Program: MA in English

　　It all started with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," the one poem I could quote from the hundreds I read in a year-long freshman survey of "Western Heritage Literature." What made it stand out in my mind? Everything that made the poem modern: the juxtaposition of drama and triviality in Prufrock's mid-life crisis, the unexpected images of an evening under anesthetic and cat-like city smog. An elective Eliot seminar followed, in which I was immersed in critical readings, lively debate, and intensive research unlike any I had encountered in required survey courses. That experience convinced me to officially declare an English major, but I was not yet declaring aspirations towards an academic career. Through three years as a reporter/editor for the La Salle Collegian, I dreamed of distant Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting. By the fall of 1991, however, I was beginning to envision fellowships, laudatory book jacket blurbs, and a tenured professorship as my ultimate goals. Several semesters as a peer tutor in La Salle's Writing Fellows Program had convinced me that I have an aptitude for teaching to match my talents in academic research and writing.

　　To clear up any uncertainties about committing myself to advanced scholarship, I decided to take "a year off" after graduation to explore other career paths. Since August 1992, I have been the Editor and Report Coordinator at McCormick, Taylor & Associates, Inc., and a transportation engineering and environmental planning firm based in Philadelphia. As MTA's "grammar guru," I have pondered at length the intricacies of comma placement, the evils of passive voice, and the burning question of whether to pluralize acre when it follows a fraction. This preoccupation with details has strengthened my basic writing skills. In the past year, I have also been called upon to teach the basics to others. Most newcomers to our staff have little or no training in technical writing, and some would definitely benefit from a refresher on the fundamentals of composition. In the spring, I will conduct a one-day writing workshop for MTA's traffic engineers, environmental scientists, and planners.

　　I was first attracted to the University of Kankakee by the Writing Studies Program. From working with software design and advanced biology classes at the college level, and with technical professionals in the business world, I have become convinced that college curricula must place more emphasis on "writing across the disciplines." The influence of computerized word processing on writing strategies is another area I would like to research. Because my experience with theories of rhetoric and composition is limited, however, I am wary of declaring a concentration in writing studies. I hope that I will have the opportunity to sample courses in the Writing Studies Program as a graduate student of literature at Kankakee.

　　My interests still lie mainly in the modern era, but my conception of the modern has changed a great deal in light of the theories I have explored since college. A seminar in the Bronte's (HON 315, 1991) and a women's studies class (audited in 1992) first exposed me to feminist criticism, which I have continued to investigate on my own. As a result of this study, I now recognize the modern spirit in such rebellious female voices of the 19th century as Charlotte Bronte and Emily Dickinson. I plan to focus my research on issues of gender and identity in women's literature in England and America. In researching your program, I was pleased to note that several professors in the department express an interest in feminist theory, women's writing, and gender studies.

　　My early interest in modernism was born of a passion for poetry, but I am currently intrigued by changes in narrative technique through the 20th century. While the modernists experimented with multiple voices and streams of consciousness, contemporary novelists like John Fowles have represented conflicting realities that seem to exist independent of the mind. I hope to investigate this and other postmodern trends in fiction through graduate study. Your faculty list includes many 20th century scholars, who would undoubtedly help me to discover exciting avenues of inquiry I have not yet imagined.

 Program: MA in English

　　My two-year hiatus from the campus setting has caused me to make a careful inspection of my decision to return to school. This inspection has strongly confirmed my previous belief that I have a vocation for both teaching and research, and it has increased my determination to enter the profession. My experience at the University of Tuscola Honors College showed me the excitement which can be created through classroom interaction and hallway interaction, whether the topic is Aristotle, Chaucer, or simply the daily news; and the eleven months which I spent producing my undergraduate thesis showed me the rewards of scholarship. I wish to continue these discussions and to pursue my own research in the future.

　　Admittedly, the weakest element of my undergraduate education is the sparseness of theory to which I was exposed. In order to remedy this shortcoming, I have solicited reading lists from several sources and I have begun my own preliminary exploration of the field of theory. I have become interested in the work of critics such as Barthes, Derrida, Jameson, Gallop, Sedgwick and Eagleton, and I look forward to exploring it further in an academic setting, and to incorporating it into my own practices. I am also eager to take part in the developments that will occur in the field of theory over the next several decades.

　　At this point, I believe that I would like to focus my graduate studies, and my career, on the Twentieth Century--both in England and in the United States. I do not, yet, feel prepared to select a dissertation topic, but I am drawn to the novels and short stories of authors such as Joyce, Wolf and Walker, and the work of such poets as Yeats, Pound, Eliot and Rich. (I am also interested in the works of several Hispanic writers, especially Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges.) One topic that I find appealing is the examination of the plurality of perspectives a text contains, especially with respect to the characters, and the way in which these perspectives allow the reader to interact with the text.

　　A striking example of this effect can be found in Wolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The text constantly changes perspectives from one character to another. And, though we are most aware of Clarissa and of Septimus Smith, we are constantly reminded that neither has a transcendent vantage point. Indeed, the perspective that I find most intriguing is one to which neither the reader nor Clarissa has any access.

　　Oh, but how surprising!--In the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her! It was fascinating, with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing room, to watch that old woman, quite quietly, going to bed.

　　The existence of this perspective which we cannot see (but which Clarissa understands to be unappreciative of the momentous nature of the evening) is a reminder to us that there are meanings and realities which exist outside of those presented by the author, meanings which it is the reader's part to explore. It is my intention, in applying for graduate school, to join the exploration.

 I hope to go to Graduate School at Kankakee because I believe it represents the next important challenge in my life. The last two years have taught me that learning about literature can be more than an avocation. Returning to school has brought about a　transformation in my life, and as I make discoveries about literature, I learn about myself. I want to keep making discoveries.

　　Since 1977 I have worked to develop a technical career. I enjoy this work, but it cannot compare to the fulfillment of reading and studying literature. Experiencing literature, and working with people who know and care about it, are what I want to do. Committing any more of my energy to a career other than this would be like writing with my left hand.

　　I want to go to Graduate School so that I can learn to know literature well. I want to explore the shape and the meaning of the novel and its literary antecedents. I want to understand what the novel has meant in different literary periods, and what is likely to become. I want to explore its different forms, realism, naturalism, and other modes, and the Victorian and Modernist consciousness as they are revealed.

　　I am drawn to the works of Hardy, Conrad, Faulkner, and Morrison, the poetry of Herbert, Dickinson, and Hopkins, and the tragedies of the Greeks and Shakespeare. I want to speak and write about the power of literature, and the experience it is for me and for others. I want to learn to read, to write, and to think critically, and to use these skills as a professional. Most of all, I want to teach, and to guide others in their explorations of the world through literature, to encourage them to see in it all that I see in it: the whole of human experience, beautifully and fully and truthfully contained in words.

  Program: Ph.D. in English (received MA from same school and department)

　　When I began thinking about how to write this statement, one that I expect will help me to chart my course for at least the next several years, I thought it might be a good idea to pull out a certain manila folder containing the original "Statement of Purpose" I wrote when first
applying to programs for graduate study. It might be interesting to see how closely I had followed the trajectory set for myself all those years ago (well, all three years ago, anyway).

　　This blast from my past was--need it be said?--embarrassing. To make a "statement," I suppose, I had strung together a list of interests that were hopelessly, if optimistically, broad. They ranged from Chaucer to the 18th century novel to canon formation to jazz writing to Harold Ross's New Yorker humorists. My interests still range rather widely. But in the two years of research, writing, and listening I have done here, I have been able, at least, to narrow my focus to a particular literary concern: the vexed, rich relations between Anglophone writing and African-derived music. In part this focus has stemmed (if I may wax catachresis) from my growing investment in jazz--after all, I did buy a cornet last summer. In addition, I find myself more and more struck by the music's remarkable textuality: jazz has its canonical texts, auteurs, and characteristic tropes; its metaphoric substitutions, metonymic
elaborations, synecdochic quotations, and ironic revisions; its hybrid utterances, dialogic interplay, and signifying rhetorical posturing. And so the writing that currently has the strongest hold on me is that which recognizes African-derived music as a full partner, whether for sparring or for building formal alliances. The writers I have been reading for whom this music becomes a structuring voice include Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Vachel Lindsay, William Carlos Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sterling Brown.

　　While my focus has narrowed from that first (over)Statement, my Purpose remains much the same. My "prime concern," as I put it then, was to develop "an approach that met the challenges race, gender, and power relations brought to understanding the dialogue between a text and its historical situation." Within that framework, I especially want to explore particular historical moments when Anglophone literature has deployed African derived musical practices (jazz, but also blues, calypso, soul, gospel) as a way to articulate the ideological category of race--race as a marker of difference (biological or cultural); race as history, and particularly as a political unconscious underwriting the West's historical narratives (including the narrative of its literary history); race as the subject's interpellation into what Dubois called "double-consciousness"; or even race as non-existent.

　　By necessity, given my somewhat extra-literary focus, I have had to add to my stockpile the critical tools used by several other fields of cultural studies, most notably historiography, ethnography, and musicology. Yet I remain convinced that any adequate ideological critique has to be grounded in the kind of close formal analysis that best comes out of solid training in literary criticism. I have tried to use the training of my two years spent working towards an M.A. at the University of Illinois to build up a basic body of work out of which I feel comfortable making future excursions. To that end, I have researched and written on: the gendering of the blues that distorts even accounts as subtle as that offered by Houston A. Baker, Jr. in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature; the boogie-woogie rumble that Langston Hughes's jazz recordings created beneath the unitary surface of McCarthyism; the outre-avant-garde avant-gardism of dancer, film star, and writer Josephine Baker; the polyrhythmic plotting of 18th-century West Indian slave narratives; and the racial love and theft that white writers articulate through the "verbal analogues" they create for black jazz forms.

　　So where do I go from here? While there is nothing especially new about entertaining a connection between race, music, and literature (it goes back at least to Zora Neale Hurston's "Characteristics of Negro Expression", I hope to work through this connection specifically as
a way toward opening up what Houston A. Baker, Jr. has called "Harlem Renaissance, Ltd": that is, a Renaissance that traditionally has been limited-temporally, geographically, and aesthetically--to 1920s Harlem under white patronage. As an example of what I mean by "opening up," I have in mind a project in which I look at the calypsos (or "kaisos" that became a popular forum for debating Trinidadian national independence in the 1930s and 1940s. My intent with such a project would be to add to the larger picture of what Paul Gilroy has called the "black Atlantic" modernism within which New Negro calls for an African American cultural nation took place. My approach has a precedent in the writings of Hurston, Baker, and Gilroy (and others like Hazel Carby and Robert Farris Thompson), but the areas into which this approach leads are still largely unexplored and promise to be fruitful areas for study.

 Program: Ph.D. in English

　　After a year and a half of graduate study in English, I am certain that I want to continue studying toward a Ph.D. in English and eventually teach literature at the college level. I have decided to continue studying and researching within the discipline of literary criticism because I consider it an especially fruitful one in which to work, allowing as it does for supplemental study in any number of other disciplines like anthropology, film, history, linguistics, and psychology, to name a few. I plan to specialize in American fiction written since World War II, because the "postmodern" period and its historical context interest me the most and because I find the epistemological, ethical, and critical questions raised by the more experimental fictions of this period especially worthy of critical analysis. I would also like to focus on critical theory, because I believe that a thorough knowledge of contemporary critical debate and its pedagogical implications is indispensable to anyone who intends to teach literature, particularly contemporary literature.

　　At this point, my background consists of three years of undergraduate study and a year and a half of graduate study of the major historical periods and figures of English and American literature, from Old English to modernism. Although I have not yet formally studied contemporary American fiction, I have read much or all of the work of such novelists as Don DeLillo, William Gaddis, Joseph Heller, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas Pynchon, as well as much of the secondary criticism on DeLillo and Gaddis. In addition, I have an introductory knowledge of most of the major critical movements of the twentieth century, from Russian formalism to postcolonial theory. Finally, I have studied Latin, German, French, and, less extensively, Italian, and would be prepared to fulfill the departmental foreign language requirements within the first year of admission to the program.

　　In regard to occupational experience, for the last year and a half I have taught freshman composition at the University of Mahomet. In addition, this last fall I assisted Professor Jean Saltzguber, the Director of the Writing Fellows Program at the University of Mahomet, in supervising undergraduate honors students whose job was to edit preliminary drafts of papers written for honors courses. This coming spring, I will continue to teach freshman composition.

　　In conclusion, I would like to pursue graduate study at the University of Springfield because of the reputation of the Department of English and because I believe the size of both the University and the Department of English would be ideal for the kind of interdisciplinary work with which I would like to supplement my study of literature (perhaps through the Program for Cultural Studies). I am particularly attracted to the Department of English at the University of Springfield because it offers plenty of opportunities for teaching.