Questions about MA application

[Alex0266]

I am planning to apply to MA programs this fall to hone my academic skills before embarking on the pursuit of PhD. Personally, I see MA more as a process of reading more extensively, practicing graduate-level writing, and gradually figuring out my particular field of interest than two years working on a topic vaguely proposed in my SOP. However, I am not sure whether it will be acceptable for adcomms. Should I pick out my particular interest for my MA application.

My thesis is about the origins of the thematic and modish inconsistencies in Oliver Twist. I am doing the research from a Marxist perspective, utilizing Terry Eagleton's theories such as "literature as product" and"author as producer". I am somewhat not confident about my thesis and unsure whether it can be used as my WS because:1）I do not know whether this topic is relevant any more. (I am a Chinese student and have no access to foreign literary journals. I did get a Norton Critical Edition of Oliver Twist but most of the articles included were written some twenty years ago. 2)My supervisor did not offer much constructive advice either; he just said it was ok. Can anyone kindly offer her or his suggestions and/or opinions?

Thanks~~

[1Q84]

For the MA application, I had success having a solid direction and stating specific interests that I hope to pursue in terms of research in my SOP. I think that adcomms want to see this from all their candidates at the MA level. That being said, you shouldn't appear so sure that you are going to write your thesis on so-and-so because, as I've heard, adcomms and departments still want to have a hand in "shaping you". It's no fun working with a candidate who is all set in their ways.

 

As for the topic you're talking about, is this a final paper you're writing for your undergraduate work? I'm confused. If you're talking about the thesis that you'd like to write for your MA, I don't think you should be so narrow in focus at this point in time. Or at least you shouldn't say so in your SOP.

 

1) Define relevant. If you're talking about it being "cutting edge," there's a whole discussion of that topic that you may have seen I think a short answer would be no, that topic is not 'relevant' because Marxist readings of Victorian literature is as old as the day is long. But check out the thread that I linked because that may not necessarily be a kiss of death for your interests.

 

1a) Are you sure your school doesn't have access to scholarly journals? That's disconcerting to me. A school in Shanghai especially should have subscriptions to online journal databases like Jstor at the very least. Go talk to your librarian and see!

 

2) Try pushing your adviser for a little more constructive feedback. Unfortunately, some folks aren't so interested in being 'relevant' once they reach tenure and they may not be the best people to ask when it comes to the latest literary trends, etc.

 

Good luck!

[Alex0266]

Thanks and sorry for not being clear enough. I am talking about the undergraduate thesis I am writing. I know the topic is old but I've invested a lot of time and energy in that, and it's almost finished, so I may not able to re-do it. But I'll try to come up with something more up-to-date for my WS.

Unfortunately, my university is not a subscriber to JSTOR and I think only a few top-tier Chinese universities are. But I manage to get an account from Taobao.com (the Chinese EBay) for a relatively low price and am now happily reading downloaded articles. Really thanks for telling me about JSTOR because I've never heard of it before: my fellow students and I look for articles on CNKI, a Chinese database of scholarly journals providing only articles written in Chinese, which has not been of much help.

About indicating to the adcomm my field of interest. How should I do it? If I just tell them that I'm interested in Victorian novels, would it sound too vague?

[brier]

I agree that you need to be specific. You can always change your focus once you get into a program if you wish. In your SOP I would mention your undergraduate thesis (i.e. as an undergraduate I wrote....) Don't waste a lot of time on it, but you could spare a couple sentences to talk about it and why you liked working with it (I would say max 3 sentences).

 

If you want to continue studying Victorian novels in your MA program, then after you briefly discuss your undergraduate thesis you could introduce your interest to continue with that field of study in your MA work. I've always had success with giving examples. For example, I work with fairy tales so in my SOP for PhD applications I stated, "While I have a thorough understanding of the history of fairy tales and have written and presented several papers on classical fairy tales and fairy tales through children’s literature, I prefer to work with revisionist fairy tales either directly, such as Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch, or indirectly, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland or Neil Gaiman’s Coraline."

 

So, perhaps you may want to consider mentioning a couple authors with whom you'd be interested in working with (I think text might be too narrow and just Victorian novels seems a little to broad). You could also narrow by time period (between the years of ...), or theory, sometimes even genre (i.e. Gothic Victorian novels).

 

I hope this helps a little. Good Luck!!

[egwynn]

Because you'd not heard of JSTOR, I thought maybe it would be worth posting this list of resources.  It's copied from where one of the librarians at my university has compiled a who's-who kind of list for research on the library website.  I don't mean to assume that you're uninformed, but I just thought it might be useful to give you an idea of other resources of value if you're not familiar with some of the staples that I think most of us sort of take for granted.  This is definitely not an inclusive list; I'm just copying and pasting from a site that I use to find things (and I recommend it to my students every semester as a good collection of the things they'll likely be looking at anyways).

 

 

 

Desk-top reference collection

 

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online

• American National Biography Online

• Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online

• Dictionary of Irish Biography

• Oxford English Dictionary Online

• Blackwell Reference Online

• Oxford Reference Online (Premium)

• Oxford Scholarship Online

• Dictionary of Literary Biography Online

• Literary Encyclopedia

• Companion to Digital Literary Studies

• Chicago Manual of Style Online

• MLA handbook for writers of research papers

• OWL (Purdue Online Writing Lab)

 

Primary sources: indexes

 

Indexes

• English Short Title Catalogue (1473-1800)
(an index but the backbone to EEBO & ECCO)

• Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (1801-1919)

• ArchiveGrid

• C19, the nineteenth Century Index

• Nineteenth Century, in association with the British Library

 

Full-text sources (primary)

 

• British Literary Manuscripts Online

• Victorian Manuscripts from the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library

• Literary manuscripts. 17th and 18th century poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

• Perdita manuscripts: women writers, 1500-1700

• Gerritsen Collection of women’s studies

• Orlando, women’s writing in the British Isles from the beginnings to the present

• Early European Books: printed sources to 1700

• EEBO (Early English Books Online), 1473-1700

• ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online), 1701-1899

• Early American Imprints. Series 1, Evans (1639-1800).

• Early American Imprints. Series 2, (1801-1819).

• Eighteenth Century Journals II: Newspapers and Periodicals, 1699-1812.

• American Periodicals Series Online (1740-1900).

• Nineteenth Century Collection Online

• Victorian Popular Culture

• 17th-18th century Burney Collection Newspapers

• Defining Gender, 1450-1900: Five Centuries of Advice Literature Online.

• Past Masters - (Full text material from Antiquity to Modern).

• Electronic Enlightenment - (17th-18th Century letters, documents, and correspondence).

• North American Theatre Online - (Texts and production info).

 

Secondary sources

 

• ProQuest Dissertations and Theses

• MLA Bibliography

• ABELL online

• Periodicals Archive Online

• LION, 600-1903 (Literature Online)

• Annotated Bibliography of English Studies

• International Medieval Bibliography

• Bibliographie Internationale de l'Humanisme et de la Renaissance

• Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

• IIPA (International Index to the Performing Arts)

• Theatre in Video

• Cambridge Histories Online

• Shakespeare Collection Digital Archive

• World Shakespeare Bibliography

• CPI.Q

• Canadian electronic library. Canadian publishers collection.

• Canadian Literary Centre

• Canadian Reference Centre

• Gender Studies Database

• JSTOR

• Academic Search Premier

• Expanded Academic ASAP

• Humanities Full Text (Wilson)

• Humanities and Social Sciences Index Retrospective (Wilson)

• Science in the Nineteenth Century

• Film Index International

• Film Literature Index Online

• FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals plus

• Films on Demand

• NFB (National Film Board of Canada)

• The Year's Work in English Studies

• The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

• Royal Historical Society Bibliography Online

• Historical Abstracts

 

Newspapers

 

• Gale NewsVault

• American Periodicals Series Online (1740-1900)

• Times Digital Archive (1785-1985)

• New York Times (1851-2007)

• Washington Post (1877-1994)

• PressDisplay

 

 

ETA: I'm in Canada, so some of these are CanLit-oriented and will be less relevant.  I'm posting them anyways.  (That also means that there are probably several key resources that I'm not including because this list is geared a bit more towards potential CanLit scholars.)

Edited April 28, 2013 by Lons

[TheWB]

On my SOP I offered a very specific topic that interests me (the American protest novel), but nothing specific as to what I wanted to do with it. I believe I suggested that I wanted to explore the ways protest novels could be used to open dialogic space for protest in communities, as well as exploring the specific rhetoric of the protest novel. I believe. What I wrote seemed to be quite sufficient, as I got in with funding where I wanted to, so I don't imagine you need to stress being overly specific in your project; after all, most people pursuing MAs in English are doing them either to broaden their reading and general preparation for a PhD program, or are looking for extra reading/work before going into teaching, editing, administration or something else. Or looking for a pay bump. In none of these cases would it be reasonable to expect an especially specific SOP.

[Alex0266]

Thanks to all of you for your suggestions! It's really helpful to have first-hand information  : I can get so little from the usually vapid websites