I started reading English novels as soon as I began my undergraduate program. But I primarily used it as a way to increase my vocabulary and to improve my reading comprehension. Since the second year in my undergraduate program, our curriculum included five major courses related to Anglo-American literature and culture: Selected Readings in English Literature, Selected Readings in American Literature, Introduction to European Culture, The History of English and American Literature, Selected Readings in English & American Fictions. Those courses provided me with a cultural and historical framework with which to understand Anglo-American literature and to know their interrelationships. I grew familiar with major authors and works in British and American literature and gained tentative knowledge of western critical approaches. Books like Literary Theory—An Introduction by Terry Eagleton and 20th Literary Criticism edited by David Lodge proved somewhat esoteric to me, but they allowed me to realize that there are important critical approaches very different from those in Chinese literature and different from conventional ones in western literature itself.

My defining interest in British and American Literature led me to write about T. S. Eliot and his poetry in my thesis Dull Roots Stirred by the Spring Rain—Meaning Through Imagery in T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land”(available upon request). In this thesis, I examined different groups of imagery that T. S. Eliot employed to externalize his central ideas and emotions. I also analyzed the theoretical justifications for his virtually excessive use of imagery by tracing it to his theory of “Objective Correlative” that he proposed in Hamlet and His Problems, a critical essay contained in The Sacred Wood (1920).

In an extracurricular event, students in our department put on Shakespeare’s drama Romeo and Juliet and I was the performer-director. Based on my own understanding of the play, I changed its tragic ending and made it a happy one by allowing the hero and the heroine to be resurrected and reunited. I believe that a love of such intensity should be fulfilled, otherwise it would be too pathetic.

In the last semester of my undergraduate program, I was recr

uited by my university to teach the course Appreciation of American Literature to students of non-English major. By applying my computer skills, I developed a series of courseware, covering different periods of American literature and illustrated by graphics and diagrams to make an otherwise difficult course interesting and easy to understand.

Nevertheless I am fully aware that my knowledge of American literature is far from sufficient. I need to receive more advanced education for the sake of a better career development. Therefore I plan to apply for a Graduate program in English at the University of XX, concentrating on modern and contemporary American literature. Your program is nationally recognized (listed as among the top 10 in XX according to XX) and it attacks me for its quality, small size and close mentorship. I am interested in your well-designed curriculum whose Contemporary American Literature, American Literary History, Special Topics in American Literature, American Literature 1865-1914, 1914-1960. Among your 13 professors, I would like to receive instructions from XX, XX, XX. XX, and XX. I believe I am well-prepared and genuinely motivated for your program, which will teach me the knowledge and expertise nowhere to be sought in my own country.joozone.com