The Never Ending Arts Degree

Rather than having a break after finishing my BA, which I should have done, I plunged straight into a Postgraduate Diploma of Arts in 1994. This was the equivalent of an honours year spread over more than a year. It required 4 units of study and a dissertation.

I wanted to study more medieval English so perhaps this subject was only being offered in this semester so I had to get on with it. The fact that I had a year off after this subject suggests to me I would have been better off waiting. I also can see a somewhat desultory attitude in my notes.

It was taken by Dr Elizabeth Moores who would supervise my dissertation later on. She has been able to keep herself off the internet and, apart from some traces as a PhD supervisor or a facilitator at a conference, I can find no trace of her or what became of her. She is not listed at UQ these days.

The course consisted of looking at the genre of “romance” literature then looking at The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and Malory.

It was assessed by two assignments that were both due in late May 1994 and I think there was a 10% participation mark. If I had been on the boil I would have submitted the first early to get an idea how I was going but it looks like both were left to the last minute.

The course was on a Monday afternoon, which must have been quite disruptive from a work perspective at my General Practice.

This was the essay from this subject EN211. Since literary theory from Leavis onward made my brain hurt, I decided to latch onto Eliot and answer the question set about him.

I supplemented my book of Eliot’s prose with every article I could find that he wrote. I remember finding them in very old volumes of periodicals in the Central library.  On one occasion I thought I had found something important and found the volume of the series, only to find the much sought after article from the 1930s neatly snipped out – the rotten swine. This obviously predated online searches.

I spent a lot of time reading and trying to understand and I suspect managed as reasonable argument.

Eliot

I was pleased to get a 7 (out of 7) for the subject and ended my Arts degree on a high note with plans to continue English studies the next year.

In second semester 1993 I started the last subject in my cobbled together Arts degree done over eight years while working full time in medical practice. This theory subject would allow me to continue studying English in a Postgraduate Diploma after getting my BA.

The lecturer was local legend Dr Dan O’Neill. He had been prominent in radical politics and the resistance to the undemocratic, authoritarian and corrupt Queensland governments in the past. He is still listed as an honorary lecture although he retired some time ago. He now runs a reading group at the University.  I found this extract from an interview on the ABC from 2011:

When I retired at the age of 65, I wanted to keep doing something like what I’d done before. You know, I’d spent a hell of a lot of time giving lectures and tutorials. Particularly the tutorials was something I really enjoyed, you know, contact with people and stimulation of questioning things and hearing people’s opinions and cross-questioning people and being cross-questioned and so on. I really enjoyed all that and it was a way of life I just didn’t want to give up. And so I thought that the way to continue this would be to convene reading groups and collaboratively read through works of literature, fairly slowly, with a lot of discussion about what it all meant. So I decided I’d convene a number of reading groups. I suppose for me it was sort of like dying and going to teacher heaven because you no longer had to do any marking and trying to grade people against one other. And so I thought that this would be pure enjoyment. And that seems to me to be the way it has turned out.

This brief appreciation gives a flavour of his influence at UQ on students over a very long time.  I was briefly one of them.

Once again on Wednesdays, I was leaving General Practice in the afternoons and this time spending two hours trying to keep up with literary theory.

We were kindly given a left over book of his Subject Materials from the old external honours course in Literary Criticism that also included material on Plato to Coleridge from Lit Crit A.

The subject we were doing, however, was a survey from that time forward – Arnold/Pater/Wilde/Eliot/Leavis/Williams/Marxism/Feminism/Structuralism/Post-Structuralism/Deconstruction.

We were offered a pass for attendance and showing we had read the voluminous handouts, or a graded assessment if we also submitted an assignment.

As the semester went on I found the material more and more head spinning. I didn’t take a lot of notes as I recall the sessions were more conversational and interactive than I had been used to. It was great.

Years later I saw Dan O’Neill’s name pop up in a collection of Clive James articles. Dan had been quoted in a book about expat Australians that had got under Clive’s skin and James let him have it with a bit of sneering invective. I am a great admirer of James’s writing style, and I own just about everything he ever published, but he has his blind spots and although Dan was only collateral damage in a take down of another author it struck me as unnecessary.

I know there was a 30% exam that was looking at MLA style, research tools, proofreading, editing and a hypothetical research situation.  I have a past paper but not the one I sat in the middle of 1993.

That said, I must have done well enough to meet the pass/fail criteria. This left me one subject left for a BA and supposedly qualified to do higher research in English.

There was a non-graded editing exercise and then this task. We were given an archive box from the Fryer Library that had items about a past production at the Brisbane Repertory Theatre.

We had to answer ten questions based on the contents and our research.

One item eluded me and I actually rang the poor fellow who had been the production adviser for the performance in question to confirm my answer. It got me 14/15.

MANUSCR

We were given a bibliographic exercise, which was like a quiz to be answered from the reference area of the library that appears to have been done in conjunction with another student but we still failed to find all the answers.

It was marked but I don’t think it counted towards the pass/fail other than being required participation.

The Checklist assignment did count. It consisted of choosing a practical research topic, selecting appropriate bibliographic reference sources and annotating some of the selections.

I chose the grail myths as a topic in which I was interested. I got 4/5.

GRAIL

The first assignment was an ungraded proof reading exercise that was to teach how to properly mark up a text when editing.

The first graded task, however, was a critique of a thesis proposal. We were given a thesis topic and asked to look at its feasibility. We were to gauge the suitability of the scope to justify a 15000 word dissertation, the potential to develop a structured argument, the available of resources and how one might go about the necessary research. We were also to comment the merits of the thesis proposal and its potential problems.

We were given a thesis topic “Romanticism and the Early European Perception of Australia”, with a three paragraph proposal.

The obvious intention was to get us thinking critically about our own potential dissertations.

THESCRIT (2)

It was marked with a few ticks, some constructive criticism and an 8½/10.

There was an immediate improvement in presentation using a real computer and MS Word. I much preferred the early versions of Word to the current model.

How did I find myself in 1993 doing a subject on English Research I ask myself?

Having a major in English and Religion nailed down, and needing two units complete an Arts degree in only eight years (!), I recall deciding I wanted to do some postgraduate work in English, which in those days was called a Postgraduate Diploma in Arts. It was the part time equivalent of an honours year.

The prerequisites for that were this subject and a subject on Literary Theory, which I tackled in second semester.

One key idea of the course was to try to help us not make a hash of the dissertation that we would tackle in the years to come. There was also instruction on simple tools (like a perpetual calendar), proof reading and MLA style. With the best part of two degrees already, learning how to research and present essays properly was a bit late.

1993 was also when I first had a real IBM clone running Word, so I have the actual documents backed up and will need to scan and type no more for this blog. I also at great expense, (~$1000) added a CD-ROM to the computer. This was an absolute marvel in the pre-internet world and it meant some of the library techniques we were being taught were already becoming redundant. I think one library task I had to do was largely able to be done on a reference CD ROM without much effort. It also was great for the children to have fun educational CD ROMs available for their use.

It was a largely practical class taught by Dr Chris Tiffin and Dr Alan Lawson and was assessed on attendance, seven small assignments, of which four were graded and a short answer exam. It was pass/fail – I passed.

Dr Tiffin is still at UQ it appears and his profile is here. This photo of him is from some time ago, I suspect before my time there.

Dr Lawson is now Emeritus Professor Lawson and also still associated with UQ.

Essay topic:

The Sermon on the Mount (Matt 4:24-7:29; cf Luke 6:17-7:1) as Evangelion.

I have what is a late draft in very faint draft printing that refused to scan so I typed it out.

It is a great example of a floundering student struggling to come up with anything that might get close to 3000 words.

I have been reminded that in amongst all this out third child was born and was pretty unwell for some time so I may have had other things on my mind.

There is an argument in there somewhere under the incoherence, but a 5 was generous.  Luckily he didn’t give the essays back, the comments would not have been fun to read.

Sermon on the Mount

After the genial style of Dr Ian Gillman this subject in second semester 1992 was a return to the formidable Professor Michael Lattke.  I had done two external subjects of his but this was the first time I met the man.

Again, I must have been leaving work early on Wednesdays to attend lectures at the University of Queensland. My recollection was that I was one of the few attendees not training or already in ministry. Lattke took no nonsense from Christians who were used to their own interpretation of scripture. If they suggested anything other than what was there he would say “I do not see that in the text” and that was it.

This was my last religion subject at UQ and meant I completed a major in the rules of the day. It was also the last course that I used my strange two disk (no hard drive) computer with a dot matrix printer and Webster’s word processor.

I was rather out of my depth here and his assessment methods exposed that rather well. I doubt he trusted undergraduates to work and so we had a mid semester exam, which I did poorly in, an essay and a viva.

Now I had done vivas in my medical course, which were pretty terrifying, but Lattke’s amazing office with floor to ceiling books and his no nonsense questioning were something else entirely. He called it an academic conversation. It is a great technique to find out what people have absorbed in a course and I suspect far too labour intensive for use these days. He told me I was a solid 5 (out of 7) student and that is what he gave me overall.