echo449

One professor of mine recc'd maxing out a credit card to do it--I uh ignored that advice and applied to 11 places. I got into a bunch, but I met plenty of smart people on my visits who had applied to the same range as myself and gotten in at the one place. Really, it's how many you feel comfortable applying to, and what you're willing to spend. 10 seems to be the norm, tho.

I've actually been trying to google things (and failing), and I am interested in what this branch of scholarship looks like--would you mind sharing some of these names with me? I'm aware of the philosophers who cite him as an influence--it's the literary studies scholars that I'm curious about. And I'm sorry if I haven't been clear--to my mind a historical project on Schopenhauer and English literature is doable and interesting. It's the idea of a Schopenhaurian reading that I'm getting hung up on, if only because I don't know what that even looks like (and I've been trying to get a handle on it for the sake of this thread).

I don't think exponential is off-base with respect to Schopenhauer, but let me go a little into why. If you are a Marxist scholar, you have a lineage of philosophers and critics you can cite--a lineage that includes major figures working in the field today. If you know scholars and thinkers that you could mention in your Schopenhauer-based lineage (major, well-cited ones), then ignore me and exponential, and go about your MA as you were. If not, then let me make an argument that you should then be perhaps a little dishonest. The truth of the matter is that, in applying to grad school, you are applying to be a kind of apprentice. As such, you are limited by the interests of the field and mentors that you have at your disposal today. And it is unclear to me that you would be able to convince a graduate admissions committee that a primarily Schopenhaurian reading of a given text is something that they could help you shepherd along. Your dissertation will be, for better or worse, reflective of the program that takes you in and of current scholarship--and so Schopenhuaer might be sidelined (unless you were in a comp lit program with a stated research interest in the German 19th century). As for languages, most schools offer summer courses to teach you how to read a given language. Honestly, work on something in your MA, but don't stress at this point about language preparation (unless you want to be a medievalist).

So bracketing my thoughts on "postmodern philosophy," I'm not saying you *can't* work on Schopenhauer, just that a Schopenhaurian study of a single author may not be a project that you could do at this moment. (For the record, I bet you'd have a hard time convincing a committee to do a pure Derridean thesis at a lot of places these day as well). On the other hand, it is definitely conceivable to do a historicist project that involves how Schopenhauer's thought pervades certain works of the period or what have you. For language prep in 19th century american? Well, if you wanted to do Schopenhauer, basically you'd need a reading knowledge of German, and that would probably be fine. Perhaps Spanish as well if your program requires a second language.

I can't speak at length right now, but I want to add a couple things on top of unraed's already good advice. First, you will need to specify a time period. Because of the way the discipline and market is set up, you will not be accepted to a program with that range. It's fine to be interested in other time periods--that will undoubtably make you a more well-rounded scholar. But the reality is that you'll need to choose a delimited time period and stick with it. Secondly, the Schopenhauer aspect of your project is going to be an obstacle for admissions committees. No one really does things like that. If you want to work on Schopenhauer, you'll have to do so in a historical sense, so your project may be confined to the 19th/early 20th centuries. In a PhD program, you will be expected to go along with certain ways of doing literary study, and, unfortunately, this will require more standard-sounding projects on your end. I'm not saying you can't work on Schopenhauer, just that you'll have to frame it differently. Not trying to critique you--I'm just trying to help you understand the boundaries of this field and all that entails for your interests.

Unfortunately, the website I used to study was taken offline as the person hosting it left their graduate university. However, I think basically the best advice that I can give you is to find lists of major writers (particularly poets) from each of the major time periods. Read their biographical entries in the Norton anthology (the long version), and perhaps wikipedia as well, so that you understand why you are being tested on those figures in particular. The Lit GRE will test you on a caricature of the writer in question, so it is less important to know individual poems than to know just what about an individual writer is famous for. If the writer is a prose writer, don't bother reading their work at all--instead, read summaries of the work and try to remember the names of major characters. Basically, this test sucks. However! The idea of the test is scarier than the test itself, which, in the end, isn't super important outside the upper-tier of programs (and even then, it's debatable). Calm down, make flashcards, and don't spend more than a month studying for it, since there are other, more important parts of your application to focus on. Also, practice your scansion a bit; it will give you some easy points. Edit: rereading your post, I would partly say that you would be well-served to take a break for a couple weeks, then go back to studying once you are closer to the test date. I put things off the important things last round (I didn't finish a draft of my writing sample until October; my statement of purpose wasn't in a near final form until Thanksgiving), and, uh, that made for a rough 6 weeks.

Off the top of my head, Irene Tucker at UCI might be someone for you to look into.

I can only answer a few of these questions, and I'm not sure how great my answers will be, but let me give it a shot to get stuff rolling. For journals: One way to find a good journal is to look at where the people you want to work with have published. If Professor Button at Harvard has an article in Comp Lit Bonanza, then that's probably something for you to look into. Otherwise, there are a few big name journals in the humanities, and here are several top-tier ones: Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, Modernism/Modernity, Representations, perhaps Boundary 2 as well. There are more, of course, but that depends on your specific subfield. Fit is important, up until the point that it's not. In other words, if you find that focusing on fit has limited where you want to apply to a very small number of programs, then you need to think about expanding your interests. I can't talk about national lit vs comp lit, so I'll just bracket that issue. If you find a grad student with similar interests, then yes, the program is willing to take on more students with your interests. If you want to work with a star in the department, then you might have some difficulties getting them on your committee/ being accepted for that person, but not necessarily.

I dunno, but I'd assume not. Rutgers is a department with a good rep and great placement, as well as a relatively cheap application fee. Those things, I think, would trump the light hassle of the process.

Do we actually know that Rutgers has had a collapse in the applicant pool? The Rutgers delay might have been due to the fact that there was a two-step process involved in applying that required a 24-hour turnaround time to submit a writing sample.

How is it untenable? How has the liberal arts been shown to be untenable? America spent ~50 years running a pretty solid higher education system, more or less, and that hasn't begun to struggle because the amount of tenured humanities professors crashed the system. Why do you say that this was an unstable situation from the start?

It depends on the department. Rutgers limits me to two outside the department over my entire time in the program. Which makes sense--they offer a lot of seminars at Rutgers and certain enrollment restrictions have to be dealt with. Where I did my undergrad, conversely, the requirements for grad students were a lot lighter in terms of required coursework, and there was a lot more flexibility allowed.

I mean, what tier are you applying to? At the top schools, "originality" is necessary in admissions, but "originality" here actually means the ability to create readings of texts that are interesting and thoughtful, things that show you are trying to go beyond the established scholarship in your field. No one will dock you points for accidentally writing something somewhat similar to a PhD thesis. My area is 20th century poetry, so feel free to PM me if you want to talk about your essay in particular. Also, i'd reiterate unræd's point--if you wrote a good essay, you wrote a good essay. Unless you are doing something very idiosyncratic to your university, I wouldn't be worried.

Ace! Well, in that case, you'll definitely enjoy it as a change of pace! I was idly looking at the course offerings there for philosophy and that department seems like it has a great range too. Enjoy!

I can speak to this! I did my undergrad at a school with a top 5 philosophy department (according to the philosopher's gourmet rankings), and had the opportunity to take a graduate course in political philosophy. My take, buttressed a little bit by following along with blogs covering academic analytic philosophy, is that the atmosphere in philosophy seminars can be much more aggressive than in other humanities disciplines. This isn't a good thing or a bad thing--just that while in English you find ways of disagreeing without out-and-out calling someone else in the room wrong, in a philosophy seminar people feel much more comfortable just looking you in the eye and saying that you have completely misunderstood a text. Now, it could be that I was at a place with a particularly combative philosophy department and a relatively chill English department, but I think that there is a cultural difference between how each department deals with disagreement, and that is worth keeping in mind. Austin is also a relatively analytic place, right? If so, then it is worth knowing that they just talk differently in those sorts of settings than a continental background might prepare you for. Specifically, I would say that there is a decent amount of jargon that we just don't use in english with the kind of disciplinary-specificity that they might expect you to be familiar with in an analytic philosophy department. If you need some more background, I've seen this list recommended before: http://www.sinandogramaci.net/Site/Teaching_files/Reading%20List%20for%20Ph.D%20students.pdf. Regardless, I think that the space between English and analytic philosophy leaves a lot of room for innovative work, so the extra effort may pay off in the long run even if you have to become fluent in two very different philosophical vocabularies!

I picked my courses a little while ago, and I feel that my courses are pretty spread out. My program has a pretty big range of distribution requirements, so one of my courses was chosen to get that out of the way (medieval lit). My other two courses are closer to my area, though neither are quite "in" it. One is right before it (late 19th century rather than modernism), and the other is a different genre than I normally work in (drama rather than poetry). Next term it looks like I have at least two courses in my area that I have to take--since those classes are taught by potential advisors--so I'm fine spreading out this time, and am excited to get some breadth down.

I've been reading Stephenson's Seveneves, but I was roped in to applying for a sci-fi conference with a good friend so knowing the genre as a whole is good, right? OP, pleasure reading right now is a good idea. If you are going to work-read, maybe only work-read books that you are reasonably sure that you'll enjoy?

I mean, this depends. What're you interested in? What is your field? What concerns do you want to engage in your coursework? An obvious answer is to tell you to go read The Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism, if you really don't know where to start with anything, but idk how useful that would be to you.

I would also chime in to say that you should look for programs in the US that have a lot of modernists, generally speaking. Even if they don't do exactly what you want to do, professors in that general time period will have the background to guide your dissertation, and there are a lot of schools with excellent modernists scholars that you could add to your list. Also, if you do decide you want to be on the academic job market, choosing a time period comes before you choose a specialty (in most cases), so that's something you may want to keep in mind.

You're basically going to have to either expand a class essay or write a sample from scratch. Creative writing won't be of interest to a Masters program since they are interested in your analytic skills as well as your ability to write. Edit: whoops cross post

Cursory thoughts: Duke Literature and Stanford's Modern Thought program should be at the top of your list. Perhaps also Berkeley Rhetoric and Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. All of those are interdisciplinary programs, and your experience in political science might help your chances at a few of them. All of these programs are really competitive, so they should be considered as risky propositions. Otherwise, UCI and Minnesota would be solid places to look. Santa Cruz as well. Hope this helps to get you started!

For the PhD programs where I needed to get in-state, it was made very clear to me that as a grad student getting in-state status would be pretty easy. However, if I didn't get in-state status by my second year, they would hold me responsible for the difference in the cost of tuition between in-state and out of state. So! But I'm not sure how it is at a place like Penn State, where residency laws are quite stringent. Perhaps they just cover out of state tuition in stipends?

Are you trying to get an academic job as a scholar of literature? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that potential academic employers won't really care about your MA once you have your PhD, so really what you want is the Masters that gets you where you need to be academically to get into a well-ranked PhD.

This isn't quite true in the humanities. Our seminars are designed to introduce us to graduate level research and publishable papers for the current state of the field. There are reading groups and such that one is expected to join, but these are supplementary rather than the main show. At the coursework level of a humanities PhD oftentimes seminars ARE our research, rather than something apart from it, if that helps.

Perhaps a masters in English would be right for you, since, depending on the school, you might only need to fulfil coursework and so wouldn't have to specialize. A second bachelors in English would also perhaps do what you want. I would caution you away from a 2nd bachelors in dramatic lot if only because that seems a little TOO close to what you've been doing.