Maria Edgeworth: Castle Rackrent

 literature, universities  No Responses »
Aug 162012
 

 

Isn’t me mother’s name O’Dea? and the O’Deas themselves descended from the kings of Ireland? Fetch me crown, yer young spalpeen, me crown that is solid gold, excepting the parts that are brass, and didn’t it come to me from the Internet itself?

Sorry about that, it’s the effect on a magpie reader of Castle Rackrent. My sentence is, in fact

. . . a specimen of a mode of rhetoric common in Ireland. An astonishing assertion is made in the beginning of a sentence, which ceases to be in the least surprizing when you hear the qualifying explanation that follows.

The narrator of the novella (avant la lettre – but that’s what it is) is a loyal older servant who details the decline through four generations of ‘the family’ and witnesses the death of the last. The narrator’s own son takes advantage of the family’s gambling, drinking, and general fecklessness to buy up the estate, so that by the end the aristocratic order has gone, the new middle class has arrived.  It’s an early example (1800) of an elegiac transitional form exemplified by The Cherry Orchard, and like the play, the novella mixes comedy, farce and pathos. The lively, entertaining Irish modes of speech mediate characters who live with a similar careless abundance, the same consistent evasion of the facts.

The vernacular might well have puzzled English readers then although it won’t puzzle anyone who can cope with Huckleberry Finn or Trainspotting. To help with the Irishisms Edgeworth provides a frame in the 18th century way, a fictitious editor who explains the rationale and provides sometimes lengthy notes on diction and customs. These are as entertaining as the narrative itself. (I particularly liked the account of the ‘raking cup of tea’, taken at midnight after a ball by a group of giggling ladies and perhaps one trusted servant.) Notes and narrative together place us, like Maria Edgeworth herself, both inside and outside an Irish perspective.

There is an interesting review in The Guardian of Edgeworth’s late novel Helen, which I’ve added to my reading list. Avoid the Wikipedia entry on her, which has fallen into the hands of an undergraduate from Indiana, and is full of the kind of thing that made my son give up his literature course.

 Edgeworth’s writing of Ireland, especially her early Irish tales, offer an important rearticulation of Burkean local attachment and philosophical cosmopolitanism to produce an understanding of the nation as neither tightly bordered (like nations based on historical premises such as blood or inheritance) or not borderless (like those based on rational notions of universal inclusion).

You’d never guess it was very funny.

 

 

 

Literature kills student

 literature, politics, universities  No Responses »
Aug 092012
 

Love reading? Thinking of enrolling in ‘literature’ at university? Don’t. What is offered today under that heading is a study of the politics of representations. If that’s what you want, go for it, but be warned: the department has a very particular idea of the scope of politics.

Number one son is a reader of considerable ability, the recipient of a Premier’s Award for literature. He lasted two weeks at university level. “I want to talk about the books”, he said, “not fit them into a narrative.”

The nature of that narrative was made pretty clear to him: the first prescribed reading was from Marshall Berman’s All that is Solid Melts into Air.

Ah well, not much harm done. My son’s course plan is intact, thanks to a credit he had in reserve.  In any case, he plans to major in Chinese, where he will meet a rather more urgent politics of representations.

Arts degree chic

 public debate, universities  No Responses »
Jul 042012
 

boy leaping
Again we read of deep cuts to a Faculty of Humanities, this time at La Trobe University. And again we read (Ken Gelder, in The Age yesterday) that the university does not sufficiently value the humanities, does not understand their worth, cannot comprehend why a large number of smaller subjects is better than a smaller number with large enrolments.

There is another way to see what is happening at places like La Trobe. Some startling enrolment figures came my way recently. They show that two out of every three students of the humanities here in Victoria are enrolled at Melbourne University. The other third is distributed amongst six other universities.

The cut-off ATAR score for Melbourne’s Arts Faculty is over 90. It follows that two thirds of the arts/humanities students in Victoria’s universities are drawn from the top 10% of the academic cohort. The old conception of an arts degree as a last resort for those who can’t get into more desirable courses is clearly false: it is now becoming a degree for the (academic) elite.

There are of course arts/humanities courses available with much lower, with very low ATAR scores. These are concentrated in the three smaller and more recently-created universities, but the numbers enrolled are so small that their disappearance would make little difference to the wider picture. A graph of student enrolments against entrance scores would no longer be anything like a normal curve; instead it would climb steeply, skewed towards the higher scores.

Startling, I said, and startled I remain. There are various explanations for the very large numbers at Melbourne, amongst them the new ‘Melbourne’ model whereby everyone must take one of six undergraduate degrees before taking up a professional course. So amongst these high-fliers some will take up law, for example. It is not as if we shall have a flood of unemployed university wits on our hands, as in the late 16th century. (Many of them went into the theatre . . . ) But how many, I wonder, will take up teaching, where the entrance scores are too low for comfort?

Jobbing English

 literature, universities  No Responses »
Jun 072010
 


Studying English taught us how to write and think better, and to make articulate many of the inchoate impulses and confusions of our post-adolescent minds. We began to see, as we had not before, how such books could shape and refine our thinking. We began to understand why generations of people coming before us had kept them in libraries and bookstores and in classes such as ours. There was, we got to know, a tradition, a historical culture, that had been assembled around these books. Shakespeare had indeed made a difference—to people before us, now to us, and forever to the language of English-speaking people.

Finding pleasure in such reading, and indeed in majoring in English, was a declaration at the time that education was not at all about getting a job or securing one’s future. In comparison with the pre-professional ambitions that dominate the lives of American undergraduates today, the psychological condition of students of the time was defined by self-reflection, innocence, and a casual irresponsibility about what was coming next.

William M. Chace, ‘The Decline of the English Department’ , The American Scholar online

My stress, my experience. All very well for me, because I went on to teach it.  But for all the others, while there’s no evidence that their degrees in English led to blasted lives, the traditional liberal writ had long ceased to run. English Departments at their height – as Chace points out, a height briefly occupied in the middle years of the 20th century -  were preparing students for a world which no longer existed.

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