Comp Lit Application Stuff
Ok, I've actually already submitted all this to UC Berkeley already, but I'm still tweaking it for future submissions this month and next. So anyway, let me know what you guys think!
The expansiveness of Comparative Literature was what drew me to the department as an undergraduate, and what draws me to it still. It’s a characteristic that fits well with the broad scope of my own interests, which include everything from German and Classical literature to East Asian Studies and Continental philosophy. I was interested in trying to find a way to unify these various strands into some sort of overarching conceptual framework - but by the time I graduated NYU, I was not quite at that point yet. And so upon graduation I decided to take some time off from academia, in the hopes that putting myself in a radically new situation for a while would help to refocus my thinking.
Accordingly, I decided to spend a year teaching English as a second language in South Korea. My year abroad was worth it, although not necessarily in the ways I thought it would be. What fascinated me the most when I was there was the way Western forms and symbols were appropriated and warped beyond recognition: televised Starcraft games; Koreans’ “misuse” of English words and phrases; squid pizza; and so on. Seeing my own culture tossed back at me as something new and unfamiliar made me realize that the “misinterpretation” of foreign elements can often itself be a powerful form of expression.
This element of self-expressive assimilation seems to be the best way to understand my various academic interests, such as post-WWII German and Japanese culture. Faced with the threat of Americanization and the need to assert a new cultural identity unencumbered by fascist associations, artists, writers, and directors in both countries have appropriated elements of American culture in uniquely German and Japanese ways -- from the way the neuroses of modern Japan play themselves out in anime and manga to the German hippies of the "krautrock" movement who turned Anglophone psychedelic music into something much more mechanical and abstract. The process of expression-via-mimicry can apply not only to whole cultures, but also to individual artists and writers. I see this process playing itself out in a wide variety of situations: Henry Darger’s incorporation of religious and commercial signifiers into his own unique artistic vision; Virgil's Roman recontextualization of Homer; or even H.P. Lovecraft’s science-fictionalized Poe homages.
All of the above examples could be categorized as different varieties of what I’d call “awkward expression”: attempts at imitation that open up the space for artistic subjectivity via their very inability to precisely replicate their influences. In this model, inspired by Freud, Žižek, and Lacan, the artistic-creative subject is a product of the gap between the pre-artistic self and artistic “Others”, whether they be foreign cultural ideas or individual artistic influences. In other words, the reality of any particular artist-creator can only express itself via the distortions and gaps created by the attempt to assimilate outside influences. Expression here lies in a sort of gap or interruption of perfect imitation that opens up the possibility of unique creation. It is this strain that separates this peculiarly Lacanian expressionism from the more traditional idea of the direct flow of inner emotions into a work.
I find these ideas quite compelling, but obviously they act only as a starting point, a potentiality that must be developed further. UC Berkeley has the intellectual climate that would allow me to do this, while working with a wide variety of very creative and influential people. I'm particularly interested in working with Judith Butler, whose work I respect greatly, and whose interests relate to my own in their treatment of identity construction and subject formation in a post-structuralist context. There are many other Berkeley professors whom I would look forward to working with as well, particularly those specializing in the fields of Latin, East Asian Studies and popular culture, e.g. Anne-Lise Francois, Kathleen McCarthy, and Miryam Sas. Above all, Berkeley possesses the sort of open-minded but demanding intellectual climate that would help to foster my own development into an original, truly expressive academic subject. Literature, like any other creative endeavor, must be an encounter, and Berkeley will provide for me the possibility of a wide variety of encounters with ideas, cultures, and people.
....
I come from a fairly working class family. My father was a policeman and my mother was a receptionist. Neither has graduated college, and of my four siblings, only one has college degree. I always stood out a bit from my extremely traditional, conservative, devoutly Catholic family - as an intellectual whose father routinely railed against “ivory-tower eggheads”; as a skeptic whose mother would often claim, whenever something bad happened to him as the result of a stupid decision, that God was punishing him for his sins; as a timid, effeminate nerd whose brothers were two cops and a construction worker.
A strict, all-boy Catholic high school is certainly not the best environment for an adolescent to come to terms with his identity as a left-wing queer vegan atheist intellectual. Nevertheless, years of feeling out-of-place in my environment slowly made me identify with any and all things unfamiliar and alien. And so I developed an interest in foreign cultures, in avant-garde art, in science fiction, and in practically anything that involved Otherness. Perhaps this is the same reason why I chose to be an academic from a fairly early age - learning excited me because it’s basically a process of incorporating the unfamiliar.
One of the major factors in my decision to pursue a Comparative Literature degree is the discipline’s openness to non-white, non-male, and non-heterosexual discourses. In my academic work I wish to deal with a wide variety of subjects on a democratic basis - from Japanese prog-rock to Nigerian Afrobeat, from the Roman comedic theatre of Plautus to the homoerotic surrealist cinema of Kenneth Anger, from Emma Bovary to Emma Goldman. Of course, no matter how many different voices and ideas I attempt to address in my academic work, my own particular perspective will always be evident - a perspective informed by my identity as a queer outcast from a working-class background.
The expansiveness of Comparative Literature was what drew me to the department as an undergraduate, and what draws me to it still. It’s a characteristic that fits well with the broad scope of my own interests, which include everything from German and Classical literature to East Asian Studies and Continental philosophy. I was interested in trying to find a way to unify these various strands into some sort of overarching conceptual framework - but by the time I graduated NYU, I was not quite at that point yet. And so upon graduation I decided to take some time off from academia, in the hopes that putting myself in a radically new situation for a while would help to refocus my thinking.
Accordingly, I decided to spend a year teaching English as a second language in South Korea. My year abroad was worth it, although not necessarily in the ways I thought it would be. What fascinated me the most when I was there was the way Western forms and symbols were appropriated and warped beyond recognition: televised Starcraft games; Koreans’ “misuse” of English words and phrases; squid pizza; and so on. Seeing my own culture tossed back at me as something new and unfamiliar made me realize that the “misinterpretation” of foreign elements can often itself be a powerful form of expression.
This element of self-expressive assimilation seems to be the best way to understand my various academic interests, such as post-WWII German and Japanese culture. Faced with the threat of Americanization and the need to assert a new cultural identity unencumbered by fascist associations, artists, writers, and directors in both countries have appropriated elements of American culture in uniquely German and Japanese ways -- from the way the neuroses of modern Japan play themselves out in anime and manga to the German hippies of the "krautrock" movement who turned Anglophone psychedelic music into something much more mechanical and abstract. The process of expression-via-mimicry can apply not only to whole cultures, but also to individual artists and writers. I see this process playing itself out in a wide variety of situations: Henry Darger’s incorporation of religious and commercial signifiers into his own unique artistic vision; Virgil's Roman recontextualization of Homer; or even H.P. Lovecraft’s science-fictionalized Poe homages.
All of the above examples could be categorized as different varieties of what I’d call “awkward expression”: attempts at imitation that open up the space for artistic subjectivity via their very inability to precisely replicate their influences. In this model, inspired by Freud, Žižek, and Lacan, the artistic-creative subject is a product of the gap between the pre-artistic self and artistic “Others”, whether they be foreign cultural ideas or individual artistic influences. In other words, the reality of any particular artist-creator can only express itself via the distortions and gaps created by the attempt to assimilate outside influences. Expression here lies in a sort of gap or interruption of perfect imitation that opens up the possibility of unique creation. It is this strain that separates this peculiarly Lacanian expressionism from the more traditional idea of the direct flow of inner emotions into a work.
I find these ideas quite compelling, but obviously they act only as a starting point, a potentiality that must be developed further. UC Berkeley has the intellectual climate that would allow me to do this, while working with a wide variety of very creative and influential people. I'm particularly interested in working with Judith Butler, whose work I respect greatly, and whose interests relate to my own in their treatment of identity construction and subject formation in a post-structuralist context. There are many other Berkeley professors whom I would look forward to working with as well, particularly those specializing in the fields of Latin, East Asian Studies and popular culture, e.g. Anne-Lise Francois, Kathleen McCarthy, and Miryam Sas. Above all, Berkeley possesses the sort of open-minded but demanding intellectual climate that would help to foster my own development into an original, truly expressive academic subject. Literature, like any other creative endeavor, must be an encounter, and Berkeley will provide for me the possibility of a wide variety of encounters with ideas, cultures, and people.
....
I come from a fairly working class family. My father was a policeman and my mother was a receptionist. Neither has graduated college, and of my four siblings, only one has college degree. I always stood out a bit from my extremely traditional, conservative, devoutly Catholic family - as an intellectual whose father routinely railed against “ivory-tower eggheads”; as a skeptic whose mother would often claim, whenever something bad happened to him as the result of a stupid decision, that God was punishing him for his sins; as a timid, effeminate nerd whose brothers were two cops and a construction worker.
A strict, all-boy Catholic high school is certainly not the best environment for an adolescent to come to terms with his identity as a left-wing queer vegan atheist intellectual. Nevertheless, years of feeling out-of-place in my environment slowly made me identify with any and all things unfamiliar and alien. And so I developed an interest in foreign cultures, in avant-garde art, in science fiction, and in practically anything that involved Otherness. Perhaps this is the same reason why I chose to be an academic from a fairly early age - learning excited me because it’s basically a process of incorporating the unfamiliar.
One of the major factors in my decision to pursue a Comparative Literature degree is the discipline’s openness to non-white, non-male, and non-heterosexual discourses. In my academic work I wish to deal with a wide variety of subjects on a democratic basis - from Japanese prog-rock to Nigerian Afrobeat, from the Roman comedic theatre of Plautus to the homoerotic surrealist cinema of Kenneth Anger, from Emma Bovary to Emma Goldman. Of course, no matter how many different voices and ideas I attempt to address in my academic work, my own particular perspective will always be evident - a perspective informed by my identity as a queer outcast from a working-class background.