A "Statement of Purpose"
Upon learning of this requirement for acceptance into the honors program, I initially thought that nothing else could be further from my purposes in pursuing that acceptance. After all, it would seem to me that the entire point of honors is to encourage enlightened, extended dialogue concerning any number of issues within the community of English scholars. The goal is to allow undergraduate students to pursue work that might actually be somewhat meaningful before they get to graduate school; to begin thinking about a set of analyses that are important to them, rather than simply absorbing more information. Most importantly, it seemed like the idea was to help students escape from the monotony of writing 800-word essays that will never allow them to express themselves or their ideas in the way they want. Imagine my surprise to find that not only did the honors program expect me to condense a myriad of ideas and prospects into a small space, but also that you consider this step important, as if it could actually serve as an accurate reflection of those candidates under consideration.
You will have to forgive me if I simply do not care. The number of ways I could otherwise be spending my time in actual purposeful pursuit of work in English is limitless. I could be reading Neil Gaiman’s 1602, and thinking about what happens on a theoretical level when one takes the superhero and recontextualizes it in an era foreign to the one in which it was created. What does this say about the 1600s? What does it say about the superhero as a narrative construct? Most importantly, what does it say about the narrative possibilities we writers have to work with when we construct our texts? More practically, I could be doing that Chaucer reading for Bodies and Communities in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Or, in what tends to be a rare moment these days, I could pursue some work in denser, theoretical texts. Maybe I could finally finish Jameson’s Postmodernism. Well, probably not. I could get a little farther, though. So yes, I was a little angry. After all, honors work is supposed to be about not wasting my time during my undergraduate education.
After the ranting ended, I smoked a cigarette and calmed down a little, and came to the realization that 1) no one cares about my self-righteous fervor; and 2) as much as writing this paper may be against my interests, not being accepted to the honors program is probably worse. However, my rage still seething, there wasn’t much else I was able to think about other than the fact that I despised this requirement. So I wondered if there were any interesting ideas to spawn out of that emotion. To my shock and dismay (for this meant I would actually have a reason to write the statement), there were.
Upon reflection, the main issue that concerned me about the concept of a written “statement of purpose” was the feeling that a statement lacks multiple perspectives key to getting to know someone. We often talk about the necessity of applying multiple perspectives and analyses to a text, of putting these perspectives in conversation with each other. Yet, right now in this moment, when we have an opportunity to engage in a conversation concerning my interests, this opportunity is denied in favor of a written statement.
Instead of engaging in some meaningfully important discourse between the two of us, the intention is for the two of us to act out a well rehearsed piece of theatre, to act out a script. Recently in an appearance/performance on Crossfire, Jon Stewart denied the show’s claims of being a debate show, arguing that rather than having a discussion between different points of view, the show’s hosts merely act out characters in a political melodrama, framed by the extremities of the left/right dichotomy. Similarly, I’m expected to write some stereotypical response, and you’re expected to judge it. If we met in person, we could react to one another, expand upon each other’s reactions, and create a sprawling discourse capable of reaching any number of positions, more accurately covering the scope of my interests.
This is often the failure of many critics as well. They have their chosen perspective from which they view a text (or maybe even multiple texts), but they fail to see what the text says back to them about their perspective. This feedback dialogue that could take place within a critical discourse is so often lacking. What we find our critics and ourselves doing is attempting to speak to each other, but really only speaking out into the void, with the hopes that another might come along and say something else. We do not have this luxury in spoken conversation, only in written statements.
Yet we see the primacy of the written statement throughout this period. The early modernists created the dualism between writing and speech, and raised writing up on a pedestal, to be favored at all times. The postmodernists deconstruct this duality, but by keeping the pedestal and turning everything into text. We favor the statement over the discussion. This position has consequences, of which we are perhaps only aware of apart from this point. We think about the crisis and downfall of utopian thinking in the postmodern period. We wonder why utopianism is no longer respected (although, perhaps, one could debate whether it ever was). Perhaps we should look to this privilege. Plato, who wrote the first utopian vision in the form of The Republic, said about writing that it was not to be trusted, that the spoken word was clearly superior. His treatises were dialogues. Perhaps the problem we have today of imagining the ideal community is that we no longer understand what it is to speak communally or democratically, as did the ancient Greeks.
In the end, you could say that a purpose I have in doing honors work in English is to find out what would possibly possess us to think that the written statement, in its current form, is communicative in a good way. What do we lose because of this value? What do we gain? This would be one of many meta-level questions I might pursue, if I feel like it.
All of this barely even scratches the surface. It’s 297 words over the limit. Surprise. I’ve said a little of what I wanted to say, in the way I wanted to say it. I had some other Marxist/neo-Marxist points to make about capitalism, modernism, bureaucracy, and the destruction of the human spirit and community, but I’m sure you would have thought that boring and preachy anyway.