Master of Arts (by coursework & dissertation) — English Literary Studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every morning at the public library where I work, I print the holds list and walk the shelves pulling books for people who have reserved them. Some titles appear again and again: thrillers, cookery books, exam guides. Every few weeks, though, a novel I studied at university turns up with a stranger's name on the slip. I have started noticing which books people come back for twice, and it has made me curious about the gap between how literature is read in seminars and how it lives in ordinary circulation. That curiosity, more than any single moment, is why I want to return to postgraduate study.

My undergraduate degree was in English Literature, and I graduated with an upper second. My strongest work came in my final year, when I wrote a long research essay on Bessie Head's A Question of Power. I was interested in how the novel handles Elizabeth's breakdown without offering the reader a stable vantage point from which to judge what is real. Early drafts tried to read the visions mainly as allegories of apartheid's racial categories, but my supervisor pushed me to look more closely at the Motabeng garden chapters and the everyday work of growing vegetables alongside other villagers. Rereading those sections, I argued that the novel's sense of recovery is tied to shared, practical labour rather than to resolving the arguments of the visionary figures. I learned a great deal from working with Head's prose at the level of the sentence, especially her abrupt shifts in register, and I would like to develop that kind of close reading within a broader study of Southern African writing about exile and belonging.

Since graduating I have worked full-time at the library. Most of the job is routine: issuing books, chasing overdue items, helping people print documents and fill in online forms. It has taught me to explain things clearly to people who are tired or anxious, and to stay organised when the desk is busy. I also helped a colleague run a monthly reading group for adults. My part was modest. I chose some of the books, prepared a few discussion questions and kept the conversation moving. When we read Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying, one member, a retired bus driver, talked at length about the funerals he had attended in the 1990s, and the discussion that followed was sharper about the novel's humour and grief than many seminars I sat in. I do not think a reading group replaces scholarship, but it has made me want my academic writing to stay answerable to real readers.

Outside work I spend Saturday mornings helping my grandmother with her bills and correspondence, which has made me patient with handwriting and paperwork, and I sing alto in a church choir. Choir has nothing to do with literature directly, although learning to hold a line against other voices has made me listen more carefully to how prose is paced.

I have kept reading critically in my own time, working through Head's letters and short fiction and returning to criticism on the novel's treatment of madness. Doing this alongside a full-time job has shown me that I can sustain independent work, but also where I am limited: I want structured coursework in literary theory and archival method, and the discipline of a supervised dissertation. My provisional interest is in how Southern African novels from the 1970s to the 2000s represent communal labour as a response to displacement, though I expect coursework to refine that question considerably.

I am applying because I want the time and training to turn careful reading into sustained argument. I bring a solid grounding in close reading, a proven research essay, reliable working habits and a practical sense of how books reach people beyond the university.