Arts, Media and Literary Studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

At half past five most mornings I am weighing dough in the bakery section of a supermarket, and for the first hour the radio is mine to choose. Last year I spent several weeks of those early shifts listening to a serialised adaptation of Middlemarch, and found myself less interested in the plot, which I knew, than in what the adaptation had done with George Eliot's narrator. Much of her commentary had become the inner voices of characters, or been dropped altogether. I began noting, between batches, which passages had survived and what had replaced them. That habit of asking what a form keeps, loses and invents when a text moves between media is the question I want to pursue at postgraduate level.

My undergraduate degree combined Comparative Literature and Music, and my dissertation examined radio adaptations of Victorian novels produced between the 1950s and the 2000s. I listened to archived recordings of three versions of Great Expectations, transcribed key scenes and compared them with Dickens's text. The most rewarding part was technical rather than thematic: tracking how sound effects, music cues and changes of acoustic space did the work that descriptive prose does on the page. Pip's first-person retrospection proved especially revealing, since each adaptation handled the gap between older narrator and younger self differently, sometimes through a separate actor, sometimes through tone of voice alone. My supervisor pushed me to support claims about 'faithfulness' with close analysis, and I came away sceptical of that word, which I now think often hides more interesting questions about medium and audience.

The theory I read for the project shaped how I think. Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Adaptation helped me treat adaptations as works in their own right rather than copies, and her distinction between telling, showing and interacting with a story gave me a vocabulary for radio, which sits awkwardly between the first two. I also found Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy useful, though I disagreed with myself several times about how far his account of oral cultures applies to broadcast speech, which he calls secondary orality. I would like to test these frameworks more rigorously, and to extend my work beyond English-language material, perhaps towards audio drama in other European traditions.

Music remains part of how I listen. I sing alto in a community choir that performs in churches and village halls, and learning a setting of a poem changes how I read it: a composer's choice to repeat a line or hold a word is itself an interpretation. I do not expect my research to centre on song, but the attention to timing and voice that choral rehearsal demands has sharpened my ear for the radio material I study.

Since graduating I have worked full-time at the bakery while spending weekends with my grandmother, who lives alone and needs help with shopping and appointments. Managing both has made me organised with my time; I have kept reading and writing in the afternoons, including a short essay comparing two podcast adaptations of a Gothic novella, which I wrote to see whether my methods worked on newer forms. They largely did, although podcasts' looser structure raised questions about seriality I could not yet answer.

A research-oriented masters would give me the methodological training I currently lack, particularly in media theory and archival practice, and an international environment in which to compare adaptation cultures. I am a careful, patient reader and listener, comfortable with long stretches of close work, and I am ready to build the early-morning notes of the past year into sustained scholarship.