EM51413

I thought that was for their English program?

@caffeinated applicant I'm applying to Duke's Literature program too! My guess (probably based on the same info you have) is that they have two rounds of interviews: one short phone interview (notifs go out in late January) and those who make it through are invited (notifs go out about a week or two after the first one) for a second-round interview on campus. The second round sounds a lot more like recruitment than interview, but I guess some final decisions are made there. I think "invited for a campus visit" in this context usually means travel and accommodation (and meals) are payed for - that seems to be the case for the Emory recruitment/interview weekend, anyway.

Anyone know if Chicago has sent out their interview invitations yet?

I used to find literary theory extremely interesting, then I realized that what we call "theory" is a particular way of doing things with ideas that can be potentially problematic. Much of this thinking is shaped by read "post-critique" debates (Latour, Felski, Love, Moi...). I find continental philosophy intensely interesting (though being a fellow Lacanian, I find Zizek sometimes questionable), but only when considered as philosophical ideas and with proper contextualization. Bouncing ideas and literary works off each other as contextualized entities each with their own dignity is more pleasing to me than reading one thing "through" another. I personally find the "here's the theory and here's my reading of this literary work through the theory" kind of scholarship pointless, because they take ideas way too uncritically and refuse literary works the chance to speak for themselves. And is not making literary works speak for themselves--often against philosophy or ideas that we hold to be true or self-eident--an important part of criticism? Nevertheless, I think it's very important to read theory, even outdated ones. Not only is it useful for understanding older scholarship, it also saves one from the embarrassment of reinventing the wheel, which happens all too often, I think, in the humanities.

maybe there's a thread...? But if you know the specific school/program you're looking for, the result page (https://www.thegradcafe.com/survey/) has a search function.

Absolutely nothing to worry about. I've learned that professors procrastinate even more than we do, and adcomms, being professors themselves, don't hold that against their colleagues. One subtle way to remind them (if the deadline is coming too close for comfort) is just to write to them about anything. They'll get the hint. Yup - I noticed a fairly serious typo (as in, it significantly changed the content of the sentence) in my PS three schools in and had to email them corrected versions. If you think it's serious enough to warrant that, go for it - there's usually an email on the department website for this kind of stuff, if not an "document update" option in the portal itself. But again I've seen worse typos on well-established scholars' CVs so I doubt people will hold it against you, however confused they may be.

This reminds me of http://www.denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm and all the controversy that followed. My undergrad background is in mathematics. And trust me, Grothendieck's category-theoretic reframing of Galois theory cannot be explained in layman's terms no matter how much you try. It can be explained more or less elegantly in technical terms, in ways that require more or less technical knowledge (although the rigor always decreases the broader the audience). If you think literary studies is filled with jargon, take a look at a math paper and see how much you understand. And would you still insist that the use of jargon is problematic in this case? If not, can you articulate what causes the difference? Of course there is such a thing as bad writing or intentional convoluted-ness for the sake of hiding the inadequacies of one's ideas, but to presuppose academic arguments, a priori, can be communicated in layman's terms is, to me, a fairly ungrounded and honestly implausible claim. If anything, "putting academic arguments in layman's terms" has given rise to enormous amount of misunderstandings of academic claims that have led to quite dangerous and problematic fallouts. Gatekeeping is not the using technical and precise language; rather, gatekeeping is making that language inaccessible. The communal maintenance of intellectual rigor is what makes humanistic thought possible at all, and being inducted into its language is what education is for. When I'm confused by an article, I usually read more about it--the context of the article, the theoretical texts (which sometimes requires more secondary texts to elucidate), prior scholarship--after which the confusion often disappears. Again, this is not to deny that bad writing exists, but there's much more to the picture, I think.

I'm not an expert on this, but as I understand the current state of affairs, a decent portion of PhD graduates will end up outside of academia anyway, whether they want to or not. I think it is amazing that you see yourself deriving all kinds of benefits from the process alone regardless of the outcome - a mentality that is perhaps much healthier than going through the program with the sole purpose of entering academia. I really don't know if not being interested in entering academia will affect your admissions, but I doubt it. Yes, U.S. programs can care a lot about placement statistics, but those programs often consider placement into industry (especially prestigious positions in industry) as important as placement into academia, not least because the academic job market is largely dominated by chance these days anyway. Do ask yourself, though, if spending all those years of your life acquiring the skills you see in a PhD graduate is REALLY worth it; this question has a trivial answer for those who want to enter academia but if all you want is solid communication skills, you might not need a PhD in English to do so, as the program will require much more specialization (and effort in general) than cultivating those skills.

Very true! My scores are good enough that I'm happy to consider that portion dealt with - unless I totally bombed the writing part, which is entirely possible because I definitely didn't write a standard five-paragraph essay...attempted to deconstruct the issue statement instead. YOLO. And I feel Joyce is special enough (especially in comp lit where he seems to be the favorite modernist of literary theorists everywhere) that studying him doesn't really bind you down regionally: I'm certainly don't plan on becoming a specialist in Irish literature at large, and neither are many Joyceans I know of. I'm quite sure some people list "James Joyce" as an interest area in itself. My paper is on linguistic and musical dimensions of semiosis (narrative as intermedial translation, etc.) in "Sirens," paired with some archival work on his musical background. Alternative ways to interpret "fugal per canonem" and the opening fragments of the episode in a musicologically informed way but without the naive formalism of early scholarship. I was lucky enough to get some undergrad research funding for visiting archives, and worked with a knowledgable prof extensively on it. The only problem is that all this was two years ago and my interest and style moved on. I do plan on connecting the WS - whichever I end up using - to my stated interest in the SoP, though, someway or the other. Even if they are not the same region/period, maybe some shared theoretical concerns can be points of connection? Or maybe English programs have more rigid expectations on period/regional specialization?

Hi all - just finished my GRE/discovered this forum/signed-up to post in this thread today! It's really nice to find a community of people going through the same process - it'll be a fun several months to go through together. I'm a rising 4th year undergrad (which is the minority here, it would seem) majoring English and Math planning to apply to comp lit PhD programs this cycle, maybe with a few English programs thrown in depending on the department's emphasis. Hopefully I can arrange things so as to not take that GRE subject test that looks like a nightmare. My interests are literary theory, philosophy (continental & analytic) and literature, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. On the literary side I usually work with modernists - Joyce, Nabokov, Kafka, Borges, etc. I'm also learning about Media theory, especially in relation to Trauma theory for a senior thesis on the depiction of trauma in anime and contemporary Japanese literature. What are you guys' (especially the undergrads) choices for the WS? My thesis is probably not going to be ready in time and I'm debating between a more orthodox reading of Ulysses (an older, more polished paper) and a more theoretical psychoanalytic treatment of postcritique and the praxis of literary criticism (which I just wrote for a graduate seminar). The fact that WS length requirement ranges from 10 to 25 depending on the school doesn't help, either... Looking forward to being active on this forum for the upcoming application season and beyond!