unræd

Oh yes, hreaðemus. Oh, yes.

Thanks so much for the helpful answer, omensetter. I certainly hope that's the case!

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.

I don't come up in a search of myself, because I keep a very low online profile, and because there's a college football player with my name who eats up most of the results (as well as one very distinguished soil scientist). If you narrow the search to include my current institution, there's another undergraduate here with my exact same (not at all common) name, first and last. He maintains an active twitter feed--there's nothing per se objectionable about it, but there are also things about it that certainly aren't professional/what I would want adcomms to see. Sigh.

They are a pain to read! And I'm a bit puzzled by the relative NRC rankings of the two UI schools, and wonder how sub field specific it is.

Have you guys also checked with your undergraduate English advising office? I know the "applying to grad school" advisor at my school keeps a packet of sample SOPs from students in the department who were accepted at high-ranked places (Cornell, Duke, etc). It's another good source for a bunch of successful SOPs, and one where you can get better information about the totality of the student's application package/their process in drafting the SOP. You can get the same person's sample to different programs, at different word counts, etc, to see how that editing process works. I know I used one of them (a Duke one) to help me when I started preparing mine.

So--has anyone completed their Harvard app yet and messed around with the weird language background page? It says to "List all foreign languages studied, spoken, or read. If your knowledge of a language did not involve formal study, indicate how acquired." It then provides ten sets of fields, in each of which we're to list an "Institution," "Language," "Course Number and Title," and "Grades received, if any." What did you guys do--list one language course for each set of fields? If you did more than one course per set, how'd you get all the numbers and (abbreviated, of course) titles to fit? The issue: I have more than ten language courses, so I can't use each single "Institution" grouping to just cover one course. But the input fields are so small that I also can't fit more than about two courses per "Institution" grouping, and use each set to cover one language. So should I spread a single language/institution over multiple groupings? That just looks so Frankensteinish and weird, and certainly doesn't seem to be how the form's intended to be used. It's nowhere near the most important part of the app, and I don't even have a clever little GIF with which to entice your interest. But advice is appreciated!

I was wondering about that, though--I'd remembered you taking the September test, and it certainly didn't seem like your scores required a retake!

WT beat me to it!

According to this site from ETS (which was accurate about the date of of September scores), subject test scores from the October exam won't be released until November 24th. And they don't mail scores to you at all, anymore, alas--but the plus side of that is that you can generate a "printed" version of your score report right from the myGRE portal as soon as your scores are in.

Oh, no--I wasn't saying either that he wasn't a good scholar, or that because he gave a single bad presentation, that means that anyone can get into his school with nothing but an SOP and a dream. Neither of those things are true, at all: he is in fact a good scholar, and his program turns away ridiculously qualified applicants every year. The only conclusion I was drawing was just that, as I said, no one--even admits to whatever tippy-top program you can name--is absolutely perfect. It's tautological, sure, and perhaps a facile thing to celebrate. But still worth remembering, I think, given how this process (and GradCafe, in a certain way) necessarily emphasizes your faults.

Also, I was at a conference this week and saw a presentation by a graduate student at one of the top schools in my field that was just absolute crap, and that gives one a certain "Well, fuck, I guess the sort of people who get admitted there aren't necessarily superhuman gods of scholarly perfection after all, so I might as well!"

I mean, the time and effort that went in to this is phenomenal, and deserves thanks and lauds. But this is one thread I will not open again until April.

Well, and I haven't even contacted any POIs--imagine the shame I'm bringing on my house! I kid, I kid. Buttressed by stories of successful admits without POI contacts and on the recommendation of faculty (who are also giving me the skinny on who's taking students and who's retiring, etc.--Old English is a small field), I decided I needed one less damn thing to worry about in this process and skipped that step entirely.

Would that this were not the story of all our lives! Sure, whenever. Let me know--I was going to try to do some elaborate, Mae West-y "Why don't you come around and PM me sometime?" thing there, but failed.

Your signature, too!

YEEEEHAW! How terribly, terribly exciting! Yay you! Woot! Is it weird to feel very proud of someone you've never met? I swear, I'm away from GC for a couple days, and cool shit like this happens!

Same here--I really do need the actual OE and OS, at least, for my argument to make sense. But like I said, I did consider putting the untranslated text of secondary source quotations in footnotes, and I may still do that when it comes time to cut for programs. In re your other question, it's a good one, but not one I'm qualified to answer. I mean, I assume your SOP for the English programs talks about the kind of work your hoping to do/have done with English texts, correct? And your undergrad degree's in English? Then I wouldn't think it's much of an issue since it's on your period, shows your approach, and is (most importantly) your best work, but again, I don't know. I will say that of my institution's three Medieval Latinists, two are housed in English and only one in Classics. But again: what do I know? Honestly, if kidnapping and interrogating adcomm members wasn't a federal crime...

Oh, definitely--way ahead of you! And, yes, I do feel appropriately skeezy about it, and that's absolutely the only sort of format manipulation I'm doing, and the only school for which I'm doing it. Everybody else is getting the whole thing, or a chunk!

I have to say, it sounds fascinating! And in re page chopping, it might be the case that if you resize your line spacing to, say, 1.9 instead of double, you can knock off a couple of pages. I don't know. So I hear. Never tried anything like that myself, for Yale's app. Nope. No sir.

What an utterly lovely idea! I don't have time to write my story now, but I definitely will come back and do so in the next few days. Excellent topic, zanmato.

I'm not going to touch the "where to put the footnote" question since you're doing MLA, and I use/am more familiar with Chicago. But assuming space isn't a major concern, are you sure it's wise to relegate the translations to footnotes, especially if there are so many of them? My writing sample has Old English, Latin, German, and some Old Saxon thrown in just for shits and giggles, and I translate everything right in the body of the text, in the "original language" ("translation set off by parentheses") way that's standard in the field if you aren't putting your translations in footnotes. It does take up more room (but you can translate the poetry in block quotes as prose in block quotes, which takes up much less), but it's what I was advised to do. I know you're applying to more medieval studies programs, but I'm loath to give a WS to an English adcomm that might have Victorianists, Modernists, Postcolonialists and a bunch of people on it who don't necessarily have reading knowledge of those relatively obscure languages and then make them have to flip down to the bottom of the page and back up constantly to follow your argument. And that's not a dig on those fields: there are plenty of medievalists who would sit on a MS adcomm who won't necessary have Occitan, for example (which I think you're also working in, correct?) or whom I wouldn't think would want to spend time on translating while reading scores of writing samples, or who come from fields outside literary study, where language work isn't as much of a daily reality. Sure, having to flip down to the bottom of the page, read a chunk, and go back up isn't terrible, but isn't very streamlined, either. In editing my own sample, I was told (by medievalists) to make the linguistic parts as easy as possible for any potential generalist readers, who might not have any medieval languages, including Latin--to put translations in the body, and to translate every little tiny scrap of language, even if it seems perfectly transparent to you. I was surprised, when I went back through, how many single words I'd left untranslated because they seemed so clear! (I briefly even considered putting the actual text of secondary literature not in English--German articles and whatnot--in footnotes, and just leaving my translation in the body, but while it's certainly acceptable/normal to see I couldn't bring myself to do it. I might, though, for the programs with really small WS sample sizes!) Plus, look at this way--if you're using your skills in translation as a selling point, put them front and center: showing them the Latin and your English right next to each other on the page will also make it easier for those with Latin on the committee to see just how wicked hot your language skills are!

Pshaw--no snafu, and hence no apology needed. I just didn't know what was what!

I'm not trying to be a douche, I'm just genuinely confused--I added Harvard to my list late, and if I'm going to send paper transcripts I need to get those puppies in the mail!

I'm coming to this conversation late, but where are you guys seeing that the Harvard English website says to send paper copies? The text at the English graduate admissions website here says, under the Admissions FAQ question on required documents at the bottom of the page, "Transcripts from each college/university you attended. The Graduate School requires that you upload your transcript(s) with your online application. Please do not send paper transcripts." Under the question about where to mail supplemental materials, that same English dept page says: "The entire application system is conducted online. Please do not send any paper materials to the English Department. Please note that GSAS no longer accepts paper materials." Am I just totally missing something somewhere?