vosemdesyatvosem

Yeah, I guess I understand that impulse. I'm interested in 19th century fiction and especially the challenges that the Russian empire poses to postcolonial theory--basically, I think the russian empire destabilizes a lot of the assumptions implicit in concepts like the other and orientalism, so I want to develop a new critical vocabulary to treat rigorously a unique cultural situation.

Wow, what a great discussion we're having! I was just accepted to Yale this week, so I've been more or less drunk for the past few days.

So.... Anyone else here working on their applications for Russian or Slavic programs?

You'd be surprised how bad a lot of professors and grad students are at Russian. Especially the ones who claim to speak/read/write it. You might be better than you think. But that doesn't matter if Russian literature and theory doesn't interest you. If you're really just clawing at straws for a language, you could always make up some bullshit about Bakhtin. But really, German seems like a good third language. It's the natural second choice after French for theory and I imagine there's got to be some major stuff relating to trauma that you could work with. Moreover, it's not going to be significantly harder than Spanish--remember that English is closely related to German.

I'm still new to this myself but my gut instinct is that focusing on postwar Anglophone literature, especially fiction, is your best bet, while identifying special thematic or critical interests that will make it easy for you to work on White--that is, race and postcolonial issues fit nicely with a focus on contemporary commonwealth fiction, including Australian stuff. As others have said, consider broadening your scope--I would argue that mass-communication, modern travel, and immigration have diminished the importance of categorizing postwar literature by place, especially within the confines of a cultural community like the commonwealth. Even if you can't find someone who focuses solely on Australian literature to study under, you'll be able to find plenty of people who'll have theorized the heck out of the commonwealth novel, maybe including Patrick White. If you need to fill in any gaps, you might be able to finagle a grant to study in Australia--which we should all strive for, regardless of our specialty! Modern fiction is probably already a super-saturated field but you're right that Patrick White is pretty under-discussed in the US (it will be important to ask yourself why that is) so you might have an all-important claim to originality and new-ness in that. At the very least, when presenting yourself to universities, you can package yourself as someone quite willing to teach the ever popular giant undergraduate survey of the postwar novel. I suspect that if economists ran english departments, surveys of the postwar novel would be the only course ever offered, alongside "Sex and Shakespeare" and something about Jane Austen.

I did my undergrad at UChicago, and I can say that among undergrads, there was always general frustration with the quality of MAPH students. The program seems to me more like a glorified version of Chicago's undergrad core curriculum combined with a few more specialized courses but I can't say I examined it very closely. Do realize that you'll often find yourself in class with a lot of self-consciously obnoxious undergrads (most, though not all, humanities graduate courses are open to undergraduates in some way or another) who've been reading Foucault in the original French since Autumn quarter of freshman year and aren't afraid to let you know that. I can say I wasn't deeply impressed with the handful of MAPH students I personally got to know but my experiences aren't necessarily representative of the program as a whole. If Chicago is offering funding for the program now, it may very well be worth it. Chicago's faculty is top-notch in most areas and Hyde Park hits the sweet spot of being both beautiful and cheap to live in.

Coming from Rutgers, you may also have a fairly strong chance of attaining placement at an Ivy League school. I'm thinking specifically of Matthew Kaiser, one of the most popular professors at Harvard right now, who took his PhD at Rutgers a few years ago.

My own thoughts on the GRE, since it seems to be a matter of such concern: consider investing in a kindle or some other sort of e-reader. I've been devouring books on my kindle for over a year now and it's got a Webster's Dictionary built into it, so it's ridiculously easy to look up words you don't know or (and this is by far the more valuable function, I think) clarify definitions on words that you understand implicitly but could never give really clear, precise definitions for. Anyway, I'm also applying to English PhD programs, most likely for fall of 2013. I graduated in '11 and I'm planning on working for another year before, hopefully, returning to the academy. I guess I'm pretty thankful that I wrote a thesis paper, since I have a fairly long paper to work with in a topic that I hope to pursue as a graduate student. Right now, I'm trying to narrow down my interests and figure out exactly what I want to study and where, in the hopes of having a good statement of purpose.