What was your writing sample?

[havemybloodchild]

Did anyone else use multiple papers depending on the school? Like I had one paper on gender roles, queerness, and Black masculinity and another on Chicana activism, American identity, and feminism, and I tried to tailor the samples to programs/POI. Not sure if this was a good idea or not.

[dangermouse]

@kendalldinniene i used two as well! mostly because the lengths for the writing sample varied so much from program to program and i was nervous about excerpting my thesis for the shorter ones instead of using a full length paper. my thesis was on thomas de quincey and the conflict/anxiety of life-writing, whereas the shorter paper was a commentary on a textual edition of two poems by coleridge that i produced, so i made sure to send the shorter one to programs which had a more robust interest in book history & material culture  

[vesperalvioletta]

My writing sample was a selection from my final paper for an 18th Century Drama course studying the connections between prostitution, authorship, and social/political commentary in Aphra Behn's The Rover and John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. I argued that Behn's elevation of the "good" prostitute over the "gay" heroine representing a demasculinization of feminine desire and reclamation of moral and bodily autonomy, a theme throughout her body of work, was a reflection of Behn's Tory and royalist political associations, but also a rendering of the inextricable connections between female authorship and prostitution. I suggested that the prostitute character in The Rover, Angellica Bianca, is an autobiographical character for Behn, and that Angellica Bianca's usurping of her own commodification yet ultimate downfall is indicative of Behn's own operation and commercial success within a male-dominated marketplace however plagued by criticism and dismissal for her daring material. 

I used Gay's work as a foil against Behn to reconnect with the political commentary thread in support of my claim that prostitutes in dramatic works of this time often acted as representations of power, intelligence, independence, and even morality due to their unique ability to exist in both masculine and feminine spaces. 

[havemybloodchild]

4 minutes ago, vesperalvioletta said:

the inextricable connections between female authorship and prostitution

Oooo, this is fascinating.  I would love to read this paper!

[vesperalvioletta]

Thank you!! ? I was a hot mess undergrad at the time, but I had a lot of fun writing it. 

[azuree]

Hi everyone. This topic is so interesting and reading other people's WS is so inspiring! My WS adopts a psychoanalytic perspective of melancholia to analyze Hawthorne's tales.What other critics identify as biblical symbols are actually psychological symptoms of melancholia. I thus argue that Hawthorne depicts Puritan sin with psychological illness and symptoms,  especially with melancholia, and analyze this mechanism of contracting psychopathology in his short story with a focus on his specific use of narrator and irony. The purpose of using irony to describe a melancholic persona, I suggest, is to modify the strict Puritan teaching and provide his own literary-religious belief that there can be an alternative means, rather than eternal damnation, of salvation for sinners who have fallen into psychological illness, a literary working-through that Freud has little accounted for in his collections. Any Americanists around? So far I don't see any scholars with an interest in 19th-century or 20th Ame lit here, so I decided not to lurk anymore lol

Edited January 31, 2019 by azuree

[Bopie5]

My WS used Kristeva's "Stabat Mater" as a lens to examine dynamics of motherhood, suffering, and the boundaries/limits of language to speak the female experience in Chaim Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev. I argued that the mother in the text hews closely to Kristeva's paradigms of the experience of maternal suffering being impossible to express within a phallologocentric framework, but that this fact manifests itself in the text as patriarchal oppression, wherein the mother's experience has no potential to voice itself. Instead, her son attempts to speak her experience through art, but the mother rejects this attempt to "speak" her. 

@azuree I'm primarily a feminist/gender theorist, but I generally apply the lens to 20th century American poetry and drama! 

[placeinspace]

@azuree 20th century americanist here! Mainly early 20th/modernist

[havemybloodchild]

5 minutes ago, Bopie5 said:

My WS used Kristeva's "Stabat Mater" as a lens to examine dynamics of motherhood, suffering, and the boundaries/limits of language to speak the female experience in Chaim Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev. I argued that the mother in the text hews closely to Kristeva's paradigms of the experience of maternal suffering being impossible to express within a phallologocentric framework, but that this fact manifests itself in the text as patriarchal oppression, wherein the mother's experience has no potential to voice itself. Instead, her son attempts to speak her experience through art, but the mother rejects this attempt to "speak" her. 

 

Damn, I have to read this STAT.

[Bopie5]

3 minutes ago, kendalldinniene said:

Damn, I have to read this STAT.

I can email it to you if you want! Or, if you meant you want to read Stabat Mater, I also have the PDF for that haha

[havemybloodchild]

Just now, Bopie5 said:

I can email it to you if you want! Or, if you meant you want to read Stabat Mater, I also have the PDF for that haha

Both, please!

[azuree]

10 minutes ago, Bopie5 said:

My WS used Kristeva's "Stabat Mater" as a lens to examine dynamics of motherhood, suffering, and the boundaries/limits of language to speak the female experience in Chaim Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev. I argued that the mother in the text hews closely to Kristeva's paradigms of the experience of maternal suffering being impossible to express within a phallologocentric framework, but that this fact manifests itself in the text as patriarchal oppression, wherein the mother's experience has no potential to voice itself. Instead, her son attempts to speak her experience through art, but the mother rejects this attempt to "speak" her. 

@azuree I'm primarily a feminist/gender theorist, but I generally apply the lens to 20th century American poetry and drama! 

Cool! I studied Butler for some time but moved on to psychoanalysis (with foci on Freud and Lacan), and I admire Kristeva's insight and critique of Lacan but it's more a theoretical invesitgation than literary analysis, so I ended up using the writing sample on Hawthorne and Freud, a more reserved choice I think.

6 minutes ago, placeinspace said:

@azuree 20th century americanist here! Mainly early 20th/modernist

Hi! I want to study 20th modernist writers as well! Is your WS based on 20th authors?

[dilby]

I argue in my sample that Spirited Away's narrative calls attention to the flexible metaphysics of the animated mise en scene by staging encounters with fantastical and transforming bodies. These encounters foreground both the cognitive processes and cultural presuppositions that undergird affective responses to the body—particularly disgust, which in philosophy/aesthetics has been a sly and unstable strategy to delimit what kinds of bodies are and are not "acceptable." I argue that Miyazaki's grotesque, intensely corporeal imagery is designed to elicit and subsequently undermine disgust, in line with Sianne Ngai's and Eugenie Brinkema's critiques of the affect as theoretically centerless, predicated on rejection and ultimately self-defeating. The film goes on to develop a more emotionally and dialectically positive intervention, constructing a pluralistic poetics of the body that highlights the redemptive potential of empathy and physical contact.

Edited January 31, 2019 by dilby

[placeinspace]

31 minutes ago, azuree said:

Hi! I want to study 20th modernist writers as well! Is your WS based on 20th authors?

It is! My WS discusses how gender is expressed in urban environments in Manhattan Transfer by Dos Passos. I work mainly in spatial/urban studies and feminist/gender studies.

[j.alicea]

I unsurprisingly have zero reactions to you scholars! Really cool stuff!

@dilby I am especially interested in yours, since I love anime, and yet I've never had the gumption to write on it (or any filmic works aside from documentaries), so kudos to you! NeMLA this year has one or two panels on anime and aesthetics that I intend to attend. (anyone else going to NeMLA to present? or just to see Hommi Bhabba?) I recently read a bit of an essay on the aesthetic of metastasis in Akira and the works of Marx, but it's unpublished and not sure if the person who wrote it would allow me to share...

My ws considers some poems/performances by Pedro Pietri (Puerto Rican Obituary, El Puerto Rican Embassy, and El Anthem) and Los Out-of-Focus Nuyorican photo series by Adál Maldonado (essentially an exhibit of fake Puerto Rican passports where all the headshots are out-of-focus) through a regional lens (specifically Antonio Benítez-Rojo's theory of the Caribbean as a meta-archipelago or a "repeating island") and argues against the flat nationalism or non-nationalism binary that is typically ascribed to Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rican artists. Instead, I read, or rather I hear and see these works as attempts to supplant the aesthetic hegemony of the West with a curative aesthesis (thinking of Mignolo and Anzaldúa here) capable of generating actual spaces for identity formation, imaginary-nation building, and resistance to Anglo American hegemony. (examples: the takeover of a church in Harlem that became the First People's Church, which began with Pietri's reading of PRO; or the Embassy and Anthem poems that accompany the passport series and other art installations, which, taken together, compose the imaginary nation of El Spirit Republic, roughly ten years before Anderson's notion of the imaginary community hit the shelves) 

Apologies for all the parentheticals - that's just how I write pre-editing phase.

 

Edited January 31, 2019 by j.alicea

[ArcaMajora]

@Bopie5 I love the concept behind your WS omg. And also massive props to utilizing Kristeva. You have a far, far stronger theoretical basis than I do but I've been playing catch up in the interim to stop myself from thinking about decisions so much. (also, great to see a reader of 20th century poetry utilizing feminist/gender theory). My period and literature are related (I'm taking too big of a risk and marketing myself transhistorically, focusing on modernist and postmodernist queer poetics but in my SoP, marking myself as cleanly a 20th and 21st century Americanist), but I primarily work in queer theory as my methodological lens (Edelman, Sedgwick, Munoz, Halberstam, etc are the theorists I tend to float around).

My sample is a direct extract from my undergraduate thesis with edits made for clarity and to help the pacing of the paper. I primarily work with the poet Henri Cole and the formation of a 'queer confessional,' arguing within the sample that the de-stablization of truth-making and truth-telling are integral to the formation of reading the confessional mode through a queer theoretical lens. I situate the model of queer confession as one of slippage, through which the direct and simultaneously surreal crafting of Cole's verse tends towards allows what is ostensibly confessed to slip in the in-betweeness of text, the produced image from the text, and text as imagined by the reader. In identifying this slippage, I then further argue the retrieval of confession as one not necessarily rooted in a clear, cleanly coded truth; but instead I question if there is a necessarily clear truth within the text to begin with. With confession as the primary genre I trouble, I draw upon Lee Edelman and Jose Munoz's work to further ground queer confession as both literary model and reading practice, to which I demonstrate how Cole's verse is cognizant of the very points that are proposed in No Future and Cruising Utopia respectively, in which Cole is acutely aware of Edelman's critique of the familial heteronormative while looking towards a poetics of queer futurity that also straddles Munoz's salient point about how 'we are not quite there yet' in the formation of queerness. Thus, what is at stake is the notion of queer confession that plays with and resists the notion of poetic truth, one that situates Munoz's work in Cruising Utopia as a necessary lens to which queer confession is neither a model of espousing an 'alternative' notion of literary truth or literary genre. Cole's poetics, as does queer confession, are instead crossings and slippages that emphasizes futurity and relishes in ambiguity.

The whole project surrounding the above was basically the base I used for my SoP to draw upon the larger project I proposed and to describe my experience with literary research.

[j.alicea]

@Ranmaag ❤️ Muñoz - may they rest in peace. Sounds like a stellar application of their theory!

Edited January 31, 2019 by j.alicea

[havemybloodchild]

@Bopie5 have you read any Suzanne Bost? Her work on pain and motherhood I think would really interest you. I’ll see if I can find the last article of hers I used to send to you, if you’re interested.

[ArcaMajora]

13 minutes ago, j.alicea said:

@Ranmaag ❤️ Muñoz - may they rest in peace. Sounds like a stellar application of their theory!

Indeed, and much appreciated ❤️ Munoz was absolutely formative during my undergraduate career, probably couldn't have finished my thesis without them tbh.

I've read your summary of your WS and I'm absolutely digging the kind of work you're doing. You've got an excellent set of programs in your sig that fit very, very well.

Also, I see you've applied to UC Riverside. That's my alma mater Feel free to DM me about campus culture, living, and the department any time. The English department hired a professor fairly recently that is in the ballpark of your field iirc.

Edited January 31, 2019 by Ranmaag

[mwils15]

My writing sample places the Fergus Hume's 1886 Australian detective novel The Mystery of a Hansom Cab into conversation with Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone  and argues that racist and orientalist depictions of people of color in works of popular fiction at the end of the nineteenth century emerged as generic features of popular fiction subgenres--particularly at the intersection of sensation and detective fiction. In contrast to The Moonstone, which plays on readers' imperialist sympathies with the intention of subverting them, Hume's novel uses racist caricatures of Asian immigrants in order to heighten the scandal of his novel's sensation plot. I also draw attention to the specific historical efforts to marginalize and discriminate against Asian immigrant groups in Australia at the close of the 19th century, critiquing the ways in which xenophobia began to emerge in popular fiction. Ultimately, The Hansom Cab anticipates the emergence of Australian Asian invasion fiction  in the 1890s and the xenophobic turns in the detective fiction of Great Britain (as emblematized by Doyle's The Sign of the Four). These texts of invasion emerged at a time when the fantasy of British colonial hegemony began to falter and demonstrate that Australian colonials (as well as other colonists of British origin in various locales) on the brink of independence began to take on the anti-POC mindset of their imperialist forerunners.

[j.alicea]

@Ranmaag Much appreciated! And I will take you up on that offer if they accept me! Is the new hire Armando García?

@mwils15 Super stoked to see someone taking on crime/detective fiction! Are you familiar with Leonard Cassuto? He does some cool work in that field, and many others (including baseball). I am very new to the genre, so I think I will check out The Hansom Cab this summer - thanks!

[jadeisokay]

1 hour ago, placeinspace said:

It is! My WS discusses how gender is expressed in urban environments in Manhattan Transfer by Dos Passos. I work mainly in spatial/urban studies and feminist/gender studies.

ah, i did something like this but in belle du jour versus l'eclisse vs 2 or 3 things i know about her. not the most complex paper but it was the longest one i had. 

[placeinspace]

3 minutes ago, jadeisokay said:

ah, i did something like this but in belle du jour versus l'eclisse vs 2 or 3 things i know about her. not the most complex paper but it was the longest one i had. 

I don’t know what half these words mean but it’s exciting to meet someone working in a similar field!!

[ArcaMajora]

11 minutes ago, j.alicea said:

 Much appreciated! And I will take you up on that offer if they accept me! Is the new hire Armando García?

Indeed Fairly recent hire iirc, graduated by the time García started teaching classes so I can't say a lot beyond pure speculation. I'll see what I can dig up.

And good luck! I hope you get in. The department's been making a push to hire more faculty as of late (I know there's active searches for tenured and tenure-track Black Studies faculty atm, and an Early Modern search is also happening due to recent retirements, tho as I write this... this feels more a nudge towards interested applicants in future cycles in the 2020s and beyond now lol)

Edited January 31, 2019 by Ranmaag

[jadeisokay]

ah, sorry! three different films we watched in an honors seminar about modernism and film studies. i got really into the idea through being a nerd for michelangelo antonioni films. he trained as an architect before filmmaking and a trilogy of his films (l'avventura, la notte, l'eclisse) feature space/place as almost their own characters. wasn't exactly what my sop was tailored to (i want to work more with memory/space in russian film/lit) but again, it was kind of all i had. i keep meaning to finish manhattan transfer and would love to read your take on it after i finish.