Preliminary notes

Receiving the news that a close relative has weeks, or possibly even days, to live, is not known to be conducive to serious studying. I mention this apparently irrelevant fact only because that’s what happened to me just around the time this course was starting. It is possible, therefore, that some of the issues I describe below may have arisen at least partly because of displaced anxiety. It is difficult to be definitive about such things.

Introduction

For some years I’ve been considering studying for an MA in English Literature. From a strictly utilitarian point of view this would be not only expensive but pointless. I don't need an MA both because I already have one, and there's nothing I would wish to do with it anyway. It would be purely for pleasure but at something like nine grand a year it would make for an expensive hobby. Therefore I wanted to be quite sure before committing myself to what could turn out to be a costly mistake. Thus when this course (from the City Lit Institute, in London, came to my attention I was very interested in using it as a way of dipping my toes in the waters of academia once again to see if a Masters was something I really wanted to do after all. I was pleased to learn from one of the two tutors that this was indeed one of the reasons others had taken this course before me.

Also, I regarded the course is a good way of studying more formally why texts work in the way they do. As a writer I'm always interested in how other writers achieve particular effects. I read, and have read, many books on this subject, and had even more discussions about it. However, I have thought over the years that perhaps a more formal approach would not come amiss. Let’s put it this way: for a long time I’ve had an itch, and it was crying out to be scratched.

The works

The course comprised the study of Washington Square, by Henry James; A Doll’s House, by Ibsen; poetry by Shelley, Wordsworth and Hardy; Quicksand by Nella Larsen and To The Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolfe. The only one of these that even remotely appealed to me was Ibsen’s play, which has been something I’ve wanted to read for quite a while. Not entirely for the right reasons, I have to admit: I wanted to experience what it’s like to be able to say, when cornered by one of those awful people who come out with things like: “Well, you will recall that Ibsen makes this very point, in the second act of A Doll’s House, blah blah drone…”, “No, I don’t recall it, because he never meant that! He was alluding to blah blah drone…” (“If you can’t beat them, join them” is what I say!)

Washington Square was of little interest because not long before I had read The Turn of the Screw by the same author, and didn’t like it at all. I thought the governess was too prone to histrionics and hysteria, and that we’d all have been a lot better off if someone had given her Rescue Remedy.

The only poem by Shelley I’ve ever enjoyed was Ozymandias, mainly because I think it presents a great object lesson to those smug people who spend their time informing the rest of us on social media how wonderful they are.

Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” (not it’s original name, apparently), was pummelled into me at school. If you want to put people off something for life, get a really bad teacher to subject their students to it for a year or so. The only version of it I thought was worth bothering with at all was a parody by Mad magazine that started, “I wandered lonely as a clod.”

I’d never heard of Nella Larsen. As for Virginia Woolfe, the main things I knew about her was that (a) she was part of the Bloomsbury crowd, (b) she knew the economist Keynes, and (c) she wrote modernist literature, whatever that was.

So not a promising start as far as I was concerned, but part of the reason I take these literature courses is to be “forced” to read stuff that has been on my bucket list for eons, or stuff I’ve not heard of before.

The books

One of the books that was recommended, though not mandatory, is called Beginning Theory: An introduction to literary and cultural theory, by Peter Barry. For the poetry, The Penguin Book of English Verse was the obligatory text for that section of the course.

The assignments

We had three assignments. The first one was a (very) short presentation to the class of one of the poems in the aforementioned book. The second one was a seminar presentation on an aspect of something covered in the course so far. Assignment number three was an academic essay, for which we were given a choice of twelve titles, none of which ignited any enthusiasm. (I’m sure the event noted right at the start of this article had much to do with that.)

My evaluation

Apart from the knowledge and insights of the tutors, I very much appreciated the insights (and in one case articles) from the other participants. The discussions were always of a very high standard, and I was delighted to be told exactly why I was misguided to regard the women in A Doll’s House as examples of toxic femininity, rather than dismissed as an idiot.

I enjoyed the texts on the whole, although perhaps “enjoyed” is rather too strong a word to use in connection with To The Lighthouse.  I can see that it’s clever, and was ground-breaking in its day, but it filled me not so much with delight but a headache.

I found the assignments very stressful. I was surprised at this, because I was a schoolteacher for years, still teach at the City Lit, and have taken exams all my life, prepared students for exams and been an ‘A’ Level examiner. Therefore although I found the assignments challenging (especially the essay), I think my over-stressed reaction was, again, not a little connected with the news I described earlier.

My presentation of a poem (Listen Mr Oxford Don: see The joys of non-standard English) appeared to go down well, as did my seminar. I have not yet received my assessment for the essay, for which there seems to be only three grades: Very Good, Good, and Don’t give up the day job. (It is officially labelled as “Satisfactory”. Really? Don’t make me laugh, squire: it seems to me that an enormous range of virtual marks is covered by that small word). Hopefully, if I achieve the last mentioned grade the accompanying comments in which judgements are made on such criteria as relevance, the writing, and a couple of other things will prove illuminating. (As indeed they should do even if I achieve either of the other grades.)

As for the books. I tried reading Beginning Theory before the course started, and found it impenetrable. I said to Elaine, “Who cares whether a critique of a work is structural, post-structural, modernist, post-modernist or whatever? Surely all we want to know is: is it enjoyable, and how does it work? And what the hell is modernism anyway?”

As an aside, around a year ago I bought a book called If Not Critical, by Eric Griffiths. He was a Cambridge Fellow whose lectures were, apparently, so riveting that they were listed in the student entertainment guide. Well, I bought it, and just about managed to get through the Introduction and a few pages of one article. The relevance of this will become apparent in a moment.

I bought the poetry book with some reluctance, because we’re sinking in poetry books here. Why would I want, or need, yet another one?

Well now, here’s an interesting thing. When it came to looking at the poetry, I was really glad we’d been told to buy that book. The poems are set out in chronological order, on an individual basis. Thus, for example, a poem by Wordsworth might be followed by Shelley’s answer to it. So you get a real sense of the interplay between the works. For the first time since coming across Adlestrop when I was 14 (and yes, that was a long time ago), I actually became enthused by the poems and poets we looked at. Who says the age of miracles is dead? Moreover, in the course of looking for a poem to present, I came across John Agard’s Oxford Don and his recitation of it, which I included in the article mentioned above. In addition, the presentations of other poems, along with their analyses, by the other students provided a veritable feast of poems and poets I hadn’t even considered looking at before.

Moreover, while I was researching for my seminar presentation, I thought I’d look in the Griffiths book for inspiration. I mean, hope springs eternal and all that. Well, not only did I find a chapter that seemed to really hit the nail on the head as far as my fledgling hypothesis was concerned, and not only found the book comprehensible; I even found it enjoyable.

Once I had developed my theme, I thought: “I wonder if what I’ve done is an example of structural criticism.” I checked the Beginning Theory book, and that did indeed seem to be the case. (Judge for yourself: I published my seminar notes in Series, Sequence, Stagnation in Quicksand.)

Since researching for, and writing, the essay I’ve been enjoying reading both of those books.

Thus, one very positive outcome for me was enjoying reading essays and books on literary criticism. Although most of the reading I did for both my essay and the seminar did not lend itself to being used or cited in the final drafts, I felt that I learnt a great deal along the way, so neither the effort, time nor cost was wasted.

As for the $64,000 question: do I still want to do an MA in English Literature? Although I don’t know how far my stressing over the essay etc was exacerbated by worry over my relative (not to mention the lack of time because of visiting him, and helping to sort out his affairs), the experience was so unpleasant (and not least for Elaine) that I believe the right decision is “No”. But not to worry: I’ve laid that particular ghost to rest, so the course was a success in helping me to make that decision, and there’s nothing to stop me continuing to do further, less academic courses. Besides, I already have an MA (in education) as I’ve said, and one doesn’t wish to be greedy. (Mind you, I’d love to use the extra MA as a launching point for the pursuit of a doctorate. I was offered the opportunity a long time ago, and turned it down, a decision I sometimes regret. See Dr Freedman, I Presume?)

Conclusion

Would I recommend this course if it comes up again? Definitely. Being compelled to evaluate works in a formal way, but with guidance and support from very experienced tutors, and with enthusiastic fellow students, pays dividends in terms of literary appreciation.

This article was first published in Terry Freedman’s Books Bulletin — see below.