The Never Ending Arts Degree

1997 was my last year studying at the University of Queensland, where I did my Medicine degree and my Arts degree and the Honours in Arts part time, then called a Postgraduate Diploma in Arts.

In trying to recall what else was going on, I’m pretty sure I did the RCIA and became a Catholic that Easter, and at some point that year was mad enough to go part time as a General Practitioner to become a medical adviser to the Department of Veteran’s Affairs. We had four children, a relatively new house and with all the driving and trains to the city for the new job I have no idea how or why I was still studying English.

Otherwise what I was mainly doing was my dissertation under the loose and benevolent supervision of Dr Elizabeth Moores, but in second semester, while struggling to finish that beast, I also did this unit. After the brave and foolish decision to go straying into modern feminist lit the previous year, I got permission to go back to the medieval era by taking an undergraduate course, EN282, at postgraduate level.

The topics covered were fairly broad and avoided the topics covered in more usual medieval subjects, that is, Chaucer.

We looked at:

• Old English literature – Saints’ Lives, Maldon, Beowulf
• Old Icelandic – Viking Romances, Prose Edda
• Gawain Poet – Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Malory

She didn’t follow my orderly list as above though, we meandered backwards and forwards a lot. There were lectures and tutorials most weeks.

Assessment was actually quite extensive. We had a small essay in the first week looking at the difference between Myth and Legend. There was a factual test after two months that I think was ungraded. She set a major essay due well before the end of semester and a two hour examination.

I remember a lot of reading and especially the Malory texts which were something in which to get really bogged down.

For some reason I went to the case of Buddy Holly to define a Legend as opposed to Myth.

This essay had to respond to something from given quotations. I used this one:

“Luce Irigaray…attempts to posit an alternative body image which is for woman a full body image, based on two lips rather than a gaping hole…Irigaray’s writings…make it impossible to maintain the Freudian conception of the male body as full. The male body can only be full on the condition that the female body is lacking. To present a female body that is full poses the question, well what about the male body, what is it?”

Moira Gatens

I used Bedford’s If With a Beating Heart, Harris’s Lover and Farmer’s The Seal Woman.

My usual approach was to research the hell out of things and I did that with the first essay in this course. In this essay, either from time constraints or design I just spoke about the books and the only other work consulted was Sheila-Rae the Brave, a children’s book that my daughters loved.

As was usual at the time, no feedback was given on the second essay and my overall score of 6 (out of 7) for the course suggested it was accepted as legitimate. I don’t imagine there many other essays as odd as this one.

I wrote on the feminist spirituality aspects on Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Maxine Hing Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.

I was commended on my research and got 17/21 but I find it rather cringeworthy now, and I was obviously trying to drag the subject back to my turf. It’s a good thing I have computer files of these now, or the copious annotations that Levy had to make would be hard to take on a scanned document.

By mid 1996 I had two of the four subjects needed for a PG Dip Arts. I had studied mainly medieval English, but was struggling to find a subject that fit my availability and bravely chose this one.

I should have known better and spent a semester so far out my area, depth and comfort zone that I am still recovering. It was fantastic but terrifying. I recall two male participants originally, but the other one disappeared very quickly. I figured out that, as a male, I struggled with the feminist part of the course. I was too stupid to note how heavy the queer lit emphasis was and that that was also going to be difficult for a boring 35 year old straight male.

The convener was Bronwen Levy, who had a long career at UQ and is now an emeritus. She is the first of my old lecturers that I have found on twitter.

I recall this was one of the first courses where access to the internet made a real difference.

Assessment was two essays (40% and 60%) and a non-assessable but compulsory seminar based on something from one of the essays. It appears I was allocated Gloria Anzaldua for week 9. I recall getting some pushback with my suggestion that she was anything other than perfect.

The book list (pretty much one a week) will give the flavour of the course:

Woolf, Orlando

Franklin, Cockatoos

Marshall, Brown Girl Brownstones

Duffy, The Microcosm

Kingston, The Woman Warrior

Harris, Lover

Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera

Farmer, The Seal Woman

Walwicz, Red Roses

Bedford, If with a Beating Heart

Galford, The Dyke and the Dybbuk

A couple of these were hard to get and may have been scratched. I know I photocopied the entire book, Red Roses, because it was out of print. Unfortunately, it had no punctuation at all and had a bit of the “Finnegan’s Wake” about it so I didn’t get past a couple of pages.

This was the major essay for Lloyd Davis’s “Renaissance, Poetry and Prose” subject in 1996 and I appear to have been in my element discussing the interaction between politics and religion. I book-ended my essay with quotes from Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum” so I was either being clever or showing off.

As was often the case you got no feedback on final essays so the 6 out of 7 rating for subject overall was the only indication of achievement.

I was clearly getting more confident in my writing whether justified or not.

Spenser and Milton

In 1996, Lloyd Davis had us present a seminar and I think they were allocated.

All I have have is the text submitted as an essay that reflected the presentation. He suggested I had tried to fit too much in and the first half lacked coherence but the second half was better. It must have been a difficult part of the job slogging through such uninspired work.

HENRYSON

Despite his criticism he gave me 16/21 which was pleasing at the time.

The dust in my life had settled enough to consider study again in 1996 after a long break.

As usual I had no idea how privileged we were to have Lloyd Davis as our lecturer. I can’t say I remember much about him except he helped with a slog through some pretty dense material.

I was sad to learn as I did my usual search for the further career of my lecturers to see he had a stellar career cut short by death in his forties.  He can’t have been much older than me and he won Humanities teacher of the year the year he taught me.

This eulogy tells the tale of his achievements. He is remembered by the Lloyd Davis Memorial Fellowship.

This course included some Medieval texts as well.  He started with Gower and continued through Henryson, Spencer and Milton. It made sense to dodge Chaucer since he was covered in other courses and Gower and Henryson were not emphasised in other places.

My notes say there was a seminar we had to prepare and then submit as written work along with a research essay. I don’t remember giving a seminar but I suppose I must have.

He gave us a thick subject reader and assistance getting into the mindset of the era.

I didn’t do any study for eighteen months so there is a gap until first semester 1996.

In that time I was still working full time in General Practice – I hadn’t noted that while doing the BA I finished a “Certificate of Satisfactory Completion of the Family Medicine Program” in 1989.  It was sufficient in those days to become a GP. I even did a couple of units towards an FRACGP but never finished it because I didn’t need to.

We also had a fourth child, a boy who was impossible at the time. This meant our little house was bursting at the seams. We moved into the hall for a while but then moved to a rental property, demolished the house and had a proper one built.

My mother died.

There were lots of reasons to put study to one side.

For the second essay in Medieval Studies: Romance in first semester 1994, we were asked to write 3000 words on an issue relating to genre/romance in the work of both Chaucer and Malory.

It was due only a week after that first essay in late May, so I can only guess I worked at them at the same time but was too lazy to get the first one in early. With my previous studies it looks like I had to look for religious aspects in the works. I even dropped a passage from Screwtape in, which seems gratuitous.

The essay suggests a fair bit of work and is reasonably coherent.

I had lost this word file and since I had no paper backup, I went searching old document backup discs to no avail. I found an old Win98 computer in the garage that still fired up and I happily found it backed up there.

FALL

Dr Moores gave me a 6 (from 7) for the course.

I remember this poem by Chaucer was long and difficult to read. We were asked to write an essay on an aspect of “romance” in the poem in relation to modern expectations and understanding of the genre.

I can’t remember enough about the poem to know if I wrote a good essay, but even though I think I was struggling I seem to have had enough time to make a coherent essay.

Troilis