Did you know that if you study English Literature at Bristol you have to read the works of Chaucer, Pope, Hardy and Dickens? You literally have to, there’s no option. Every year you’re forced into at least two compulsory modules, or one if you’re a lucky joint honours student like me.
These 40 credit modules, while clearly intended to give you an overview of “English Literature”, essentially just idolise privileged, white, middle-class males, while women, the poor, and people of colour are sidelined; some almost written out of popular history all together.
If you’re lucky – really lucky – you’ll have a few token female writers thrown into these modules, but no doubt if you have the privilege of reading Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, you’ll have to study her in relation to Swift, and, even then, you’ll probably only spend five minutes on her poetry because, as it turns out, the real focus of the tutorial was actually all about Pope’s “Essay on Man” and his lasting friendship with Swift… how exciting.
(Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, real-life HBIC. Painting attributed to Geoffrey Kneller)
That’s not to say that there aren’t modules wholeheartedly dedicated to the kinds of works that subvert, undermine or stand apart from those ideals discussed and illustrated by the “Greats”. However, if you’re really into women’s writing, or Black British literature, or works from the Commonwealth then you’ll have to wait for your special subjects. But, just remember to choose wisely. Since you’ve already been allotted your compulsory 40 credits for each term, that only leaves you one 20 credit option either side of Christmas – diverse, don’t you think?
Of course, you could make it all the way through your degree without studying more than a handful of writings about women… by real women! You might even be able to completely sidestep the concept of Black British literature, and Postcolonial writing could pass you by if you happened to drift off in the one, very specific, first year lecture on race and diaspora.
Like I said before, at Bristol, you can find whole modules purely dedicated to Postcolonial literature and women’s war-time writing – the kinds of books and poetry collections that won’t always be brought to the front shelf of Waterstones – but these are outnumbered by obsessions with Milton and Shakespeare and Dickens. Of course, as Literature students we do need to know about these guys, everyone is always talking about them… but therein lies the point: everyone is always talking about them.
I don’t know about you, but I came to university to study things that I hadn’t encountered before. If I can pick up a copy of Defoe or Coleridge in any high street bookshop then I don’t consider it as something I had to come to university for. I can literally read that stuff any time I like, and when and if I do, I won’t be paying £9,000 on top of the price of the book for the privilege of tunnel vision which pretends there aren’t other works of literature we could be studying that are more diverse or insightful.
I don’t enjoy this side of my course, but even more than that, it disappoints me that with every module I take that breaks away from the “classics”, whether that’s Black British Literature or Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing, we encounter the same conversation:
“We had to fight for this module to take place.””This module was deemed a little risky, so it almost didn’t happen.””There’s a surprisingly large opposition to this subject at Bristol.”
It is astounding that in 2015, in multi-cultural Britain, in a subject cohort that boasts vastly more female students than male ones (although still is demonstrably very white and middle-class), that we are sidelining subjects that are a key part of history, of culture and of real life.
Yes, I understand that reading lists are dictated by individual tutors and maybe in the past three years I’ve just been unlucky, but at the end of the day literature is all about documenting and understanding the way we interact with the world and rationalising its effect on us. If we pretend that English literature is only best documented by white, English, upper-class men, then what is the point of reading this degree?
(Nella Larsen, only taught on certain modules, despite being literally brilliant. Photo by James Allen, via The Library of Congress)
These compulsory modules might give us the “grounding” we need to understand the progression of English literature but they’re not the absolute essentials. If you’ve made it this far then you’ve probably already got some idea about the “classics” and what you’re actually in need of is a variety of literature to widen your world view. By reducing Postcolonial, Black British and women’s writing down to 20 credit special subjects we are pigeon-holing massive issues, denying more than half our population and a significant portion of our world history a voice.
If you are able to make it through your degree without studying any of these subjects in depth, then what kind of perspective of the world are you going to graduate with?
A skewed and naive one, no doubt.
(Featured image credit: Salon)