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1Q84, have you read any Huysmans, perchance? Reading Against Nature with The Picture of Dorian Grey was one of the most fun pairings I did when I was aimlessly bumming around between jobs and getting by on stolen food and books in Chicago... Idk if it'll make Wilde any more palatable, but Des Esseintes (the main character in Huysmans' novel) is a Fop To Be Reckoned With -- its also the crazy weird book that makes Dorian lose his innocence. Victorians drive me nuts too, but pairing them with their cooler French contemporaries can help? Maybe? You've sparked my interest in Gissing though...

Congratulations to all the admits! Best of luck to you and congrats on your admissions -- looks like you've snagged some solid admits to make up for the Cal rejection!

Obviously, I have no idea where you are located, but you may want to look into teaching public school if you think that's something you can handle. Getting subbing certification just requires a BA in my state, and since I live in an area with (sadly) very low teacher retention rates I was able to get a job doing long term professional teaching on an emergency certification. It's hard work, but respectable and rewarding. There's also freelancing (someone on here a while ago was talking about E-Lance, which can be pretty legit). I know a bunch of people who do Americorps and I also know people who have found paralegal work with just BAs in English or Comp Lit. These are just things I've experienced or seen others do. There are obviously many options -- more, in my opinion, than you may have been led to believe in undergrad. Entry level work in fields like technical writing or copywriting/editing can lead to quite good careers as well, I believe. There are places for technical writing that I've seen that hire straight out of B.A.s (the main example I know of near-ish me that has hired lots of people from my alma mater is Epic Systems in Madison, WI).

Admissions pouring in... Congratulations to all!

Ohhh yeah, forgot about that for a second. Dude, 18th century Britain was weird as shit. Horace Walpole and William Beckford were in Parliament as well, yes? I dunno about federal government, but I could totally imagine an erotic novelist getting elected to California state government. And the author of 50 Shades of Grey could also very well be the next big host on Fox News and I wouldn't bat an eye. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_Who_Trespass)

No shame, and welcome! Both my SO and my undergraduate lit studies advisor have been trying to get me to get into him for a while, and what short stories I've read by him have been a lot of fun. Maybe I'll check out that collection when I get a chance. I think upper crust teenagers in the late 18th century had a lot more free time than us. I think of it as being about as much of an accomplishment as someone publishing a pulpy science fiction or horror novel (on like Tor or Baen or DAW books) in their first or second year of college. Pretty sure that book was considered a particularly trashy and adolescent example of the trashiest genre (Gothic) in a medium already considered pretty vulgar (the novel).

damn! Major congratulations!

Thanks, quena! Best of luck with yours too! I'm looking forward to seeing Comp Lit popping like English has. I wonder if comp lit programs (or any more comparative or interdisciplinary programs) take longer to get acceptances together simply because so many departments have large chunks of faculty rooted in other departments...

First, I Just want to send a double congrats to Gustav for the acceptances! I can at least stand with quena in saying I'm waiting to hear from Penn's comp lit program (I would have applied to an equal amount of English and Comp Lit if it weren't for a variety of non-academic related factors). I can echo this for Medieval Studies though - which like comp lit seems to be on a schedule completely different from both English and comparative literature.

Congratulations!! p.s. -- I was never under the impression that the "literature" in "lit rhet and comp" specified only English!

Thanks, that actually helps a lot! I guess this should seem obvious, but I'm terrible with e-mail etiquette...

Okay. So I know this is a problem some people might not want to hear. And maybe this has already been discussed elsewhere. But for those of you who have been blessed with acceptances already - do you respond to the email that is sent? My most recent notification was a formal email, and I'm not sure if I should respond to it -- I feel rude just letting it sit there in my inbox unanswered, but I also have no idea what to say -- I feel like whatever I say will seem overly formal and ungrateful (or just like a superfluous email) or overly giddy and grateful. Anyone know if there are any agreed-upon conventions on how to handle this wonderful problem?

I got a similar email from Fordham (I applied to their Medieval Studies Master's program). I thought it was strange too, but I honestly haven't read much into it, it seemed like a generic email to me. The Fordham emails are kind of weird. I got an email from M.S. program saying that my dossier was being reviewed and then invited me to come visit and crash on a graduate student's couch. It seemed sort of personalized (saying that I should consider speaking to a specific professor), but I still wasn't sure what to make of it. Like, "yeah, we just got your application, come visit us without knowing whether you'll get in or not!"

Hell yeah, congrats! um. also. (i just got accepted to the University of Chicago)

Congratulations, SubmarineReflection, a fantastic program! (I'm the closeted comparatist who's been eagerly waiting for y'all to get some news...)

Lol YES. I love The Monk. That book is among the most ridiculous, puerile, morally disgusting, and over-the-top annoying novels I've read.

Congratulations to all the admits! All are well-deserved, I'm sure!

^LOL this is hilarious. Love it. WT, your poem is great too. This happens to me too, but also when I'm not expecting anything. Maybe I'm just naturally paranoid and jumpy though. I don't know what the significance of today was supposed to be admissions-wise, but all I have in my emails are spam ads for crappy jobs in my area and an anti-bullying powerpoint sent to all the teachers at the high school I work at. Hope all you wonderful people who haven't gotten any good news get some as soon as possible. I will probably not be able to focus on anything until I hear word from Chicago again.

What!? What!? I leave GC for a few days and there's all these *insane* admits! Congrats to everyone, like so much! Can I just hug all of y'all?

hypervodka, though my interview was a very different format (skype, just two profs at once), what you say is very relevant to my experience. SOP and WS were the focus, and email correspondences I'd had with them came in to play at times as well. the only discussion of language was them telling me what resources I'd have for further study (though the interview was for English, language prep is important for anyone trying to do medieval studies). My WS dealt heavily with translation and translation issues though, so perhaps because of that they felt no need to "test" me. But I too never felt interrogated, even if they had specific things they wanted to ask me. But yeah, can't stress the SOP and WS thing enough. Even if it's painful, it really is worth going over those two things again. When it's been almost two months since you submitted your materials, it helps to know what you can casually mention to "update" their knowledge of you and to know what they're working with so you can address their questions, etc. Best way to know how they see you is to go over the two biggest things they have to work off of when getting to know you on paper.

Yeah, I'm not sure how I would measure "rigor"; like others I will assume all will be demanding. Everyone will understand challenge and rigor differently due to differing interests. My undergrad experience reflects ComeBackZinc's comment almost to a t: plenty of people got by with passable grades without doing that much work, but others (like me) worked their asses off -- I want to say it was because I chose to, but it was really because I was falling in love with doing academic work. People like me resented those who didn't go the extra mile because it made the general classroom atmosphere less stimulating (but also, perhaps, drove us to work that much harder). I imagine this "sharing the load" atmosphere will be present in a Ph.D. program even more strongly -- your cohort will be more carefully selected, more passionate, and (possibly) more competitive than in undergrad no matter where you go, I would think. That's how I imagine it anyway -- people will know if you're not keeping up, and I imagine that will be the case almost anywhere, especially in the aforementioned "top 50" or whatever universities. In short, I'm sure all of us 2015ers are in for quite a demanding few years. :-)

Lol, I have a pretty common eastern European surname, and google searches of me will often yield white pages of a bunch of Romanian immigrants in the U.S. and a popular Romanian EDM DJ. Wyatt, I too am pretty useless at social media. I have a linkedin, but have never kept a facebook for longer than a year. I had one recently, but then got sick of finding myself in petty arguments or hurting someone's feelings based on this friend acceptance or that casual comment. There's also a lot of people who find me who, frankly, I have no desire to keep in touch with! The only management I've really done is to have a friend remove a pretty grotesque poem that I drunkenly wrote for a student zine in my freshman year of college from the zine's tumblr. The rest is linkedin, a youtube video of a presentation I did at my college, and a twitter that I don't know how to use (but somehow, apparently, I managed at some point to retweet a medieval manuscript illustration of Pope Leo III getting his eyes gouged out by a group of ruffians??).... I've considered getting an academia.edu profile just to download essays for free, but I have no idea what I would put on my own profile! I have no real publications... maybe someone can enlighten me on that aspect of the website.

Lol, no actually. Though looking back, it was a goofy post. It's just awkward when you post something and then see that someone has addressed similar things while you were writing your post and I wanted to express gratitude and comradery. (I'm also tired from a long day of work and writing super goofily today)

Didn't see this when I posted, but yeah! Right on, man! Totally going to bring up this idea when I go in to try and teach 18 year olds how to write sentences and paragraphs tomorrow! These are intrinsically useful things that also happen to be beautiful, fun, and powerful.

I was getting ready to respond to bhr's post about rhet/comp and saw this too and wanted to affirm that I did notice this too. While I agree that distinctions between "high" and "low" literatures are usually BS (I'm trying to be a medievalist, half the shit I read is pulp fiction, just written like 700 or more years ago), I also saw the point they were trying to make. What I saw in my program was these "zombie" courses getting offered as remedial writing classes for students coming into college not being able to put a sentence together. Which is fine. Yeah, cool. But I agree that there should be upper-level courses for those things too, of course. Science Fiction Studies, for example, is like, an actual academic field (and journal). To address PW and Rhet/Comp and bhr's wonderful post, I saw the Rhetoric major at my college get completely shut down because no one knew what it really was about and it was perceived as "Lit Studies lite." Which was the department's own damned fault if you ask me. I feel like if I had been able to take just one or two professional writing classes as an undergrad, my job prospects out of UG would have doubled or tripled, even as a lit studies person. Just because I have more "literary" academic aspirations, doesn't mean I don't value easing my job search. Or fucking getting able to work with rhetorical theory and stuff! That stuff is legitimately interesting, demanding, and nuanced in its own right!