What skills are involved in English Literature studies?
October 8, 2007 6:23 AM   Subscribe

What is meant by the study of English Literature?

Firstly, I should point out that it's probably going to take a British person to answer this to my satisfaction, although I appreciate all perspectives.

Here's why: I studied the British A-Level in English Literature, and also a component of my degree was literature-based. Yet, despite this, I still don't understand what skills we're talking about. Believe it or not, nobody ever explained this to me. All I ever did was to learn quotes from our set texts that substantiated facts that I mentioned in essays that answered bizarrely convoluted questions!

Now I know the etymology of the word "criticism", so I'm not blind here. In fact, I'm probably more knowledgable than the average joe -- part of my degree also included a very interesting cultural and critical studies component (for a short while, Raymond Williams was our god!). I know about how postmodernism and feminist theory can affect the criticism of literature -- using literature to provide perspectives. It's almost as if I understand the advanced skills, but don't understand the basic skills.

What I don't understand, and what I think it will take a Brit who has successfully been through the UK education system to tell me, is what we mean by pure English literature studies. It's a devastatingly simple question to be asking.

If I pick up, say, Wuthering Heights, what kind of thing will I be looking for if I were studying it as a set text and wanted to get a very good grade?
posted by long haired lover from liverpool to Society & Culture (34 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
What does an English major do with a text? For me the first question to ask when approaching a text is: how is this text to be approached? Some texts present themselves as entertainment, as distraction; some, particularly the texts of modernism, are meant as a pure work in abstraction from the author and need to be read as that; of course works are written for different genres and need to be read as signifying within that gerne...so in other words you're trained to ask the very question you're asking here in AskMe, and you're trained to be familiar with some standard building-blocks of an answer, so you're not starting from scratch each time.

This is how I studied literature in America. If you want to know how to study and get a very good grade, you should the prof.
posted by creasy boy at 6:38 AM on October 8, 2007


You should ask the prof, that is.
posted by creasy boy at 6:38 AM on October 8, 2007


Response by poster: You should ask the prof, that is.

I'm 35 and my education is a long way behind me! But it doesn't stop me being curious.
posted by long haired lover from liverpool at 6:41 AM on October 8, 2007


I'm not a Brit, but the best basic explanation I heard was that what we do in English classes is analysis and synthesis, meaning, etymologically, that we break down the text (analysis) -- into themes, style, etc. -- and then reconstruct it as a whole (synthesis)
posted by dagnyscott at 6:47 AM on October 8, 2007


Yeah, I got that part, but I stick to my answer: there is no general method for getting a good grade independent of the prof in question. When I studied in England for a semester, I had to adjust to the fact that the prof wanted to hear a gender analysis of every novel I read. But this is surely not generalizable to all profs in England. Or what are they called: tutors? readers?
posted by creasy boy at 6:49 AM on October 8, 2007


how is this text to be approached? Some texts present themselves as entertainment, as distraction; some, particularly the texts of modernism, are meant as a pure work in abstraction from the author and need to be read as that

This sort of explanation killed English Literature for me. I don't understand what "how is this text to be approached?" means. Nothing is meant to be approached in any particular way -- EXCEPT when you have a specific goal in mind.

How is a woman meant to be approached? By a man who wants to have sex with her? By her employer? By her parents? How is a novel meant to be approached? By someone who wants to enjoy it? By someone who wants to use it for political ends? By someone who wants to get an A in a class?

"are meant as a pure work in abstraction from the author and need to be read as that"

This ALWAYS opens a hug can of worms, but why should I care what the author intended? I've debated this with people for hours, and they tend to say things like "because literature is a form of communication and when you're talking with a guy, you care what HE intends." That's fine, but why MUST one approach literature that way? I don't approach it that way, and yet I find it completely fulfilling. When I DO approach it that way, I enjoy it less. (Not everyone is like me, of course.)

When I took lit classes, I asked questions like this over and over, and never made any friends by doing so. I was often treated as if I was in a church, asking "How do you know God exists." I may be very wrong, but in the end, I suspected that English Literature is a field that runs on its own momentum. There are no real answers (I was never given any, anyway) as to why Lit people read this way instead of that way. They do so because they are following the rituals of their culture.

When I looked at Lit that way -- when I looked at much of school that way -- I did better in my classes. I decided I needed to deduce the "local customs" and follow them, however arbitrary they seemed to be. I did. It worked. I got straight As. I graduated. And now I read the way I want to read.
posted by grumblebee at 7:12 AM on October 8, 2007


A while ago the Quality Assurance Agency attempted to answer your question for a large number of degrees. They produced a range of "Benchmark Statements", each of which set out the expected subject knowledge and skills for a graduate in that discipline. This is the one for English. They make interesting reading no matter what your undergrad major was in.
posted by patricio at 7:21 AM on October 8, 2007 [1 favorite]


If I pick up, say, Wuthering Heights, what kind of thing will I be looking for if I were studying it as a set text and wanted to get a very good grade?

Well, one reason why Wuthering Heights is a set text at A-Level (I read it for mine, too, and I'm just a little younger than you) is that there's a fairly obvious formal device at work from the start -- the nesting of first-person narratives -- as well as broad social themes. A-Level texts are often chosen because they employ those kinds of glaring formal conceits, as the equivalent of those big-pieced jigsaw puzzles you give to small children.

The broader question, I think, applies more aptly to GCSE EngLit, where you're generally answering simplistic questions along the lines of 'what are the key themes of Jane Eyre?', 'what makes Romeo and Juliet a tragedy?', 'why is Hamlet upset with his mother?' (With only a little snark here: most freshman undergraduate papers on Shakespeare in the US read like GCSE-level essays to me.)

Once you get to A-level, there's definitely a greater emphasis on textual criticism and the way you tease out meaning from formal elements. And really, that's what the examiners want to see: formal criticism in the Richards-Leavis tradition, with perhaps a splash of social or gender criticism when the set text makes that kind of thing amenable.

There's an obvious reason for this: for A-Level, classes are looking at individual novels, or small collections of poetry, and generally not doing a huge amount of background research. So the best skeleton key is the one that's built on 'unity', 'integrity of the text', 'everything's there for a purpose': the process of analysing what's there on the page and putting it back together. It's also the one approach that you can guarantee every sixth-form teacher knows, regardless of when he/she studied EngLit.

At the undergraduate level, things get much more complicated. But the same could be said of most subjects.
posted by holgate at 7:32 AM on October 8, 2007


Response by poster: At the undergraduate level, things get much more complicated.

Can you give me examples? I assume you mean that you start to study genres rather than single texts? This is more akin to what I did as part of my degree: I studied postmodernist literature, picking out a handful of texts to use as examples.
posted by long haired lover from liverpool at 7:37 AM on October 8, 2007


'everything's there for a purpose'

There's no such thing as a platonic purpose. Some PERSON has to have the purpose. So: everything's there for WHOSE purpose? They author's? Is there evidence for this? Is there evidence that all (or most) authors had a grand plan and that everything on every page -- down to the level of phonemes -- somehow adheres to that purpose? What is that evidence? Furthermore, even if it's true, why should we care? Why is the author's purpose important to us as readers?


A while ago the Quality Assurance Agency attempted to answer your question

I just read through that. It struck me as a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It basically said that English Lit is defined in a different way by each person teaching it. Which is probably the only true thing you can say about it -- except that those definitions tend to follow trends (whatever ism is popular on campuses when you're enrolled). So the job of the English major is to figure out the current trends and excel at them.
posted by grumblebee at 7:44 AM on October 8, 2007


Can you give me examples? I assume you mean that you start to study genres rather than single texts?

Genres, themes, authors, works in historical context; the development of themes and techniques through authors' careers; the differing approaches of an author's contemporaries, etc. It's much more 'compare and contrast', and even then, there are alternative approaches for those kinds of comparisons and contrasts.

One classic EngLit distinction is between the genre-based Cambridge syllabus, which assesses tragedy and pastoral and whatnot from classical literature through to modern, and the more periodic Oxford syllabus, which focuses on slices of history and examining what kind of literary things are going on during that period.

(grumblebee: you must have had crappy teachers, because your complaints are really aimed at them.)
posted by holgate at 7:53 AM on October 8, 2007


There's no such thing as a platonic purpose. Some PERSON has to have the purpose. So: everything's there for WHOSE purpose?

In this case, grumblebee, the PURPOSE is to teach a group of people with differing interests, aptitudes and abilities to PASS AN EXAM.

(And please stop kicking at the pile of straw that started out as the intentional fallacy. We get your point.)

School-level EngLit teaches a lowest-common-denominator approach, because that's what gets the class the skills to get through the exam. It's no different if you're studying history or geography or biology or maths: you get taught simplifications that are good enough for the people who don't go further, and have to be unlearned or greatly revised the moment you move on.
posted by holgate at 8:01 AM on October 8, 2007


(grumblebee: you must have had crappy teachers, because your complaints are really aimed at them.)


No, my complaints are aimed at lack of systematization, which sounds very ugly and scientific, I know. But here's my problem: why study English Lit? What's the goal? My guess is that for most people, it's something like "to become a better reader and a clearer thinker." Fine. How do the current methods help one do that (what defines a "better reader")? What evidence do we have that the current methods DO help people achieve these goals.

In my experience (son of an English Lit prof, 20 years in college), there IS no evidence. So in place of it, we have trends that run on their own momentum -- or that become accepted because some charismatic faculty member pushes them (or because they play nice with some hot political agenda). Which means the the system is ARBITRARY. It DOES help readers become different kinds of readers than they were on the way in: arbitrarily different.

I fear that my posts will be taken as an anti-Eng Lit soapbox, but I'm really trying to answer the question: in my view, the subject matter/goals of Eng Lit are fuzzy and based on trends. The student desirous of an A would do best to follow those trends and pay close attention to their current teachers, noting whether they follow the trends, follow a variation of them, or are reacting against them.
posted by grumblebee at 8:06 AM on October 8, 2007 [1 favorite]


I know about [...] postmodernism and feminist theory [...] It's almost as if I understand the advanced skills, but don't understand the basic skills.

You might be interested in looking at Leavis's The Living Principle: 'English' as a Discipline of Thought, which is essentially one influential critic's systematic answer to your question. And in general, I think reading some pre-1970s criticism and theory will be the easiest way to answer this question; perhaps the next logical step is something like Practical Criticism or the Wellek/Warren Theory of Literature. Your background should make it easy to fill in the later developments (instead of "advanced" and "basic" I think you really mean "recent" and "earlier" criticism), and what you seem to be looking for is the pre-theory, pre-cultural-studies account of the uses of English. One thing you'll see is that such accounts always varied, and the present has no monopoly on theoretical controversy; but you'll still find a different set of claims being made for the use of studying literature – some of the claims you'll see will be that English builds cultural competence, rigorous critical thinking, skill with language, and civic or moral virtue.
posted by RogerB at 8:10 AM on October 8, 2007


grumblebee, I'll just point to this line:
what I think it will take a Brit who has successfully been through the UK education system to tell me
and say that you're railing against the satsuma when the question's directed towards the Bramley.

Are there critical trends? Oh god, yes, and please spare me thrice-boiled New Historicism. Is the US system, with its broad-based undergraduate system and broader-still high-school curriculum, more susceptible to being driven by crit-by-numbers trends? Absolutely. Sucking up in the classroom has rewards? Gosh, wouldn't have thought that for a second.

But if you're complaining that English Lit isn't mathematics, I'll grant you that point, but I'm not sure it gets us anywhere.
posted by holgate at 8:21 AM on October 8, 2007


Well, I don't want to cause you or anyone irritation or anger, so I'll bow out. But I actually think I was asking some valid questions and making points pertinent to the question. Since my dad is British and I've lived in both the US and the UK, I know something of the educational system in both countries.
posted by grumblebee at 8:33 AM on October 8, 2007


Response by poster: But if you're complaining that English Lit isn't mathematics, I'll grant you that point, but I'm not sure it gets us anywhere.

Agreed, and I also agree that Grumblebee's criticism is pretty personal to his experiences. But please take this argument elsewhere and don't hijack my precious once-every-7-days ask.mefi thread!
posted by long haired lover from liverpool at 8:33 AM on October 8, 2007


Response by poster: Although, actually, I've got to say that it's been interesting reading holgate and grumblebee's perspectives.
posted by long haired lover from liverpool at 8:43 AM on October 8, 2007


I'm going to bow out after this reply, too.

What RogerB says upthread chimes with my earlier comments. Think of the progression from GCSE to A-level to university as a kind of historical re-enactment of the 100-odd year history of 'English Literature' as a subject. You start with impressionistic Leslie Stephen-esque criticism, move through to the formalism of Richards and Leavis, and then hit theory and genre studies.

To some extent, what I think you're referring to as 'pure English Literature studies' is the old path of the medieval trivium that is Rhetoric.
posted by holgate at 8:54 AM on October 8, 2007


Response by poster: All that hullaballoo, however, is often different from how to get a good grade in a class, which is to play to the professor's interests. So, basically what creasy boy said about that.

This reminds me of what a first-class Cambridge graduate said to me once. We were just chatting in the pub about our A-Level English Literature studies. He'd got straight A grades and I got a more average spread.

I explained that I thought the point was to study the text, to form a relationship with it. Back in '89 I spent hours poring over Pride and Prejudice, looking for hidden meaning! And don't get me started on Ted sodding Hughes *.

His approach? The one that got him his straight A grades? First he laughed at what I'd told him what I'd done. Then he said he'd got a good study guide for each set text. Then he'd learnt the study guide almost by heart and recited its pertinent points when writing his essays (rephrasing, of course, and not plagiaristically).

His point was that the study guide gave the examiners what they wanted to hear. In other words, A-levels are no place for original research. I wish, wish, wish I'd realised that at the time. Well, actually, I did; even the teachers made allusions to the fact that study guides were a pretty good buy. But I thought I was being more honourable in going it alone. Has anybody got a time machine I can borrow so I can go back and slap myself about a bit?

* Although I did develop a love of the texts, including Shakespeare. Even now they resonate with me in ways I suspect they don't with most of my fellow students. Who else would think of Prince Hal's sense of duty when attending his sister's wedding?
posted by long haired lover from liverpool at 9:58 AM on October 8, 2007


Disclaimer up front: I'm writing from the American academic perspective. I have some exposure to British English lit education but not enough to try to answer your question from that perspective.

I don't think I've ever heard or used the term "pure English literature studies." It's a strange concept to me.

It sounds a little bit like asking about "pure cooking studies." With cooking, you've got the raw ingredients (=texts), and then there are an unlimited number of ways that you can treat the raw ingredients. A lot of different preparations will taste good to a lot of different people. (But that doesn't mean that there is no "wrong" way of cooking. There are lots of "wrong" ways of cooking—basically, anything you do to the food that renders it inedible or universally unpalatable.) Just because one preparation doesn't taste good to one person, or to a few people, doesn't invalidate it completely. But there are trends in the food industry, and there are local cultures. Every now and then, there will be some style of preparation that lots of people get really excited about, and they try their own variations on that preparation.

With English lit readings, the question is not so much "does this taste good to me?" but more like, "does this reading enhance my understanding of the text? Does it call my attention to some aspect of the text that I hadn't noticed before? Does it add a layer of complexity to my understanding of the text? Does this approach seem to have the potential to enhance my understanding of other texts, if I were to apply it to them?" In the academic establishment, when a lot of people agree that a certain approach enhances their understanding of a lot of texts, that approach becomes a "school of thought" or a "body of criticism" or a "theory" or a "trend."

Of course, this is a simplified explanation which lots of my colleagues would pick bones with . . .

You say that you feel like you got the advanced skills without knowing what the basic skills are. My best guess for the "basic skills" would be "close reading" (see here and here). My experience would suggest that most practitioners of most varieties of English lit criticism would say that the skills of close reading are foundational to their work; "close reading" is generally what we agree that we should be teaching in intro-level undergraduate classes.

To extend the cooking analogy, close reading skills might be the equivalent of basic chef's training in knowledge of ingredients and some essential techniques (chopping, roasting, whatever). Now, can you cook yourself a perfectly delicious meal without having gone to culinary school? Of course. Can you read and enjoy a novel or a poem without ever once applying "close reading" to it? Of course. But if you're going to pursue cooking as a discipline, at least in the Western cultural setting, you're going to learn about ingredients and techniques. If you're going to pursue the study of English lit as a discipline, at least in the American academic setting, you're probably going to be expected to learn "close reading"—even if nobody explains it to you as such. I suspect that this is also true on the other side of the pond, although I apologize for giving such a lengthy answer without being able to meet the specifications of the question.


p.s. on preview: I don't know what was in your Cambridge friend's study guides, but guides like SparkNotes generally point out some of the major features that a skilled close-reader would be likely to pick up on. It's not so much that the guides are telling you "what the instructors want to hear" as if that were a completely arbitrary thing and the guides somehow read the instructors' minds; it's more that the instructors and the authors of the guides have all learned the same set of skills, which is the set of skills you're being tested on, although those skills may not have been taught or explained to you very effectively, so they can appear mysteriously as "what the instructors want."
posted by Orinda at 10:11 AM on October 8, 2007 [1 favorite]


You dragged me back for one more:

His point was that the study guide gave the examiners what they wanted to hear. In other words, A-levels are no place for original research.

This is true. It's also understandable, given the testing framework. (A joke among my college EngLit friends was that early undergraduate success was based upon dressing up reiterated truisms as if they were original, and that original thought is only slowly allowed to creep into your work under professional supervision.)

Yes, there is a certain institutional heft (and stylistic distinction) that helps separate a tenured professor's 'radical re-reading' of a text from the classic teenage essay on how 'it speaks to me this way'. Yes, it's frustrating to knock out That Bog-Standard Jane Austen Essay if you're talented enough at 17 to know it's going through the motions. But if you're a precocious 17-year-old who likes reading literature, you already think you're ready to tie up all the world's loose ends* and it takes a few years of university -- and growing up -- to learn otherwise. Crawl before you walk before you run marathons.

* cough, ayn rand, cough
posted by holgate at 10:30 AM on October 8, 2007


If you're going to study only English literature, part of what you're studying is the geo-political entity (England) whose culture and history led to the creation and acceptance of the literature. One perspective on art is that it is a reflection of the world around it, and obviously studying "English literature" as some sort of unified entity would require that perspective.

So quite simply, I think the answer you're looking for is: when you study English literature you're studying England. First as the birthplace and cultural environment that led to the work, but also (through criticism) how the work was received and continues to be regarded.
posted by lubujackson at 11:32 AM on October 8, 2007


Response by poster: Holgate, yes, I know. They should really let us leave school at 14, go and work, get the idealism beaten out of us, and then let us come back to study in our 20s or 30s, when we'll actually appreciate it and could do it properly (my God, I think I've just accidentally suggested National Service). I've little doubt that I'd do a far better job if I studied my A-levels again.

Thanks everybody for their answers. The various replies have given me an interesting perspective on this topic, including the rather more clinical American approach to criticism. Holgate perhaps hit more nails on the head than anybody else but it's been an interesting read throughout.
posted by long haired lover from liverpool at 12:53 PM on October 8, 2007


"English" Literature also serves an ideological function in the way it prioritises ancient Germanic literature ("Anglic") while deprecating pre- and post-Saxon invasion literature (mostly Celtic/Scottish/Welsh/Cornish/Irish and Romano-British). For instance, why study Beowulf over the Llyfr Taliesin/Mabinogi/Y Gododdin (or even the Lebor Gabála Érenn), when the former is an overtly Scandinavian story set in Sweden (composed by invaders in "Anglia"), while the latter are (mostly) set in Britain and deal with similar iron-age cultures? Because the Saxons won, and pretty much all the non-Germanic literature describes the fight against the invaders. For the longest time the Saxons (and their conquerors, though cultural relative, the Normans) used "English" literature to help drive a unification of the different cultures within the islands of Great Britain and Ireland.
posted by meehawl at 1:31 PM on October 8, 2007


you say: His point was that the study guide gave the examiners what they wanted to hear. In other words, A-levels are no place for original research. I wish, wish, wish I'd realised that at the time. Well, actually, I did; even the teachers made allusions to the fact that study guides were a pretty good buy. But I thought I was being more honourable in going it alone. Has anybody got a time machine I can borrow so I can go back and slap myself about a bit?

* Although I did develop a love of the texts, including Shakespeare. Even now they resonate with me in ways I suspect they don't with most of my fellow students. Who else would think of Prince Hal's sense of duty when attending his sister's wedding?


Orinda points out why study guides helping doesn't mean that the instructors only want some arbitrary thing. And the fact that your friend did better on the exams shows that exams are only so good at measuring whether people have the skills and knowledge they're meant to be learning.

But surely you learned more by the way you studied for the exam than he did? So it sounds like you win that round, exam marks notwithstanding.

Studying literature enriches your mental life tremendously. (Or, it did mine. It sounds like it did yours too.) Learning to be a better, more-perceptive reader means that you have the world library of great literature available to you, and you have the tools to get through it yourself and appreciate some of the hidden goodies in it. For people who have these skills, it's sometimes hard to see how rare they are among the average run of 20 year olds, but I teach undergraduates and let me tell you: vanishingly rare. For most undergraduates I interact with, the world library of great literature is just not available as it is for someone who has had some instruction in how to read carefully, in what different literary devices are for, etc.

Relatedly, you may be interested in the thoughts (about what kinds of skills are meant to be learned in English lit courses in American universities) in this thread.
posted by LobsterMitten at 2:44 PM on October 8, 2007


Response by poster: But surely you learned more by the way you studied for the exam than he did? So it sounds like you win that round, exam marks notwithstanding.

Yes, I'd agree. But he's the one who went to Cambridge. I slipped a grade at A-level and didn't even get to my first choice of university, having to take my 'reserve'. I had really banked on going to my first choice and you could argue my life would be different if I had.

Now I'm not bitter! Life is a continual process and no experience is better than any other in the long run. We end up where we want to be, even if that's by unexpected routes.

But the vital point is that education isn't about learning, or appreciating the subject. That's a happy by-product that you should keep to yourself. Education is about passing milestones and raking up qualitative, erm, qualifications. Sad, I know, but those are the breaks. (Note that university education, at least in Britain, is slightly more expansive than this, but it's still essentially goal-based.)

And this is the answer to the question I asked initially. What skills are required to get a good grade at A-level English? The skills needed are those that will give the examiners everything they expect. You have to game the system. That means reading study guides more than you read the original damn text, and bombarding the examiner with realisations that somebody else has made; a person who, as holgate points out above, comes from the same tradition as them and speaks the same critical language.
posted by long haired lover from liverpool at 2:28 AM on October 9, 2007


What skills are involved in the study of English literature? Leavis answered your question fifty years ago:

Our business is to promote the intelligent study of literature, and the discipline will be manifested in the power to be "intelligently articulate about it" -- it will be manifested in sensitive and cogently relevant thinking (which entails perceptive judgement) expressed in sensitive, lively and scrupulous prose.

Or as Eliot put it, more succinctly: 'There is no method except to be very intelligent.'

Does it work? Does the study of English literature actually help people to acquire these skills? Yes, it does. A good critic can help you see things you've never seen before, and to read the work of a really good critic -- Empson, say, or Ricks -- is to be constantly humbled by all the things you failed to notice.

Two experiences stand out for me. The first was hearing a friend of mine, a literature don at Cambridge, talking enthusiastically about the film Jurassic Park, and realising that his profession gave him a set of critical skills which he could apply to anything he saw or heard. The second was reading John Sutherland's collection of critical-essays-for-the-common-reader, Where Was Rebecca Shot? and realising how much I'd missed in the texts I'd read for A-Level, how shallow my understanding had been, and how much could be learned just by asking the right questions -- nothing highly theorized, just good old-fashioned critical intelligence.

His point was that the study guides gave the examiners what they wanted to hear. In other words, A-Levels are no place for original research.

Yes, I can understand this; but what follows? Not your cynical conclusion -- that it's better to copy the answers out of the study guide rather than bothering to think for yourself. No: the point is that an accurate, precise, focused approach to the text is what is being rewarded here -- and your vague ideas about 'forming a relationship with the text' and 'looking for hidden meaning' were just not focused enough.

They should really let us leave school at 14, go and work, get the idealism beaten out of us and then let us come back to study in our 20s and 30s, when we'll actually appreciate it and could do it properly

And yet the Leavisite method of criticism is a highly idealistic one: it's based on the idea that there are good and bad works of literature, and that the task of the critic is to help people appreciate the good and recognise the bad. And a number of Leavis's disciples became schoolteachers and went into the classroom armed with an evangelical faith in the study of literature as a powerful tool for intellectual and social improvement. Very unfashionable now, I know; but I find it admirable.

What I'm saying to you, I suppose, is that you should try to hold on to your idealism -- and for heaven's sake, don't think of the study of English literature as a mechanical exercise in which texts are fed through a meat-grinder labelled 'criticism'. And if you feel that you've failed to get the best out of your university experience -- well, why not come back and do a second degree? Plenty of people do. You might even find it makes you more employable.

You have to game the system

Oh, no. No, no, no. That isn't what teaching and learning are about -- it's what bad teaching and learning are about. Sadly, it's all too common, and it sounds as though you've suffered from it without recognising it for what it is.
posted by verstegan at 3:39 AM on October 9, 2007


Response by poster: verstegan, I think you've misunderstood what I've been saying. Essentially we agree on all points. The crux of my argument is that there are two modes of approaching literature in order to pass examinations: cynically regurgitating what others have discovered, and original research. Depending on your skill level, both can lead to good exam results at A-level literature. If you recall, that was the actual question I asked. But the path of least resistance is to use a study guide. This is also the most fool-proof method. If I did my A-levels all over again, I would use study guides. No question. A-Level English Literature is not about appreciating literature. It's about passing the final examso you can prove to others (usually employers) that you've an above-average intelligence.

In other words, the techniques needed to pass examinations are quite separate from those required to appreciate literature. Make no bones: Few teachers at GCSE or A-level are going to teach you to appreciate literature, unless they're idealistic and (probably) straight out of college. They're going to teach you what you need to pass an exam. This is good, because that's their job and the outcome is what everybody wants. Any system that features semester-based teaching across a limited time period that culminates in examinations will be like this. IMHO, but also simply based on practical experience. As mentioned, universities are more relaxed, and you needn't feel as embarassed if you actually enjoy the subject, but ultimately they're academic sausage machines.

As it happens, I had a teacher who taught me A-level Classical Civilisation, who did make me appreciate and love Juvenal, Horace, Petronius, Homer... And that's the only A-level where I got an A grade. And I didn't use study guides but genuinely did form a relationship with the text.
posted by long haired lover from liverpool at 4:20 AM on October 9, 2007


Then he'd learnt the study guide almost by heart and recited its pertinent points when writing his essays (rephrasing, of course, and not plagiaristically).

This is plagiarism. Using someone else's ideas without citing them is plagiarism, even in an exam. Most times, examiners don't worry about citations, because while the facts and some of the lesser ideas may come from secondary sources, the main ideas are expected to come from the student's head. In this case, they did not. This is to me a clear case of the worst sort of plagiarism - claiming to have gone through the trouble of of analysis when you did not. I really don't care if someone steals a sentance here and there - sentances are not so original. But to steal a thesis? An entire argument? That's the real crime.
posted by jb at 4:36 AM on October 9, 2007


Response by poster: This is plagiarism. Using someone else's ideas without citing them is plagiarism

You're both right and wrong. In legal terms, plagiarism has a strict definition of literal copying of another's work. But in moral terms, plagiarism is described as you say. Remember that we're talking about school examinations here and not higher research at a university.

With a book like, say, Wuthering Heights, there are only a set number of concepts that can be drawn from the book (as holgate says above, it's like a jigsaw with nice chunky pieces, and that's why it's chosen as a set text).

So the ideas simply can't be original to the student, unless the student presents a new perspective, and as others in this thread have already pointed out, that's not what examiners want. They want to see the doggy jump through the usual hoops, rather than run off and walk on its hind legs around the ring while balancing a chocolate on its nose.

So really my Cambridge friend is just taking a short-cut to discovering established ideas, which, to be frank, most teachers should be pointing out anyway. The main thing he's doing is learning what the examiners are likely to want -- it's less about the facts and more about the importance of the facts in his chosen context, which is what's needed to score highly in an A-level examination. A study guide also presents the kind of critical language he's likely to want to use. It just contextualises everything for him, often better than some teachers (I suspect).

I just want to add that using a study guide isn't cheating, and nor does it mean a stupid person can blitz exams with A grades. A study guide is just that -- a guide. It's a shortcut. In the hands of a dunce it's useless. In the hands of somebody who is genuinely intelligent, it can save a lot of work. In the hands of somebody like me, who has half a brain, it would have helped me get on the straight and narrow, and not run around the ring attempting (unsuccessfully) to balance the chocky treat on my snout.
posted by long haired lover from liverpool at 6:14 AM on October 9, 2007


This is to me a clear case of the worst sort of plagiarism - claiming to have gone through the trouble of of analysis when you did not.

What if you'd been taught that argument in class? Are you plagiarising from your teacher? If so, then the definition is so broad as to be meaningless; if not, what's the distinction? Remember, we're basically talking about A-levels here.

But I'm actually going to take verstegan's side on this, in part because I was odd enough to take both Maths and EngLit at A-level, and there's a similar distinction between knowledge and competence. You can know a solution, and then you can know why the solution works; literary analysis is seldom as clear-cut, but no prep notes can instill the click, the why.

Furthermore, it's easy in retrospect to mischaracterise originality of thought as originality of analysis: 'when a man's fancy gets astride his reason', particularly at that tender age, 'the first proselyte he makes is himself.' That is, you can be very impressed with your own capacity to 'get things' out of texts, but I now know that I brought a shedload of baggage to my reading as a green teenager.

(And I will say this: the raw aptitude that actually gets you into an Oxford or Cambridge to read English is different again from the skills that get you through A-levels, or at least was for me and my contemporaries. That's an advantage of their interview process; later on, I could usually pick out the candidates who'd get in, because they had that critical knack, albeit at an apprentice's level.)
posted by holgate at 6:22 AM on October 9, 2007


Response by poster: That is, you can be very impressed with your own capacity to 'get things' out of texts, but I now know that I brought a shedload of baggage to my reading as a green teenager.

Panic by The Smiths: "It says nothing to me about my life". Things only have value if they have value to me.

Shouldn't doctors try and cure adolescence?
posted by long haired lover from liverpool at 8:51 AM on October 9, 2007


Actually, I have never used secondary sources or professors' arguments without citing them - we were shown how to cite lectures or personal communication. (Though I think secondary sources are entirely unnecessary for introductory literature analysis - they are too tempting as crutches). Even in an exam situation, a student should cite if they are concious of getting a major idea/thesis from another source (as opposed to a simple fact).

Students do come up with original ideas all the time - or they aren't doing their job. Even if an idea is not unique, in that some one else has also come to that conclusion, it is still original if the student came to conclusion based on their own work and thinking. Repeating someone else's path of discovery is honourable, and a necessary learning experience; conciously avoiding making your own discoveries by copying a study guide is not honourable, and it is immoral, even at the undergraduate level. Your friend was at university to learn to think for himself - and instead he cheated both himself and the university, and everyone else who worked hard for their degrees. If he had been my student, and I realised he was doing something like that, I think I would have advocated for him to be removed from the university.

Now, perhaps I have misunderstood you, or perhaps your friend exagerrated when he said he just memorised the study guide. If he used the study guide to hone his analysis skills, that is fine. But if he did literally what you have written (memorised the study guide, and repeated its points in his own work without attribution, not just one or two along with his own, but using the study guide as the source of his own argument), that is plagiarism of the most serious kind.
posted by jb at 3:18 PM on November 13, 2007


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