New draft of English SOP
I find exploring questions surrounding literature to be an excellent blend of creative problem solving and engagement with significant conceptual issues. Involving myself in conversations of meaning, art, and society, I find a great enjoyment - not so much a feeling of penetrating a mystery as in sensing its potentiality. What I can say definitively - especially from the perspective I am gaining spending a year away from school - is that while the product of my academic work may or may not have ramifications in the wider world, I enjoy it for the experience that it is. This personal satisfaction is essential to me as a person and my identity as a scholar. I want to look for similar moments of enjoyment - of things as things for their own sake - in literature. Each time I have looked closely at these moments, it has been like watching possibility itself projecting and expanding through history and the tradition, which, much like Eliot characterized it, is always changing. Though I know experiences like this abound throughout literature, I have encountered them most acutely in the works of Elizabeth Bishop and John Clare.
My interest in these two poets springs mostly from two concurrent projects I completed my senior year as an English major. One was an independent study of Bishop’s poetry and the other was an annotated bibliography project on Clare, focusing on his reception history. I found unexpectedly that the two projects complemented each other; Clare and Bishop share in their distinctive poetics a resistance to idealism, which they express in their devotion to detail. Not only is their heightened sense of the particular a response to their contemporaries (Coleridge and Keats to Clare and the Confessional poets to Bishop), it is a direct expression of their own enjoyment of nature and the objective world. Reflecting on their work and influenced by Juliet Sychrava’s book, Schiller to Derrida: Idealism in Aesthetics, I found in myself a desire to explore practices of description not only in the works of these two exemplars but in other areas of literature as well.
One area I feel particularly drawn to is modern Chinese literature. In addition to my B.A. in English, I received a second B.A. in Asian Studies at Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI), which consisted in large part of Mandarin Chinese language courses, some of which I took during a semester studying at Capital Normal University in Beijing. During my last undergraduate semester I read and reflected on five short stories written in 20th century China by authors including Lu Xun and Mao Dun. I am deeply intrigued by the formative stages of literary vernacular styles in the Chinese language, both for having come so late in the nation’s cultural development and for their influence on the descriptive content of the period’s literature.
(fit statements)