The Never Ending Arts Degree

This was one of two subjects I took in second semester 1989. What possessed me to do two subjects is not clear to me at all now and I certainly didn’t make that mistake again.  Perhaps buoyed by a good result in Medieval Literature I thought I could get my BA done in half the time, but I was working full time in General Practice and completing the Certificate of Satisfactory Completion of the Family Medicine Program and, while that wasn’t as difficult as the hospital years had been, it was still a heavy enough work load without trying to do two arts subjects at once.

This was my sixth English subject and at the time constituted a major. It was taken by Mr D.H. Henderson who, as usual, provided voluminous lectures, reading guides, assistance with assignments and preparation for the examination. He also had to suffer my below par essays full of spelling mistakes, convoluted syntax and tortured argument.

We covered the novels, Moll Flanders, Pamela I, Joseph Andrews and Gulliver’s Travels. I recall Pamela in particular as being interminable. There was also some Samuel Johnson and poetry by Dryden, Pope, Swift, Gray, etc. …and plays by Gay and Congreve. …and I was reading for a Government subject.

One big change was the arrival of a computer. The already old fashioned Commodore 64 was purchased for the sole purpose of doing multiple choice questions over the telephone for the RACGP. There was a very expensive item called a Tandata unit that you could borrow from the college, plug into a phone line and do MCP questions towards the certificate. We were informed that a $15 cartridge inserted into a Commodore 64 would achieve the same outcome, and so it did. It also introduced us to banking from your home computer many years before the internet.

With the primitive word processor on the Commodore 64, I could now type for myself.  This meant more spelling errors (no spellcheck and no wife typing and correcting howlers on the fly). The printer we had was a peculiar device with a plastic ribbon in three colours that took an age to print not very distinct letters, but it was just about readable. It is however not very scannable after all these years so I will have to retype the essays.

Assessment was two essays of ~1000 words each and an examination. I am reasonably sure I did not keep up with the reading this time.

I expect I went into UQ for the exam in June 1989. It must have been quite odd asking for time off from work to do an English exam.

There were three questions and my notes on the paper show I wrote on two of the Canterbury Tales (the Millers tale and another), Pearl and on the Fourteenth century mystics – the Cloud and Hilton.

I got a seven and enjoyed medieval literature more than any of the other  units I had done to that time.

For the second assignment, I was at least organised enough to get it typed. We had to look at two characters from the general prologue to the Canterbury Tales.

Analyse the methods and details which Chaucer uses to create in your mind rounded and life like portraits of the Shipman and the Physician.

Chaucer’s Shipman and Physician

This short essay was right up my alley and was given 20/20.

This assignment is unusual in that it is hand written by me and (gasp) legible. I suspect I left it too late to get it typed by my wife who was busy with work, children etc etc. Whether typed or hand written, in those days you could get away with a lot of things as far as formatting was concerned. On the other hand, an unsubstantiated comment or infelicity of expression was certainly noted. Looking at this essay, I suspect a hand written assignment made me more likely to succumb to my flaw of interminable sentences. Having my wife type something was editing on the fly as she would let me know it was dreck. I even think that typing myself in the age of word processor to come, impeded my prolixity somewhat.

For some reason I thought it was a good idea to compare a Mystery Play to Life of Brian and what followed was a clumsy attempt to understand a pre-enlightenment mindset. For some reason, I seemed to come back to this idea a lot and this may be where it all started.

I have typed this essay for posterity (egad).  With the technology available now, I know that I was under the word count – a rarity for me.

I think I might have got 20/20 for this but I slipped up with a bit of a stretch in the final paragraph and I only got 19/20.  The comments were encouraging and I got the good mark for “originality and clear expression” or maybe because I didn’t bore him. He commented that “It’s good to get something original and outrageous now and again.”

Second Shepherd’s Play

Despite being overwhelmed by Victorian literature the semester before this, I ploughed on with English courses as they came up in external studies at UQ.  My recollection is that I watched a program called Six Centuries of Verse in the early 80s (I found it on DVD quite recently) that got me interested in literature and I enjoyed the program on Chaucer particularly.

The course was taken in 1989 by Tony Glad, who impressed me as being the best teacher I had in external studies.  That may have been just my enthusiasm for the subject, or that I actually found the time to attend the weekend seminar and so actually met him, but he certainly conveyed his enthusiasm for the subject and pointed me towards ideas and works that were very new to me at the time.

I’ve looked for traces of him on the net and found all of three. He was one of many consulted in 1973 for an enquiry into academic salaries. He was consulted about the symbolism in the stone work in the Great Court of the University of Queensland in this publication. Part of a review he wrote is published here, where he is described in 2002 as a former lecturer in English. I recall that he only had a BA and I can’t imagine anyone without a PhD getting a course like this nowadays. If that means teachers of his quality are not employed at universities it is a major loss.

I was still working in general practice and thinking about whether I would join that practice or look further.

My wife did the same course in 1993 and my notes have somewhat got jumbled with hers, but the course didn’t seem to have changed much in structure.

We did some Chaucer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Piers Plowman, Mystery Plays and some poetry. We were also encouraged to look further afield and I chose the Fourteenth Century Mystics – Cloud, Julian of Norwich, Hilton and Rolle. I don’t think I had come across “The Cloud of Unknowing” before this, so that was a major discovery.

I sat this in November 1988 and have no recollection of the experience at all.

We had to write short notes on six passages from poetry that was provided.

From a choice of questions on Victorian Novels I chose:

Select a passage from each of Hard Times and Middlemarch which you believe to be a key passage and say why.

The last question was:

Write an essay on what is meant by non-fictional literary prose of the Victorian period and evaluate Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy as an example of it.

My notes on the paper suggest I had something to write although they make exactly zero sense to me now.

I escaped this course with my tail between my legs with a grade of 5. I had no desire to revisit Victorian literature any time soon.

The assignment topic I chose for EN204 was:

Make a detailed comparison of Maud with Jude the Obscure from a narratological point of view.

Maud Jude

The mark was 14/20 but I think I bored him as well as myself. I was relying too much on Barthes’ early work apparently and there were whole vistas of analysis that I left untouched. I’m impressed I got this much done myself.

This subject was second semester 1988 and I should have seen it coming.  Dr Con Castan was the lecturer again.

There was just too much material for me to read and I really struggled to keep up with full time work in general practice and two small children at home. We studied five novels – Hard Times, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, Portrait of a Lady and Jude the Obscure. There was also substantial amounts of poetry by Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Clough, Rosetti, Hopkins, Patmore and Hardy to cover as well.

Castan had produced ample lecture notes, study guides and reading lists and set Houghton’s The Victorian Frame of Mind as required background reading.

Assessment was an assignment and an examination and I really should have known better. I have no idea how I read as much as I did.

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.