The Little Professor

On chatting with a graduate coordinator after a rejection (or, why protesting a rejection is not like protesting a grade)

This is that time of year when graduate coordinators behold students who, for whatever reason, have not been accepted into a (the) graduate program of their choosing.  If you are one of those students, and are disconcerted/dismayed/distressed/otherwise dis- about your rejection, here are some suggestions for successfully discussing matters with a graduate coordinator:

1.  To begin with, you were almost certainly turned down not by a single person, but by a committee (or, in the case of some doctoral programs, the entire department).  Graduate Coordinator X is usually not the sole person responsible, and should not be addressed (attacked) as such.  Moreover, Graduate Coordinator X usually cannot overturn the committee's/department's decision all by his or her lonesome.
2.  What does the rejection letter say? If you did not meet the minimum qualifications as laid out on the admissions form, then protesting is perhaps not the ideal response in this situation.   
3.  Along the same lines, there are some questions (qualifications, application procedures, GRE requirements, deadlines, etc.) that you should have asked before you submitted the application.  If you a) did not do so and b) were rejected for something have to do with same, then c) again, protesting is not the ideal response.  By the same token, if you insisted in your application that you only wanted to work on Field X, and the department does not support Field X, then you might wish to ask yourself why you applied to an inappropriate department for your needs. 
4.  Thanks to confidentiality rules, the graduate coordinator cannot discuss certain elements of your application.
5.  It is highly unlikely (at some schools, may be impossible, depending on how the administration handles paperwork) that you will be allowed to revise-and-resubmit just one element of your application.
6.  A student graduating summa cum laude with a 4.0 in her major and a portable multi-year fellowship can nevertheless still be rejected by, say, Stanford and Harvard.   Just about everyone was rejected somewhere--because there were too many applicants, because there were too many applicants in their field, because there were no faculty in their field, because there were a lot of other applicants with a summa cum laude, a 4.0, and a portable multi-year fellowship in the pool, etc.       

Keeping those things in mind,

1.  The average graduate coordinator will be happy to explain how to meet minimum qualifications, whether by additional coursework, taking the appropriate GREs, etc.
2.  Some graduate coordinators may be willing to discuss your statement of purpose or essay--if they remember it or even still have it (see #5).   (In case you're wondering, I have met with rejected applicants to discuss problem writing samples; however, this is a small program where the applicants are almost all local.) 
3.  If you wish to follow through with #2, then you must ask yourself if you are willing to hear what the graduate coordinator has to say. 
4.  Let's say that the graduate coordinator does suggest how you could improve your writing sample or statement of purpose.  This does not mean that a) the program will accept you in the future or b) that you can fix everything and be accepted now.  Always remember #1 above: the graduate coordinator does not control your destiny. 

Picnic at Hanging Rock (redux)

I'm teaching Picnic at Hanging Rock, which is always a dicey proposition: students find it either utterly absorbing or utterly boring.    (In some ways, I'd actually prefer to have students read the novel--if anything, it's darker than the film--but it's not in print in the USA.)  Watching it again, I noted that Weir slightly undercuts the novel's double-edged critique of the Appleyard establishment.  The film preserves the novel's opposition between the unruly, dangerous Australian landscape and the overstuffed, overdecorated  "Victorian" interiors at the college; the latter is dominated by Mrs. Appleyard's ominously ticking clock, which in part represents the school's rigid social structure.  As Miranda implies when she explains why she no longer wears her watch, though, the ticking clock also hints at mortality and decay.  If Mrs. Appleyard embodies English propriety, then that propriety itself obviously decays over the course of the film, as her alcoholism reveals itself under pressure.   The novel's Mrs. Appleyard, however, is not just an alcoholic: she's a con artist.   She sells not Victorian Englishness (which is what the gullible parents want to purchase) but "Victorian Englishness," making Mrs. Appleyard and her establishment  neo-Victorian--and quite cynically so.  In the film, the only real sign of Mrs. Appleyard's identity as confidence-woman lies in her famous error (intentional on Lindsay's part? accidental?), also in the novel, about Felicia Hemans: she mistakenly ascribes H. W. Longfellow's "The Wreck of the Hesperus" to Hemans, when she really means "Casabianca."*  (One of the wealthy students, Irma, recites a couple of lines from "Casabianca" while on the rock.)  It's a splendidly ironic error, because Mrs. Appleyard holds Hemans up as a model of "English" poetry, even as she confuses Hemans with an American poet.   Given the film's obsession with surface-level conformity, often undermined from within (as in the secret love affair between the two servants), it's not surprising that Mrs. Appleyard's supposedly authentic Englishness turns out to be interchangeable with Americanness...

*  In the film, Sara, the orphan and would-be poet, keeps an engraving of Byron on her bureau--not only a very different model for poetry, but also a cosmopolitan, exotic figure. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Sadie Jones,   The Outcast (Harper, 2008).  A young boy's family implodes after WWII.  (Review copy)
• Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia (Harcourt, 2008).  Rewrite of The Aeneid from the POV of Aeneas' wife #2.  (eBay)
• Bruce Arnold, Irish Art: A Concise History (Praeger, 1968).  Early edition of oft-reprinted introduction to Irish art from the Middle Ages to the mid-twentieth c.  (Campus library booksale)
• John Burrow, A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century (Knopf, 2008).  New general history of historiography.  (HBC)
• Matthew Dennison, The Last Princess: The Devoted Life of Queen Victoria's Youngest Daughter (St. Martin's, 2008).  Biography of Princess Beatrice.  (HBC)

What do you mean, "unnecessary"?!

The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.  Devoted to tracking, well, unnecessary quotation marks.  (Via Judge a Book by Its Cover.) 

A quick observation, apropos of gardening

As a general rule, it is much easier to water the lawn when the water in question only emerges from the hose's nozzle, as opposed to random holes in the middle of the tubing.

I am not entirely sure why there are random holes in my garden hose.  When asked, the hose was not especially forthcoming, although I think my query was reasonably civil.  (Or, at least, not laced with excessive profanity.) 

Fictionalized book history

I'm about a third of the way through John N. King's Foxe's Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (2006), and took special note of this observation:

...Martyrological tales and the letters appended to them bring to life scribal practices through their dramatization of the writing and circulation of manuscripts. They portray a collective process of writing, copying, and circulation of manuscripts as a means by which prisoners in extremis attested to their religious faith and attempted to sustain and comfort their coreligionists.  Affording insight into habits of reading and writing within a company of beleaguered coreligionists, they open a window into a world in which manuscripts and the writing materials functioned in a manner akin to that of discredited religious relics.  (45-46)

Victorian Protestant religious fiction--and not just historical fiction--frequently preoccupies itself with the same questions: how do religious texts circulate, how are they read, and what do those processes mean? In a sense, these narratives produce a fictionalized history of the book.  Or, more precisely, the Book, because most novelists concern themselves with strategies for disseminating and reading the Bible.  In historical novels, Bibles circulate in manuscripts, in fragments, in clandestine printed editions; they are concealed in secret compartments, hidden in special pockets, smuggled into jail cells.  Communities coalesce, develop, and sometimes disintegrate around the buying, giving, and receiving of Bibles (and sometimes other Protestant devotional texts as well).  Here's a random example, plucked from a pile of books near my desk.  The novel is L. Pocklington's The Secret Room: A Story of Tudor Times (1884; RTS, [1915]), set during the Marian persecutions:

"Aunt Joan has the Bible writ in Latin; but I never came across those words [Matt. 11.28-30] the few times I looked in it," said Bertram, with a sigh.  "I trow you speak of an English version."

"Yea, verily! I know Latin but out of a priest's mouth," said the weaver, smiling.  "See, here is my book.  And he took a short thick volume from his breast, and laid it open on the table.  It was one the children had seen him reading by the light of their stolen candles on one or more of their previous interviews, but he had always thrust it out of sight on their approach.  (93)

This exchange may look like it's not saying much, but it's actually heavily loaded.  Our speakers are an upper-class boy (his sister is looking on) and a common working-man; the former comes from a Catholic family, the latter is Protestant.  The Catholic child has no access to a vernacular Bible and no particular interest in the Vulgate, even though he is educated enough to read it.  Moreover, the novel claims, he cannot find "those words" because, in an obvious nod to centuries-old Protestant arguments, the Vulgate mistranslates the Scriptures.  In a standard polemical move, then, Pocklington establishes a social and educational hierarchy only to invert it, because it's our weaver (working-class, literate only in the vernacular) who is better-educated: he, after all, not only knows the Bible, but also knows it in a "good" English translation (Tyndale's) and, as we discover very shortly, helps convert Bertram's mother to Protestantism by reading aloud.  Indeed, the weaver, unlike Bertram, both regards the Bible as the text (not just a text) and reads it constantly--even though such reading is clearly identified as illicit.  Our weaver embodies a new religious energy that animates the lower classes through the force of the vernacular Bible, making the workers into the proper spiritual  "instructors" of their superiors (but, not surprisingly, without actually subverting social distinctions; like most novelists, Pocklington has little truck with the more radical Reformation movements).  At the same time, the weaver helps shape an illicit, underground community of Protestants through his Bible readings, amongst those who "met in secret to read and expound the blessed Scriptures" (94).   The novel is typical in its back-and-forthing between representations of secretive and solitary Bible reading and secretive and communal Bible reading, which work together to distinguish Protestant identity from its Catholic counterpart, grounded in ritual spectacle.  Within the novel's overall narrative, with its very presentist reading of the Marian persecution's significance, this fictional history of the vernacular Bible marks both the emergence of a Protestant future and its potential other, the lurking threat of a resumed Catholic persecution (a response, of course, to the growing visibility of Catholicism during the nineteenth century). 

This desk accessory was designed by someone without a degree in feline psychology

No self-respecting cat would deign to sit in this, as opposed to walking in front of the computer screen/flopping down on your papers/draping its tail over the keyboard.  (Via CO.) 

The GoogleBooks Research Project (2)

Alas, death by snippet view, once again.  I suppose I should consider myself lucky that snippet view snipped some text, as opposed to, say, a blank margin. 

GoogleBooks' policies about snippet view/limited preview are more puzzling than they appear.  The Edinburgh Christian Instructor isn't covered under the Partner Program, seeing as how everyone involved has been really most sincerely dead for, oh, well over a century.   Unless someone at GoogleBooks has consulted a medium or ouija board (or was visited by the Ghost of Copyrights Past), I sincerely doubt that they've managed to chat with either the authors or the publisher.  Similarly, like most journals published in the early nineteenth century--come to think of it, like any journal published in the early nineteenth century--the ECI is in the public domain.  So that can't be it.  I'd wonder if Oxford was worried about damage to the bound journal itself, but snippet review still means that the entire volume has been scanned.  Ergo, that's no answer.  Finally, Oxford has plenty of other public domain texts available through GoogleBooks.  I give up.  What's going on?

Even more frustrating, however, is that I cannot get GoogleBooks to cough up either the beginning or the end of the article, with the relevant page numbers.  I've got a date and volume number, but...the pages! What are the pages!?!  Doing different searches and then counting the number of hits doesn't help, because I don't know what I'm counting from.  Is page 194 the first page? Yes, no, maybe? Is page 197 the last page? Ditto.  Remember, the purpose of snippet view is to provide us with data to go forth and ILL.  I've done that, but with a very apologetic note at the end.

This Week's Acquisitions

(I've decided to start indicating which books come from where.)

• Michel Faber, The Apple: New Crimson Petal Stories (Canongate, 2007).  Neo-Victorian short story collection that spins off from Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Mary Swan, The Boys in the Trees: A Novel (Holt, 2008).  Historical novel-cum-mystery set in turn-of-the-century England and Canada.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Sam Taylor, The Amnesiac (Faber & Faber, 2007).  Man has amnesia, finds interesting but ominous manuscript.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• John Harvey, Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators (NYU, 1971).  The art of Victorian illustration--Cruikshank, Phiz, etc.  (eBay)
• Melissa Fegan, Literature and the Irish Famine 1845-1919 (OUP, 2002).  "Famine literature" as a genre.  (Oxford)
• Simon Joyce, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (Ohio, 2007).  Study of the political and cultural apppropriations of "the Victorians."  (Scholar's Choice at the 2008 NeMLA)
• Joe D. Burchfield, Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth (Chicago, 1990).  Kelvin's interventions in geological disputes.  (eBay)
• Gordon Rupp, Religion in England, 1688-1791 (OUP, 1987).  Standard ecclesiastical history.  (Oxford)

Gripe of the day

I hate it when Google searches turn up a catalog entry only after the item has been sold.