defensiveness; on failure; backdated

I have been busy for the past few weeks preparing for my first year oral exam, which was on Thursday. The exam is the one that I think I may have mentioned to some of you, whereby I submit a list of texts broadly representative of British and American literary history and a panel of three (plus one observer) quiz me on it for twenty minutes each, so that the three time periods that they represent occupy an hour. I failed all three sections of this exam. When I got feedback from the examiners, (and all that follows is a melange of direct quotes) I was told that I came across as being very witty, charming, urbane, intelligent and glib. That I was all style and no substance - that in many cases they simply didn't believe that I had read the texts that we were talking about. Of course, because I am not stupid enough to believe that my examiners are stupid, I had read every text on my list. I got the DGS to admit that the impression that I gave to the committee was that I thought that I was a clever Oxford boy who could slide through this exam on his charm. That I was so charming that I had never really been pushed on anything before. Everything had simply fallen into my lap and I'd not had to really work for anything before. Frankly, said the DGS, they just wanted to see me sweat a little. But it is important that I understand that this isn't political, it really isn't, and everyone thinks I'm fabulous and golden and noone is out to get me, and it really isn't political, but they just want me to do it again. Discursive, bluffing, bullshitting, throwing questions back with modifications rather than just answering them: my style is parrying, apparently, and superficial - and evaluative rather than analytical. I seem to have been trained, they say, in a softer, more pastoral tradition.

On this last remark, which is, perhaps, the only substantive criticism that was levelled, I have been thinking a bit. And it occurs to me that I think that in general discussion, rather than in a context in which you actually have the text in front of you and are talking about what a sentence means and why, or what a particular piece of punctatuation is doing, I believe that a simple aesthetic judgment is almost always more defensible on the spot and therefore a more rigorous mode of discussing a text than to make some assertion about a text or body of texts without the ability to provide textual substantiation for that assertion. By which I mean: without recourse to textual empiricism for an evidential debate, I think that aestheticism coupled with a very flexible relativism and circumspect openness to other, differing aesthetic judgment, will always be the most valid, interesting, useful way of talking about a work.

So - I will be retaking the exam in the next month. I will knuckle under, suck it up, kiss the ring. I am not going to leave Stanford over this, and nor will it go on my record. But it is an instantiation of hierarchy that serves no end other than itself. No other student in my cohort failed this exam, and I hope that I do not flatter myself that I am not so distinctly the worst of my peer group that such a clear, nay, qualitative line can be drawn between my knowledge, manner, and intelligence and theirs. So I do, I confess, wonder: to what extent did I fail this exam because I have two degrees from Oxford? To say that I am unhappy, crushed and disappointed would be litotic. But there is nothing I can do about that. It might be a hoop to jump through, but if I don't jump through it I will not be able to jump through other, more meaningful hoops down the line, to whit passing my orals proper in two years, getting a PhD, or getting a job.

The irony of it all is that I was not trained in anything remotely resembling a softer, more pastoral tradition. I was trained in a way that, despite its flaws, attempted to imitate the Socratic tradition. And perhaps on top of that I simply ingested Blindness and Insight too deeply - took its epistemological lessons too very much to heart, and have attached too much importance to de Man's exhortion not to "confuse the rigour of the analytic procedure with the epistemelogical authority of the ensuing results." But soft it wasn't, and pastoral it wasn't. By which I mean, intellectually lazy it wasn't. And intellectually lazy I am not.

Networking

Dear XXX,
I realise that I'd already agreed to meet XXX this thursday morning for a long RA meeting (splicing together videos of british comedy for her to give as a lecture on a XXX Alums British Isles cruise... enough said). Would next thursday, or any day that week except fri, be any possible? Sorry for this mix-up - I overlooked my meeting withXXX .

XXX had some fascinating things to say about potential hires. I don't know where he gets his information from. How are you doing?

Best
XXX

stanford email

I'm sorry to write a mass email about something as important as this, but I thought that it would be dishonest of me to pretend that you were all getting an individual email, and you would all see through it pretty quickly anyway. (Although in saying that it is 'important' I effortlessly elide importance to me with importance to you, which might not be valid...) So there follows a rather disorganised set of impressions about my visit to Stanford last weekend.

With much love to all of you,
xxx


On Thursday and Friday I went to visit Stanford. From the visit, I liked what I saw a lot. The campus is very big indeed, and built in a sort of faux-antique hispanic style. The library is enormous and has around 8 million holdings, including a lot of early printed books in the eighteenth-century. On Thursday we were greeted with breakfast and talks from the Director if Grad Admissions, who congratulated us on making the 4% admission rate, and the Director of Grad Studies and the head of the department, both of whom evangelised about the programme. We were encouraged to mingle with other admitted candidates, many of whom are, or were still making decisions, largely between and Stanford and one of NYU, Columbia, Virginia and Yale. The other candidates are between 22 and 36, though mostly around 25/6, so I'm at the younger end of students. They are specialising across literary history, but clustered mainly in Medieval, C18th, and modern literatures. It reflects the strength of C18th lit at Stanford that though it is a more marginal area than most, 4 of the admitted students had chosen it as their focus.

We were taken to lunch at the faculty club, with current grad students and faculty members. I then had office hours meetings with professors in my area (Professor Blakey Vermeule, C18th Lit, Prof Ursula Heise, Theory and Urban Lit). There was then a class on Romantic poetics with other grad students, who were really impressive. We were taken out for dinner in the evening by the grad students at the faculty's expense. They seem genuinely happy with the programme - extremely well-funded, intellectually stimulated and fulfilled people who were content with the choice that they'd made. No-one pretended, of course, that the workload was anything other than very strenuous, but they did say that Stanford did absolutely everything in its power to make sure that nothing got in the way of students doing their work.

The next day we had breakfast and another class, this one on the history and theory of the novel with Professor Franco Moretti, who is one of stanford's biggest names and a truly inspirational theory. I haven't even really studied the novel and it found it very exciting; I'd love to take classes with him. Then there were more office hours, in which I met with two more professors in C18th Lit, Prof John Bender and Prof Terry Castle, both of whom had a lot of upbeat things to say about Stanford (as you would expect) and who were very positive about my admission. After lunch there was a tour of the library for a few hours and then tours of the enormous campus. After that we were driven into San Francisco by the grad students, which was a 35-40 minute drive, and taken out for dinner (so much eating!) at a Tapas restaurant. she came along and got to meet my fellow prospectives. At about 10.30 or so I was absolutely exhausted and we went home.

All of this is just to say that I really enjoyed my visit there, and found the graduate students at Stanford to be very, very smart and just as friendly. They have said, also, that they will look into seeing whether they can reimburse me for any of my air fares - so we'll see about that. The atmosphere there was so un-English-ly content as to be almost jarring; the faculty, staff and students all seem uncomplicatedly pleased to be in their huge red sandstone buildings, surrounded by their Rodin sculpture garden. The university's wealth is sort of staggering - I think that their endowment is in the region of $20bn. Which is, presumably, why they can afford to pay their english grad students so well.

I did ask some grad students, once the shine has come off your experience at Stanford, maybe after a few years, and the inevitable jading and cynicism has begun to set in as it does at any institution, what criticisms are typically levelled, and what complaints made? The response was that the dissatisfactions that people feel owe more to the actual process of writing a doctorate ("It's hard! And can be lonely!") rather than inhering in the institution itself, which, more than anything else, made me look forward to started classes there in September.

(Oh, and XXX, I met that girl that you didn't like at the NYU w/e. Stanford has just lost Seth Lerer, so it is more likely that she'll be in your cohort than mine. Ha!)

xxxx

Dear XXX,

Thanks very much for your email. My number for your reference is xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. I've spent my day at work ignoring my deadline for this report on Danish vs. Canadian sub-regional financial autonomy, which is, somehow, even drier than it sounds, and reading up instead on the Ph.D. course at Stanford. I have a couple of questions which aren't urgent, and if you'd rather answer on the phone at yr convenience than having to type everything out that's fine.

The Ph.D. handbook on the English faculty website assumes that a five year course is normal; however there are six years of funding and looking online, estimated mean times to degree at Stanford seem to vary between seven and eight years. How does this time to degree change the structure of the program? Is the leeway for a longer dissertation-writing period? Or is the extra time factored in elsewhere?

Thank you very much also for your kind words about my sample - as you can see, whilst writing it I developed a strong interest in theories of urban space that I tried to suppress with limited success. Something I would be very interested in doing would be to pursue these interests and think about poetic formations//formulations of urban space more generally (or even for example look at Hart Crane vs GG Lorca in New York - there's probably some fantastic SF examples I'm overlooking). I know that this would take me wildly out of my specialised area in both literary and more generally disciplinary terms, and my heart isn't set on it, but I was wondering - could I get credit for taking a class in Stanford's Urban Studies department? And if not could I do it anyway? Also were I to commute my time in the first year by transferring credit from my Master's at Oxford, would my funding be docked? (The handbook implies this - I don't think I actually want to do it, but I wanted to ask in case.)

Similarly at Berkeley I know that they stipulate that you have a member of another department on your dissertation committee. Looking through the handbook, that doesn't seem to be a requirement; but is it a possibility? I was also hoping to live in Berkeley with my partner and commute - candidly, is this possible (with a car, presumably)?

I've been talking to XXX XXX, who asked me to pass on her best wishes to you, and she's just hugely positive about the program - would it be ok for me to contact current grad students with questions? Otherwise I have spent my day looking at the course lists and getting extremely excited about them, and hoping that United's strength and depth will show against the Gunners in the last ten games of the season.

with all best wishes,

on stanford

Dear XXX (and XXX),

Thanks so much for your responses, which have been really helpful and which have made me feel pretty great about Stanford. My only anxiety (or at least one of them) is that I want to live in Berkeley with my gf and commute - looking at the reqs it seems that I'll be required to take two or three classes a term, sorry, semester, sorry, quarter, and so I'd only have to drive down a couple of days a week. It looks like I'd have borrowing rights at the Bancroft too - from your experience, do you think that a setup like this would be tenable. (And from this pov it's reassuring that I'd need a car anyway.)

As far as apps go, I'd be more than happy to share my statement and sample for what they're worth. As I was saying to Ryan earlier, when people have commented personally in emails to me they have commented on my sample, not my statement, for whatever that is or isn't worth. I confess that also, not being in the system in any sense as an international student whose recommenders knew no-one, I insidiated myself with the faculty at colleges I really liked. I'm in the incredibly lucky position of having supportive parents, and they helped me out with visiting colleges I liked and meeting up with professors I wanted to work with. I emailed them all two months in advance, give or take. I bound up copies of my Master's dissertation and distributed them liberally, which I just hated doing because self-promotion is for scummy right-wing politicians, but which I think was probably worthwhile. Certainly, I've had a better strike rate, if I can be crass about it, at schools where I met people then I have where I didn't. But I'd definitely be more than happy to offer any and all help you wanted, if I can offer it without sounding like an arse.

I'm also pumped by the awesome things you say about XXX XXX, who basically seems to be the Bomb in human form. One thing I was wondering, though – what are the possibilities for interdisciplinary study? I would love to take a couple classes in Urban Studies or in theories of space, for example – would I be able to do that, do you know? The interdisciplinarity is something that I actually preferred about Berkeley, where it is actually a requirement to have someone from another department on your doctoral committee. Also at Berk there are a couple of Stanford grad students who have cross-registered in Berk classes – is this something that's done much?

Thanks also for all the tips about where's good to go in Palo Alto – my question is also whether there are any shit-hot bookshops in PA?

I'm also at work, and also bored by it. My report on Danish sub-regional financial autonomy just isn't getting written…

xxx