thestage

I would probably round down, yes. Better to come across as humble or whatever than possibly look like you are attempting to cheat the system. I doubt it really matters either way, though.

Don't I know it!

You did not say you were poor at memorizing things; you said you could not distinguish poetry written in 1750 from poetry written in 1900. Regardless of whether or not this fact is indicative of your inability to do graduate work, it is certainly the kind of thing this test exists to determine. You answered your own question. And yes, I am implying that someone interested in graduate study in English literature should be able to tell, based on reading it, if a poem is more likely to be neoclassical, romantic, victorian, or proto-modern. The secret to these tests is that such distinctions are not at all based on memorization, they are largely based on syntactic and semantic comprehension. Yes, reading Keats helps you identify Keats, but knowing anything about romantic literature should be more than enough to pin a Keats poem as belonging to that period. I'm not saying the test is fantastic, and I'm not saying every question is a matter of century bingo, but I do believe that people interested in advanced study in a field should be interested in the parameters of that field and intellectually humble enough to recognize their faults and holes as faults and holes rather than irrelevant fluff. If you, PhD in English literature hopeful, cannot muster enough energy to not summarily dismiss entire swaths of poetics and literary history, who will?

schools don't round up, so I wouldn't round up in that situation either. at worst you come across as disingenuous, and I doubt the potential benefit (which would be, what, crossing an imaginary GPA threshold in the mind of someone too lazy to look a the transcript?) would outweigh that negative.

it could just mean that there is a high correlation between what adcoms see as top notch writing samples, and high GRE scores.

technically he was algerian

what you are trying--and failing--to quote is Derrida's "there is nothing outside of the text," which does not at all mean what you apparently think it means.

not to be a dick, but these two things are related

I would also like to note that the space they allow you to respond to this question is only ever able to accommodate like 4 or 5 other schools at most, even if you resort to creative abbreviations and acronyms.

When you talk about, say, power structures and patriarchy, there is rarely an effort to elucidate what, if anything, these have to do with literature. If the "goal" of the methodology, investigation, whatever, is advancement or promotion of one group of people or literatures, than you will have a hard time convincing me that it is theoretical in nature. There certainly is feminist theory and feminist literary approaches that are more theoretical than others--Hélène Cixous comes to mind--but simply taking a piece of literature and demonstrating how it propagates systems of marginalization is not theoretical, it is interpretive. It is functional. That so much of the sociological criticism "arises" from theoretical paradigms that are no longer understood as vital should be considered prima facie evidence of their distance from theoretical concerns. If the understanding of why a certain approach to literary studies is externalized from textual concerns, then it does not strike me as properly literary in nature. "How does a text function as a text" cannot be reduced to sociological concerns, even if the movements of the text after the fact either demonstrates, supports, or in some way produces certain social paradigms. There's a reason "cultural studies" is gaining traction as a catch-all term in opposition to notions of theory or literature. Cultural studies would assume as a condition of its existence a foundational relationship between the beliefs of a society and the cultural output of that society, and from that premise investigate instances of the reciprocity of that relationship; theory, which is really another word for philosophy, would look at the underpinnings of the idea of that relationship, and critique the movement between the two as a movement, in textual terms. Or, yes, it could deny the foundational premise entirely, or discard it at its leisure in favor of something it would take to be more profitable. Of course this does not mean that there is no interplay between theory and what arises from or informs the theory. That would be nonsense. Even current boogeyman Derrida wrote a book on Marx, took the fight against ethnocentric assumptions as a foundational premise of his methodologies, and would be the first to tell you that the mere concept of removing a "theory" from its object or from the society in which it arose is a nonstarter. But it would be safe to say that studying the work of Sam Delany from a queer black studies perspective would be more interested in how the social conditions of "black" and "queer" inform the content of Delany's creative output than in how the text structurally internalizes (or intentionally deprivileges) those concepts, or how matters of perspective are, in general, as a function of phenomenological reality, transformed as a process into a cohesive written (and thus empirical) total. Something like that.

This is the sober version of my earlier hyperbole, for the record. As someone much more interested in the theoretical than the sociological, I have to find ways to justify the former in terms of the latter in order to come across as relevant. The project is hard enough as it is, I'd rather not be forced to justify it within the confines of the discipline. But there we are.

"Funding," he said, and sprinted away.

well, there are rather deterministic technological markers. moore's law isn't uncritical optimism

it ( c ) only (a) takes (n) one (o) word (n)

well it wouldn't be very witty anymore if I explained it. just give me this one, I need to keep up appearances

when I took it a year ago, I think even 164 or 165 was 99% percentile. I, uhh, don't even remember how I figured that out, but there it is. I also know that you don't need to have answered every question correctly to get a perfect score (170). I like to pretend I got every question right anyway so that I at least had that when everyone rejected me. look, assholes, I may not be good enough for you, but if you put a piece of nondescript bullshit writing in front of me I can absolutely answer any vague question you'd have about it with unerring precision! then again, all my other percentile ranks (including subject) have gone down in the intervening year, so the cut off for 99% has probably gone up. but yes, 169 is still certainly in there.

also I could be witty and call this as good a description of literature as any

god am I ever not looking forward to doing this again I figure I'll probably break the record by checking results the same day I submit apps

these boards have never taken very well to hyperbole if everyone were as cool as sam delany I think we'd be alright

There's much to relate Benjamin to poststructuralism. Don't tell that to English departments though, they sure love fads and poststructuralism came and went, now we have to talk about gay black people or we're off the team /suicide

I was actually just looking at Temple yesterday, and the same vagueness got to me. I did a search on this very site and it seems to me the school just tries to get funding for a portion of its cohort, with no guarantees. and by "tries to get funding" I mean "fails miserably, doesn't communicate with anyone, and then eventually gets back to you after april 15th." They're off my list.

Duke lit more or less requires proficiency in at least one foreign language to be considered

feeling awful, still behind the eight ball, lost most of my summer to an incredibly poorly timed mystery illness

All is occasion. I don't care who Queenbee is, and I certainly don't care about her intentions or motives. Her post was an opportunity to say something about the way the humanities are perceived, and so I said it. Next time, I'll be able to say it better.