queennight

Also, all of my family and friends told me that I couldn't do it (from claims that the economy is crap so why go into it, to the idea that the discipline is useless, to the idea that I would hate it in a year and drop out). So I went ahead, became an english major, and did it myself. And it was pretty much the greatest feeling in the world.
 

Because I'm better at reading than at math.
 

Wonderfully put!  I think this is probably the most difficult thing to teach, but I think many people who study literature are in some ways better prepared to approach texts than many students of, say, philosophy or history, that I've met.  Literature, more than anything else (at least that I can think of), is the form of expression that forces you to suspend your own preconceptions, opinions, thought processes, etc. and try and surrender yourself to the voice of another.  To me, this is an important skill -- to be able to approach a text, a situation, or another human being and just listen and try to understand before you let your own ideas or opinions get in the mix; to approach something and try to understand it before judging it is something way more people need to learn to do. 

I love this thread so much.
 
It's easy to forget exactly why you study English when you're so bogged down in the semantics of it all. I jumped from science into the discipline (I went into first year thinking I would do a PhD in Immunology, which clearly didn't work out). It was a pretty drastic switch, after a lot of jumps all over the place; I went into science, then transferred to political science, then environmental geography, then history, and then finally stuck with english and loved it. For me, english was finally the subject where you could study the individual, rather than the collective. I enjoyed history, but I didn't enjoy military history, which was what early undergraduate courses were mainly on; I wanted to identify with the individual, and english gave me that opportunity.
 
Also, I took a Victorian Poetry class and learned about J.S. Mill and his depression and how he pulled out of it using Romantic poetry after a childhood stunted by utilitarian learning. I really connected with that.
 
For me, english isn't so much a potential profession as it is a completely soul-consuming lifestyle. In my multiple majors, I've never met a group of individuals more passionate about what they study. Also I'm not sure why this is, but for some reason I've always found english majors to be exceptionally kind individuals. I think it's simply because we study trauma and suffering all day long; it helps you appreciate others on an entirely different level. Cruelty won't get you far in this enterprise.
 
So - to answer the question: why? In some way, I think all disciplines point towards the answer to 'the meaning of life.' Biology gives you a breakdown of biotic organisms, chemistry deals with the molecular, physics grapples with cosmology, business teaches you about chasing money. None of those were satisfying to me. English, in some way, bridged the spiritual; I like to think that the imagination is one of the last holy places in our secular Western world.
 
I don't think that I'll ever fool myself towards thinking that I can understand purpose, or meaning, or whatever you might call it, but at the end of the day, I'm exceedingly proud to have chosen this discipline to try and grapple with all of life's questions. I love the inclusivity and the kindness; the simple, revolutionary idea that all stories are relevant are something that I hope becomes more and more common as the literature department ages. I sincerely believe that by studying the stories of others you can become a wiser and more well-rounded individual - you can connect. You can understand. You can relate. In a sense, literature is therapy, at its best; and I simply love watching individuals tell the truth about their lives, or fictional characters, etc. There's something so thrilling, fun, and exciting about a discipline that deals entirely with the imagination, and it's somewhere I would love to reside for the rest of my life. Is this madness? Maybe. All I know is that for me, it's been insanely worthwhile and fulfilling, and I couldn't be happier in a subject.

So, it has been longer than "the next few days"--but thanks again, zanmato, for the discussion prompt!   So, why English? (Or, "why English literature?" since that's more my focus, and I don't want to give rhet/comp short shrift.) A bunch of reasons. I love the actual technical process of literary argumentation, the (for lack of a better word) "puzzle-ness" of it: there's something breathtaking about watching someone take a bit of text from here, a snippet of text from there, seeing them amassing piece after piece of detailed textual evidence and building up these seemingly disconnected shards of language into a carefully built, coherent whole that shows you something you didn't see before. I love the openness of literary study to different methodologies, from detailed, übertraditional textual criticism to more theoretically-centered (or at least more explicitly theoretically-centered) approaches. I love the capaciousness of it, how it greedily absorbs other objects of inquiry into itself. Want to use literary texts as a lens through which to examine historical, philosophical, anthropological, or scientific phenomena? Be our guest!    Really, though, it's because even shorn of all the analysis and accretion of criticism the things we study are (this is subjective; I'm sure historians would say the same about the past!) still fundamentally interesting, entertaining, and (yes, it's ridiculously subjective, but still) beautiful, in and of themselves. Aside from their usefulness as objects as inquiry, all of them--poetry, plays, stories, novels, essays, movies, TV shows--are just plain fun to consume.   I'd also be curious to hear what draws people to the periods/genres/issues they work on, too. So, then, why do I study medieval literature?   Well, like the broader question, it breaks down into the "reasons" and then the actual reason. Given my love for detailed argumentation, I love how medieval literature can lend itself to very technical approaches, how so much can turn on minor details of translation or linguistics or manuscript evidence. I love the simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of medieval lit, how you can read a poem and hit something as (seemingly) universal as a fart joke in one line and then something in the next that is completely inexplicable without recourse to habits of mind and patterns of thought that are utterly foreign and removed from our own experience. I love the underdog-ness of it, how medieval literature gets no love, generally. I love the ways "the medieval" is endlessly created and recreated in contemporary discourse, fashioned into things and toward ends that have little to nothing to do with the actual Middle Ages. I love that, by being a medievalist, you are perceived as being ridiculously specialized when in fact you get to teach a full one thousand years of English literary history. There are personal things in there, too, that echo with zanmato's story. As a fresh out of the closet fifteen year-old, I bought a copy of Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality at a used bookstore, and it had a profound effect on me--which is funny, because now I disagree with a lot of his argument. But at the time it captivated me; I stayed up all night reading sly erotic poems written by unknown (to me) medieval monks who totally wanted to do each other. While that was a looooong time ago now and I had another, entirely unrelated career in the interim, I remember so clearly that weird rush in the blood, simultaneously being overawed by Boswell's seemingly magical ability to marshall convincing evidence based on detailed philological (not that I knew what the word meant at the time; I just knew the man could read Latin, which seemed so damn cool) argumentation but also feeling like, in some weird way, these men were long dead yet speaking almost directly to me.   And all that's well and good. But honestly?    I study medieval literature because, if you choose a reading assignment at random from one of the syllabuses of the classes I've taken in the last four years, there's a not inconsiderably better than average chance that it involved giants and/or a dragon.

Reading these in grade 3 really, really got me into English:
 

 
Maybe I should just use this post as my SOP and be done with it!

Love the new profile pic, 1Q84. In fact, I just finished writing a paper on "Lycidas" this morning. "Blind mouths" has to be one of the best conceits in the English language.
 
 
That's a good question. I came to academia from a creative writing standpoint, in that I wrote and published a bunch of poetry before I realized that I could actually spend my life studying the discipline. Since almost all of my poetry is "formal" in that it is mostly written in traditional forms (sonnets, villanelles etc.), I suppose it follows logically that I would have an interest in the nature of form and meter. Sonnets have always been my "specialty," as it were, from a writing standpoint, and a research seminar on Shakespeare's Sonnets in particular had a major effect on me. Not only were both professors (it was co-taught) fantastic (and both became LOR-writers)...the content was somewhat transhistorical, delving into Petrarch and even Ovid as traditional inspirations for Shakespeare. My proposed course of study is something of an extension of that, though at once more specific and more broad (if that makes any sense). But it all seems to work together, in my mind.
 
I also happen to love a lot of Early Modern writers simply on their own merits. I truly enjoy a lot of Milton, and my love of Shakespeare extends well beyond his sonnets. I have a healthy appreciation for Donne, Spenser, Sidney, Jonson, Marvell and others as well. Having said all of that, I'm a generalist at heart, and it will be a little sad to exclude some of my favorite periods / genres from graduate study, but at the end of the day, if I can spend my grad school years focusing on transhistorical prosody, grounded in the early modern era, I'll be happy as a clam. Assuming clams are, you know, happy.
 

 
(I think it's safe to say that these clams aren't)

YES.  My Teacher is an Alien scared the living shit out of me when I secretly read it in some dark corner of the public library that my tiny little elementary school in downtown Winston Salem, NC used.  That series was fucked up. 
 
Yes, Wyatt, for how much of a minority we are, us medievalists seem to love crashing all the threads on GC.  I reaffirm unraed's post wholeheartedly.  I study literature for a million reasons, none of which are good.  Science is so awesome when you read about it in science fiction or read science from 1,000 years ago, but then you start to read the real stuff and its boring and hard.  If "real" science (pffffffff) was more similar to 12th century alchemy or to Star Trek that's what I'd be doing right now.  Or if I could get away with doing analyses of the poetics of scientific writing on invertebrate mating practices or tectonic plate movements instead of doing labs, I'd be all over that.
 
I also study literature because its impractical and useless and I have a lot of political beliefs about the importance of "useless" things in a capitalistic society.  On the other hand, it's practical for me because I'm trying to make a living reading books instead of being a wage-slave.  And because a B.A. in English isn't that sustainable in the Rust Belt (where I currently live).  Also my dad said I should be a plumber and I was a disobedient little shit -- I said I was going to be a poet and, for my day job, write erotic novels for suburban housewives to get off to to make up for their incompetent and oppressive husbands.  This eventually expressed itself as a scholarship package at a faraway college.
 
Unraed almost exactly described my basic, theoretical interest in the Middle Ages.  I fell in love with dream visions and hagiography in particular -- I was into science fiction and surrealism already, and these medieval texts seemed to outdo any modern text when it came to blurring the lines between dreams and reality.  I fell in love with the notion that matter was accidental and changeable in relation to the Creator's weird plans as well as the philosophical implications, tensions, and contradictions of the notions of authority and asceticism in monastic texts.  Also, medieval ideas of natural history and etymologies are just so wonderfully weird.  Also: Chaucer.  And marginal pictures of Asshole-Bird-Men (pardon my specialist jargon) getting trumpets rammed up their butts.  And Bernard of Clairvaux being a melodramatic fop whose biggest accomplishment was getting the Virgin Mary to spray breast milk into his mouth.  And Jesus' side wound.  And alliterative poetry.  Also, studying Europe before Protestantism came and ruined all the fun, before absolutist monarchy, before the free market and John Locke and Adam Smith (may they burn in eternal hellfire), before the stupid and incessant fetishization of individualism and the so-called "Enlightenment," before the Victorians and their boring doilies and all the other stuff I was supposed to read in school that made me regret majoring in English and not, say, French or German or Spanish or Philosophy.     

Brown and Pennsylvania don't require GRE Subject Tests, and both are highly ranked Ivys. (Although Pennsylvania will strangely accept your score if you wrote it anyways.) NYU also doesn't require it, but will accept it if you wrote it and are gleefully proud of your score. However, none of these schools are particularly renowned for Medieval Studies (which I think is the direction you're asking for?) so take them with a grain of salt; that being said, I think I've heard a couple times that it's all about the professor rather than the program.

Never stop trying. Never. (Panda: applicants, Attendant: administration everywhere)

I am actually very much so surprised - and a bit frightened - I thought acceptances would be focused more around early-mid March. But I guess most schools prefer February! Jeez; talk about soon.

(taking English to mean a wider "literature" definition; hope I'm not a sore thumb!)
 
Another early-reader here, hyperlexic around two years old. My parents are both from very rural, uneducated backgrounds; my mom was sixteen when she had me. But even though they divorced shortly after, both my dad and my mom were extremely dedicated to making me better off than they were. There were two junior colleges in the city and my dad has always been notorious about dumpster diving - he was giving me calculus books to study before I was in middle school. Another consequence of being rural, my mom didn't get a computer until I was 13 - and we never didn't have dial-up while I was there. So, even with the internet, all I could do was read. And before it, reading was all I wanted to do.
 
I read every book in the library of both my elementary schools and my intermediate school (5th-6th grade). I wanted to do it for middle school, but it was way bigger and I only got the wrap-around wall section and three of the rows. I always had the most Accelerated Reader points. For most of high school, I gorged on manga/Japanese comic books in addition to the "books" they had in the library (I'll eternally despise whoever came up with Tayshas and why they think reading the shittiest YA imaginable should be more valuable than every other type of book).
 
None of the classes in English really made me love English on its own - none of the teachers really seemed that into it, even though it was "advanced." The one defining point was in 10th grade, where we were given a list of short stories and picked one to analyze - I chose Akutagawa's "In a Grove." It must have been luck he was on there, because the teacher had no clue who he was. But that was my small taste of real Japanese literature for a while.
 
So I went to college for computer science, because I'd been good at programming already; I stopped reading so much these two years. Then I had a very affecting personal tragedy when I was transferring over to a four-year university. I started reading again, a lot, mostly for escapism and mostly escapist fiction. Kokoro by Soseki became my first entry point into "real" literature, by chance. The one World Literature class I had been taking was the only one that semester I still did well on, because it's the only one I could still care about. So I switched to English.
 
I initially had a kind of weird year of exclusively reading Japanese literature (besides coursework) - more than a hundred books - because I couldn't not. When I wanted to read something, I would just think, "there's a Japanese book for that." But that cemented it as my area of interest. Literature is my chosen field because everything I learn has relevance to it. I read non-fiction in other fields very often, but I know that knowledge is always building upon my understanding of some facet of literature - it's especially more obvious with Japanese literature (like my current binge on kimono). Reading and learning are what have always made me want to be alive.

Great topic!
 
I started out the same way most of you did, most likely -- started reading at an early age, preferred books to sports for the most part etc. I also started writing poetry at a very early age as well. In rhyme, no less. I can still remember the first few lines of a poem I wrote when I was ten: "A deer stood by, flickering its nose / Its tail taut, its body froze." Not exactly Pulitzer material, but hey, it rhymed and even had meter! Throughout high school, my writing of poetry turned into writing of lyrics, as I was in a few rock bands along the way (and I thought I could sing). I also played piano, drums, and dabbled in a few other instruments, also writing songs. I was a bit of a lazy high school student, but English and English Literature were by far my favorite classes. I recall only getting Bs in them, but I can remember saying to others at the time something along the lines of "I may not be an ace student, but I guarantee this material will stick with me more than for most of my fellow students." And I was right.
 
My life took me in a bunch of different directions in my late teens and twenties, but through it all I kept my reading of literature and writing of poetry as a major avocation, to the point that I became relatively "successful" as a poet. It was after I immigrated to the U.S. five years ago that I discovered (thanks to the erstwhile support of my wife, and her parents who are both professors) that I could, in fact make my avocation a vocation. I'd had a couple of vocational degrees, but formalizing my love of literature and poetry has been one of the best decisions of my life, and these last few years have been among my happiest. It just feels good to be on a long and fulfilling path. I don't think any of us would be doing this if we didn't love it, to some degree...and that's certainly the case for me. I could easily get into deeper, more personal details as to why I came to this decision in my thirties, but suffice it to say that experience is indeed a great teacher as well.

I was always naturally good at reading. By age 6, I was reading chapter books and I could spell my older brother's weekly spelling list without even seeing the words initially. I read 1984 for funsies in high school and I actually had nightmares in which acid was being poured on my boyfriend at the time as I watched his skin melt off because I wouldn't give up some mysterious tape that had incriminating evidence about his family on it. From there, I decided to go in to English education to prevent the breakdown to language and therefore the cumulation of power into one or a few individuals. About the same time that I decided I didn't enjoy working with high school students (thank you, required internship hours!), I discovered the Wierd Sisters from Macbeth and all their historical witchy gender implications. Boom. Done. Sold.

1Q84, I read your post while I was at work, and so did not reply (almost typed "apply!") then, but I agree with the others: apply.
 
i'll speak only for myself, but I know that I won't be my sane rational self again until after spring when I know my fate, and so I don't trust my decisions regarding graduate school from here out. I've already caught myself considering waiting another year to be more ready--and I have a lot of shit under my belt--just because I was panicking.
 
plus: if you apply and get into a school, even if it isn't one of those top schools, you might still kind of feel badass about having potentially been a serious competitor in that process.

Hey folks,
 
Because I was a bit curious, and had a bit of time on my hands, I went through and cross-referenced the USNews Top 40 Graduate English rankings with the 2014 Ph.D. applicant acceptance dates found through Grad Cafe's Results Search. It appears that some institutions sent out most of their acceptances on one day, while others opted for "rolling" acceptances and spread them out across a week or more.
 
Please note that this list is very approximate, as it is based on third-party information, and only on last year's figures. And I don't personally endorse the USNews rankings, but it seems to be the simplest go-to guide for the top schools. People can feel free to add more schools as they wish!
 
That said, the following list gives you some idea when acceptance decisions could be made this year. Waitlists and rejections are a different matter altogether.
 
Berkeley – Late January to Early February Harvard – Mid-February Stanford – Late January to Mid-February Columbia – Mid- to Late February Princeton – Late February UPenn – Mid- to Late February Yale – Mid-February Cornell – Mid-February U. of Chicago – Early March Duke – Late January UCLA – Early February U. of Virginia – Early to Mid-February Johns Hopkins – Mid-February UMich-(Ann Arbor) – Mid-February Brown – Mid-February UNC-Chapel Hill – Mid-February Rutgers (NB) – Mid- to Late February U. of Texas-Austin – Mid-February U. of W – Madison – Late January NYU – Late February Northwestern – Early February CUNY – Mid-February Indiana-Bloomington – Early to Late February Urbana-Champaign – Mid- to Late February Emory – Early to Mid-February Ohio State – Late January to Early February Penn State – Varied widely UC-Davis – Early February UC-Santa Barbara – Mid-February Vanderbilt – Late January to Early February U. of Iowa – Early March UMD-College Park – Early to Mid-February U. of Washington – Early to Mid-March WUStL – Mid-February Rice – Early February U. of Minnesota (Twin Cities) – Early February USC – Late January to Early February Carnegie Mellon – Mid-February UC-San Diego – Early February UC-Santa Cruz – Mid-February Notre Dame – Late February U. of Pittsburgh – Early to Mid-February  
 
Mid-February is (unsurprisingly) the most dominant acceptance period, though Vanderbilt, OSU, Stanford and a few others seem to be early accepters. The Penn State figures are rather baffling, and a cursory glance at the Results Search page shows that there was really no consistency in 2014, and some rejectees weren't even notified.
 
Hopefully some of you will find this helpful!

THE ACCEPTANCE THREAD HAS OPENED THIS OFFICIALLY MEANS THAT THERE IS HOPE

THE ACCEPTANCE THREAD HAS OPENED THIS OFFICIALLY MEANS THAT THERE IS HOPE

THE ACCEPTANCE THREAD HAS OPENED THIS OFFICIALLY MEANS THAT THERE IS HOPE

THE ACCEPTANCE THREAD HAS OPENED THIS OFFICIALLY MEANS THAT THERE IS HOPE

Well, with the advent of my conditional acceptance to Cambridge, it seems I have been assigned the duty of starting an acceptances thread for our little GradCafe cohort! I'm not sure how this works, but here goes nothing. I'll update my list as results come in.
 
Schools applied to:
 
Cambridge - accepted! No funding info yet.
Oxford - ?
Berkeley - ?
Cornell - ?
Harvard - ?
Yale - ?
 
As I said to Wyatt's Torch, I can't wait until we are all doing our happy I-got-in dances!
 

to get that cheese
 

rofl, Derrida, as old white french dudes go, was sexy as hell. A certain charm about his writing style that melts my heart. In a very homoerotic and slightly masochistic way. Like he's beating Western tradition, and your brain, into a bloody pulp and then stopping for a second every once in a while to wink at you with his pretty domineering eyes. He's a weird looking bastard but I'd let him deconstruct my drawers any day.

Also, I can't believe it hasn't been said already, but I think this thread should take a new direction. Mount Rushmore being the white-male-supremecist act of colonialist ideological terror and phallic worship that it is, I invite us to unpack this notion of a "Theorist Mt. Rushmore."

Eep, Cambridge just made me a conditional offer of acceptance!!!
 
I know the real challenge is yet to come: funding, oof. There's no way I could attend unless I get the Gates or a College scholarship or something similar. But!!! Still!! It took my entire application less than two weeks from the time I submitted the last of my supporting documents to be processed and accepted -- that seems like a compliment. And, also, Cambridge! 
 
This will make the rest of applications season sting a tiny bit less. <3