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You'll run into the kind of problems exemplified by Deleuze and Kristeva, in part, because of the translation. But Deleuze just makes words up as he goes along -- which doesn't help. Foucault is hit or miss. Some of it as actually very straight forward. Should look at this: http://www.denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm

Several of mine ran late as well. My own advisor submitted 3 weeks after the due date. Despite the stress, it didn't cause a problem with any of my applications. I'd assume most programs expect the letters to run late. Just keep on her without blowing up.

Cornell's is sweet, and USC's funding is really amazing.

Just read Carpenter's Gothic by Gaddis for a seminar. It was taxing, but form-wise, hugely impressive.

This happened last year with USC -- In fact it happened with a number of programs. They're aware of it, so it shouldn't be an issue -- I'd just contact them if it doesn't look like you'll have access by the end of the day.

It's actually rare for LORs to be individualized, and frankly, not the norm -- and certainly not expected by programs. I've been on the receiving end of various committees that required them in the past (and I have read hundreds of them), and they're hardly ever doctored for individual institutions. Their function is to present your ability as a candidate in general (i.e. in any program) rather than your ability within one specific program. It doesn't say anything bad about you--or the writer--if she doesn't personalize it -- so don't worry! There are far, far better ways to put your "best foot forward" in the application process. And I can 99% guarantee that departments will be far too busy to go snooping around other department's submissions to verify that your letters have been personalized for you. At best, the only kind of personalization your LORs should be concerned with is the address of the institution you provide for them to mail the letter to (not that many are mailed these days).

In the past the test was geared toward general knowledge of the field, meaning that the Nortons were very useful. For the last two seasons or so, it's been more like 80%+ reading comprehension with far less identification. So rather than cramming the huge amounts of tidbits the ETS suggests, developing your ability to speed-read and comprehend several paragraphs of text in 15 seconds or less would be more beneficial. As far as theory goes, the ETS website and practice tests suggest a cursory knowledge -- enough to "spot the theorist" from terms such as "difference" or "cultural hybridity" etc. This is no longer the case as the theory questions appear to have been significantly ramped up. So here you'd be well suited to cram tidbits of knowledge from the Norton text, and get a sense of the main figures in various fields. If you look at the postings about it this year, some people did very well. It might be worth hitting them up to learn their strategies, but I'd wait until app season is over (January?) as they're all super busy right now. Good luck! In other words, what the testing service says is on the test is not really what's on the test. Learning test-taking strategies and corner-cutting skills will serve you well.

I scored 640 and it was 92nd %. This was from last September.

Exactly. It was good enough for me not to have to take it again, and good enough for me to get some nice offers, but I was told by a couple of programs that 97% and above was their hope. Brutal.

Oh no, I apologize. Not what I was intending... that bugs me too. I was literally told by a program that 92nd percentile wasn't competitive by a DGS. It sucked because I was kind of happy with my score! Apologies if it sounded like I was bragging -- not the case at all.

Keep in mind too that the dept. can love you and highly recommend you for entry, only for the recommendation to get denied by the DGS due to GRE / GPA issues. There were, I think, two cases in last year's Grad Cafe batch who had this experience. One, I seem to remember, was actually told they were in by the department, only to be rejected a few days later by the DGS. But yes, many programs base their initial cuts on GRE/GPA. (Hopefully it's not the case for many of you, but I got a couple of rejections very fast last year -- which led me to believe I was on that initial chopping block because, although my GPA was a stellar 3.98, my GRE verbal was a very average 92nd %-ile. One program [uCI] did tell me that the GRE score might prevent my application from even getting into the hands of the committee.)

It all depends on the thrust of your project. The way to work with somebody like Foucault is to specify the details of your topic, and then figure out if he would be best suited to provide the kind of readings you're working with. I mean you could just pick up Foucault and start reading, but I doubt it'd be fruitful. Think of Foucault as the hammer that you can use to build your new sandbox. Just playing around with the hammer would be dull in light of the hours of fun the sandbox could bring. (Okay, shitty analogy, but you get the point). If you just want to get an idea of what Foucault is up to, get a reader. Any reader, really. In fact, the thinner and most reductive the better. That should give you the opportunity to get a general overview of his work, then you can go after specifics from there. Norton has stuff like that in its head notes, but I've heard from several profs that Norton head notes are notoriously dodgy. One way to figure out who to consult is to search articles on similar topics to the one you're working on and take a look at who they use and how. In order to do that, you need to know (or at least have a good idea about) what problem you're looking to solve.

Leland de la Durantaye has a solid Agamben reader. It covers pretty much everything, and does a good job of translating it into readable. Critical Introduction, I believe it's called

Again, with Agamben, I'd familiarize yourself with his argument -- especially if you're dealing with Foucault's work on Biopower -- but don't read the whole text. Homo Sacer is a very challenging book that requires a ton of pre-reqs to really understand it. Much of it is dealing with ancient culture, and Roman law (which is what the Homo Sacer is from), so it'd be the concept that's of value rather than the whole text. In short, it corrects Foucault when he says that the sovereignty shifted from taking life to giving life, but it does so in a long-winded and extremely convoluted way. It has some good stuff on "potentiality" vs. "actuality" -- which is his whole bag, but you'd be hard pressed to just pull that out of it. It's similar issue to saying you're going to read Foucault -- there's just so much of it (except perhaps Biopower, but he never really finished that thought). The best way to deal with either one is to figure out specifically how they'll play into your project and go from there. This is not the kind of stuff you can just pick up and read holistically. With many of these figures, you're just better off browsing a Norton to see who would be effective for your means, and focusing on more stand-alone, contemporary texts. Lyoness' suggestions sound like better options.

If it's an "overcoming diversity" or "challenge-to-get-where-you-are" narrative, then it might work. It's such a tenuous thing, though, who knows what will appeal to the reader? The only thing I'd do is watch out for hackneyed cliches. I read a few "how to write an SOP" texts (even attended a free seminar) and the examples were excruciating. I took a risk and referenced a relatively obscure performance artist--completely outside of my field--who incorporate mixed media into her work, and I threaded that throughout as a sort of intellectual funneling. It allowed me to talk about my own diverse history and whatnot. So whatever you choose, I'd approach it not just as a "hook," but more as a foundation.

I'm still trying to parse the Agamben / Foucault connection. Agamben is offering refuge from biopower via the internalization of the sovereign, right? The Dada manifesto is great, and you can essentially argue the institutional framing of the museum just by using Duchamp's Readymades, but I'd also think about the Futurist manifest. On one hand it's hilarious, on the other, it's really useful for postmodern ideas of time/space compression (the kind of stuff David Harvey barks on about). Actually, both seem tangential for the OP's project!

Agamben's Homo Sacer works well in tandem with Foucault, for sure. I just read an article by Katia Genel in which she paired them up against one another. That would be another way to see if it's up your alley.

Yeah, I was pretty shocked. I guess the only reason they didn't post some kind of "don't bother" notice for modernists was just in case they happened to run across someone who really blew them away. What was a little saddening though was that I'd been in touch with several profs there, and none even mentioned that this might be the case. Yeah, I heard that from several sources, too. It's kind of sad, but C20th is by far the most saturated field, so it makes sense. Even though I'm technically C20th British, I'm finding ways to diversify so that I won't be completely doomed on the market.

[The main texts are 1000 Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus. I wouldn't read either, but instead lift a couple of concepts (like the Rhizome, which I think is in Anti-Oedipus. Neither is very accessible, but Zizek did some stuff on them that's at least readable (Organs Without Bodies)]

FYI, I also got feedback from Duke following a rejection last year and was told that they simply didn't make any offers to Modernists at all because they already had too many. I was encouraged to reapply this year as they would be opening the modernist pool back up, but I had already accepted another offer.

Doesn't sound like it'd be a problem to me. I mean if it was in another discipline entirely, or a detached area (say medieval) then it might raise some concerns. You could always make an indirect reference in the SOP; something like "My research and writing on structuralism has shaped my interests in narrative structure in ways x, y and z."

Re: D&P, it really depends on what you want to do with the project and how it threads your ideas together. Perhaps you could discuss with your overseeing (panoptic) professor the possibility of checking out a few main texts from the library, but using the reader as a guide and jumping back to the primary stuff as needed? It sounds to me like you're aiming for a crash course in Foucault, so a wide but superficial exposure might be better suited than just one text. Perhaps pick up D&P and skim the contents to see if he's going to be hitting on the stuff you'd be looking to incorporate? The other way to tackle it would be to power through one of Oxford's "Very Short Introductions" (about 100 pages or so), and then go back to the sources. I can't think of much practical stuff off the top of my head, but if I do think of something, I'll post it here. Hayles has Electronic Literature, but it might be a bit dated now. Some research into contemporary work would probably be best. Jameson's Cultural Logic would give you a good build up of the Late-Capitalist simulacra stuff, but again, you might want to relegate him to articles for this particular project as he's dealing with topics that set the scene, but might not be the best for methodology. You might also want to think about getting a few of Deleuze's ideas down: the Rhizome, Body Without Organs etc. Jameson and Foucault aren't too taxing, but chances are you'll be faced with some very heavy duty reading. Zizek might be worth a peek as well. Sounds like you've got some researching to do! And as far as the text you're using for analysis, that unread copy of Gravity's Rainbow you mentioned is probably the paradigmatic representation of all of these issues. It's dealing with problems of technology and the body in a very literal way (people getting packed into V-2 rockets as human sacrifices / Pavlovian mind control / sentient light bulbs called Byron and whatnot). It's an intimidating text to write about, though.

Foucault might be tough to cover for this project, just because there's so much material. If you just read D&P, you'll be missing a good chunk of his important arguments. I'd consider him to be foundational (in other words, read several of his well-known ideas in excerpts rather than all of D&P). Chances are, most of the contemporary writers dealing with this subject will be working with him directly, so maybe scan your projected texts' bibliography and see what they're referencing the most. His lecture, "Society Must be Defended," for example, gets referenced a hell of a lot. Were I you, I'd maybe choose two primary texts that are both contemporary and perhaps argue against one another (to situate your own argument); one semi-generic 'history of technoculture' (if such a thing exists); and one text that deals with academic praxis / utility within the humanities. Use your articles as opportunities to read well-known foundational chapters (such as "Precession" from Simulations, or the first chapter of Jameson's Cultural Logic). Perhaps even expand your definition of "articles" to look at something like Alex Juhasz's "Perpitube" (a very hot-off-the-press example of transmedia techno-theory). However you go about it, you really should attempt to get groundings in some of the history (Industrial Revolution), get some of the main concepts (Late-Capitalism / Hyperreality), and then trace how current discussions work around those ideas. This might be a good place to dig around to see what the current arguments are: http://con.sagepub.com/

You might be better of with a Foucault reader because D&P doesn't cover the spectrum of his output. Biopower, for example, is commonly referenced in contemporary theory, and that's predominantly outlined in The History of Sexuality. Pantheon has a pretty cohesive collection of Foucault's greatest hits, you might want to look there. As far as the others, I only know Hayles' stuff, but I've never been that impressed by it. It might be smart to supplement contemporary texts with some postmodernist cultural standards such as Baudrillard's "Precession of Simulacra", Jameson's "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Kristeva's "Essay on Abjection," David Harvey's stuff on time-space compression (even some Benjamin, such as "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" etc. Much of what is discussed today is grounded in many of those ideas that were put out in the 80s (and earlier), but it would be difficult to think about technoculture without reaching back into the 19th C and early 20th C and seriously considering the industrial revolution, Fordism, post-Fordism via some Marxist stuff. Jameson is a good guy to talk to about that.

I think I've mentioned this somewhere before, but be prepared for system overloads on the final day of submission. Last year, four or five of online apps I was dealing with pretty much shut down due to traffic. For one of them, I kept having to hit refresh for hours on end. If you can't get everything in a week ahead, perhaps at least get as much of the application filled as possible so that all you have to do is attach your PDF files and hit submit.