Master of Arts (by dissertation) — French Language & Literature postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Most Saturdays at the second-hand bookshop where I work, a box of donated paperbacks arrives and I am the person who sorts the French ones. They are usually Simenon, Pagnol and school copies of L'Étranger with pencil notes in the margins. Last year a box contained a battered Livre de Poche edition of Mariama Bâ's Une si longue lettre, the novel I had just written my Honours long essay on. Someone had underlined, almost exclusively, the passages where Ramatoulaye addresses Aïssatou directly. That reader seemed to have noticed what had held my attention for months: the novel is less a story told to us than a conversation we overhear, and its force depends on that.

My Honours essay, supervised within my department, examined how the letter form shapes what Ramatoulaye can and cannot say after her husband's death and his earlier second marriage. I argued that the period of mourning in which she writes gives her a sanctioned withdrawal from public life, and that the letter turns this enforced silence into a space for judgement. I spent a good deal of the research period on close reading in French, comparing passages where she speaks of herself in the first person with moments when she shifts to describing women in general. Writing the essay in French, I found that my argument became sharper when I had to choose between near-synonyms, and my supervisor's comments taught me to quote less and analyse more.

For a dissertation-based Master's, I would like to widen this question. I am interested in first-person forms such as letters, diaries and the autobiographical novel in francophone writing by West African women, and in how these forms negotiate intimacy and public argument. Ken Bugul's Le Baobab fou, which I read after finishing my essay, approaches similar territory through an autobiographical narrative of a young Senegalese woman's life in Europe, and I would like to think about what changes when the addressee disappears and the reader is left alone with the narrator. I do not yet know whether the comparison will hold across a full dissertation, which is partly why I want the time and supervision to test it.

Two things beyond the essay have prepared me for sustained independent work. First, I tutor French to four secondary school learners each week, mostly preparing them for examinations. Explaining why a learner should use the imperfect rather than the passé composé has made me far more precise about my own grammar, and building short reading exercises from simple texts has shown me how much a sentence's structure carries its meaning. Second, the bookshop has made me an organised reader. I keep a running log of French titles that come through, which has led me to authors I would not have found on a syllabus, including several Quebec and Belgian novelists I am now reading slowly in the evenings.

Outside work and study I sing alto in a church choir, which has nothing to do with literature except that it demands punctuality, rehearsal and attentive listening to others, habits that serve research well. I also drive my grandmother to her Thursday appointments, so I am used to planning my weeks around fixed commitments and protecting time for reading.

I am applying for a dissertation-based degree because my Honours year showed me that I work best when I can follow one question deeply, write regularly and revise in response to criticism. I want to improve my academic French to the point where I can engage confidently with criticism written in the language, and to produce a dissertation that reads first-person texts with care rather than treating them simply as testimony.