[Cwgrad-announcements] English Seminars (building from Mary's post)

[Neil Aitken]

With regards to the usefulness of English seminars (and Comp Lit seminars as
well), I'd like to continue some of the points that Mary brings up and add a
few of my own (and now Robin and Carly seem to have covered some of these
points as well!)

A)  Helps you build a critical writing portfolio.  If you are interested in
a teaching career, be aware that you will often need to supply more than
just a creative portfolio - you'll need to provide critical writing
samples.  Taking these English and Comp Lit seminars can provide you with
the critical papers you need.  They'll also provide you with valuable
experience so that you will know how to write critical / academic papers
should the need arise -- or should you wish to expand your critical writing
portfolio.

B)  Becomes your ticket to academic conferences.  If you write a good
insightful paper, with a little editing you can turn it into a conference
paper.  You can then submit your conference paper to different graduate
conferences in the humanities and with some financial assistance from the
department or the college, you can attend and present at conferences all
over the world.  It looks great on the CV and can be quite helpful if you're
looking forward to an academic teaching career.  This creates a paper-trail
-- people (including people who might one day hire you) can see that you are
serious about your field.

C)  Opens the door to a PhD.  If you are interested in pursuing a PhD in
English Literature, Creative Writing, or Comp Lit, you really need to take a
good selection of English and Comp Lit seminars -- choose ones that reflect
an interest in a field or secondary field -- this will help define you and
your interests -- and make you stand out from the crowd.  I took my seminar
courses in Chinese Literature in Translation and Sino-Western Comp
Literature -- while some of the things I learned, I expected to learn -- I
also discovered other things through the course which may become other areas
of future research.  You just won't know until you take them.

D)  Enriches your writing world.  We don't write in a vacuum -- we write in
dialogue with many many cultures and "texts."  If we avoid taking seminar
courses or choose ones that don't make us stretch, we are doing ourselves as
writers a great disservice.  If we keep circling the same block, we'll keep
writing the same poems, the same stories.  There's a much bigger world of
literature and art out there, and grad school is the perfect time to explore
it.

E)  Provides access to the critical jargon.  While we don't necessary have
to (or want to) use all the lit crit terminology, I think it's very valuable
to acquire some level of fluency so that we can participate in the
discussions.  Knowing what people are saying about other creative works will
help us understand how our own work might be encountered in a classroom.  It
also provides us with the language to engage in the same discussions as a MA
English Lit or a PhD English Lit.  But it will take work and effort -- at
least I found that sometimes I needed to build a "codebook" to interpret
some of the more obscure lit crit theory references.

Anyway, just to make a couple personal notes on all this.  First, the work I
did on one critical paper for a comp lit course (it was actually an
undergrad course which I had upgraded to a grad seminar) led to an
invitation to present at a Chinese Literature Studies conference
(unfortunately I was not going to be in the country at the time, so couldn't
attend).  Just because the class is an undergraduate class, doesn't mean you
should turn in lesser quality work.  Second,  when I applied for PhD
programs, I used critical papers written for my comp lit seminar and one
written for a creative writing seminar that had a critical focus -- when the
acceptances came, a number of the schools noted that they liked both the
creative and the critical portions of the portfolio.  Even though these were
for PhD programs in Creative Writing, they still wanted and appreciated
strong critical writing.

Ok -- I'll end my rambling here :)

Best wishes to all those incoming and outgoing,

Neil Aitken (MFA '06)

-- 
Neil Aitken
www.neil-aitken.com
www.aitkenwebdesign.com
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