously. I went from a late 2008 MBPro (7200RPM HDD I think) to the 2010 MBAir with a 256GB SSD. It's unreal. Photoshop opens with hefty .psd image files in less than 10 seconds. Boot time is something obscene. I've yet to discover an app that I can throw at this and it will cause a startup time exceeding 15 seconds. I typically have in excess of 25-30 tabs open in Chrome at any given time--no problems whatsoever. Seriously, SSD is transformative. By all means, be assiduous about backing up (Time Machine/Time Capsule is great here) but if you're buying anything in 2012, make sure it has an SSD.

Being human has historically limited our perception, bound it to the human. Recent works like Insect Media, Alien Phenomenology, etc. have really opened up interesting discussions. Posthumanism isn't new, of course, but I think there is a general trend toward removing the 'centrality' of the human in criticism itself...and I think that's a great thing.

...$12,000 per semester at the Master's level? From a non top-10 university? It's unheard of, quite simply. I'd really like to see the letter, if that is indeed the case.

- The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (Ruiz) - The Mill and the Cross (Majewski) - American Falls (Solomon) - Bill Viola's various works - Raumlichtkunst (Fischinger) - Gerhard Richter Painting (Belz) - Anthony McCall's solid light films These are just a few movies or video works that enter into a critical relationship with painting, representation, analog/digital, and a variety of issues related to art history and theory.

I've let Rochester know that I will not be accepting their offer. Hope someone else benefits from this.

Weird. I Cmd+F'd for it several times before posting, and nothing showed up. But, thanks! Edit: Aha! It's written "New, Haven, CT" and I was searching for "New Haven."

So...are we all done for this round? It looks like most of us have more or less decided where we're headed, or we're in the final stages of deliberations (visits, etc.). I think every program has announced its decisions by now--anyone still waiting?

If I might ask--why? I recall you mentioning that Pitt had offered you a very attractive fellowship package (I think it was Pitt). Austin's funding, based on what I've read around here, is definitely not even close. Is there a very compelling reason that Austin is so attractive to you? Faculty/program fit?

New Haven is not included on the list of cities. . .

The place I am likely going to end up at is $28,000/12 mo, x 5 years. First two years no teaching requirements. The others range between 18-20,000, but I do not know the details. USC is an exception and offers close to $30,000 but location and living costs offset this a lot.

Good going! Though I take it you're still working things out between your top two choices.

I support bluecheese's suggestion, for what it is worth. There aren't that many film studies programs in the country at which I feel I'd have a really excellent fit (and, importantly, that are powerful enough to be a viable springboard to the kind of career I am aiming for). Yet, I applied to 13 programs this year, up from last year's 8. Now, of course my SOP and essay last year were quite bad, so that certainly didn't help my chances. This time, I've had a much better round, and one of the waitlist programs is one I did not apply to last year. I think it's a good idea to maximize spread and apply as widely as possible, while ensuring a reasonably good--if not amazing--fit. Ultimately, the adcom judges fit, not us. I'm not sure I'm a good fit at all, at one of my waitlist programs, but apparently they beg to differ!

I have to disagree. While it is certainly true (as of 2005--I don't know of any improvements or changes afterward) that English is part of all the curriculum boards, what is equally true is that the texts and the syllabi themselves are hopelessly antiquated. Thus, Wren & Martin--something that hasn't been used in schools in the West for many decades, if not a whole century. Certainly "everyone learns English," but I'm fairly sure it is incontestable that the level of English being taught and the actual grasp of English as a result is, as I said, highly idiosyncratic and not at all English as it is commonly practiced in the English-speaking world. Witness the very odd syntax of "Indian English" as often seen in tech support emails. My favorite example is the annoying usage of "revert." The medium of instruction is English, but (once again) not at a very professional level. There are very, very few schools across the entire country where proper pronunciation can be relied upon. I was not criticizing the blend of different languages at all; rather, I was pointing out that the very form of English is often different from what is expected of collegiate English in the US or UK. The structure, if you will. And this is (linguists may help out here) undoubtedly related to the fact that most Indian kids at 18 are commonly thinking in a different "mother" tongue and translating to English (written, or spoken). And, yes, this is entirely my observation.

May I ask where you're finally headed? Just curious, since turning down Chicago is a fairly big deal! Feel free to PM.

You all just got the standard MAPH letter. There's a part in it that is customized to your individual applicant profile, and may mention faculty of interest to you, but other than that it's a standard letter. Definitely don't dismiss MAPH out of hand, though. Recent placement has been very, very impressive (both to PhD programs and non-academic positions). Plenty of discussions on this forum.

Yeah, I figured that might get downvotes. However, I do understand what you're saying and it's a view I've encountered before. But consider the following. I was born in '87. At that time, the subcontinent wasn't doing too well. It so happens that my family's a fairly academic one, has been for a couple of generations (in a limited way). Under those circumstances, the greatest power parents could give their kid was an edge when it comes to English. This is something I'm incredibly grateful for in retrospect, because even today, the average 18-year-old Indian (living in India) has a rather modest command of the language. It'd likely be an idiosyncratic grasp, with British idiom and spelling mingling freely with American colloquialism...all in all, a mess. That's because the language isn't taught with adequate rigor, but anyway, we're moving off-track. Long story short, yes, it would indeed have been very progressive for a fairly middle-class family in the late 80s/early 90s to emphasize English as the first language for their kid. Speaking for myself, I can say it's definitely paid off in the long run.

From the Department's handbook: "IV. Languages: students must pass examinations in: German (for students of western art), French, and if necessary another language pertinent to their dissertation." Since I'm hoping to go fairly deep into Western aesthetics, that means German for sure. And one cannot do film studies without French (this applies especially if one is interested in phenomenology like I am). I don't actually know about Yale English; only that their Comp Lit language requirements are frightening. Technically, I shall have 5 languages by the time I graduate. I'm already fluent to native-level in three languages. English, as it happens, is my 'foreign' language since I was born in India. I was lucky in that my family is quite progressive and actually started me on English before the regional languages. So yeah, I have English, Hindi, and Bengali--not that the latter two are of much use...still, looks nice on a CV. I'm relying on Pimsleur and Assimil, along with BBC's language courses and HeadStart to give myself a grounding in French. This will be followed up with any summer immersion programs I can find (I believe Yale does offer something like this, and I'm sure other universities have equivalents). I'm including a few links that should help anyone needing language work. http://www.amazon.com/French-Reading-Karl-C-Sandberg/dp/0133316033 http://hs2.lingnet.org/french.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french/mafrance/flash/ http://www.learner.org/resources/series83.html http://gloss.dliflc.edu/Default.aspx http://www.scribd.com/word/removal/6150224 http://www.laits.utexas.edu/fi/vp/

Yeah, it still feels surreal at times. But, these days I'm more concerned with figuring out how best to achieve my projected language acquisitions in time.

That is exactly what we're trying to do, right now! We're (at least in my field, but I sense this is a conversation occurring more widely) coming to terms with the fact that we are, beyond doubt, in a post-medium condition. The question inevitably arises: how then do we (re-)define our objects of study? Stanley Cavell's notion of automatism has often been raised in these debates. The automatism of a technology of a medium not only indicates the possibilities of that medium/tech, but also opens up opportunities for transgressing those possibilities in various ways. If you can provide a cogent argumentative framework to justify the textuality of your grandfather's farting, power to you--by all means, study it. Pluralism is a good thing. And Two Espressos: I definitely think Greenaway is onto something, and his sentiment that cinema has not yet been born/been invented has been repeated both before him and after him by many other theorists and film/video artists (André Bazin, J-L Godard, etc.). This relates back to Cavellian automatism, really, and we've been moving away from textual (literary) underpinnings for the past two decades or so. First the historical turn to reposition film and cinema within a more expansive art historical/moving-image tradition, and then a turn toward affective/sensual approaches.

I think this is the sort of essentialist, reductiionist impulse I've always resisted, and have thus affiliated myself with scholarship that goes against this sort of separation. You keep talking about Mad Men as a TV show. Why is it that you cannot recognise it as a text? Why does there have to be a "visual canon," as though a film, television show, anime, etc. are not, also, texts? I'm unsure if this is just a semantic slip on your part or if there is a deeper significance, but it's something I always find troublesome. I do not believe that we must have separate canons for separate mediums of expression, for the simple reason that medium-specificity is dead. Gone. The digital has erased that. In this context, you should definitely read Rosalind Krauss on the "post-medium condition." Medium specificity is not tenable in an era when letter, sound, and image can all be collapsed to binary bits of data. Making value judgments about text (and this is why I insist upon defining text as emanating from any 'medium'--defined in the classical sense for lack of a suitable replacement) is not our goal, to my mind. My work is to question, theorise, excavate, contextualise, but not to make value judgments that define this film (or text) as "good" and that as "bad."However, resisting such value judgments doesn't imply that the selection of texts is arbitrary. The canon includes texts by judging them against their individual merits, as you rightly note. It's just that these merits are not fixed.

- Who judges the shitty works and the 'great' works, whether by dead white European males or minorities? And who judges the judges? - Why should we not analyse reality TV? The Jersey Shore conference at UChicago began as a tongue-in-cheek thing, but the range of critical perspectives that emerged at the conference was delightful, and definitely allowed me a shockingly pleasant glimpse at how "bad objects" may nevertheless be deserving of critical attention. As someone who detests Quentin Tarantino's work, I often confront popular animosity. When I point out the ideological whitewashes and cavalier revisionism that mark his movies, I get the familiar refrain of "Oh, it's just a movie!" But I don't believe that popular art should go uncritically viewed, allowing insidious perspectives to slip into the mass vernacular. - The theoretical lenses you speak of showcase their powers and failings when applied to 'worthy' objects just as well as 'bad' objects. If anything, at a time when the humanities are under ever-increasingly-rabid assault from the right wing of society, I would argue that expanding the scope of our theoretical arsenal is a powerful response to allegations of navel-gazing pedantry.

Yeah, I appreciate this initiative. Perhaps if this document is adequately populated, it can be made a sticky for future reference.

I've added Yale's info for mine, and will add Rochester's as well. My info differs a bit from yours, but feel free to assimilate them/integrate them somehow if you'd like.

Is this restricted to English/Lit folks only? I ask because it's often the case that humanities programs tend to have similar funding/teaching package awards.