Revised SoP
You guys were super helpful last time. I revised my SoP and added some details, like my undergrad thesis and so forth.
It weighs in at a heavy 524 words, but it'll get a bit longer when I add in the actual details about my fit and figure out my ending. I'm really just looking for general ideas. After this I'll give it another fine-grained edit and then send it off to my professors. Thank you thank you!
Some issues: I'm not crazy about my intro (flowery AND sort of dull?), and I might be using too much jargon-y with intertexual buzz words. I don't know how to end it, either. Tell me if this is a decent edit or if I should can whole parts. Thank you so much!
I started college as a Renaissance Studies undergraduate, hellbent on studying Shakespeare. Yet while I savored classes on Elizabethan politics and household dynamics, my prime interest became Shakespeare adaptation and allusions in contemporary media. Like Ariel's vision of Fernando, modern writers transformed Shakespeare into bones of coral, his voice made new by interpretation. Here was Miranda, reincarnated as a debauched Lolita. Here was Stephan Dedalus, bandying around Hamlet allusions. I ultimately switched to the Modern Studies interdisciplinary subset, where I studied postcolonial writers, contemporary poetics, and French modernists. Professor Susan Fraiman introduced me to feminist criticism through writers such as Jane Austen and Olivia Butler, Radclyffe Hall and a romance novelist. Her multi-genre approach reinforced my interest in intertexual discourses.
Feminist criticism further informed my senior thesis, where I asserted that the uninterrupted male narratives in Lolita and The Virgin Suicides troped their female subjects' lack of agency over their burgeoning sexuality. Male unilateral control over the girls' stories, I argued, reinforces Lolita's and the Lisbon sisters' objectification. I analyzed the novels' film adaptations as departures from this objectification, positing Kubrick's Lolita as a cautious, censored product of 1950s sexual mores and Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides as a feminist adaptation.
Though I am very much the product of a Modern Studies schooling, my devotion to Shakespeare, a canonical and often heretical story-stealer, guides my present approach to literature and film. I see the canon as non-linear, kaleidoscopic, where old texts slide under new ones. I am still intrigued by intertexual adaptation, and my dissertation will analyze the ways in which new writers have grafted contemporary crises of identity on ancestral literary scaffolding. Works such as Jane Smiley's novel A Thousand Acres, Marina Warner's Indigo, and Julie Taymor's films Titus and the upcoming The Tempest (starring Helen Mirren as “Prospera”) testify to a growing body of feminist Shakespeare revisions. How does narrative structure differ when a pre-existing plot arches over the new story? Did these contemporary visionaries find Elizabethan conclusions of gender wanting, or have they tapped into potential interpretations embedded in the original plays?
My doctoral research will also encompass women who adapt and direct books written by men. Mary Harron (American Psycho), Jane Campion (Portrait of a Lady) and Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides) have appropriated modern novels that address the ways in which a decade's mores fetishize female characters. Do these feminist adaptations strive to lend more authenticity to the hypotexts by virtue of women reconstructing patriarchal oppression through their own lenses, or do their refracted visions-male imagines female, director adapts novel-further destabilize the core text?
I believe that [X University's] doctoral program, specifically its [unique, liberal set-up], is uniquely tailored to my interdisciplinary pursuits. I hope to work with [Renaissance professor], whose approach to [gender/postcolonialism in Shakespeare], as evinced in [article/book on subject], will help guide my understanding of embedded sociohistorical issues in Renaissance texts. I am equally compelled by [Modern/Contemporary Lit Professor, preferably with some experience in cinema]'s work, whose application of [gender studies/queer theory/etc] to [novel/film] in [book/article] employs the same modes of reclamation and discovery as I plan to use in my study of literary appropriations.
How do I end this??
It weighs in at a heavy 524 words, but it'll get a bit longer when I add in the actual details about my fit and figure out my ending. I'm really just looking for general ideas. After this I'll give it another fine-grained edit and then send it off to my professors. Thank you thank you!
Some issues: I'm not crazy about my intro (flowery AND sort of dull?), and I might be using too much jargon-y with intertexual buzz words. I don't know how to end it, either. Tell me if this is a decent edit or if I should can whole parts. Thank you so much!
I started college as a Renaissance Studies undergraduate, hellbent on studying Shakespeare. Yet while I savored classes on Elizabethan politics and household dynamics, my prime interest became Shakespeare adaptation and allusions in contemporary media. Like Ariel's vision of Fernando, modern writers transformed Shakespeare into bones of coral, his voice made new by interpretation. Here was Miranda, reincarnated as a debauched Lolita. Here was Stephan Dedalus, bandying around Hamlet allusions. I ultimately switched to the Modern Studies interdisciplinary subset, where I studied postcolonial writers, contemporary poetics, and French modernists. Professor Susan Fraiman introduced me to feminist criticism through writers such as Jane Austen and Olivia Butler, Radclyffe Hall and a romance novelist. Her multi-genre approach reinforced my interest in intertexual discourses.
Feminist criticism further informed my senior thesis, where I asserted that the uninterrupted male narratives in Lolita and The Virgin Suicides troped their female subjects' lack of agency over their burgeoning sexuality. Male unilateral control over the girls' stories, I argued, reinforces Lolita's and the Lisbon sisters' objectification. I analyzed the novels' film adaptations as departures from this objectification, positing Kubrick's Lolita as a cautious, censored product of 1950s sexual mores and Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides as a feminist adaptation.
Though I am very much the product of a Modern Studies schooling, my devotion to Shakespeare, a canonical and often heretical story-stealer, guides my present approach to literature and film. I see the canon as non-linear, kaleidoscopic, where old texts slide under new ones. I am still intrigued by intertexual adaptation, and my dissertation will analyze the ways in which new writers have grafted contemporary crises of identity on ancestral literary scaffolding. Works such as Jane Smiley's novel A Thousand Acres, Marina Warner's Indigo, and Julie Taymor's films Titus and the upcoming The Tempest (starring Helen Mirren as “Prospera”) testify to a growing body of feminist Shakespeare revisions. How does narrative structure differ when a pre-existing plot arches over the new story? Did these contemporary visionaries find Elizabethan conclusions of gender wanting, or have they tapped into potential interpretations embedded in the original plays?
My doctoral research will also encompass women who adapt and direct books written by men. Mary Harron (American Psycho), Jane Campion (Portrait of a Lady) and Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides) have appropriated modern novels that address the ways in which a decade's mores fetishize female characters. Do these feminist adaptations strive to lend more authenticity to the hypotexts by virtue of women reconstructing patriarchal oppression through their own lenses, or do their refracted visions-male imagines female, director adapts novel-further destabilize the core text?
I believe that [X University's] doctoral program, specifically its [unique, liberal set-up], is uniquely tailored to my interdisciplinary pursuits. I hope to work with [Renaissance professor], whose approach to [gender/postcolonialism in Shakespeare], as evinced in [article/book on subject], will help guide my understanding of embedded sociohistorical issues in Renaissance texts. I am equally compelled by [Modern/Contemporary Lit Professor, preferably with some experience in cinema]'s work, whose application of [gender studies/queer theory/etc] to [novel/film] in [book/article] employs the same modes of reclamation and discovery as I plan to use in my study of literary appropriations.
How do I end this??