Doing English

A Guide for Literature Students

Robert Eaglestone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351707527
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Doing English presents the ideas and debates that shape how we 'do' English today, explaining arguments about the value of literature, the canon, Shakespeare, theory, politics and the subject itself.

In his lucid and engaging style, Robert Eaglestone:

• orients students by encouraging them to think about what they are doing when they study literature;
• bridges the gap between English at A-level and International Baccalaureate to English in Higher Education by exploring traditional and theoretical approaches to literature and explaining key ideas and trends;
• explains to students why English, more than any other subject, is the cause of public debate and concern in the media and amongst politicians and educators.

This popular and classic guide has been fully updated throughout to take account of recent research, educational changes and current events, and it now includes a chapter called 'Why Study English?' – showing how and why the skills taught by English are transferable to a range of careers. This immensely readable book is the ideal introduction to studying English Literature.

PART I

HOW WE READ

1

Studying English

•Who is this book for?

•What is it for?

•How to use this book.

Who is this book for?

This book is about why and how we study English. It will explain key ideas about English and the study of literature. If you are doing English literature at university or college, or for A-level, or on an IB course, this book is for you. This book aims to be a stepping-stone to higher education by introducing significant new questions and ideas about English and literature.

English, the largest and most popular arts and humanities discipline, seems very different from other school or university subjects. It’s not just that reading literature is (usually but not always!) pleasurable. In English, your knowledge of literature is made through your experience of reading and isn’t simply handed down to you from authorities: you do English (it isn’t, shouldn’t be, done to you). More, knowing about literature is often a sort of knowing that can’t easily be explained: for example, knowing that a story moves you deeply is an important piece of knowledge but is hard to write about for an exam. (If this leads you to think that there might be different kinds of knowledge, you’re right, there are, although the processes of education and assessment sometimes make them feel all the same). English can be unpredictable because when we read, our own experiences and imaginations – our own selves and the communities that shaped us – are inevitably bought into the class or seminar. Reading, thinking, feeling and learning about literature is bound up very closely with how we live, how we are with others, how we talk, feel, question and have opinions, and, sometimes, how we decide between right and wrong. It’s a strange subject, then, at the same time both inside the systems of education (you have to take exams) and outside them (it’s about who and how you are, about things that can’t be assessed by a test). These are some of the reasons that students are drawn to English (and, perhaps, that some don’t like it). This book aims to explain why English is the way it is and what this means. In addition to this, as I’ll show later in the book and centrally in Chapter 13, English teaches vital skills and broadens capacities for life and for work.

Perhaps rather surprisingly, there isn’t a clear answer to the question ‘What is English?’ To say that it is ‘the study of literature’, ‘analysing writing’ or simply reading novels, poems and plays and thinking and writing about them doesn’t really answer the question. What does ‘learning about literature’ or ‘doing English’ actually mean? What ideas does it involve? Why do it one way rather than another? Why do it at all? People usually begin ‘studying English’ without thinking about what they are doing in the first place and, perhaps more importantly, why they are doing it. And because it’s both inside and outside the normal processes of education, the answers to these questions are all the more complex. Teachers of English at all levels in education have had long and tortuous discussions and arguments (and even ‘culture wars’) over these questions – over what the subject is and how to study it – but these have rarely been explained to you, the person who is actually doing English. But the answers to these questions are important because they shape what you actually do; your curriculum, essays, projects and exams; what literature you read; and even how you read it. Some people think these ideas are too complex for students beginning to study the subject: I disagree. I think lots of questions about English (such as ‘is there a right answer?’ or ‘why are we doing this?’ or ‘why is it called English?’) crop up right at the start. The answers to these questions shape what you do, whether you know about them or not. Doing English aims to explain these ideas and show how they influence you as well as being interesting in their own right.

Knowing about these ideas will also make you better at doing English. John Hattie, an expert in education, undertook a huge ‘study of studies’, covering some 80 million (!) students over many years. He argues that what he called ‘metacognition’ – he means, roughly, ‘knowing what you are doing’ – is crucial to improve a student’s work. This makes sense: I believe that if you know why you are studying something, the subject becomes easier to understand and you become better at it. In English, this means that what helps you to do your best is not just knowing the texts but knowing what you are doing with them and why.

This book is shaped by four core ideas about English that I explain through the first four chapters.

1: Reading is active

First and most importantly is the idea that reading is active process, something you do. It can seem passive – you often read sitting or lying down, after all – but it isn’t a natural process, it doesn’t just happen. Reading is a dynamic act of interpretation. And knowledge is made through the experience of reading and can’t simply be ‘poured into you’, as if it were water and you were a bucket. This means that ‘reading’ and ‘interpreting’ mean almost the same thing, and you’ll see I use the words almost as synonyms in this book.

When you interpret, it means that you find some things important and not others or that you focus on some ideas and questions and so disregard others. You bring your ideas, your tendencies and preferences – yourself – to a reading a book, hearing a poem, seeing a play, watching TV or a film or looking at social media on a screen: your interpretation is shaped by a number of presuppositions. These are the ‘taken for granted’ ideas, tendencies and preferences you carry with you and, like glasses that you can’t take off, you always read ‘through’ them. On a surface level, your interpretation will be affected by the context in which you read and the expectations you have of the text. For example, if you read a novel about women in the Victorian period for a history project, you’ll think about it in one way (perhaps, to find out facts about how women were treated or represented); if you read the same novel for fun, you’ll read it in another way (perhaps, to find out what happens next). At a deeper level, you bring with you presuppositions about yourself, other people and the world, presuppositions you may take so much for granted that you might not even realise you have them. At this deep level, everyone has different presuppositions because – simply – people are different, to a greater or lesser degree, and have been shaped by different experiences. People from different backgrounds, sexes, sexualities, religions, classes, ages and so on will be struck by different things in any text. In addition, everything you have read and experienced previously affects how you interpret now. This idea is sometimes summed up by saying that everyone is ‘located’ or ‘placed’ in the world. Some argue that your interpretations will always be constrained by these presuppositions; others think that you can escape them (what do you think about this?). Whichever is the case, you can think about and analyse them. More, you can learn about other presuppositions, other ways of interpreting texts.

All this means that, in the study of literature, no interpretation is neutral or objective; rather, it has to be argued for and explained. And it means that how we read is as important as what we read, because our presuppositions, to a great degree, shape the meanings we take from literature. Part of the aim of this book is to explore the impact of this rather obvious but often forgotten idea that texts are interpreted. This book also aims to make us think about our presuppositions and how they shape how we read.

It is because of the importance of interpretation that I have used the word text regularly throughout this book. Apart from being shorter to write than ‘novel, poem or play’, it emphasises that reading is an act of interpretation – texts are things that are interpreted. The word text also makes it clear that it’s not only literature that is interpreted; so are people’s actions, television, posts on social media and music, for example. News is interpreted both when it is watched, heard or read and when it is put together by journalists or others (and part of interpretation is judging whether an item is news, fake news or propaganda or lies, for example). All these are ‘texts’.

2: English is a discipline

Something important stemming from this first point: while English can seem as if it is just you reading, it is a subject or, more formally, a discipline. All educational disciplines, and perhaps all forms of knowledge, grew from very basic human activities. Chemistry grew from cooking and making clothes (dyes and so on). Geometry means ‘measuring the earth’, vital for early faming societies. Creative writing and criticism both come from listening to stories and poems or watching dramas – interpreting texts – and then asking questions and talking about them, and writing about them in different ways. More, every discipline is made up of the questions it asks of the material it has chosen as its subject: originally practical questions (what to mix together to make red dye?), then, slowly, more abstract questions (how does the process of dyeing actually work? How do the different substances involved react to each other and change?). Similarly, acts of interpretation lead pretty quickly to quite complicated questions, ideas and debates (including debating what actually might count as literature and what might count as a valid interpretation). These sorts of ideas have come, through complicated histories, to form the discipline of English and shape what we do in it today. I look at those histories in Chapters 2 and 3 because, while these ideas are often ‘below the surface’ and are rarely discussed with students, they still shape how English is taught and learned.

It can be a bit of shock to think of reading and talking about books, and so about ourselves and others, as a discipline. But English is a discipline that has spent a long time thinking about its own nature as a discipline, precisely because it can look as if it is not one. As a discipline, English has all sorts of questions and ideas that it brings to the study of literature; this book explores some of these. And I’ll argue in Chapter 4 – and in the rest of this book – that studying English involves coming to know about these questions and ideas and how they might change our understanding of texts.

3: English is controversial

People who practice the discipline of history are historians, and those who study biology are biologists; however, for reasons that the next two chapters will make clear, even the name for people who study English is more controversial (although I liked the idea some year 12s came up with when I discussed this with them: ‘Englishers’). Indeed, the third idea that shapes this book is that while English is very popular, it is also very controversial, often because of its subject matter but also because, as a discipline, it is woven into deep moral and political visions about who we are, how we should live and how we see the world and others. People with very different views on politics, morals, religion, education and history (and everything else!) have clashed time and time again over the subject of English, and these clashes have shaped the discipline, and how we read, in particular ways. This is one reason why, for example, the A-level curriculum keeps being changed. To think about English and how we look at literature is to see a reflection of these clashes, of ourselves and of our cultures. This idea is developed throughout the book, and, again, part of the reason for this book is to explain why this subject is so contentious.

4: English is constantly changing

Finally, this book tries to show that English, and how we see literature, are constantly changing. All disciplines change over time; chemistry is very different now from how it was 300, 100 or even 50 years ago. More, disciplines are born, grow and die out over time. English is a relatively new subject; its modern form is only just over three or four generations old. It is also one of the most quickly evolving and developing subjects; indeed, the study of literature has transformed radically in the last 30 years or so. One result of this has been that there can sometimes be a large gap – even a ­disconnection – between the way you study English at university and the way you study it for A-level. This gap exists because there has been a huge influx of new ideas into the discipline of English – ideas about, for example, feminism and gender, sexuality, the mind and the body, politics, race, globalisation, the environment and the contemporary world, the use of digital technology and other art forms, as well as ideas drawn from all sorts of other disciplines. These new ways of thinking about literature have stimulated new forms of studying literature and even helped rediscover books, trends and authors that were previously passed over or ignored. These newer ideas, often summed up as ‘literary theory’, created this gap. You may come across some of these ideas at A-level, and, if you choose to do English at university, you definitely will. Studying English today means having a sense of what these ideas are and, crucially, why they...