The Never Ending Arts Degree

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.

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.