good sample Statement of purpose sop Comparative Literature

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 into the genres of novel, poetry and visual arts by women writers. With abundant top-notch faculty, an excellent reputation, and unmatched research facilities in my field, your graduate program is exactly what I need to help me become a qualified scholar and teacher in the future. It would be a great honor if I can study in the Comparative Literature graduate program in Fall of 2006. 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 angles. During summer, I went to Europe and Brighton, England, for short term language study. The experience of living in different cultures and making friends with people from other countries gave me new perspectives and understandings of the world. In graduate school, my primary research was on gender, cultural studies, issues of identity, social and cultural representations of women, and on female writers such as Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood. My minor was Chinese-to-English (English-to-Chinese) translation. 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 website. My one-year French class in graduate school helped me solve most of the basic third language problems encountered during the translation process. In addition to living in the States for a year when I was young, I lived in Los Angeles from October 2004 to June 2005 to further experience its culture diversity, taking TESOL certificate classes and French in the UCLA extension. Most of my TESOL classmates are high school teachers, and thus I had a chance to discuss cultural differences and different approaches to students from different countries. During my undergraduate years, I participated in YWCA foreign affairs training and became a member of the Toastmasters. These experiences helped me understand more about global organizations, foreign affairs, and how to express my own ideas properly in different occasions and contexts. I worked as an interpreter for the Organization of American College Education Fair in 1999, and a receptionist at Fu Jen Catholic University’s Fourth International Conference on Literature and Religion. I love to be an interpreter because it provides me chances to help people and to have more interaction with others. In my graduate life, I was a research assistant, and later a teaching assistant in American literature class. From 1998, I started to work part time as an English teacher and a translator, translating materials ranging from English teaching materials, short film clips, film theory (history of contemporary criminal movies), and a cartoon The Dog of Flanders. I also worked as a General English Proficiency Text exam supervisor during my graduate years, becoming familiar with time and class management and strengthening my ability to solve sudden problems. After graduation, I worked full-time at Premier Image Technology as a customer service engineer, and my major job was to write technical documents, such as user’s manuals and service manuals for digital cameras and projectors. Because my manager was Japanese, I was his English-language interpreter during many conferences. It was a very interesting and challenging experience to receive information, digest it, condense and interpret it right away. In the process, you find yourself not only as a medium of human communication, but also as a helper and learner to gain new knowledge. In addition, I worked part time in Chinese Culture University’s adult division as an English teacher. From my previous teaching experience and the experience of working in adult education, I further progressed in course design, and the use of computer assisted materials, and most important of all, I developed the ability to teach and communicate with students of all ages. As my long-term career plan is to become a professor in literature with knowledge of western and Chinese literature, I believe that the comparative PhD program can provide me with a multiple cultural, literary, artistic, and language environment for my research. Based on my previous studies in literary theory regarding identity, representation, and history of Chinese, British and American literature, my future research will concentrate on cross cultural literature: 1) Modern (20th century) American and Chinese literature with works by female authors 2) Culture and gender studies 3) Genres of novel, poetry and visual arts 4) Further language acquisition: French 5) Translation of literary work (Chinese – English) For more details of my personal information, previous research papers, creative writing works, paintings, and translation works, please refer to my webpage: www........... It will be a real joy for me to study in a PhD program in comparative literature within a state-of-the-art environment. I’m confident that your program can open a door for me to broaden my scope in literature and art, and achieve the highest goals that I have set for myself in life. Chart of my future study plan
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