I Want To Specialize In Patrick White

[CrunchySocks]

I am one of those weird Australian literature people who apart from visiting Australia a couple of times is a red, white, and blue yank. So, I want to specialize in Nobel laureate Patrick White. Even though he won the Nobel (in 1973) and is the most recognized author from Australia with the possible exception of Nevil Shute (pulp), he is still virtually undiscussed in America. There is an American Australian studies society that publishes a journal called Antipodes and has a bi-annual conference and two universities house Australian Studies Centers (UT Austin and Georgetown), but few people in the rest of mainstream academia care about literature from the Antipodes. Even UT Austin and Georgetown's ASC house works and there is no research going on. Specializing in just White might limit me since I also love Indigenous life-narraitves and my thesis used whiteness to discuss white male writers' depiction of Aborigines. So, even just White is short of what I really want to do. But, I am worried about 1) finding a supervisor and 2) finding a job after my Ph.D. since no American university has any Australian lit program. I guess the trick is to market it as commonwealth? postcolonial? I want to teach British lit surveys and then be able to teach special topics in commonwealth or postcolonial texts. I am just confused how to present myself. What am I to do?

Edited April 6, 2012 by CrunchySocks

[Galoup11]

unless it's someone like milton, shakespeare, or chaucher, very rarely is specializing in a single author advisable.

Indeed, very few universities are going to offer a course on a single, somewhat minor author more often than once every few years. Broaden your scope, and have you considered any graduate schools in Australia? It would seem a natural fit, and you could always come back and teach in the U.S.

[ComeBackZinc]

Now, your dissertation could certainly end up being about his work. But as has been said, you couldn't possibly get a job saying you were just specializing in this one person, couldn't credibly assemble a committee or comprehensive exams on him, etc.

[jywayne]

Of course, everyone who earns a Ph.D should seek a broad literary education, but I know that most of my scholarship centers on John Steinbeck. Nothing wrong with focusing on the author you're most interested in--so long as you realize that your author isn't Milton or Shakespeare and thus you gotta look at the whole picture.

[vosemdesyatvosem]

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.

Edited April 8, 2012 by vosemdesyatvosem

[CrunchySocks]

unless it's someone like milton, shakespeare, or chaucher, very rarely is specializing in a single author advisable.

Is it a sin to admit that I can't stand Milton and barely appreciate Shakespeare? I marginally like Chaucer due to having taken a seminar on The Canterbury Tales, but I still don't get why these three are the BIG three? And someone tell me... what could possibly be written on Shakespeare that hasn't already been done. Imagine the articles and books one would need to read to become a Shakespeare person nowadays. A professor at my school who is the resident Shakespeare scholar has been finding so little on him to write about that he creates parallels like Shakespeare and Bruce Springsteen. Course this same professor also like Harold Bloom (huh?). I know, I am a modernist right? Thank you all for your suggestions. I should say that what I meant was most likely I would do my dissertation on White. But, there is the issue of getting a job after my Ph.D. and it having been on someone no one knows. I need to find a way to market myself as modern British/commonwealth. There are people who claim to be Austen specialists or a William Blake person or once I even heard of a Willa Cather scholar. Going to a school in Australia is a dream for sure but also pretty damn expensive. I have looked into the expense and without a scholarship I couldn't possibly afford that expenditure. While I was in Australia I was told that I would be more likely to get a scholarship if I had published a peer-reviewed article. Creative pieces, and I do have a play published, just don't count. The complexity of Australian literature goes beyond what even White though. In my M.A. thesis I discussed three white writers who portrayed the Aborigine in their work. I used whiteness and masculinity as theoretical lens for my research. All three of these were at varying degrees of success or utter failure. White is the most sophisticated in creating the notion of "other," but the Aborigine never goes beyond the image in 19th Century Australian society. So, I have come to White by way of post-colonial discourse and not my how others traditionally discover him. I suppose I do think it is a shame he isn't discussed more in America. Maybe for too long though we harped on Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer that we left out everyone else. Only in the last two or three decades has there been a real focus on writers like Aphra Behn. Yup, surprise there were women writers even back then :-)

[ivandub]

As someone from Australia, I can tell you -- if you're approaching your work with enough seriousness to be a competitive applicant at US schools, then you will easily get a scholarship at whatever Australian university you apply to. The difference in levels of competitiveness is enormous. Basically if you have around an A average in the final two years of your undergrad, you'll almost certainly get a scholarship. GREs and even writing samples don't happen here. Having a publication can help too -- but, if you've already done an MA, you must have plenty of material that could find publication in a graduate student journal or something. From what I can gather I think roughly 50% of applicants at my university (one of the top handful in the country) receive scholarships... Compare that with any English PhD program in the US.

I would however agree with vosemdesyatvosem that you would probably be better off finding an English program in the US with some good people working in British modernism and postcolonial literature, and maybe try to spend 6 months at an Australian university while you're writing your dissertation.

[CrunchySocks]

As someone from Australia, I can tell you -- if you're approaching your work with enough seriousness to be a competitive applicant at US schools, then you will easily get a scholarship at whatever Australian university you apply to. The difference in levels of competitiveness is enormous. Basically if you have around an A average in the final two years of your undergrad, you'll almost certainly get a scholarship. GREs and even writing samples don't happen here. Having a publication can help too -- but, if you've already done an MA, you must have plenty of material that could find publication in a graduate student journal or something. From what I can gather I think roughly 50% of applicants at my university (one of the top handful in the country) receive scholarships... Compare that with any English PhD program in the US.

I would however agree with vosemdesyatvosem that you would probably be better off finding an English program in the US with some good people working in British modernism and postcolonial literature, and maybe try to spend 6 months at an Australian university while you're writing your dissertation.

Just curious what is your area of study and are you interested in White? Thanks for your comments.

[ivandub]

I've read one White novel, which I loved (The Vivisector), but no it's not anything I've read or studied seriously. I'm in a critical theory MA program, and in some ways my interests now are more in philosophy than literature (though my undergraduate degree was in English); my plan for a PhD is to find a comparative literature program that is somewhat interdisciplinary and with strengths in European philosophy. I guess basically I'm interested in theoretical questions of modernity and modernism seen with regard to the development of modernist forms in the novel and in cinema. So I'm in a different situation from you, my sense of what I want to do in a PhD remains rather too broad.