Comp. Lit. - Reapplying to a school I turned down

[Brisk]

I was an applicant last application cycle, and I ended up being more successful than I expected. I found the advice on this forum really helpful, although I didn't contribute much; I thought I would ask for some advice for my situation now. I apologize that I need to be vague; I'd be mortified if someone figured out who I was.

I narrowed my choice down to two options last year — in fact, the two options that I had been most excited about throughout the application process. Both PhD programs, with nearly identical funding packages, geographic regions, etc. One was in Comp. Lit., and the other was in a national literature department at another school.

I chose the latter. After weeks of wracking my brains/writing out more pro-con lists than I could count, neither program seemed a clear winner. So I picked what seemed like the "safe" option of focusing on one literature.

Now, I won't say I'm miserable, because I'm not. Things are going reasonably well. But I am unhappy, and a few things worry me:

1. There's a chance that my advisor might retire earlier than I was led to believe. (Knowing retirement was a possibility for this professor, I asked about it (politely) when applying. The answer has changed a little since I arrived.)
2. I find that I'm frequently methodologically at odds with the department. I'm all about learning new things, but I have a little bit of training in the kind of reading/scholarship that I'm good at; reading in a vastly different way feels like fighting with one arm tied behind my back at this point.
3. My research interests have remained squarely within the domain of comp. lit., but I'm be trained to be a very specific kind of scholar who doesn't generally use comparative methods. (There are two comparatist faculty members in the department, but the department is structured such that they don't interact much with graduate students doing coursework.)

I understand that some degree of unhappiness is normal in the first year, I really do. I've been filled with regret since sending in my decisions, though, and it's only gotten worse — and I now have a few good reasons to consider starting over.

My question, then, boils down to whether it would be weird/impossibly awkward to apply again to the department that I turned down. I know that there'd be no guarantees — I might not get in this time around. But I'm really starting to think that I'd grow into a better scholar in a comparative literature program, and I don't want to get to the end of these long five or six years and still be filled with this kind of regret.

Thanks for reading this far. Does anyone have any experience with this? Any advice?

Edited October 31, 2016 by Brisk