English Literature Personal Statement

As an English literature major in undergraduate and graduate school, I have been working as a teaching assistant at ..... University, an English teacher at ..... University extension, a free-lance translator, an interpreter for American Educational Fair in Taiwan, and a customer service engineer at ....... After these attempts of exploring my real interest and my possible future career, I decided to follow up my pursuit in literature, and with the aim of becoming a professor in literature for my life-long career. Therefore, I need to extend my previous knowledge to a cross-cultural context, mainly modern American and Chinese literature in the twentieth century, focus my future research on the issue of identity and gender studies, and delve

I graduated from the English department at -------- University, having chosen English literature as my major. While my overall undergraduate GPA was 3.80, my GPA for my major was 3.90 and for my final two years amounted to 4. In my undergraduate years, I developed all the concrete knowledge and analytical skills necessary for an English major, including a substantial amount of histories of English and American literature, literary theories, western civilization, speech and debate, linguistics, art history, Business English and Translation. The courses I took in English literature during my junior and senior years included works ranging from the Romantic period to modern and postmodern literature. For American Literature, I was especially interested in the 19th and 20th century’s literature. Among my favorite literary theory courses were deconstruction, psychoanalytical Criticism, Feminism and Marxism and postcolonial criticism. Combining a close reading of literary works and literary theories, these courses enabled me to appreciate literature more deeply and to interpret literature from various

The accumulative GPA is 3.91 for my two-year master degree. My thesis Body and Identity in Sylvia Plath’s Work was an accumulation of cultural and gender studies which probed the issues of social and cultural representation and formation of female identity in the American fifties. The thesis includes Sylvia Plath’s novel, short stories, and poetry to analyze how Plath translated the social formation of female identity. I became more concerned with cultural, social aspects while dealing with literary text. My minor was Chinese-to-English translation, thus I worked on translation history, methods, theories, techniques and language structure comparisons. In addition, I also translated literary works for practice, for instance, short stories and prose written by famous Chinese authors such as Qin Han, Jian Zhen, Zhang Ai-Ling. (For more details, please refer to the “Translation” section on my website, designed for applications: http://home.kimo.com.tw/21032105) Meanwhile, I began to write Chinese poems and essays. Leaving, one of my essays, was accepted by United Literature in Taiwan and published on its