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The academy is, almost by definition, not the place to look for "unacademic criticism." I will say the there's far more diversity within programs than you might expect -- while certain schools do have certain flavors, there's usually a wide range of methodological approaches taken by both faculty and students at any given place. But graduate programs in literary study are (for better or worse, given the job market) designed to produce scholars of literature that engage with literary studies as an academic discipline.

I'm going to just very narrowly answer your question about publications -- this isn't an answer to your broader "do I stand a chance" question or a comment on the other information about your applications that you provide: the vast, vast (seriously, it's vast) majority of students accepted to PhD programs in English (literature; I don't know about Rhet/Comp) do not have publications in peer-reviewed academic journals.

I have a colleague whose writing sample and SOP each had multiple typos, and he got in to just about every school he applied to. Which is not say that noticing typos in your materials after the fact isn't anxiety producing -- seriously, don't reread your stuff after it's sent -- but just that a typo (or many!) isn't at all disqualifying. Take heart!

Welcome to being an academic! If you get in to a PhD program, you'll fit in just fine. I don't mean to be flip, and without further details it is of course entirely possible that your materials are indeed all those things. But I'd doubt it on spec, just because your own feelings are not a really very good guide to that. They're actually a horrible guide to that! Take heart: everyone feels this way applying to graduate school. Everyone (alas!) feels this way in graduate school. Everyone feels this way on the job market (where, admittedly, the pressures are far, far tighter than at any other point along this timeline), everyone feels this way as they struggle for tenure, and even professors with fancy endowed chairs who've been teaching for 30 years sometimes feel this way, too. It's normal, it's natural, and it's even a (potentially) good sign, in that your worry about not being in pace with the field shows you know there is a field to keep pace with, and that you're not applying blindly with no idea of what the conversations is academic literary study are really like, which is often an issue for (some) candidates direct out of undergrad. (And I say that as someone who went directly from a BA to a PhD program myself, and who thinks a lot of the "you've got to get a Master's first"/"schools prefer MAs"/"MAs are necessarily stronger candidates" advice on GradCafe is often too strongly stated, occasionally misplaced, and sometimes even downright wrong.) The bigger question is coping with it. Short term, there's not a lot to be done: waiting around for admissions is shitty, and there's no way around that. Myself, I avoided GC between the time I submitted my last app and got my first acceptance, and tried (with naturally relatively little -- but some! -- success) to prevent myself from obsessing about my applications by spending time with non-academic friends and throwing myself into non-academic hobbies. In the longer term if you're admitted to a program, imposter syndrome's a beast, and there are all kinds of ways of trying to build yourself (and your colleagues, who'll be feeling the same things!) up and, often more importantly, keep things in perspective.

That may be true for UCLA, but at Berkeley very, very few of the graduate students have cars, and pretty much everything is accessible via a good public transit system. Never fear, you can still go carless in Cali!

So much of it is holistic, and is shown in broader strokes through all your application documents (writing sample, SOP, letters) rather than in a paragraph tacked on at the end of one of them. What sort of scholar are your materials suggesting you want to be? What critics and intellectual/theoretical traditions do you engage with? What's your methodological approach? What sort of texts do you see yourself working on? You have an identity as an applicant, and it should be visible as a thread running through your application. But honestly, I also think the whole idea of "fit," at least as it's usually discussed on GradCafe as some magic and mysterious key that links singular applicants to singular programs through an alchemical configuration of shared interests and opportunities, is overrated. People who do well in a given application season tend to do well in a given application season. The fact is, strong applicants will tend to be picked up by multiple programs, irrespective of those programs' differences. If you've applied to programs sensibly, choosing ones with faculty that are more-or-less open to your interests, chances are you could do the work you want to do at any of those institutions. The other, nasty, undiscussed part of the equation, though, is that "fit" includes all kinds of institutional things that really are opaque (or that can be) to applicants. The department's not taking a Victorianist this year, because two of last year's Romanticist admits shifted period. An Early Modern prof is going on sabbatical, or nearing retirement, and won't be taking on new students. There isn't a medievalist on the committee this year to argue forcefully for the relevance of a writing sample on 12th century Anglo-Norman diplomas to literary study. There are (this is always true) just too many twentieth century applicants, and while a great many are excellent on spec, there just aren't the spaces for them, even if they all "fit" the department. Prof A got an email from an old student of theirs, Prof B, who's now the undergrad advisor of an applicant to Prof A's school, saying to keep an eye out for that application. This is exactly it. The purpose of the research question articulated in the SOP isn't actually to outline a course of research, even though we all write/wrote as if it were, and even though when you go on visit weekends profs will nod their heads sagely as you all discuss it. It's there to show that you know what a long-term research question looks like in literary studies -- what sort of things are asked in the field, what aren't, how they're situated, etc. As I said, it's usually a good idea to. My point was that it's not strictly speaking necessary, nor worth forcing or worrying about overly much. The SOPs I wrote for two of the programs that I got into didn't mention POIs (although it was clear because of my historical period who I'd work with), and I know students at my current institution (UC Berkeley) who didn't mention profs in their Berkeley SOPs.

Mentioning POIs in your statement of purpose is (like the lit GRE) one of those things that gets a lot of attention here in the fora because it offers the illusion of a degree of control that is obtainable if only you'll research enough, which is a predictably attractive thing for people with excellent research skills but who find themselves in a situation (graduate admissions in literary study) where they have almost precisely zero control, ceteris paribus, over the outcome of the process. It also often seems like the only way applicants have of addressing "fit" (it isn't), which can otherwise appear wholly inaccessible and mysterious -- in addition to being ultimately up to the school in question to determine (it is). The fact of the matter is that you can get into programs of all kinds by mentioning professors you want to work with, but you can often get into those same programs without mentioning any professors at all. Yes, on the balance, it's usually a good idea to indicate who you would see yourself working with, and why -- but that's not a laundry list of people you might want to take classes with; to the extent that it signals anything institutionally, it's a list of potential dissertation supervisors. But at the same time, programs know that people change, and that for all intents and purposes (at least in the US) no one ends up actually pursuing the course of research outlined in the SOP, and there's no expectation that they do so -- people even change historical period, much more often methodological approach, and even more often the actual topic! There's no magic number above which you'll seem dilettantish and unfocused and under which you seem inflexible and not able to work with anyone else. It really boils down to: if you can make a solid, well-researched case for a substantive connection between a professor's work and your own, make it; if not, don't. (But, real talk, more than three is probably excessive, and the norm is closer to two.)

The UC graduate schools require a separate personal history in addition an academic statement of purpose -- it's essentially a diversity statement, and is not a departmental requirement, but a university system-wide one.

It's important to note, though, that the more queer-friendly the program, often the less emphasis is placed on sexual identity as a marker of diversity. At Berkeley, for example, so much of the graduate student population (and faculty) is LGBTQ+ that it becomes the sort of thing that doesn't really answer the personal statement's prompt about working with/contributing to the education of students from diverse backgrounds. I know Berkeley profs who've suggested that applicants not use their sexual identity as their lens for the statement, in fact, because it's really just not a thing here.

Have you already paid the application fee? If not, my guess is that it's just an attempt on their part to make sure that people who start an application finish one -- no, they don't start considering applications until after the deadline, but it's in their financial interest to make sure that every app begun is an app paid for.

Of course, if you're somehow wrong about your gut feeling and it turns out he doesn't veto legislation the religious right tries to put forth, I and many other Americans will be less "extremely surprised" than "deprived of our civil rights," but hey. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, take what follows with a grain of salt, "it's just one person's experience," etc, but I had successful SOPs for two schools that didn't mention POIs for exactly the reasons you mention. Unlike in my other statements, there wasn't an honest, sincere way to tie their work to mine, and so my fit paragraphs for those schools focused on institutional draws more broadly (collections, research centers, resources, etc). A huge caveat, though: my field is such that even though I didn't mention them, it was entirely clear who'd be my advisors -- each school only had one professor in my period.

Also, Berkeley has a number of comp lit profs with joint appointments in Classics, and comp lit students who work on Ancient Greek and Latin -- although they also work on them in conjunction with modern literatures.

I included a statement like this for the two schools whose writing sample length limits required me to submit a smaller portion of a longer work, and in that sort of context it's certainly helpful (and often explicitly requested). And yes, certainly, of course, if the paper would appear nonsensical without contextualization because its basic warrants reflect assumptions tied to a particular prompt or course, then you should definitely provide that necessary context, but I doubt that's the case for most self-contained writing samples. When you're presenting a whole, unexcerpted paper that presents a self-contained, sensical argument (and surely "what the goals were for the paper" are explicitly addressed within the paper itself -- part of the work of any paper is to situate itself and the question it's treating) that sort of statement isn't required, or even common. The hiring committee analogy also seems imperfect; applicants to graduate programs often don't have a "larger body of scholarly work" in which to situate a writing sample, and moreover the discussion of their work in those larger terms -- and their writing sample's place within that -- happens in the SOP. I'm just not sure the value of telling applicants to categorically add another preparandum their agenda, especially when it's something that admissions committees aren't requiring, requesting, or expecting.

This is a very minor thing in an otherwise excellent post about the necessary (in the logical sense) importance of canonical works to theoretical positions that engage the concept of hegemonic canonicity, but I just wanted to correct this bit for anyone thinking of applying to UCB. The program requires that you have a Shakespeare course, but not necessarily a graduate one -- it can be an upper-division undergraduate class, so most students enter the program already having fulfilled the requirement with a course taken at their undergraduate institution. (It's also worth noting that there's been a lot of recent talk about how odd it is that we're one of the last holdouts for a specific author requirement at the graduate level, and I'd not be surprised if the req were gone in a couple years.)

I'm at Berkeley. All students admitted to the English program are funded, including international students. There are two in my cohort of thirteen; I know of at least one in the incoming cohort of nine. Hope that helps!

I began my SOP in the summer before my application season -- about in early July, I think? It was a solid week's work to produce a document that I thought was pretty good, and then months of redrafting and tweaking after my readers saw it and went "lol nope." (Which is precisely the reaction you want them to have.) It went through multiple drafts with multiple readers, incorporating feedback from each and then starting the cycle over again. It never felt finished, really -- I think I probably made tweaks to it here and there for different programs, especially in terms of talking about fit (when I did, which wasn't always), right up until a couple deadlines -- but it had reached what would become its final form by, say, September/October or so. It is never too early to ask your referees for letters, and so if you know who it is you'll be using, you might as well send them an email today. If they aren't already helping you prepare your materials, they'll eventually want to see copies of your SOP and sample (perhaps in addition to other things), and they'll want to know about your list of programs -- a couple of my letter writers wrote different letters for different places, so it's nice to give them at least a ballpark idea of what sort of ones you're thinking. (Although, again, they might be the same people helping you decide that!) I applied to ten schools. The top, say, 7-8 of those were set by the spring of my junior year, in part just because there's a limited number of programs that are strong in OE, and because my advisers were very clear about what places warranted applications and what ones didn't. The last 2-3 were settled on by September. I didn't reach out to POI at all. Some people do, and if that's the sort of thing you're interested in, go for it! But it is most definitely not the norm in the humanities (none of the people I've talked to about it in my cohort did), not expected, and depending on how the process is set up in the department, has few benefits in terms of admissions. Where it might be useful is knowing if a prof you're interested in working with is retiring soon or something like that, but that's also the sort of thing your advisors/referees should be able to help you with, if they're as plugged into their/your field as they (ideally!) should be. But again, if that's you're thing, knock yourself out. My sample was a paper I wrote for a class the end of my Junior year, and I applied in the fall of my Senior year. I began revising it midsummer, and it went through three rounds of research/writing/revision with my advisor before all was said and done. It was finished by September, but I didn't do some of the length editing (*cough* and margin/spacing-playing) required for programs with different length limits until I started applying in the fall. Hope that helps!

I can't speak for other fields like American Studies that would seem to be closer to what you're interested in, but the idea that interdisciplinary programs come with severe job market downsides unless you're at a certain sort of institution (insert obligatory "bleh" for the concept of ranks and tiers here) certainly holds true for the interdisciplinary fields I know about. Berkeley is definitely amenable to interdisciplinary work; of the the twelve grad classes required for coursework, only seven need to be in English and students are encouraged to take classes outside of the department.

Most graduate schools -- not programs/departments, mind you, but schools/divisions -- have minimum full time credit enrollment requirements before candidacy, usually the equivalent of three courses per semester. You should check what that number is for your school. There are usually "filler" credits that you can take if you're doing lab work, say, or teaching, or studying for candidacy exams, but I have a hard time picturing a DGS or program who'd be cool with a two course full-time load for a student who isn't also doing one of those other things.

I am also someone who went in to the PhD knowing at least my narrow chronological specialization, as well as what sort of arguments I generally like to make. But at the same time, there's a lot of leeway in there, and I've been thinking a lot about it lately, about who I want to be as a scholar and about how I'm beginning to make that take shape. The big medieval conference was this past weekend, and a friend asked me idly as we walked to the next panel if I was more a poetry guy or a prose guy. In answering that question--which was just casual, between-panel BS--I actually learned a lot about what I value in literature, and what I don't, and what sort of person I want to be in the field. As for the above, they're all excellent ideas for how to go about specializing! And those sorts of things--that is, your actual interests--should obviously be at the fore. But in addition to text, methodology, distance/closeness to the material, and gaps in existing scholarship, let me add another possible discrimen, albeit one that is maybe less popular to talk about: cold, hard cash. No, I'm not advocating chasing every job market trend, or doing stuff you don't like just because it's hot or because you can get paid to do it; I'm as resentful of the neoliberal commodification of humanistic knowledge based on its ostensible utility as the next guy. But at the same time, a boy's gotta eat, and that can sometimes inflect your work in interesting and unexpected ways that are worth at least being open to. For example, I got a religious studies grant next year, and while I certainly have worked on religious texts and the grant made sense in the context of my current interests/scholarship (otherwise I wouldn't have applied for it!), I wouldn't have thought to frame that as a primary interest or specialization. Now, though, it will begin to become a part of my identity and how I present myself as a scholar, how I talk about and situate my work, if only because it'll be both part of my cv and a thing that will influence some of the conversations I have and the thinking I do. This is in some ways as much an argument for a certain openness to serendipitous discovery as it is for following the money, I suppose, since there are a lot of other things that can push you in unexpected directions or towards projects you might not have otherwise considered--available archival resources, your colleagues at your institution and their work, professors, what courses happen to be offered when you're in coursework, etc etc etc. That, then, would be what I'd say: be open-minded and flexible!

Berkeley provides five years (two of which are teaching) of guaranteed funding in its initial admission packages--which is roughly comparable to elsewhere, although a lot of the peer departments it looks to are starting to offer six years. (Yale did last year, and Harvard did this year, I think.)

It's certainly true that gre and gpa are often first reviewed, and often for purposes of cutting out applicants/meeting requirements set by the grad school as opposed to the department. But they don't have "more weight" than a writing sample, at all, at least in English (and the humanities more broadly) assuming your scores aren't beyond the pale. Maybe this is a disciplinary disconnect--are you in a field in the humanities, GradSchoolTruther, or something else?

Except that it isn't the mission of public universities to "educate all students… regardless of how ignorant an applicant is," and no one is "entitled to an education at a public university" in the United States. San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez established that there is no fundamental right to even a primary education, much less a college one, under the US constitution. Many state constitutions guarantee education to children (usually through the twelfth grade) as a right, and the Supreme Court has recognized since Meyer that students have a right to that (again, primary and secondary, not college) education unimpeded by certain state actions. State institutions of higher education are still bound by the fourteenth amendment, in that if a state is going to offer public college education it must do so equally among those students it educates (this is why, for example the use of affirmative action in college admissions is a matter of constitutional law). But that jurisprudence has never held that public universities must accept all applicants, which is the only schema under which a process that admits some applicants but not others on the basis of merit (i.e. by rejecting "ignorant" applicants, to use your language) would be a constitutional issue. That there isn't any sort of "right" to postsecondary (i.e. university education) can be most clearly seen in the fact that students at state schools, even land-grant ones, still need to pay tuition. Again: no one is entitled to an education at a public university, which means that in admitting students those universities are free to use academic merit and the fit of a prospective student's proposed research within the department--which is what a writing sample or interview is intended to measure--as a discrimen in admissions. It is true that they may not consider status as certain protected classes in their decisions (they can't, for example, categorically deny admission to an applicant solely because she's a woman), but that's an equal protection issue, not a first amendment one.

You've misread molloy's post. He's one of the most tireless advocates here on issues of income inequality and the importance and rewards of teaching socioeconomically disadvantaged students, which he has, you know, actually done. In the phrase "the alternative being to be lucky enough to find a job teaching the children of the 1%" the "teaching the children of the 1%" percent is a bad thing, the downside to taking a more stable and financially secure job in a private school instead of a public one. Telling him what he has no idea about when you have no idea about him is, again, not the most charitable of possible responses.

Except that it's just that sort of language that internalizes and, frankly authorizes, a lot of real world, piss-poor academic labor practices. No, academia should not be a labor of love in which one resigns oneself to a potentially economically precarious position in return for experiencing a vague Life of the Mind that doesn't need recompense because it is supposedly its own reward. I'm usually one of the first ones here to look askance at people saying that the cruel realities of the job market are in any real sense oppressive (I'll totally buy exploitative, though), but I think it's equally misguided to say that those realities don't matter. It's a job, and the minute we treat it less like a job that deserves (like all labor!) fair compensation and instead imagine it as special and set apart, as some quasi-monastic pursuit of ill-defined capital-K "Knowledge" that imagines financial hardship as somehow constitutive of the scholarly project, is the minute people think they don't need to pay their students/adjuncts/faculty well because, hey, what the hell do they do all day but sit around and talk about poetry and doesn't everyone know there's no money in the humanities and isn't that what they signed up for, anyway? I also don't know how productive it is to try to discern the OP's passion or lack thereof at this remove. OP's been through this, OP's done this, and OP's not sure they'd do it again. Saying that that must mean that oh, well, OP just didn't want it hard enough, or doesn't now, seems uncharitable.