Aquinaplatostotlestine

Butitwaslaundryday, Like you, I've been accepted into the PhD program in comp. lit. at Chapel Hill. Are you planning on attending the "long" visiting weekend March 25th-28th? I'm also trying to decide between UNC and another program (Penn State) and am hoping that visiting both campuses later this month will make that decision easier! Best of luck with making your decision and congratulations on your acceptances! Cheers.

While I agree with Medievalmaniac that what they wrote does sound very promising, I think in addition to the very good list of questions provided you need to add one very simple one: are they, or are they not, guaranteeing you admission? I had an experience similar to yours this round. One of the schools I was accepted into informed me that while they could not take me into their PhD program, they were happy to let me into their M.A. (Ironically, this was supposed to have been my safety school!) However, in the email they sent me there was none of this business about "inviting me to apply." They told me straightforwardly I was in. Had they worded the email ambiguously, like yours sounds, I would have immediately emailed or called and asked for clarification. And I think that's probably what you should do too. Best of luck with your application! Cheers.

Graciela, Yes, I am definitely working (and will continue to work) on polishing up my French. Ideally, I'd like to be able to read some primary and lots of secondary sources by the end of the first year of my doctoral program. Perhaps that's ambitious, but since my goal is to be able to read (rather than speak) the language, I believe it's doable. My background in Spanish is also helping me greatly. I'm also hoping to be able to do a little more work in Latin. At the moment, with a good dictionary and a lot of patience on my part I can work a little in the language. However, it is so important for what I want to study that I need to spend a lot more time on it. Finally, Portuguese. I can already read quite a bit just thanks to knowing Spanish, but I would like to be able to speak this language by the time I finish my PhD. Having graduate level skills in both Spanish and Portuguese will really help me (I think) achieve my long term goal, which is a cross-appointment in comparative literature and Spanish/Portuguese (or Romance Languages) departments. Now, if only accomplishing all of this were as easy to do as writing it out! Best of luck with your future applications.

Although I’ve been accepted into a few good Comparative Literature programs this round, my language abilities are nothing extraordinary. Like you, I’m fluent in Spanish. However, I’m not a native speaker and my knowledge of the language comes from living in Mexico for nearly two years and from taking Literature, Culture, and Anthropology courses at a local university there. I have the equivalent of four semesters of college French (3 classes + 1 summer intensive in Amiens, FR.) Finally, I took one accelerated Latin course. It claimed to the equivalent of a year’s worth of studies, but honestly the whole thing was pretty basic. Besides English, the only language I can study (and appreciate literary subtleties in) is Spanish. I think there are two additional things that have really helped me, though. First, I have a Masters degree in English Literature and while I was finishing that degree I was able to publish an article in a peer reviewed journal in my field. That meant that I had a really polished writing sample that laid out pretty exactly what my focus was. In my SOP I also made sure to show how my previous work absolutely could be a springboard into what I want to do now in Comp. Lit. Secondly, I only applied to schools that had a number of faculty members--and in a number of different departments--working in my field (Inter-American studies, Utopian studies, and the discovery of the Americas). As much as I could, I made sure the “fit” quality of my application was really, really high. I knew I would be competing against “better” qualified candidates in the sense that they would have more language prep, so I wanted my application to be something potential Ad.Comm. members would notice and be excited about. Hope this helps! Cheers.

Congrats' on UCLA, Stony Brook and Buffalo. That's great. Like you, I've been accepted into a few schools (Penn State, UNC Chapel Hill, and CU Boulder) and am still waiting on word from NYU. I know that two weeks ago one person was admitted, but since then I haven't heard anything. I didn't know that in comp. lit. people had been interviewed. If that's true, then my guess is that at this point those of us who haven't been interviewed will not be accepted. But here's hoping for some early March acceptance notifications! Cheers.

To jump into this great discussion, here's what I'm reading and what's on deck: currently, I'm polishing off Foucault's unabridged History of Madness (the Routledge edition) and Roberto Bolano's Los detectives salvajes, which I'm not liking as much as that other, much more massive novel of his, 2666. I'm also pushing though Francis Bacon's Novum Organum and rereading some of Shakespeare's history plays. On deck, I've got an anthology of Kierkegaard's writing I'm excited about, several books by Borges and Alfonso Reyes that need (re)reading, and Montaigne's Essays (Although I've read many of them, I'm going to make a concerted effort to read the complete collection, cover to cover ). Seeing everyone else's lists makes me jealous, I wish I had all your books too! Cheers!

Thanks for sharing both of those videos, they were very funny (and a little sad. but mostly funny.)

Subzoo: You may not “hate” the Academy (that all powerful overlord, to use your rather puerile language), but you did reduce several important facets of contemporary academic life to “stupid little accolades” when we were discussing this same issue in the thread “MA vs PhD.” While I can relate a little to your Miniver Cheevy-esque lament about the current focus of many Literature departments on literary and cultural theory, and while it is romantic to dream about bucking the system and about a return to the “days of old” when critics like Walter Pater, William Hazlitt, and Matthew Arnold—the “great” literary critics you mention—enjoyed much more intellectual currency than they do today, you are being nothing other than antagonistic and, I think, a little naïve when you write that “[you’ll] be a different kind of professor and critic than [we] all aspire to be.” A kind of professor you both implicitly and explicitly position against “[t]he Academy, or academe, or whatever the hell it is [we] call [our] all-powerful overlord.” So much for queries one and two, then, since it is apparent that you oppose what the Academy stands for and do not wish to be what the Academy considers a scholar (i.e., someone who accrues those “stupid little accolades”; although, to your credit, you do admit that “[you’ll] probably end up scrounging those qualifications [yourself]”). As for query three: I very much doubt that you want to be the next Salinger, I think that between this thread and the one I mention above you have made it very clear what, in fact, you aspire to be. However much we may disagree, Subzoo, I appreciate the fact that you’ve stood your ground and kept this entertaining back-and-forth going . It has provided a welcome relief from the stress of waiting to hear from grad schools. Cheers, and the best of luck w/ your applications!

Up to a certain point I can sympathize with Subzoo, and I very much doubt if we are the only ones to occasionally bemoan the super-saturation of “Literature” with literary and cultural theory, race, gender, and queer theory, deconstruction and dialogism, Marxist (or Marxian) and post-colonial theory. But however frustrated I may get working my way through a particularly dense essay by Derrida, Gayatri Spivak or Judith Butler, I keep at it until I understand because 1) these theories have become the lens through which literature is viewed, explained, and contested in the Academy today (a staunch defender of classical ideals and the canon like Harold Bloom can complain about this all he wants, it doesn’t make it any less a fact or his position any less Arcadian); and 2) because these literary theorists, however much their purposefully difficult writing styles sometimes makes me want to throw their books against the wall of my room, do take the pulse of the cultures we live in (and of the history out of which our society has emerged and remains indebted to) and the way we view art, read literature, and think aesthetic concepts like the sublime and the beautiful is culturally informed. There is a Spanish philosopher named José Ortega y Gasset who understood this, I think, particularly well and who argued that “no hay valores plásticos absolutes.Todos ellos pertenecen a algún estilo, son relativos a él, y un estilo es el fruto de un sistema de convenciones vivas [No artistic values are absolute.They all pertain to a given style, and a style is the fruit of a system of living conventions]” (1). If Ortega y Gasset is correct (or if, for that matter, Nietzsche or Foucault are, who both say similar things), if our appreciation of literature and art is conditioned by the socio-cultural moment of which we are part, then the study of literary and cultural theory pays impressive dividends by means of the insight it offers us into the texts we love. (What a funny turn these posts have taken, which began about getting a Masters degree. ) Cheers! (1) _La deshumanización del arte y ideas sobre la novela_ (México,D.F.:Editorial Porrúa, 2007), p. 71.

Like Pamphilia, I was also that it was better to apply directly to a PhD program rather than pick up a terminal M.A.; all of my applications that round, however, were rejected. To make a long story short, I ended up getting an M.A. in English Literature at a State university. Once I got over the crash my ego suffered (after all, I don't think anyone really dreams of getting an M.A. at a school no one has ever heard of), the experience turned out to be the best academic one of my life. Because of how tight jobs are/were, the professors at this school (or at least the ones I worked with) were all Ivy league graduates. Through their expertise and continual pushing I was able to get a publication in a peer-reviewed journal, present in a few conferences, and grow tremendously as a writer and as a scholar. This time around, I've been much more successful in my applications and I have no doubt that my M.A. is a part of that. Looking back, I've realized that had I jumped immediately into a PhD program I probably wouldn't have been ready for it. But that's just my experience. Something else that's interesting, though, is that I've switched fields: my M.A. was in English, the PhD I'm going to pursue will be in Comparative Lit. One final thing: at most schools I don't think having an M.A. will hurt you (and may in fact help), but my guess is that things like "fit," your SOP, writing sample, and LOR's will be much more important to a committee than having that extra suitable for framing piece of paper. Cheers!

Lise: I do hope that you are right. I've been very surprised by the one acceptance/handful of wait-listed posts on the results page. Of course we'll know soon enough, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a few more acceptances . Best of luck to everyone. Cheers!

Thanks for replying, Amormundi. And congratulations again. Let's hope you're right and more NYU admissions are coming :-)

Having taught GRE test prep courses to undergrads at the university where I got my M.A., I can tell you that creative approaches and abstract stylistic flourishes (in short, a lot of what makes writing so enjoyable) will not net you a high score on the AW section. They are very specific about what they want, and what they want is basically a five paragraph essay of more than average length with some college level vocabulary thrown in. Also, and this is key, on the analyze an argument essay, you have to be critical-- point out logical fallacies, examples of poor reasoning, shaky premises, invalid conclusions, etc. All that being said, I mostly agree with Karamazov: The AW score isn't going to make or break your application. Cheers.

Straightshooting: Fair enough, and I can definitely see where you are coming from: for anyone who takes this seriously and is passionate about their work, frustration is the only possible response to the "might as well" apply to grad school approach that you mention. And I never meant to come across as overly prudish, I've certainly employed your picturesque phrase more than once myself with friends over beers (usually in discussions involving Lacan)! Best of luck with all your applications. Cheers.

I saw on the results page someone had been offered admission at NYU in comp. lit. Congratulations! Would you mind sharing a little more info?