cyriac

Hugely cool! Where'd you place it!?

Scholars who chatter about "beauty" seem (and might in fact be) unserious; discursive etiquette (except, you're right, maybe, at the liberal arts college) forbids it. Institutionalized literary study is, as Susan Sontag argued, necessarily philistinistic. Don't get me wrong. Certain books have been more important to me than certain longish lasting romantic relationships. But these sorts of feelings about texts have nothing to do with academe. It seems to me that what literary study ought to equip students with is confidence against variegation and density.

See, now, illiberal apologies for the humanities are, I think, ultimately deleterious. If literary practice is about utility--about teaching people how to write--then we ought to scrap novels and poems and just teach people how to avoid comma-splices.

The question of usefulness is problematic. Fish's argument--or, well, the argument he was making two or three years ago in the Times--was that the humanities are simply about duplicating professorial taste. It's glib and relativistic, so it appealed to me, anyway. John Guillory (who is/was also a Miltonist) makes a related, though more refined and nuanced set of claims in the Cultural Capital. The humanities, he says, are about furnishing students with, well, cultural capital: "I am better [than you] because I have read Alice Walker and Edmund Spenser &c." There's (come on, you've got to admit it) at least a whiff of elitism in humanistic study. The systematic defunding of the humanities (particularly at state-sponsored institutions) makes some sense.

Does the survey account for the size of the programs and the number of alumni/ae? Doesn't it suggest--if a small program like WUSTL has nearly as many well-placed graduates as a big program like UCLA--that WUSTL is *much* better than UCLA?

They're loaded to the gills. They've got among the highest 25 endowments on a per student basis edit: I'd've loved to have stuck around for the Ph.D. Many tears about this same-school-stigma business.

PhD students at SU are indeed allowed to register for courses at Rochester and Cornell.

I do seventeenth-century lyric and Milton. I'm in Europe at the moment, but I'll try to visit, yes. Diversity of coursework is a valid concern. I wonder whether they have cross-enrollment arrangements with Rochester or Buffalo or Cornell. I have six places yet to hear from, but I'm pretty gaga about the program and will probably enroll.

Re: Stats, PBK, summa cum laude, departmental honors from top twenty U. 98 percentile verbal GRE (bad quant, bad AW, did not take the subject test). Published poetry, no published scholarship. Fulbright fellow. No MA.

They do seem to emphasize professional development. The program is tiny. Looks like there are about fifteen students enrolled in the Ph.D. program at any given time. Of those, I'd guess that a third are probably finished with their coursework. If there are three courses offered, say, each semester, I'd imagine that each seminar has three students. I suspect it'll be very intimate. The MFA program is absolutely top-shelf, so we'll be in the company of some extremely talented poets and fictionists.

Whoops! Did not see this thread. Yes, got a call from the DGS. Tuition waived. Health & Dental. Stipend is $14,951 for five years! Five funded offers.

They admitted me! Pumped in the extreme!

Perhaps the poster meant MFA, which, at Brown, is granted by an entirely different department.

Well. I'm two rejections deep, and that first one bummed me out in a big way. Those applications really dissipate the emotional sap. Lately, though, I feel better. I graduated in May and am doing a Fulbright this year. I find the prospect of time off--ten months, say--increasingly appealing.

Still no word from Durham. Increased use of tobacco products, though.