One thing I didn’t mention before, but was thinking about, is the Christian concept of divine wrath. In some Christian schematics, God is pure love, but there is also divine anger. In contrast, human love is partial and incomplete, and so too is human righteousness always inherently corrupt. Some formulations of the Christian ethos seem very servile to me — serve the status quo because only God has the right to get angry. But other formulations seem to allow that humans can be agents of God’s wrath. Strange.

And thanks Topspun. I look forward to your post on Commonwealth. I’ve fininshed reading “Part One” and I also noticed a lot of “inside baseball” as you put it. In part one, they seem to be critiquing Agamben for pages and pages, but they only mention him once in a footnote. I remember trying to read Agamben’s book Homo Sacer back in graduate school and found his prose painful, confusing, and unconvincing, so I never quite understood why he was so “hip” in 2003–2004. I somehow suspect that the Bush administration is what “made” Agamben’s career because his book State of Exception was such a timely response to the Bush doctrine. I’ve never read it, but I like Hardt and Negri’s critique of Agamben that the “exception” is not just in the “sovereign” but also in the very mundane, everyday make-up of capitalist economics.

Anyway, part of me thinks I really should familiarize myself with Agamben’s work, but then I feel that I don’t have the time to read two or three books that I don’t actually like or enjoy. (Lots of papers to grade, lots of articles on other topics to write.) I’m wondering if you have any suggestions for a short-cut?

When I saw Andrea’s question, my initial gut-reaction was “yes, not having a degree in English will be a factor when you apply, but it shouldn’t stop you from applying. You would need to address that in your personal statement and demonstrate that you are prepared (see what I wrote above in the blog about how to do that well by showing that you know what the faculty at the school actually do), and then have a good writing sample of course.”

So, that was my gut reaction, but I wanted to be sure of my answer, so I consulted with a friend of mine whose job it is to look at grad. school applications and advise English majors at a big public university. She basically agreed with me, but added that it would help if you had at least a couple English classes under your belt. If you took one or two when you were an undergraduate, then that’s enough, and you can mention those in the personal statement. If you never took any, then you might want to find a way to take some now. And if you took a class where you read Spanish or Latin American literature in Spanish, then that’s great. My advice would be to use your Spanish. There is a lot of really hip, cutting-edge work being done right now on Latino studies inside English departments.

She also stressed that the really important thing is to have a good writing sample. For the M.A. and Ph.D. programs, this means demonstrating that you can do a research paper that recognizes an on-going debate about a work of literature and/or cultural issue and advances a clear thesis. For M.F.A.’s, it means showing that you know how to write good stuff that isn’t self-indulgent or amateurish. My advice is that you definitely have a lot of friends and — if you can — former teachers read drafts of your personal statement and your writing sample.

Thank you

There is a reason why most of Kenyan’s animals are alarmingly endangered (except for cartoonist Gado’s famous zoomorph symbols of corruption), while game animals are teeming and multiplying so much in Germany and Japan e.g., that they are increasingly becoming a problem. The reason is that in both Germany and Japan, game is intensely and sustainably hunted, while Kenya subscribes to an outdated and colonialist ideology of – quite discredited – “fortress conservation”. Noble animals that have to be defended and protected against ignoble savages.

I also hope that my last post indicates that I have a problem with dichotomizing the two starting different points to begin with. But if one must, it should be clear that there is an extremely complex relationship between “love” and “hate” and “anger.”

Maybe I should finish the Hardt and Negri trilogy for some insight…