The Statement of Intent
First of all, thank you to all the troopers who plowed through my statement- thanks to you I am making serious headway. Comments ranged across the board and I am taking them all very seriously.
I am going to reply to everyone who commented individually, but in case any of you are interested in reading round II, I am including it below. I hope that in addition to gaining insight on the process myself, I am providing a record of drafts and cuts that will help other people construct their statement. In looking for templates online or a guiding statement to learn from, I found just about nothing, so hopefully watching someone else go through the process will be informative for people looking online for resources and personal statement guidance.
Also, I am more than happy to advise or read and comment if anyone wants to send me anything!
Here is my statement with some MAJOR revisions- I just about cut the whole thing in half!
“What we accept in life we cannot accept in story,” protests Susan Barton, the heroine transcribed from William DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe into J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, one of the many novels I analyzed for a graduate seminar thesis entitled “Mut(e)ilations: The Loss of Voice and the Voice of Loss in South Africa.” I describe Susan’s remark as a “protest” deliberately; Foe is Susan’s dissent against the grand narrative of Robinson Crusoe, a text she decries as Defoe’s attempt to create an anesthetized legacy from her witness narrative. I argued that to begin healing in post-apartheid South Africa and indeed, the many histories of national trauma in the 20th century, the country must memorialize and inscribe within its national canon its history of forgetting people; and must reveal instead a story of disappearance and a disappearance of story, a tale of lost tales.
Living in South Africa and studying its literature led me to consider the use and misuse of language to represent silence in traumatic histories. Those familiar with DeFoe’s original text will remember the slave Friday, literally rendered speechless by the text. Rewritten by Coetzee, his mutilated tongue alienates him from communication, his silence subject to wanton interpretation and mistranslation. In my study, which earned me a 2004 writing award by the University of Cape Town and a 2005 award from UCDavis, I found assigning meaning to the silenced victim as destructive as denying the victim language altogether, and decided to probe it further in other literary contexts.
Exploring the violence of both muting and ventriloquizing victims drew me to a course in Holocaust Literature. My senior thesis explored how the stories told through children’s literature has and will construct Holocaust memory for upcoming generations. I again encountered attempts to fix meaning to a silenced people, and argued that Holocaust literature reinterprets that silence in order to pursue modern political, cultural and social agendas. While doing so keeps the history relevant for modern audiences, it is also a ventriloquist’s act. I maintained, as I did in my South African study, that the literature of traumatic cultural memory must acknowledge ambiguity and anarchy in the victim’s story, the history of silencing and the silences in the historical narrative; the capacity of language to both give voice and to subvert it. I concluded that we cannot affix meaning to the subaltern story, that we can only memorialize the trauma and eulogize the loss.
In pursuing my PhD, I would like to consider how to tell the tale of a silenced witness, how literature grapples with untold stories in global postcolonial and postmodern texts, and our motivations for interpreting told and untold stories as we do. My knowledge and interest in 20th century literature is informed by my coursework and subsequent work directing education for the New England Holocaust Memorial. My academic analyses of witness narratives is informed by my work with Survivors, their stories enabling me to understand how witness narratives are transcribed into the literary canon. Attending seminars in Berlin in a 2006 conference on Holocaust memory revealed the importance of this examination, and witnessing Germany struggle with cultural memory and its representations echoed for me the struggle over the South African historical narrative. I hope that by studying the witness narrative and the literature it produces, I can return to both countries equipped to guide them in understanding their tales of lost tales.
In 2007 I accepted a research position with the Institute of Jewish and Community Research, a think tank devoted to studying social demography. There, I consider how and why textbook publishers choose to incorporate versions of post-Holocaust history into their texts. Surveying varieties of accounts reminds me that history is more discourse than monologue, one easily manipulated by the speaker’s language. Moreover, working at the Institute has allowed me to hone my research skills and confirmed my ambition to pursue further academic scholarship, leading me to enroll in Hebrew and German courses, which will allow me to access primary documents in my field. In my quest to reconsider and expand my initial arguments, I find my thoughts on the witness narrative influenced by the work of several Columbia faculty members, including Professor Spivak’s subaltern theory and Professor Hirsch’s preoccupation with the limits of language to represent traumatic memory.
I do not suppose that as a PhD, I will understand or explain these episodes of traumatic and violent history, or their massive effect on how we construe ourselves and our surroundings. Instead, I intend to better understand traumatic witness and to project a theory about what type of story we, as witnesses, will tell. I wish to research, document and influence the texture of that memory, to help weave the narrative that will pass on.
I am going to reply to everyone who commented individually, but in case any of you are interested in reading round II, I am including it below. I hope that in addition to gaining insight on the process myself, I am providing a record of drafts and cuts that will help other people construct their statement. In looking for templates online or a guiding statement to learn from, I found just about nothing, so hopefully watching someone else go through the process will be informative for people looking online for resources and personal statement guidance.
Also, I am more than happy to advise or read and comment if anyone wants to send me anything!
Here is my statement with some MAJOR revisions- I just about cut the whole thing in half!
“What we accept in life we cannot accept in story,” protests Susan Barton, the heroine transcribed from William DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe into J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, one of the many novels I analyzed for a graduate seminar thesis entitled “Mut(e)ilations: The Loss of Voice and the Voice of Loss in South Africa.” I describe Susan’s remark as a “protest” deliberately; Foe is Susan’s dissent against the grand narrative of Robinson Crusoe, a text she decries as Defoe’s attempt to create an anesthetized legacy from her witness narrative. I argued that to begin healing in post-apartheid South Africa and indeed, the many histories of national trauma in the 20th century, the country must memorialize and inscribe within its national canon its history of forgetting people; and must reveal instead a story of disappearance and a disappearance of story, a tale of lost tales.
Living in South Africa and studying its literature led me to consider the use and misuse of language to represent silence in traumatic histories. Those familiar with DeFoe’s original text will remember the slave Friday, literally rendered speechless by the text. Rewritten by Coetzee, his mutilated tongue alienates him from communication, his silence subject to wanton interpretation and mistranslation. In my study, which earned me a 2004 writing award by the University of Cape Town and a 2005 award from UCDavis, I found assigning meaning to the silenced victim as destructive as denying the victim language altogether, and decided to probe it further in other literary contexts.
Exploring the violence of both muting and ventriloquizing victims drew me to a course in Holocaust Literature. My senior thesis explored how the stories told through children’s literature has and will construct Holocaust memory for upcoming generations. I again encountered attempts to fix meaning to a silenced people, and argued that Holocaust literature reinterprets that silence in order to pursue modern political, cultural and social agendas. While doing so keeps the history relevant for modern audiences, it is also a ventriloquist’s act. I maintained, as I did in my South African study, that the literature of traumatic cultural memory must acknowledge ambiguity and anarchy in the victim’s story, the history of silencing and the silences in the historical narrative; the capacity of language to both give voice and to subvert it. I concluded that we cannot affix meaning to the subaltern story, that we can only memorialize the trauma and eulogize the loss.
In pursuing my PhD, I would like to consider how to tell the tale of a silenced witness, how literature grapples with untold stories in global postcolonial and postmodern texts, and our motivations for interpreting told and untold stories as we do. My knowledge and interest in 20th century literature is informed by my coursework and subsequent work directing education for the New England Holocaust Memorial. My academic analyses of witness narratives is informed by my work with Survivors, their stories enabling me to understand how witness narratives are transcribed into the literary canon. Attending seminars in Berlin in a 2006 conference on Holocaust memory revealed the importance of this examination, and witnessing Germany struggle with cultural memory and its representations echoed for me the struggle over the South African historical narrative. I hope that by studying the witness narrative and the literature it produces, I can return to both countries equipped to guide them in understanding their tales of lost tales.
In 2007 I accepted a research position with the Institute of Jewish and Community Research, a think tank devoted to studying social demography. There, I consider how and why textbook publishers choose to incorporate versions of post-Holocaust history into their texts. Surveying varieties of accounts reminds me that history is more discourse than monologue, one easily manipulated by the speaker’s language. Moreover, working at the Institute has allowed me to hone my research skills and confirmed my ambition to pursue further academic scholarship, leading me to enroll in Hebrew and German courses, which will allow me to access primary documents in my field. In my quest to reconsider and expand my initial arguments, I find my thoughts on the witness narrative influenced by the work of several Columbia faculty members, including Professor Spivak’s subaltern theory and Professor Hirsch’s preoccupation with the limits of language to represent traumatic memory.
I do not suppose that as a PhD, I will understand or explain these episodes of traumatic and violent history, or their massive effect on how we construe ourselves and our surroundings. Instead, I intend to better understand traumatic witness and to project a theory about what type of story we, as witnesses, will tell. I wish to research, document and influence the texture of that memory, to help weave the narrative that will pass on.