Correspondence
Dear Editors,
I found your 'English Now' anniversary edition extremely interesting but, despite the excellence of some of the contributions, there seemed to me to be no proper discussion of what, ideally, an Honours course in English studies should attempt to do. The main emphasis appeared to be pedagogical: the problem of teaching English to a much-enlarged student intake, without either the cultural background or commitment to the subject which existed in the days of older contributors like David Gervais and R. D. Gooder.
I retired from degree-level teaching some years ago and so am out of primary touch with the situation as it is in 2005. Nonetheless, the shift of emphasis which your contributors describe was already in place. It was a shift which appeared to occur without any adequate consideration let alone theoretical rationale, but to be a response to a change in the cultural weather. I do not myself believe that there was an educational case for abandoning the traditional English degree with its obvious structural coherence for a pick 'n' mix approach to the subject based on what students wanted to study rather than what they ought to study.
In all subjects which have practical outcomes on which people's lives may depend, the emphasis is on what a student ought to know and what skills (s)he ought to acquire. A pick 'n' mix approach to a medical degree would merely turn out less competent doctors. I well remember my sister spending day after day in her attic study in order to obtain the mastery of Gray's Anatomy she needed to pass her Second MB. It was no sort of fun but sheer hard slog. But it was necessary: a doctor must have a thorough knowledge of the intricate structures of the human body.
Just because English is a subject the study of which has no obvious practical outcome, I do not see that the approach to its study should be different. However unfashionable it may be to insist on them, the two criteria should still be: What (allowing for time constraints) must a student know? What skills must (s)he acquire?
Any attempt to answer these questions must involve a consideration of the nature of the subject. English is the study of selected texts, usually, though not exclusively, works of imagination, written — again usually, though not exclusively — in the student's native language. The texts are both objects of knowledge (they consist of a finite number of words, [End Page 169] arranged in a particular way, which were originally published or performed at a particular date and in a particular place) and — at least to my mind — communications from persons which are not fundamentally different from other communications such as a personal letter or a narrated anecdote. Ultimately, it seems to me, literary texts, because written by individual persons, are to be explained and judged in the same way as we do actual people. That is why such works cannot be appraised by the application of rules, however elaborate and sophisticated the theories on which the rules are based; that is why, too, there will always be differences of opinion and interpretation with no final answer. And, naturally people whether writers or critics differ in the extent of their understanding and insight. One reason why Lawrence is a major critic is that he saw more clearly than anyone before him that there was no such thing as a purely literary judgement.
A literary education involves a training in judgement refined by the acquisition of adequate and relevant knowledge, interpretative skills, and opportunities to develop imaginative sensitivity. It is a particularly valuable kind of education because it depends on negotiating complex and diverse criteria, and judging how relevant each is in a particular case. Its value is that it simulates the complexities of judgement and imagination in actual living.
What, then, should a literary education consist of? Judgement is subjective, but in the case of literary texts it can only be strengthened if such texts...
