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Hej! I'm an Australian student looking to study in the US, specifically around NYC (where my gf currently lives). I have an undergrad in philosophy at USYD and a Masters by Research in English at the University of New South Wales. My project was on the relationship between Hegel and Kierkegaard's respective modes of representation and the "ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry." It centred on questions of the exception and repetition, taking 1843's Gjentagelse as its primary focus. Along the road I've picked up a lot of interests and areas of study. I've written conference papers on Badiou, Media, Hegel, Benjamin. I've also worked on psychoanalysis, Marxism, communist history and deconstruction. Broadly speaking, my overall project is concerned with the construction of universals across the gulf of difference, and the way that language/analysis might accommodate this. Because of this pick-and-mix I've been looking at places like the New School, but won't be able to support myself without funding so that seems to cast doubt. I've also heard that people have reservations about UPenn At the moment I'm looking at 1. Media at Brown with Joan Copjec 2. Philosophy at Columbia with Honneth or maybe Lydia Goehr 3. Philosophy at CUNY, not sure who with 4. English at NYU, not sure who with 5. Religion at Princeton with Eric Gregory I've done the GRE and got V-170, AW- 5.5 and Q- 149 (lol). Does anyone have recommendations on other programs that might accommodate a project as confused and baroque as this? Cheers!

Hi, all – I apologize in advance if any of my questions are glaringly obvious, but I require gradcafe wisdom on submitting a multimedia essay to PhD programs in English literature and similar disciplines like cultural/media studies. As a point of reference, my essay examines the ideological edifice of two Steve Bannon documentaries, Torchbearer and Generation Zero, and draws on the theoretical framework of S. Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology. Such analysis requires that I embed clips from either film as textual evidence, and the platform I decided upon was WordPress, buying my own domain to give a little autonomy to the project. To start, how do different PhD programs deal with this type of submission? I'm sure disciplines like media studies have pretty clear-cut protocol for what I'm describing, but I'm not sure how English literature programs might differ, if at all, but they're my main point of interest here, so it'd help to receive as much knowledge as I can on the subject. Further, might there be an advantage to briefly describing relevant scenes in my essay, as Žižek so often does, in lieu of embedded clips? On the one hand, this move would streamline the complication by maintaining a purely textual essay; on the other hand, I can't possibly imagine paraphrasing a literary text, e.g. Ulysses, for an entire paper without losing rhetorical effect on some demonstrative level. (Good grief, I never thought I would ever align Joyce and Bannon in a metaphorical capacity – I think I may need an ice-cold shower, or perhaps a holy water blessing from Dr. Buck Mulligan himself.) If you're so inclined, I also have a few less-pressing questions: 1) Preferentially, is WordPress the best platform for a multimedia essay such as mine? 2) How does one formalize your page-count with embedded videos, or does this ultimately not matter as much as word-count when submitting to programs? 3) Submitted multimedia essays should preclude peripheral or paratextual content, like expository "About" tabs, right? Thanks everyone!