TripWillis

Good thread. It took me a while to think of it, but I got it. For one, I agree with two espressos on psychoanalytic theory: blerg! I'm not big on the subject of interiority. That said, I better get my Oedipal (or I guess Elektra) complex out of the way and say bell hooks. Technically, we play for the same team; we both have the same goals. I find many of the things she says generally agreeable. But I think she's so concerned with writing crossover criticism that she overpolemicizes and turns what could be very interesting and well-founded social theory into sensationalistic provocation. Often she goes for those winning one-liner proclamations about "black people" and "white people" that can make or break critical race theory and falls flat on her face (you have to be a really strong writer to pull those off and I'm not sure she has the tact). That and I'm suspicious of her consistency in writing off all African-American literature (i.e. literature produced with the formal codes and subject matter that makes it Af-Am lit) produced by white authors: Quentin Tarantino, Behn Zeitlin, Jennie Livingston (I'm unaware if she's critiqued Carl Van Vechten)... she spares no one. Potentially, this could be a good thing. I like interrogations of much beloved cultural figures. However, at this point it definitely seems more like a grudge or a part of her brand than an honest engagement with their work. Finally, her investment in the uplift narrative drives me crazy. She seems to have no awareness of the historical violence it takes to produce an uplift narrative, which is really surprising seeing as how she's a feminist. Although it was tempting to pick an easy one and say Harold Fucking Bloom. But I doubt it would be news to anyone, based on my interests, that I can't stand his work... you know... the work that isn't probably ghostwritten in a giant cashgrab scheme. (Also, Dwight A. McBride's "Can the Queen Speak?" pointed out a lot of flaws in her pieces on queers of color, including her apologizing for homophobia or sexism in bizarre instances) When it comes to authors of literature qua literature, I have always had a ton of trouble getting into Gilbert Sorrentino. Many people praise him for sending up the pretentiousness of the NY literary community, but I don't think he wrote with enough awareness of his own self-important style. It's like his satire only served to bolster what he was ostensibly making fun of. Whew. That felt good to get off of my chest.

I think I knew you were there -- are you still there? What program?

Yeah, but you implied it. Subtext.

Yep -- people who sit on ad-comms read this board and they will figure out who you are. A few of us noticed this last year when we were meeting with our prospective programs. Someone at Rutgers mentioned something to me about my admission to CUNY w/o having been told that I got in there; another person who got into Rutgers told me someone brought up his waitlist at Princeton during a prospective visit. He didn't realize it at the time, but later he remembered that he hadn't told the guy about it.

That's a lot of MAs. They tend to be cash cows for the university, so I'm guessing you will be accepted at most if not all of them.

Last year I got a $300 travel stipend to visit one school -- this included transport, meals, and lodging. I didn't get anything for the other schools, but didn't need it anyway, so I never asked. Maybe if I had...

Ask him if you can do an article-length research paper instead of the 5-7 page papers; tell him it would be more applicable to your future interests. The kids wanting to do 5-7 page papers are obviously just trying to duck out of a more challenging piece of work, but there's no reason why everyone should have to follow one draconian rule in terms of paper writing; the professor should be willing to work with you, and since he/she has already shown a willingness to do so by offering to work out the paper parameters democratically, I'm sure it won't be a problem. The only thing (as someone else mentioned) that I think maybe 5-7 page paper assignments would be good for is conference papers. You could treat each one like its own conference paper and have three potential conferences to go to and articles to pursue. Still... eh.

I heard on February 9th. Good luck!

I don't envy any of you right now. Last year around this time, I started to get into a fevered habit of constantly refreshing my e-mail, the forum, and the results board ALL DAY. I probably did it a total of 90,000 times. I will never be able to reclaim the sanity I lost between January 5th-February 8th. Enjoy. "The hard part was getting the brain OUT."

Hi bdon! Things went well (all A's, although it doesn't feel like a big deal the way it used too ). It is challenging but rewarding. I feel like I'm in my groove now. How's everyone else liking it?

Exactly. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to not like Harvard.

False.

I would go for it if you guys think you can swing it. It's pretty awesome here.

Everyone will be funded going forth.

Fall '13 entering students. And the new fellowship is $25,000/yr, 1/1 teaching years 2-4

Also, they dramatically upped their fellowships and decreased their teaching load for FL13 students.

It's amazing, and only getting better. But I'm biased. Don't be surprised to see it ascend to the top 15 within the next five years...

Maybe wingdings would come off as really profound. My SOP was handwritten in blood and it just said "yes yes do it" And look where I am now.

Get it under 20. Use TNR 12 point.

All my favorite cultural criticism, no matter what the school of thought, has stylistic and aesthetic choices that make them literary, and that's the sort of stuff I like. The stuff you're talking about sounds like semiotics, formalism, digital humanities, and structuralism, all of which are totally legit (some of which are supposedly passé, not that I would make any argument about that). I would argue, also, that those texts can be literary depending on how you write them. I personally have a resistance to the quantification of the humanities. Understood on your sociological questions point.

I'm not sure I understand this divide between sociological questions and theoretical ones. Sociology is social theory. History is also a kind of theory (narratology, facticity, materiality, dialectics). Is what you're saying more that you're more interested in metaphysical and aesthetic ideas in literature than you are in sociohistorical ones? That's fair enough. But I also think metaphysical and aesthetic ideas can, and probably should be, dually studied as sociohistorical (see, for instance, Heidegger and Paul de Man) -- not saying you have to, but someone probably should so we don't lose the provenance and context of everything. And is anyone saying that sociological literary questions have to focus on marginality? I feel like you're throwing out a straw man argument. Marginality comes up a lot of in sociological questions because of how important cycles and structures of dominance and power are to sociological theory, but it is just as much a study of the dominant imprint as it is the marginal group.

Sure, and I didn't say everything is a text (although many things, from shoeboxes full of photos (Tina Campt's Image Matters) to the city skyline (Michel De Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life) can be read), just that everything we are working on or studying belongs to a circuit of ideas about literature whose phases and influences and connections are rhizomatic and composed of indeterminacy, thus making that traditional border between literature and non-literature blurry at best. Literary criticism, theory, etc. are also literature (and should be approached as such in their writing) because they are making interventions in literature and they are written through and with the consideration of language. Conversely, novels, poems, and drama can often be read as theory or criticism. I didn't mean to be unclear. I'm not trying to say something about canonicity or worth or value. I'm trying to say something about how we approach work. I don't think there's any reason to consider crit and theory apart from literature. And since novelists and poets and playwrights don't write their work like prescriptive, totalized, applicable methodology, I see no reason to read or write crit and theory that way. But, alas, this seems to be the real gist of the cultural studies debate -- is "it" literature qua literature? The answer is that there's no easy answer and it isn't up to you or me to draw the line. I hate overdeterministic disciplinary thinking. All I'm saying is that academic work should be read and written like, as it is accompanied by, literary texts.

I'm not saying "buffet of theory"; I'm saying that the division between theory as reading methodology and text as object to be read is blurry, and we're all the better for it. Papers, novels, essays, etc. are also literature, and I think it's helpful to keep that in mind when you're writing about any given text -- i.e., if your reading is just a reflection of or pure adaptation of a critical stream, then what's the point in writing it? In other words, theory is more helpful if you think of it as a circuit of ideas rather than a methodology. Granted, each set of ideas is going to affect your tactics, but, like, I'm not a queer theorist any more than Derrida is a deconstructionist. I work in a few modes that intersect and exchange and pose interventions. That's all I mean.

I think BQS is an intervention in broader fields and a way of creating a usable past/canon that has been suppressed and hampered by years of racism and homophobia in academia. It also speaks back to and alters critical discourses, such as queer theory, african-american studies, etc. It's not really a theoretical apparatus unto itself. At any rate, it seems like contemporary scholarship is trying to get away from these easily acquirable theoretical apparatuses. I tend to think of theory's progress not as dialectical or synthetic or as confinable reading methodologies; you gotta make your own reading and each reading is an intervention. Further, the residue of "old" theory often explodes through new stuff. Dead. Fad. Speculation. Who knows? I can't tell. We'll see in a buncha years.