Glasperlenspieler

How did you get this from the OP? What makes you think that? I really don't think this is always the case. And even if it's true that all instances of a B+ are ones in which the professor did a poor job (which again, I really don't think is the case), then it's certainly not the case that "people know" this. This seems right.

As someone who doesn't think the term "continental philosophy" is very helpful, I suspect that you can probably get more personalized recommendations by specifying what philosophers, topics, and questions you're interested in.

I'm in the middle of a multi-year hiatus from Proust because I got bogged down in the part scene of Sodom and Gomorrah. I still think parts of In Search of Lost Time are the best things I've ever read though.

A few more thoughts and then I'm probably out: I see know that there are at least two senses of 'relevant' that pertinent to this discussion, and I may have latched onto one mistakenly, when the other is actually what is being discussed: 1. Literary scholarship is relevant because there are many people in the general public that are interested in related matters. 2. Literary scholarship is relevant because it has a meaningful impact on the contemporary world. If we're talking about relevance in the first sense, then I certainly agree that literary scholarship is relevant to the general public. I still think that I would rather see more of an emphasis on having academics write for more popular venues. In some ways, the sciences are a good model for this in which researchers publish very technical studies in academic journals and then there are other venues like Popular Science or Popular mechanics specifically designed for communicating these developments to a broad audience. In philosophy, things like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Richard Marshall's interviews are good examples of similar sorts of venues. For literary scholarship and cultural studies, literary magazines like the LA Review of Books also play an important role here. I prefer this approach for several reasons. 1) I really do think that academic writing is a different sort of writing than writing for general venues. And I think that writing for a general audience is very hard and that many academics can't do it well. So it may make sense for the people who are skilled at it to be focusing on it rather than have academics do a poor job of it. 2) I really don't think every article published in an academic journal is that valuable. (I tend to think that as a result of career pressures academics publish too much). So rather than writing a summary for every article, having people who have a in depth knowledge of the field could write essays covering the field more broadly and communicating its important insights. This also helps prevent us from simply maintaining the academic article and mongoraph as the necessary building blocks of scholarship. 3) Finally, it's important to remember that most people don't have access to these articles anyways because they are behind a paywall. If the goal is the democratization of knowledge, then the first order of business is a complete overhaul of academic publishing. Regarding relevance in the second sense, I really wish I believed it was true, but I'm increasingly skeptical. Full disclosure, I'm midway through a PhD program in literary studies and am increasingly plagued by doubts about the relevance of my own scholarship and that of fields I am familiar with, especially in a world in which right-wing populism doesn't seem to be going away and climate change is apt to fundamentally change the face of the earth in a very short period of time. So this is the position I was coming from in writing the above. Maybe this is just graduate school depression talking, but I do think it's a mistake to simply assume that what we do is relevant in the second sense, with out critical engaging that assumption. On a final note, I'll reiterate my support for academics writing as clearly and simply as possible (but, as Einstein tells us, not any simpler). In that vein, I find it deeply ironic that scholars like Judith Butler and Stanley Cavell (who I find infuriating to read) are both ostensibly influenced by J.L. Austin, who was probably one of the clearest writers of academic prose in the English language.

I have two cynically (and probably overly snarky responses) and two more serious responses. However, I think the serious responses are really just more elaborate articulations of the cynical responses, so feel free to read whichever suits you: Cynical take #1: This conversation seems to assume that academic writing already is relevant to a general audience and is merely being communicated poorly. But it's far from obvious that most academic writing is relevant to a general audience even if it were communicated perfectly. Cynical take #2: One wonders if these summaries wouldn't end up being longer than the article/book itself. Serious take #1: @politics 'n prose's point about considering the reader when writing is very important. However, this conversation seems to take for granted that the reader in academic writing should conceivably include anyone. But it's not at all clear to me why that should be the case. All writing has an audience. When I write a letter to a friend, I write it with the assumption of his particular background knowledge, perspective, etc. When I write an Op-Ed, I write it with a particular newspaper reading public in mind. Presumably a NY Times Op-Ed is going to look different than an Op-Ed in the local paper of a small town. And there are good reasons for that. Why should academic writing be any different? This is why I think the point about writing for public venues is extremely important. We live in a world in which it's not only increasingly important to justify the existence of the humanities, but also one in which certain aspects of humanistic inquiry are undoubtedly important to contemporary society. Yet I think it would be a mistake to think that those sorts of writings would or should have the exact same content as articles that get published in academic journals. They are not merely ideas expressed differently, but fundamentally different sorts of writing addressed to very different audiences. The importance of engaging in public discourse, however, also needn't imply that all humanistic research be pertinent to a general public (and I would contend that most of it is not). That's not necessarily a bad thing though. The pursuit of knowledge and the application of that knowledge are different goals, albeit both important and frequently intersecting. Serious take #2: As a literary scholar with a background in analytic philosophy, I'm certainly no fan of jargon. I think it's use should be limited to when it's necessary. However, it's interesting to me that this discussion of summaries has focused primarily on the articulation of jargon. But isn't that what dictionaries of literary terms are for? I don't quite see why the author of an academic article needs to duplicate that job. Certainly, if a new theoretical concept is being introduced, that should be articulated clearly, but I would hold that standard should always be in place (which is not to say that it also is and maybe these reference materials need to be updated more frequently and written in a more accessible fashion). I also think it's fair to assume a certain amount of knowledge (or ability to use reference materials) on the part of the reader. Doing otherwise, seems to needlessly increase the length of the works in question (which also isn't going to do much to attract a general audience). Consider a recent abstract from New Literary History: This essay advances several overlapping claims about how to conceptualize fiction within the density of historical time. First, I show that fictionality is entangled with ideologies of disenchantment and secularization. There is a long tradition in the West of both distinguishing and deriving fictionality from categories of bad belief; within the framework of the secularization thesis, possessing fiction—which is to say, having the literary infrastructure for a "willing suspension of disbelief"—becomes the mark of an achieved secular modernity. That history suggests the need to reconsider, in turn, what Catherine Gallagher excludes from her well-known account in "The Rise of Fictionality." The present essay seeks to theorize fictionality otherwise, in a manner that is hermeneutic and comparative. To do so, the second section addresses the archive of medieval literature and advocates for a shift in analytic focus, away from contemporary theorizations of literature and toward literary practice. "Commonplaces" of fictionality—or the shared motifs, genres, and contexts for semantic unearnestness—offer one strategy for doing so. The essay's final section then contends that these arguments are related to an important trend in medieval studies, a trend of arguably anachronistic scholarship on topics like medieval disability and medieval race, which deploys modern constructs in nonmodern archives. On the model of such undertakings, a comparative poetics of fiction stands to pluralize the literary-critical concept by returning it to its volatile interface with language's capacity to depict what is nonactual and the reinventions that result. (Source: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/731674) All in all this seems to be a pretty good abstract for what appears to be an interesting essay. Some terms are probably needlessly obscure ("the density of historical time"). Others are certainly jargon in some sense of the term: ideology, disenchantment, secularization. Book (and very large ones at that) have been written on each of these topics. I would certainly expect that the author will situate her use of these terms in the broader discourses. But the abstract actually seems to function as a pretty good summary of what the essay is doing. To entirely remove all of the theoretical terminology would seem to require making the summary much longer than it currently is (plausibly to the length of the article itself). And I'm just not entirely sure what is to be gained by that. Again, I'm all for academics writing clearly and using less unnecessary jargon. Additional summaries, however, seem to be a fairly artificial bandage for making humanistic scholarship more relevant to a wider public.

This ^^^^^^ You have limited space in an SOP. Don't waste it talking about your pre-undergraduate educational experiences when you could be further articulating your research interests, who you are as a scholar, and where you hope to go with your research.

@politics 'n prose, I'm not familiar with either of the programs you mention, so I can't comment too intelligently there. I don't think the distinction between literary studies and cultural studies is particularly relevant in today's academy, so I wouldn't worry too much, especially if those programs are housed in strong English departments. I do however know that say, people with PhDs from American Studies departments often struggle in comparison to their colleagues in "traditional" English departments, though the job market is awful for everyone. I can also say with relative certainly, that you will not be hired as a junior hire in a philosophy departments with a degree like Purdue's Philosophy and Literature. Philosophy departments are arguably a lot more parochial than English departments, but I'm not sure English departments are immune from that sort of criticism.For instance, journals like Philosophy and Literature are often looked down upon by people in literary studies as being too "traditional." I happen to like the journal, but these are the sorts of things it's important to beware of. I think in general that in the job market it's important to be able to fit yourself into a well-defined box. As I said above, Chicago's Committee on Social Thought is a program that I'm very sympathetic too, but despite the Chicago pedigree and the reputation of the program, it really doesn't do a good job of placing its graduates. Many people, myself included, are very attracted to out of the box approaches to scholarship, which cover a large territory. But if you look at those sorts of studies, I think you will often find that they are written by scholars who *already* have tenure and that their first books were often much more clearly situated in their home discipline. In regard to @UndergradDad's comment about the reconfiguration of the humanities, I think it's important to distinguish between the sort of interdisciplinary done for intellectual reasons and the merging of departments for budgetary reasons. The latter is a reality and it will only put more pressure on the job market, which I do not think will be favorable to applicants who do work that is hard to define. I hope I'm wrong, but that's my general outlook. For what it's worth, this is the best think I'm aware on the topic of interdisciplinary:

Graduates from interdisciplinary PhD programs generally have a tough time finding jobs. This is true even for very prestigious programs like Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. I imagine that would be an even bigger issue at an institution that is not particularly well ranked in English OR Philosophy. Interdisciplinary is and will probably continue to be a hot buzz word, but at the end of the day, you usually get hired by a department in a standard discipline and you need to demonstrate your disciplinary chops in order to stand a chance.

Once you're in a PhD program, grades don't matter until they do. Here's a pretty common (unwritten) attitude towards grades during the coursework phase of a PhD program: A = you're doing fine work A- = this clearly isn't your best work, but I don't have any serious concerns about your capabilities as a grad student B+ = there are serious concerns about your ability to be a successful graduate student. In most PhD programs, anything less than an A- is a very bad sign and is being given as a sort of warning. Even if there aren't explicit GPA requirements, there are GPA requirements.

Yes and no. Having read an ungodly number of articles in literary studies, I would say that a good essay on a literary text does both. The key is perhaps not to "engage" with a large number of secondary literature, but to clearly situate your reading in the context of the existing scholarship. For the body of the article it's common to structure it around a close reading, but the footnotes and brief framing comments make it clear where this reading converges and diverges with other readings. In this way, you may not be directly arguing for or against existing scholarship, but you are making it clear where this arguments fits into what's already out there. You might directly engage with only one or two other critics at key points, but you can easily make reference to 10, 20, 30 other scholarly works by briefly commenting on them in the footnotes in a 20 page essay. The merit of this style of argumentation is that it keeps front and center what's really important: your (hopefully original and compelling) reading of the text, while also doing due scholarly diligence and making clear that your reading is rooted in but also going beyond existing scholarship. NB: This would be a paradigm for an article in a good peer-reviewed journal. A writing sample may not need to fully fulfill this, but the closer you can come to approximating it, the more successful you're likely to be. There are, of course, other ways to go about writing an essay in literary studies, but I would say that the above is an important form that one will have to become accustomed to in order to succeed in academia.

If we're talking about PhD programs, then I don't think it's really necessary to talk about your career goals. A PhD in the humanities is essentially a vocational degree and the admissions committee will probably just assume that if you're applying, it's because you want to be a professor. And if you have alternate career goals, that might actually be something that makes an admissions committee look on your application less favorably (for all the talk about alt-ac, professors often look down upon non-academic jobs). Use those few lines of your SOP to more fully articulate your interests, your project, or your fit for the program.

There are two good answers to this question: 1. Talk to your advisor. 2. Look at the CVs of recent PhDs who got TT jobs.

Honestly, the admissions committee probably isn't going to care one way or another if you include work experience. Since most people don't have a whole lot to put on the CVs when applying to grad school, I think it usually makes sense to include work experience. It gives a more well-rounded sense of the applicant and makes for a nicer looking CV. The writing center work would also be relevant and is definitely worth including. If your CV is over 2 pages, you can probably cut most of the employment stuff though. I sincerely doubt the admissions committee is spending much time with CVs. That doesn't seem like it really belongs on your CV. Without a certificate, it's not really any different than you doing lots of individual reading outside of class. If it shaped the way you conceive of your academic interests then MAYBE you could talk about that in your SOP, otherwise leave it out. I sense you may be spending too much time thinking about the CV. Focus on the SOP and writing sample instead. Those are what will actually determine your admissions success.

No, and no.

I agree completely, though I would mention two caveats: 1. Placement is in many ways a backwards looking metric. If a program does a good job of placing its graduates in 2020, that means it was a good place to choose to attend in 2014. It's not a guarantee that the program will be as successful in 2026. Though one can usually assume that there will be at least some continuity here. 2. Not all attrition is bad. In particular, attrition in the first couple years of a program is a better sign than attrition later on. If graduate school (or that specific program) doesn't make sense for a given student, it's good for both the program and the student to realize this and the earlier, the better. 0% attrition is not the ideal, but high attrition is certainly concerning. Neither of these points discredit placement and attrition as metrics, they should just be taken with the appropriate caution.

I'm confused as to why you provide an article addressing the "value" of different undergraduate majors to address the state of the field for Rhet/Comp PhDs. I suspect that your description of the state of the field is largely accurate, but the data from that article pertains to a clearly distinct (albeit not entirely unrelated) issue.

Definitely meant Western Michigan University. I apologize for the mistake. As far as I understand it, Houston does fund most (if not all) it's MA students and has some pretty great philosophers as for as I'm concerned. I'd be more than happy to add Texas A&M to my list. I know less about Texas Tech. Edit: Just checked A&M's website. They seem to have instituted a PhD program and discontinued the terminal MA?

I think you have this backwards. There's much less discussion about MA programs, in part, because the advice there is much more transparent and less dependent on one's individual situation and interests: There are a number of MA programs that offer tuition waivers as well as a (small) stipend in return for teaching duties that also have a strong record of placing students into good PhD programs and offer a good, well-rounded philosophical education. Among these programs are Georgia State University, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Northern Illinois University, University of Houston, Michigan State, and some Canadian universities. Other programs offer partial or competitive funding, which can make sense if you receive such funding. MA admissions are not as competitive as PhD admissions, but they are still competitive, so it's a good idea to apply to a number of programs. Since an MA is typically a stepping stone towards a PhD program, fit is less important than the above factors (funding, placement, and well-rounded education). Going in to dept for an MA in philosophy does not make sense.

I think it "can" be worth it in a Lewisian sense. I just think that possible world is rather far away. In all seriousness though, I wouldn't dispute that some people have good experiences in such programs and get admitted to good PhD programs. But I'm not at all convinced that it's superior to the experience one would have at a funded MA program, and even if it were hands down the best MA in the world, it still wouldn't make sense to accrue that sort of debt. (If you're independently wealthy, do what you want.) Granted, all my experience with these programs is second-hand (I do know several people who went through the MAPH program), so I can't help you much in that regard. But I will say one more thing: how transparent a program is about its placement record says a lot about the program. GSU (https://philosophy.gsu.edu/graduate/placement-record/) and UW-Milwaukee (https://uwm.edu/philosophy/graduate/graduate-placement/), for example, have commendably transparent placement records on their websites. If a program doesn't advertise this sort of information, it's probably because they don't want you to see it.

Nope. Tufts and Brandeis offer scholarships on a competitive basis. If you get one of those, then it may make sense to attend. Otherwise, you also shouldn't be going there. Same goes with NYU, Chicago, et al. It's always a bad idea to take out loans for grad school in the humanities. A good MA is not a guarantee of getting into a PhD program. Furthermore, even if you do get into a PhD program, the job market is terrible and even if you do get a job, it's not likely to pay enough to allow you to pay off 50-100K+ in debt very quickly. Taking out loans for an MA in philosophy is just plain stupid.

I don't think it's necessary to cite in your SOP. I had one quote in mine, didn't cite it, and still got accepted to places. Just make sure you make it clear who the quote comes from and, if relevant, what work. That being said, you say you're using "quite a bit of quotes." If you're using more than one or two, I think you should reconsider. The SOP is the place to show your own voice, not the quotes of others. It's also not the place where you should be doing close readings relevant to your project. The goal should be to sketch out who you are, what you're interested in, and what sort of project you foresee yourself doing. While a quote might be useful in that, more than that will probably take away from it.

It seems like you have a good list of programs for people doing Lewis-style metaphysics. Given your stats, you will probably have more luck with MA programs. It's probably still worth applying to a couple PhD programs, but the ones you list are likely sufficient (NYU and Rutgers will be ridiculously difficult to get into but that's the case for everyone; USC and Syracuse won't be a cakewalk either but they should be slightly less competitive). I might think about adding a couple more funded MA programs. While I think you've done a good job of identifying those MA programs especially strong in your area of interest, I'm not sure fit is as important when it comes to MAs. Take a look at places like UW-Milwaukee or Georgia State that offer full funding. They may not have anyone who specifically works in your area, but Lewis is well enough know that someone can certainly advise a master's thesis and your main goal with an MA would be to garner a high enough GPA and good enough letters so that you can be competitive for PhD programs down the line.

Not a classicist, but wanted to mention that depending on the exact nature of your project, if you're primarily interested in reception, a comparativist-friendly German department might also be a sensible place to pursue this research (though I'm not sure Germanists are that much better off than classicists when it comes to the job market). I can think of several departments that might fit the bill.

Not really. Here are three topics of study that could conceivably fall under the description you gave: 1. The suppression of a particular heresy in monastic communities in Italy in the 14th Century 2. Philanthropic responses to poverty (and the surrounding discourse) in Victorian England 3. The American federal government's rhetoric and response to the AIDs epidemic in the 1980s An account of any of these topics would almost certainly pertain to an account of the power structures that determine "what people perceive as truth" in a given society and at a given time, as the "obligations which been internalized in people" in those societies as well as how those obligations came to be. And any of these projects could plausibly benefit from a Foucauldian theoretical orientation. If you want to get admitted to a graduate program in history, those are the sorts of projects you will need to propose. And, as will be clear, each of these projects will likely demand a radically different methodology, set of research skills, historiographical awareness and knowledge base. Furthermore, each project would require a very different doctoral advisor.