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

Personal statement example

In the transcripts I type for a market research company, there is a rule for what cannot be heard. If a participant mumbles or talks over someone else, I write [inaudible] with a timestamp and move on. Early in the job I noticed how much that small bracket carried. A recording would be rewound four or five times, and in the end a whole response about a bank's mobile app reached the client as an empty space with a time attached. The work is routine. I transcribe around six hours of audio a week alongside my other commitments. Still, it has given me a practical sense of how a written record decides who has spoken and who has not. That question shaped my undergraduate reading, and it is the one I want to pursue in a dissertation.

My Honours research essay looked at J. M. Coetzee's Foe. The novel retells the Robinson Crusoe story through Susan Barton, who wants the writer Foe to turn her account into a book. Friday, whose tongue has been cut out, cannot tell his own story. I argued that the novel does more than lament Friday's silence. It makes Susan's desire to interpret him part of the problem, so that every attempt to give Friday a voice risks becoming another way of writing over him. The most demanding part was the final section, where the narration shifts and the language becomes dreamlike. I resisted reading it as a neat resolution. In the end I treated it as the novel refusing to give the reader what Susan wanted. My supervisor pushed me to support claims with closer attention to grammar and tense. The habit of asking who is speaking in a given sentence, and from where, has stayed with me.

For a dissertation I would like to extend this towards Zoë Wicomb's David's Story. In that novel a female amanuensis records the story of a man involved in the liberation struggle. The figure of Dulcie remains frustratingly out of reach, both for the narrator and for David himself. I am interested in how both novels make the act of recording visible, and in whether Wicomb's handling of a mediated, partial testimony speaks back to the kind of allegory Coetzee uses. I am not yet sure whether a comparison of two texts is the right scale, or whether the project should stay with Wicomb and treat Foe as context. That is something I would hope to settle through further reading in narrative theory and in criticism on South African writing after 1990.

Since graduating I have kept reading in a disciplined way. I set myself a novel and two critical essays each fortnight and write a page of notes on each. This has made me faster at finding an argument in dense prose, and more honest about when I have not understood something. Transcription has also made me patient with detail. I am used to listening to the same ten seconds repeatedly until I can stand behind what I have written.

On Saturday mornings I coach an under-11 netball team at a local primary school. It has nothing to do with literature, though it has taught me to explain an idea three different ways until one works, and to plan a session around what a group can actually manage. I enjoy it because it pulls me out of my own head, and because watching a shy nine-year-old start calling for the ball is a quieter satisfaction than any essay mark.

A research degree suits the way I work best: sustained attention to a few texts, close reading tested against criticism, and the freedom to follow a question as it changes. I am ready to give that question the extended time it needs.