cruel optimism

Just caught a typo in mine a few days ago (submitted it to three schools too). But hey, if you've been hammering away at the writing sample for so long and hadn't spotted the mistake, perhaps your readers won't notice it too.

haha, i've turned my notifications on for my university email (which i hardly use at all now that i've graduated), so anything that comes through that inbox these days startles me somewhat. (evidently, i won't be sleeping well for the next few months.)

I definitely agree on these points. There are ways to make academic writing more explicable to readers, but I'm just not sure if it should be done through short summaries of articles. As you said, resources like intro to X guides, or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or even wiki sometimes, do aid one in one's understanding of particular terms, and a similar format can certainly be adopted for an academic article, when one elaborates on, while engaging with what one is citing in the piece. Mari Ruti and Kathleen Stewart, as @ecogoth mentioned, do this quite well. (Though I personally take some issue with Ruti's critique of critique in Distillations. Again, it was due to a matter of specificity and overgeneralization: "Progressive critical theory," she writes, "defined here loosely as a combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, poststructuralism, Marxism, cultural studies, and deconstructive feminist and queer theory — has been relentlessly dismissive of habits, particularly of habits of thought that organize social collectivities." I'm not sure if this statement itself is necessarily true, given that plenty of contemporary Marxist theorists today, amongst other critical theorists, now work with affect precisely as a means of "organiz[ing] social collectivities". But anyway, I digress.) My hesitance wrt to short summaries is that because they are so condensed, one might just extract the limited content in them and run with it, without being made to see the nuances of the ideas when they are explored in greater detail. I picked up on your mention of Butler because inasmuch as her writing may be dense, it situates her concept of "performativity" within a specific context, vis-à-vis discussions of sexuality, class, ethnicity, vis-à-vis gender and power relations, vis-à-vis feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory etc etc. This is important because it stipulates the scope in which the term is/should be used. I'm not saying that everyone ought to slog through gender trouble just to be able to cite Butler, but that summaries such as the one she offered in her email is, while short and concise, somewhat insufficient. (I have joked, though, that I'd spent so much time going through her books, only for her to spell it all out in one email. But of course, I was kidding.) Perhaps, then, what we need is not summaries to preface articles, but only for academics to expound on their ideas more clearly, because: But of course, we can't all write like Mari Ruti or Sara Ahmed, and we'll all also have our own stylistic preferences. Say, certain theorists that my friends find unreadable, I rather enjoy, and vice versa (you'd probably never catch me reading analytic philosophy). It's partly about finding something that suits you, and using that as your way into a particular field, I think.

just an email about the portal (basically the application site) on which we can check our application status... ...in the future.

it is interesting that you should cite Butler for this point, given that her concept of "performativity" is famously overused, misused, and therefore misunderstood. (see also: this) there is certainly a way to explain Butler — or any other theorist — well, but I'm not sure if it can so easily be done in a short summary (which implies concision and often dilution). as someone who works quite a bit with theory and intellectual history, i am quite wary about invoking theoretical terms without either 1. presuming that my reader has at least a general, background understanding of the context in which the theory/its jargon was produced, the body of work it draws from, and the work it follows (since one has to make such presumptions in some forms of academic writing such as one's statement of purpose. but even then, one tries to be as specific as the word limit would allow), or 2. working with, and explicating the exact nuances of what i'm citing (this means elaborating on qualifications and caveats, and lots more paragraphs or footnotes than what a simple summary permits). because the restatement of theory in overly callous or simplified terms frequently means isolating certain propositions from the conditions in which they were made — and by extension, what their implications really are — what then follows tends to be something of a game of chinese whispers/telephone, in which interpretations get increasingly distorted, without the precision of the original text. this is how one arrives at such reductive readings of "postmodernists" (who aren't even postmodernists, or relativists, for that matter) (and on that note, since when did butler become a "face of postmodernism"??), that empty these theorists' more renowned work in what we could call literary theory of their associated ethical, political, and historical significance. this is, of course, not to say that academic writing should be inaccessible — it shouldn't. but like @merry night wanderer, i'm more inclined towards a discerning use of theory and its jargon (i.e. do you really have to say "deconstruct" when what you mean is "take apart"). and when one does cite theory, i do prefer that it's explained thoroughly and with care, rather than simply, and thus risking misrepresentation. you're definitely right that "scholarship can catalyze change," but i'd be more wary about what kinds of scholarship do so. i don't know if i'd necessarily want change driven by zizekian notions of multiculturalism (perhaps critiques of that, yes, but not zizek's ideas directly). in any case, i believe that academic writing and public-facing writing are two drastically different genres that readers (academic or otherwise) consult for different purposes. i look to one to be told a gist of things, and another for premises and arguments with which to engage, to ask questions about the stakes and implications of certain claims that are made — i wouldn't, say, read a new yorker profile of lauren berlant's work for the same reason that i would delve into cruel optimism. and i think most readers do understand what they're getting into, or what to expect from each genre. so, for me, accessibility isn't necessarily about the difficulty of the language or ideas per se — if it's good scholarship, i'd more than gladly work with its rigour — but it's more about having the opportunity to even come across the pieces in the first place, and the time to just sit down and read. i'm aware that neither are, at the moment, that accessible (so much of scholarship is still locked behind paywalls), so that's something that has to change.

It's not even 2020 yet, and we're already getting shellacked by NYU.

It is actually a required field on the application itself, though I'm not sure how much it would count for in the entire application. (Do you have any idea about that?)

I'm sure it won't be too much to email the asst graduate coordinator once again, because this is a rather urgent matter, though I'm not sure if anyone's in the office right now because it's the Thanksgiving break. Perhaps give them a few more days? Otherwise, try emailing to graduate coordinator herself and explain your situation, and perhaps she'll be able to redirect your email to someone who'd be able to help.

The above replies have all addressed crucial points. But what I want to reiterate and emphasize is this: you'll likely be required to do not only courses you might not be interested in, but also quite a fair bit of mundane, administrative tasks during your PhD program and after. There may be courses and practicums on pedagogy, seminars on professionalization, plenty of (futile) grant applications, and of course, classes to fulfil the necessary language requirements. And I'd say foreign languages aren't ever irrelevant, especially since it is important that academics are able to search for and read scholarship in foreign languages, even if their main research interests fall under the broader category of "english studies". Working only in one language limits the scope of your research and the perspectives you're engaging with, so the more languages you're functional in, the better, I'd say.

I'd say one long, sustained piece of writing is preferable to two shorter ones (unless there's such a discrepancy in quality), since you're likely better able to demonstrate your research and reading skills in the former than the latter. Though of course, if you're working from your senior thesis, you'll likely have to extract and contextualize chapters/sections from it, and it sometimes isn't easy to make that call. On my end, I've decided that creating a new WS from scratch, based on a tangential idea in my honours thesis (which I'd like to continue pursuing at grad school) was the best option for me, but each to their own, I guess.

Have already reached out to several people on gradcafe for SOP swaps, but if anyone else here would like to do so as well, do drop me a PM!

Hi all, chanced upon this list of funded MAs in English on twitter today, and thought I should share it here, just in case anyone needs the information, or has anything to add to the document. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XZ7ejtJETaRH7ufh2O1S21HOeTTy9EYgi7Z5vUHCRLI/edit#gid=0