Roll Call

[unspeakable]

Just because I'm tired of reading "Has anyone heard from..." threads.

Post your vaguely identifying details here! What is your focus? Where have you applied? MLA or Chicago (or APA for you interdisciplinary types)?

No fair lying, but feel free to give vague or partial answers. PM those in your field for bribery or smack-talk, depending on their/your wait list status.

My focus is the long 19th century, transnational. So far I've been wait-listed at UT Austin and rejected from Stanford, UPenn, and Princeton. I'm waiting on the inevitable Berkeley rejection. Five more to go after that. I'm almost afraid to say it, but I think the Chicago Style Guide is far superior to MLA.

Unspeakable

[booksareneat]

Just because I can't seem to not be on this forum today, I'll play along.

I study 20th Century & Narrative theory, rejected from Wisconsin, WashU, and waitlisted at Loyola (chicago). I applied to more, but I'll leave that part vague.

I tend to think that anything could be better than MLA. You know that old saying about the thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters writing Shakespeare? I think they wrote the MLA handbook. (Ok, I'm just playing, MLA, don't get mad).

[Comfect]

Sure, I'll bite. Anything to not do work!

I study Shakespeare and the religious/political culture of the Renaissance. So far I'm rejected from Stanford, Penn, and WashU, and accepted to BC, BU & Tufts. I applied to 5 more schools.

And most definitely the Chicago style guide over MLA. That's an unfair fight.

[hadunc]

I too will play along....

I've been rejected from 5 out of 7 schools I applied to and have been wait listed at one (Loyola Chicago). Still waiting to hear from one more school but I am already 99.999% certain that I was rejected there too (it's an ivy). It was my first time around though, and I think the major problem with my app was that I am not yet focused enough in what I want to study (I'm still finishing up my undergrad degree). I know that I want to concentrate on 20th century American lit and that I have a lot of interest in Feminist/Gender Theory, but I'm also interested in Post-colonial theory. My writing sample drew comparisons between a 20th century non-American short story and a story from the Old Testament and investigated the thematic similarities between the two, specifically violent images related to gender. As you can see, I'm kind of all over the place

I prefer MLA, but I'm really not a fan of any of them. Such a pain, so many pointless, arbitrary rules.

[latetothegame]

Application stats are in my signature.

I'm interested in late Victorian through early Modernism and specifically in the way that comic modernism pokes fun at its predecessor. I'm interested in cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth century, the cultivation of cosmopolitan subjectivity in characters/individuals from that period, and in sympathy as a tool in that project.

I got my B.A. and M.A. from a regional U. but have solid scores, letters, etc. Am worried about writing sample because it's pieces of my thesis and now I'm worried it's too disjointed. But it's Monday morning, isn't it?

Chicago is superior.

[mentalyoga]

I work from a feminist post-modern theoretical framework, and primarily focus on literature from the 1950s onward. More broadly, I'm interested in women's lit, which is what I attempted to make clear in my personal statements--because while I focus quite a bit on female confessional poets and more contemporary women writers like Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Flannery O' Connor, etc. (and looking forward to doing work on Jeanette Winterson and A.S. Byatt, my new literary loves), I'm also absolutely taken with their predecessors...Austen, the Brontes, Woolf (!), Willa Cather, and so forth. So 19th century onward, with a focus on women writers and a deconstructive feminist perspective. For example, my thesis is looking at a feminist political subversion of fairy tales in Anne Sexton, Atwood, and Angela Carter--my writing sample, though, was on queer subjectivities/sexualities and the foreclosure of possibility implicit to heteronormative temporality in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

Applying to doctorals out of undergrad, no preference on formatting style, though I mostly use MLA (because it's the standard at my undergrad). Also an aspiring poet. My program stats are in my sig.

[dd87]

Hey guys. I'm planning on studing late eighteenth and nineteenth century American literature, with a particular focus on intersections of racial pseudoscience and literature. So far, I've gotten into the CUNY Grad Center, waitlisted at UPenn, and rejected from Yale and (bleh!) UPitt.

I think you can do great things with both Chicago and MLA, but I prefer Chicago.

[mrfuga0]

Oh man, I'm a posting maniac today. That's what happens when you sit at a computer nine hours a day.

Accepted with fellowship at University of Missouri-Columbia. Rejected at WUSTL (yeowch). Two others on the burner.

I study contemporary literature from places of long-term ethnic conflict and compare images of violence from ex-patriate writers and national writers. There's a much more eloquent way to say that, but it's 4 pm on a Friday. Sorry.

I do have a lady-crush on Andrea Lunsford, so whatever she says, I'm good with.

[commoner]

My focus is postmodern cultural/ethnic theories (polycultural theory to be more specific) and late 20th-century/early 21st-century American texts.

My list of rejections is below.

Oh yeah . . . MLA is lean and mean and could easily take Chicago in a cage fight.

[orinincandenza]

I'm also coming straight out of undergrad, though I graduated in Dec '07. I'm into 20th century lit. All of it. In my SoP I tried to stay away from the word 'postmodernism,' but the stuff I read for fun now and want one to day to do all my work on is mostly classified as that -- Wallace, DeLillo, Vollman, Powers, Barthes, Barthelme, etc. White American guys who are mostly still alive.

I'm also into the dead ones too, and some Europeans I guess. The modernists. Joyce, Fitzgerald and Hemingway mostly (plus Woolf, who is not a man but is still white :| ), and I want to use their stuff to investigate narrative theory and 'the trajectory of the individual throughout 20th C lit.' To quote my SoP. I wrote my thesis about a DeLillo novel that asks if the concept of a single author/storyteller is obsolete, and explores the dichotomy between artists and terrorists (and this was 10 years before 9/11!). I'm real interested in the intersection of technology and 20th C novels, too, and I have a sincere but sorely undeveloped interest in film.

I got my BA from the University of Illinois, and I've been rejected from Penn, UChicago, UIChicago, Northwestern, and waitlisted at Brandeis. I really, really want to go to Brandeis.

And unrelated to my career aspirations, last night I re-watched the very first Nightmare on Elm Street and I think it's maybe one of the most brilliant things ever put on film. I want to write Wes Craven a letter.

[lyonessrampant]

The schools I applied to (and subsequently was rejected from) are below, but my interests are early modern poetry, particularly sonnet sequences from the 1590s. I am also interested in the lives of English saints and mystics in the late medieval period. The construction of the self in relation to the other in love poetry as well as the navigation of religious expectation are two of my most recent projects that I'd like to continue working on.

I am familiar with MLA, Chicago, and APA, and I feel like they all are just collections of (sometimes esoteric) rules, but I'm most familiar with MLA. However, the MLA handbook is definitely far less user friendly than APA in my opinion.

[guenevere01]

Potential grad student seeks compatible university. Funding a plus. Interested in late medieval manuscript culture, and especially enjoys feminist and reader response theory. My main focus has heretofore been on Chaucer, but I'm open to other authors as well. I like long walks on the beach and mojitos, and listening to indie bands. See info below.

[lotf629]

Oooo, sonnets, lyonessrampant! Did you read the Pinsky thing at Slate http://www.slate.com/id/2211066/? Do you think it's basically on-target? I love sonnets although I know appallingly little about them. I'm an Anglo-Saxonist.

[lyonessrampant]

I may be a bit of a romantic, but I read the voicedness of Stella in the songs of Astrophil and Stella (granted a more liminal selection of that poetic sequence) and that of Lady Elizabeth Boyle in Amoretti as an assertion of agency. I read that article, but it feels like much the assertion of New Historicism to me. I may be relying too much on Jack Daniels in the absence of the real acceptances I desire, but I feel like the address of the poetic situation without attention to the option of futurity (I mean really did Lord Sidney and Lady Penelope REALLY have any options?) means that there is something in the sociological context we ave to look to. However, bottom line is that I just love these sonnet sequences from Sidney and Spenser (my MA thesis topic) or Lady Mary Wroth or later Drayton too. All in all, I think they're awesome

[lyonessrampant]

DAMS UChicago! Seems I'm just waiting to go home and check my mail to get the official reject. Fuckers. I've got something of a lie from some profs there, but I'm sure that they made those promises before the economic hardship, so the people they accepted must be deserving. I'm trying my hardest not to be bitter, so good luck to those accepted and waitlisted. I mean it. I think this whole app process can make those of us left out of what we accept/hope for douchebags, so I'm watching my beloved scifi and hoping the best for everyone else.

[lyonessrampant]

See other thread about me being sorry for venting/ranting and that posting while slightly inebriated may be a bad idea. . . Anyway, if any of you have sensitive eyes, I'll try to restrain from vulgar language henceforth

[rinneron]

Friday night, and I'm stuck at home with lung issues (blech) and somehow missed this the first time around! I love reading what everyone is into -- and I'm trying to waste time before I really, officially have to work on my MA thesis, so I'll bite.

I study 20th century American (and some British) and proudly call most of it postmodern. I also try to cast myself as a modernist (in order to be more marketable), but after talking to me for 5 seconds you know it's a secondary interest (though I happily cite Faulkner, Joyce, and Hemingway as favorites to read and work with). According to my statement of purpose, I like to "explore the aesthetics of memory, identifying the novel as an artistic landscape that invites the public reexamination and romanticizing of private nostalgia." Basically, I like to believe that postmodernism (and the postmodern memory/memorial), as it's both ahistorical and historically saturated, offers an opportunity to reconsider and challenge public archive as a primary vehicle of recorded history. I also like looking into how this all intersects with identity, narratology, postmodern/post-structuralist theory, etc etc. And I'm starting to develop a very soft spot for poetry.

I was accepted to BC and Northeastern and rejected from a hell of a lot more schools.

And I love MLA. I'm proposing tomorrow.

[draff]

Results in my signature; applying after BA, MA, and MFA. I read poetry with a historically materialist & formalist lens (formalism isn't a bad word). Period-wise, let's say Late Modernism, and we'll figure out what that means some other time. If I could have written any two books in the last fifteen or twenty years, one would have been Cinematic Modernism, by Susan McCabe, and the other would have been Walter Kalaidjian's American Culture Between the Wars. Probably. Probably stuff by Cary Nelson and Jerome McGann would be up there, too; or Nathaniel Mackey or Maria Damon or Lynn Keller. Or Marjorie Perloff.

Going into the process with a bit of symposia presentation, a bit of publication (nothing especially notable, though), and lacking an awful lot in prose style / essay-writing deftness.