This was in June 1988 and was a two hour closed book examination. There was a choice between two questions on the plays, Doctor Faustus and The Changeling and a choice of questions on poetry.

I have my notes on the paper and I compared two scenes printed from the plays and looked at Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” and Donne’s “The Sun Rising” of the poems. I avoided the sonnets.

I must have done reasonably well as I got a 6 for the course.

This assignment was submitted mere weeks after the birth of our second child. It must have been a rush job because I hand delivered it, having left it too late to trust to the post. It is still hand typed, but it is now A4 paper, which should make scanning easier.  The lack of correction fluid suggests I made my poor wife type the thing while juggling feeding a newborn and chasing a toddler.

Actually the scanning of this one was still difficult as the lecturer’s pencil comments mucked up the OCR and it took a while to get into shape to make a pdf.

Shakespearean Comedy

It was graded B+ and it appears I did at least try to read the plays closely.

I studied this unit in first semester 1988. Happily, I was out of the hospital system and had my first job in General Practice. I was working on a Certificate of Satisfactory Completion of the Family Medicine Program. At the time this was an acceptable alternative to a FRACGP. My interview for my first job in general practice was basically, “When can you start, I need a holiday.”

Our second daughter was on the way and was born before the first assignment was due and we were settling into our tumbledown house.

None of that stopped me from illogically pursuing my external studies, and having done two introductory courses in English it was time to step up to the meatier subjects.

This course required reading six plays and large selections from both Lyric and Metaphysical poets. The Shakespearean plays were Othello, The Winter’s Tale, I Henry IV, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We also studied Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Middleton’s The Changeling.

As usual the external studies of the era gave an incredible amount of help. The course coordinator and author of the course materials was Mr D. H. Henderson, of whom I can find no trace. There were Lists of References, Study Guides, course materials on all the major sections of the course with relevant supplementary articles provided and sample essays. There was also considerable guidance for the examination, as the assessment was just one assignment and an exam.

The last assignment in EN109 back in 1987 was:

Re-examine”Heart of Darkness” in terms of the extent to which it could be seen to reinforce or challenge bourgeois ideology.

Heart of Darkness

Con Castan charitably commented:

My only reservation about this was that I found it difficult to read in places. I think it is a matter of sentence construction rather than anything else. However you have done excellent work this course. I wish you well with your future studies.

He was being kind – the assignment was typed on foolscap paper (so scanning it was fun) and lacked such basics as proper punctuation. He gave me a 7 in any case.

The option I chose for the second assignment was to “develop a narrative theory or grammar of your own.” I invented a concept called the narratom, which showed some originality. It was well received.

Narratom

The texts used were from Susan Cahill’s anthology and were “The Story of an Hour” and “Like a Winding Sheet.”

As a first assignment in criticism we were given the task to:

Identify and comment on the ideas and assumptions about literature in the introductory essay by Susan Cahill to “Women and Fiction.”

This was an anthology of short stories that can still be bought. You can read much of the introduction at Amazon and one of the reviews usefully reprinted some of it:

In each story in this collection an artist expresses with realistic compassion the consciousness of an individual woman. To label any of the writers ‘feminist’ would be to force that writer into an easy category, to insist her home is not the house of fiction but a smaller place. Yet it is no error to see these fictions as feminism’s sacred texts, their authors as the movement’s greatest prophets, for they tell us more about what it feels like to be a woman than all the grey abstractions about Women heard on the talk shows or read in grey reviews about grey books on sexual stereotypes. In a world whose future may be rationalized by the abstractions of _realpolitik_, anything that takes us closer to the heart, that makes us respond seriously and sympathetically to the individual human being is to be revered. ‘In the end, our technique is sensitivity,’ Eudora Welty writes about the crafting of the short story.
The twenty-six stories in this book have been selected because they are extraordinarily moving and convincing portraits of women and their lives by extraordinary writers… women in the city, suburb, country, ghetto, working-class Jewish, celibate Catholic, Irish, English, American Canadian, and a few secret French women. Women who choose women over men, women who choose husband over personal fulfilment, women who know self, women who are too oppressed or too weak to know or choose anything. The twenty-six stories in this anthology show that a woman’s destiny is as mysterious and individual and various as the human personality itself … these fictions …unfold a deep understanding of what Stephen Daedalus’s mother in _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ prayed her son would someday learn: ‘What the heart is…and what it feels.”

I have resorted to a freeware OCR program to decipher the old typed essay but being on foolscap means it didn’t fit an A4 scanner bed. I hope I’ve edited my essay well enough to be readable.

Cahill

It got a good mark with some generous comments but noted more obvious critical comments could have been made.  Con Castan suggested she had a feminist variant on a Leavasite position. I doubt I would have known how to make that argument. Despite no great interest in feminist writing and criticism I was fated to have quite a lot of it to do at times.

For second semester in 1987 I chose this subject. I was still studying externally while working full time at Redcliffe hospital, this time as a Medicine and Paediatrics PHO. This meant I wasn’t operating anymore and wasn’t quite as stressed but the ER work was still dreadful. During the semester we moved house from Redcliffe to Daisy Hill, which was a good idea because I was still outside Brisbane and so could justify continuing as an external student.

This was an interesting subject examining the practice of literary criticism. I was pleased to find the assessment was all assignment work, which suits external studies better than examinations.

The lecturer was Con Castan (1931-2012), whose obituary reveals a fascinating life unknown to the distance students he taught back then. He was certainly a very close reader of our assignments and offered a lot of encouragement.

The exam was in June 1987 and my fragile memory suggests it was at an examination centre in Redcliffe.

In two hours we had to pick four topics out of fourteen and I wrote on covenant traditions, prophetic vocation, apocalyptic literature and the reform of Josiah.

I got a passing grade only, despite my notes suggesting I did get a fair bit of work done in between exhaustion, etc. That semester I also learnt to do an appendicectomy, pin fractured hips and coagulate bladder tumours amongst other things. Thankfully, I became neither a surgeon nor an Old Testament scholar but I don’t think it hurts to have dabbled.

The second assignment for RE100 in 1987 was:

Discuss the problems associated with identifying the original words of the prophet Amos and the social situation in which the words were originally spoken.

Amos

The marker did not like this at all. Instead of being criticised for not putting my own ideas I was told my ideas were lousy and poorly argued and got a bare passing grade.

He may have had a point.

Incidentally my suggestion of linked Wisdom and Prophecy traditions turned up years later in my dissertation on the Gawain poet.

I just recalled that because I was living out of Brisbane (just) at Redcliffe, I could continue as an external student. Later in 1987 we moved to Daisy Hill in Logan City and so was still outside the Brisbane area.  I could continue as an external student but still have access to the Brisbane libraries. Sweet.

The first assignment for RE100 was due in early April and somehow I got it done. Irritatingly there was a third different style for referencing in three semesters. In retyping the assignment I have replaced endnotes with footnotes and adapted the style of referencing somewhat. I also corrected rather more typos than I had anticipated suggesting my proofreading was done while sleeping off a late night in Casualty.

Scholars have generally been concerned with identifying the literary sources that they see underlying the Pentateuch in its final form and with the interpretation of these underlying sources. Focussing your discussion on Genesis, write an essay in which you discuss the strengths and limitations of this approach.

Pentateuch

Conrad’s marking was scanty and his comments to the point:

A well constructed and presented summary of the material. You should work on introducing more of your own thoughts and critical evaluation of the material as well. 4/5

That does not mean 4 out of 5, rather a score of 4 to 5 in a scale of 7. The problem with that was that I doubt I had any original thoughts on the matter at all.  Rereading the essay I am impressed by a well structured but completely derivative argument, which I would fully expect from a first go at a religion subject.