claudeneustace

Hello, everyone, I have had a gander at your wonderfully manic musings, and I am thrilled to find people as wracked with anxiety and terror over this whole process as I am. In many ways I am in a particularly awful situation, as my one year masters program is gearing up intensely right now, and I've yet to take the GRE Subject or General Test (I'm doing both in the next few weeks). To say that I'm coasting on my knowledge of the canon and writing ability is especially naive, because I haven't even started a draft of an SOP, have no time to contact POIs (I only just discovered that acronym; won't pretend: feeling a bit exclusive) and I'm not from the States, so I feel like I'm excluded from an arcane body of knowledge about schools and professors and grad school generally that the Yanks among you are privy to. All of which is to say, someonepleasetellmeicandothis!

As someone who visited Harvard as a visiting scholar in 2010, I've only gleaned a scant perspective on the general character of each university. So often these take years to properly observe. But I can say that while I'm sure that BrandNewName has captured the political bent of each school perfectly, I can also say that you wouldn't have to look too far to find our beloved queers, pinkos and hippies -- they're certainly there, lurking in the woodwork, away from the marauding jocks. When I was there I took a critical theory class, which had a very advanced syllabus (lots of Agamben, Badiou, Blanchot, as well the bigger French names), and though I didn't get into the Freud seminar with Marjorie Garber, in that one had to read Freud's entire corpus as well as lots of Saussure, Lacan, Kristeva and Zizek, etc. All I'm saying, is that while Cornell is surely substantially better for contemporary critical theory and philosophy, amongst the graduate students themselves, critical theory was hardly a dirty phrase. Good luck and congratulations!