Gold Lining in Various Endearments

Anxiety's returned. Yesterday I got my first grad school rejection...via email (classy, Northwestern University). I applied to seven other schools, and it's a good thing no one else has gotten in touch with me yet (rejections are sent out first), but I'm worried. My plan B is awesome - Mlitt at University of Glasgow - but I'd rather go straight into my PhD. And Northwestern wasn't the best school of the bunch. I mean, I know it's part luck. I have a 3.9 GPA, three glowing recommendation letters (one from the German department, one from the Philosophy department, and one from the English department), a relatively good statement of purpose (one of which I will post here because I'm feeling underconfident and want to prove it isn't shitty), and an extensive curriculum vitae (I work a lot). Streeeeeeeeeeeeess.

But yesterday wasn't all bad. After I got their email (an email!) (come on!) (seriously?), Willow and I went to a bar, where a man named Bill bought our drinks. At first it seemed like one of those nice oh-look-at-the-young-girls things. Then an old man came into the bar, and Bill bought his drinks. Then a young cook who works at Applebee's came in, and Bill bought his drink. Then two old ladies stopped near Bill on their way out and thanked him for buying their drinks and meal. We talked to him about his work (he invented something very technical sounding that I'm completely ignorant about when he worked at University of Michigan in the eighties, and now he owns a cleaning company with one of his daughters). I think people must take advantage of his generosity, but I don't think he minds. So I'm going to write him postcards and make him feel as loved as I can.

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Statement of Purpose

Academic Statement of Purpose Amber * English Language & Literature Ph.D. 45732952

In seeking a position as one of University of Michigan’s doctoral students, I pursue eventual professorship. Your doctoral program is enticing in part because of its rigorous interdisciplinary scholarship and in part because of the opportunity to both teach and work intensively on a doctoral dissertation. Your program provides an opportunity to further cultivate instructional techniques and to fashion my own pedagogical panache in an intellectually exuberant community, and that excites me. The prospect of teaching 20th Century literature, my primary period of interest, is a welcome challenge. There are a multitude of subjects I will never be qualified to teach—Nanophotonics, Epidemiology, and Drawing 101, to name an arbitrary few—but I am built to teach English.

I am especially interested in the stylistic innovations of British and American pre-postmodern and global post-postmodern literature. I have a crush on Philip Larkin. I have a bigger crush on Camille Paglia. I am an unabashed Midwesterner and therefore adore Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson. Joyce’s smutty letters to his wife are my favorite specimens of his writing. I wish Barbara Pym and P.G. Wodehouse had somehow fallen in love, with Nancy Mitford as the obvious product of their union (despite the chronological impossibility). There isn’t a Graham Greene novel I haven’t adored. I was introduced to The Beatles through Haruki Murakami. Most of my knowledge of France comes from Julian Barnes. It was Evelyn Waugh who first taught me that awful people can be tremendous writers. Arnaldur Indriðason conquered my violent autonomic reaction to crime literature. A.N. Wilson first turned me on to Hilaire Belloc and, more importantly, to the young fogey. I intend to write an encyclopedia of Hitchensisms one day.

University of Michigan’s emphasis on encouraging the pursuit of interdisciplinary interests is perfectly suited to my scholastic aims, since I am interested in contributing to a revival of the waning romance between philosophy and literature. This relationship, once the platform for a savory dialectic, has suffered in contemporary American academia from the contempt of ornery analytic philosophers who presume that literature serves a merely belletristic purpose. These are thinkers who deride the more friendly stances toward literature held by continental philosophers, and who disparage the prose of philosophical giants like Plato, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. Abstruseness was once the philosopher’s element. The best philosophers provide extensive examples and use extended metaphors. Plato invents the Allegory of the Cave; Nietzsche invokes Zarathustra; Kierkegaard cites Abraham’s would-be sacrifice of Isaac. Each example is literary in form, and pre-analytic philosophical writings surge with countless more. The real world is unordered. Philosophical remoteness is mingled in literature with the contumacious irreverence of actual life. Contrary to analytic presumptions, literature serves as a link between reality and philosophy.

The unattractive disciplinary narrowness by which the analytic philosopher operates derives from an inability to appreciate the Gordian nature of literature. Their distaste for convoluted arguments, born naturally enough out of a desire for clarity, nevertheless strains the link between logic and creativity. The appeal of philosophical discourse within a novel is its realistically cluttered, disorderly structure of argumentation. It was Heidegger’s assertion in Poetry, Language, Thought that art is a dichotomy of exposure and concealment of truth that prompted my interest in literature as applied philosophy. In novels, especially the novels of the past two centuries, ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic concepts are both presented and veiled in the concreteness of messy specificity. This presentation of philosophy as reality is valuable for its adherence to human experience.

As an instructor, I will encourage students to consider literature not only according to established scholastic appraisal, but also with authentic reflection. The first novel I loved (beyond the Nancy Drew series and countless fantasy novels) was To the Lighthouse. I was thirteen. Rather than appreciate Woolf’s novel as an experimental modernist work exploring the melancholy of a sad family caught in the flux of its time, I identified with Lily Briscoe’s feelings of isolation and idolized her drive to create art. I hated Charles Tansley for his insolence. I thought Mr. Ramsay’s moment gazing at the hedge was the most beautiful instant a person could ever achieve.

This initial reading, narrow though it was, motivated my expedition into literature. There is something written, somewhere, for everyone. A detail-oriented student might appreciate Salinger or Nabokov for their thick lists rather than their exhibitionistic narrative voices. A drama-glutton might appreciate Powell’s novel cycle not for its macrocosmic intricacy but for the machinations of its various plotting men and women. An excursionist might appreciate a Durrell novel not for his introspective characters but for the ancillary scenery. A sociopath might enjoy Murdoch not for her philosophical infusions but rather for her stock of dominant personalities.

Guiding students toward discoveries of the Something Somewhere will be my Someday Job. The prestige of University of Michigan’s English Language and Literature doctoral program is indisputable, and its disciplinary diversity indicates an exploratory nature that I eagerly welcome. Your encouragement of conference participation is attractive as well. The opportunity to someday teach literature, however, is the sine qua non for my vocational happiness, and judging by the interdisciplinary topics that have recently emerged from the department—German theater on the American stage, Black writers and the photograph in the 20th Century, alternately affectionate and condemnatory analyses of the past decade’s culture, physiognomy in 19th Century literature, early European reactions to (and subsequent fuddlings of) Chinese culture, ad infinitum—I am certain that my education would be piloted not only by those who are markedly distinguished mentors, but also by those who share an appreciation of literature as a discipline which uniquely interacts with other subjects.

The English Language and Literature Ph.D. will allow me to pursue my interests in the ethics of literature during my doctoral studies. I would be able to work specifically on a refutation of Lamarque and Olson’s assertion in Truth, Fiction and Literature that truth plays no essential or indispensable role in the critical assessment of literature. I wish to develop a counterargument asserting that successful literature must possess logical validity—which ultimately translates to coherence—which is essential for ascertaining truth. The world formed in a novel must be believable; to be believable, it must have some kind of consistency. This consistency comes in the form of the logical, believable progression of the story which builds on its already-established parts. If a novel possesses validity—if its fictional progression keeps the reader’s disbelief suspended, just as a good actor does—then it possesses the requisites for philosophical truth. My goal is to fully flesh an argument against the much-beautified assertion made by Lamarque and Olson, and their legion of forbearers, that appreciating literature for its truth-striving is an invalid reason for the aforementioned appreciation.

I need your time and guidance. I am a dedicated student. I have paid my way through the four years of my two baccalaureate degrees. I am only increasing momentum. I strive to make teaching literature the bane and boon of my remaining existence, and hope that University of Michigan will steer my flight.