Grad school application deadlines have come and gone. Thanks to all who offered feedback and support during the process, which was, perhaps not surprisingly, grueling. Since many great folks were so involved in the ever-evolving applications, I thought I’d post the final version up here to show you the results of your efforts!
Statement of Purpose
Reading Frederic Jameson (1991)
I see sunlight
negotiating tree branches
myself, ten years old
unmindful, careless
of the weighty thoughts at work
Upon the world.
During my undergraduate career in English literature, I became very interested in the idea of the world. Along with globalization, we are inevitably confronted with the concept of this thing, this planet on which we all live and upon which we must learn to get along, despite the challenges of our many voices, many motives, and multivalent needs. In literature and across disciplines we attempt to think our way through space, time, self, community, history, future, change, and loss as we move towards becoming a fully-fleshed global society. The task of finding balance and concord? Seemingly impossible, and rich with portents of homogeneity that make it, perhaps, inadvisable. The alternative? Geopolitical fragmentation, ecological upheaval – as speculative fictions say again and again, “the end of the world.”
But the world is always ending for someone, somewhere – Medea, King Lear, Esther Summerson, Dwayne Hoover – and then resolving, again and again, into the grim dystopias or second-chance utopias of our societal narratives. So? Can literature save the world? I once thought the question naïve and the subject matter outside the purview of all but the most esoteric scholarship. However, the particular impact on academic discourse of what Suman Gupta calls the “entanglements” of globalization and literary studies has me eager to return to the field of English literature to further explore what began as my very undeveloped interest in the world, and the imagined mechanics, in literature, of its potential to end.
Toolkit
In the five years since completing my degree, a successful career as a creative consultant and content developer has allowed me to engage with currents of globalization in two distinctly nonacademic ways that inform my approach to the study of globalization in literature/literatures of globalization.
First, I’ve worked almost entirely online, and have felt like an active participant in one of David Harvey’s “fierce rounds” of space-time annihilation, as the internet has caused the slow and often unquantifiable effects of globalization to rocket forward. In an era wherein the old standards of mis/communication are losing meaning under a crush of electronic data, I believe that my intimate knowledge of the flow of online discourse will be a useful resource to my studies and to my colleagues.
Next, my work has allowed me to live a location independent lifestyle. Over the last five years, I have been able to live and travel wherever I (as a white girl with a Canadian passport) chose. This position has been simultaneously liberating and deeply troubling. Having experienced first-hand the realities of transnational and even post-national culture – borderless for some, heavily guarded for others, scandalously inexpensive in the context of its devastating environmental impact – I bring to my academic studies a grounded knowledge of the sublime and monstrous dichotomies at play in a world increasingly vulnerable in terms of geographical and mis/communications borders.
Based on my academic and professional backgrounds, I am fascinated by questions of how literary study devises to navigate globalization, of the impact of globalization on literature, and vice-versa, of the tensions between developing global literary theory and keeping practices small, sustainable, local, and of how the shifting nature of global communication is impacting the production of literature and literary study.
Focus
As my particular area of interest has long been on this idea of what Ihab Hassan so lovingly calls, “the great world,” I would best love to engage with the fearful and fascinating exploration of its potential to end as it has evolved throughout the history of literature. There are several useful approaches to this subject: the private vs. public cataclysm, the politics of posthumanism, the imagining of dystopian vs. utopian futures, the influence of geopolitical shifts on our fear of destruction, the impact of ecological crisis on our narrative vision of apocalypse; the list goes on and offers itself up as a rich source of nourishment for thoughtful critical engagement.
Debatably, the type of literary exploration that I propose resists periodization, working instead towards building bridges of discourse across and throughout histories and places. However, I do believe that the entanglements of globalization and literature call for just such a discourse, and that my proposed focal point(s) will not only flourish under these conditions, but may well answer the silly question: can literature save the world?
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