merry night wanderer

Just got an interview request from UMD--

I was only formally trained in theory in a single overview class as an undergrad, and have largely had teachers with more standard historicist or formalist approaches, so it's something I look forward to investigating further in the future.I love theory, though I am definitely of the school that thinks that literature is a special kind of thing to analyze rather than a mere reflection of theoretical concepts. As someone with a philosophy background, I also often find that approach relatively ungrounded and unrigorous, and much prefer to start with understanding the text "on its own terms" insofar as we can - which is, ironically, something I learned more explicitly in philosophy, with the Principle of Charity and all. I understand the objections to the idea of "literature on its own terms" and think some of them are quite valid, but it just feels like putting literature through a meat grinder, and at the expense of some of literature's unique insights. I don't think the age of theory is over, but I think we are finding that our previous approaches are a dead-end. I find the affective turn in the humanities to be fascinating because while I think aspects of it are quite tenuous, it is genuinely grappling with the problems we've inherited by revisioning perception, embodiment, etc. (even if, as Eugenie Brinkema says, we're often just using it as a substitution for previous essentialisms). Which is not to say postmodernism is untenable - I have a lot of respect for it, and I think it's sort of inevitable that the era proceeding the one after would get exhausted of the previous theoretical approach, and I have no doubt postmodernism will be rediscovered someday, but I also suspect we are in the process of constructing something relatively different.

Thoughts on MA SoPs versus Ph.D ones? I feel like it's a little presumptuous to put my proposed research project in the MA SoP - am I wrong?

Thank you, @karamazov! I somehow didn't find that bit. I am clearly going somewhat insane.

Does anyone know whether you should apply to Boston U's PhD and MA programs if you aren't coming in with an MA?

I need to read Ishiguro finally, but I'm currently completing a short story collection, so it'll have to wait until I'm in a novelistic mentality. I have so much to catch up on with novels after M.F.A.-land! I should be reading short stories (and am picking my way through Ted Chiang's lovely Exhalation, a bit) but I'm largely sick of short stories (his are just too good to ignore), so poetry it is. Mostly Rilke's Duino elegies right now, and then I'll go contemporary again. Aside from that, I can't wait to get my hands on Carmen Maria Machado's new memoir, In the Dream House. I love her short work and she's described it as something like a fantastical memoir, which I love the idea of, though queer, abusive relationships as a theme is not going to make the going fun, I'm sure.

Tangentially, we really need to trade notes at the end of this to settle the question of whether the M.F.A. puts us in the "has an M.A." pile or "no M.A." pile. This seems like it's been aggravating for many of us, and I suspect future posters would benefit from a postmortem, lol.

The MFA was in fact a great primer in this, because it's even more subjective and chaotic. It's crazy, too, because you will find people who get into many schools, so there is definitely a bit of hivemind/trendiness at play, but for most people it's a total lottery, since GPA, GRE, etc. matter substantially less for an MFA than for us (and here, they're not even terribly important). You never know how much engineering is going into crafting the cohort, or how sympathetic the first or second readers of your applications will be. You can only work on your writing sample until you're spiraling into a vortex of self-conscious mania. One of the most legendary posters on the MFA Draft group on facebook was rejected by tons of schools over the course of years - only to get into Iowa. And waitlisted, I think, at Cornell, or something like that. It was insane.

Finishing up my Rice application and I've noticed something curious - almost every single one of their graduate students has an M.A. from another school. If schools have firm preferences about this, I really wish they'd say something (though I am already in M.F.A. no man's land where this issue is concerned).

I am so sorry this happened to you. I would contact whatever backup professors you can think of right away and let them know about your prof's emergency. Can you also contact the two schools you're missing a rec letter from, too? Often the schools are constrained by institutional app submission procedures, but I often find that whatever GA or admin is coordinating the process in the actual English department is very understanding. Seriously, what a nightmare. Crossing my fingers for you.

I didn't mean my broad, comparative generalization in my case as a suggestion that there aren't such teachers. I know there are; I should have couched it better. But I also know that I basically got college-style English classes in high school when many people are not that fortunate, I know that this was pointed out to me many times by people who weren't homeschooled, and I also know from friends who are English teachers is that their curriculums are often (obviously not always) extraordinarily stifling and constrained. But to be honest, I likely sound way more positive about homeschooling here than I actually feel, and way less enthusiastic about public school than I feel as well, when politically, I am a thousand percent in favor of public school, and think it's absolutely urgent to put more resources into it. All I really intended to do here was say that I got a great humanities education, in some respects, as a homeschooler, even if other aspects of it I feel quite ambivalent about.

No doubt, and the comments were made by people within a similar class demographic. But at least by comparison, and using the standards of the university, people often made those comments, and in the case of my peers, they often felt quite negatively about their high school English education. I don't intend to condemn or condone those comments, and I'm certainly not condemning or condoning homeschool. I've never been to public school or taught it, so I only know Common Core standards in an abstract way, as someone who has created eLearning for them.

I don't mean to paint too broad a brush on this, especially since I don't have direct experience, but my conclusion here is from trading notes in my peer group, and from the fact my professors commented that I seemed much better prepared for English, as an undergrad, than my peers. I'm sure quality depends quite a bit depending on resources available, and I hope it goes without saying that I blame teachers for none of the problems we have with education and core curricula right now (I am very pro-public school). But that was what people observed about my performance as a homeschooler back then. On the flip side, I remember nothing about my science education and my biology textbook was like a fourth pro-creationist propaganda.

I loved Sonlight! I definitely used the Christianized version, but I attribute a great deal of my love of ancient civilizations to their curriculum - they had so much glorious historical YA fiction in their middle school program. This led to a love for mythology and me almost becoming a classics major in undergrad. I think I would have loved homeschooling if it hadn't had such a religious tint for me, so kudos to your mom. I feel this intensely (though I was in the evangelical homeschool quarters, not the Catholic ones). I really got to go to town on the humanities in a way that is rare among my peers who went to public school. My classes were discussion-based and highly emphasized argumentative structure, rather than the sort of paint-by-numbers "find the foreshadowing" bullshit high school teachers are forced to teach these days. But it was so ridiculously conservative. I remember my teacher mocking "Song of Myself" in front of class for being this narcissistic, godless, gay manifesto. Everything was just filtered through this meat grinder of conservativism. It's one of my favorites poems now, and never fails to bring tears to my eyes for being so gloriously narcissistic, godless, and gay. lol

Very much so, though now, I am cycling through feelings of "who knows? anything could happen" through "I am FOR SURE not getting in ANYWHERE," ha.

^ I do want to say, I only brought it up in the Personal Statements (when those were framed differently from the SoP and requested information on your background), and in the 1,000-word SoPs. Schools that only require one 500 word SoP won't have a clue.

I was also homeschooled. I brought it up as part of my personal history, though for other reasons (for me it was a mixed bag - it definitely gave me an edge with the liberal arts, but it was also isolating, and I had some mental health struggles as an undergrad during the transition, like Wimsey). I don't think anyone cares unless it's part of a bigger narrative you're presenting. Though, I must ask the classic homeschooler-to-homeschooler question: what was your curriculum?

I am much more in favor of the academy valuing things like popular articles as worthwhile endeavors, lecturing outside the classroom, etc., than condoning the sort of anti-intellectualism that assumes all jargon can be "distilled" to plain terms.. As with many things in education, the problem is not that academic language is hard but that it's inaccessible - as EM51413 suggested. For the record, I do think a lot of bloat could be cut from jargon in English, and I always strive for as much clarity as I can myself. I try to be quite rigorous about using as little jargon as possible. But there are moments where it is helpful or even necessary to use words we've adopted in very specific ways. I have a partner in STEM who is very philosophically-minded, and that combination is great for forcing me to translate my ideas as best I can into layman's dialect, which is something I think every academic should do (and ideally is already doing through teaching). He does the same for me, which is incredibly awesome and enriching. But there is always something lost in translation.

Just wanted to mention that if anyone else is still (perhaps ill-advisedly) fiddling with their SoP, I'd be happy to swap with them. I am second guessing this thing in a new way every day.

To be honest, I am skeptical - as a professor, you will very likely be required to teach things like survey courses, to say nothing of things like comp exams and Ph.D foreign language requirements. Your devotion to your interests is laudable, and mental health can be a problem for the best of us, but the requirements of a Ph.D are the requirements you'll have to contend with. I don't see any way out of needing to do very well in areas that are not the specific range of things you are most interested in.

I am in a particularly weird bind since my work history includes jobs that aren't academic at all, but still relevant to teaching experience (instructional design). They help explain part of what I've being doing this whole time I've been out of school, so I've decided to include them.

Happy to swap if anyone needs it-

You're both probably right - I think the word 'suggested' is just tripping me up a little. I think I will summarize parts, and then possibly cut out the review of scholarship section, hmm. That just makes me nervous because - well, I need to demonstrate I know how it's being discussed!

This is a very pressing question for me as well. I have a hunch about where my ultimate interests will land, but I'm not sure if articulating it is wise - in part because I feel it is presumptuous, knowing how far I have to go to really be well-read in these fields. What I do have is a defined time period (Romanticism), a set of theoretical and methodological approaches (aesthetics, philosophy, and cognitive studies/affect theory), and a life experience trajectory - essentially, I'm a fiction writer, and my interest in how symbols/universals/reference points are "constructed" within texts relates to my interest in analogies and metaphor/metonymy - and in the allegorical genre, though the major Romantics ostensibly swore it off for the most part. Where I'm struggling is with the last part - again, it feels so tentative knowing that I have many shelves' worth of dense theory to read before I'm fully up to date and can really join the conversation. My solution right now - though I'm certainly open to advice - is that I will frame my interests as questions, and sketch out a diss/project in an open-ended manner. Regarding time periods, I have a lot of sympathy for the thematic approach but the advice I receive is relentlessly to choose a time period. It's just how things are categorized within departments, and later you can expand your work to include other time periods. I know I plan to do so.

So I'm applying to UCSB, and it's honestly one of the schools I'm most excited about - I love cognitive literary studies and philosophy of mind, and they're stellar in that regard. But their writing sample is "suggested 10 pages." Could someone speak to how they're approaching this, or how they did approach it, if they made it in? It just seems as though it's hardly any time to get to the heart of things - I have a 12 page version of my paper that makes my core argument based on the text, which I'm using as a basis, but it doesn't showcase my theoretical and methodological position within today's scholarship at all. In this form it's just another argument about evil in Christabel - it doesn't get to the cognitive science/phil of mind/affect theory twist, which is why I'm into UCSB in the first place. I'm wondering if I shouldn't just drop the 20 page version on them anyway.