Critical Literature? Context and Criticism in A Level ...

1 January 200430 People have some odd ideas about studyingliterature. They re not really sure what it involves or even if there s any point. Every November,when I speak to prospective sixth-formers about A LevelEnglish literature , there are always some faces in thecrowd whose scepticism is all too plain. One year, aworried father stayed behind to speak to me daughter was torn between english literature andsomething that seemed a bit more worthwhile, likeBusiness Studies or Economics: she d filled all her otherchoices, and there was only one space left. As far as hewas concerned, english just didn t seem to be teachinganything. If it was all just a matter of reading books andhaving opinions about them, then couldn t his daughterdo that at home?

2 As english teachers ourselves,steeped in the rhetoric of the subjectand armed with any number ofarguments about its purpose andvalue, it can be easy for us to forgetthat there s a world outside: a worldwhere other subjects seem just thatbit more important, more relevant toa particular career, or even just morehard-edged. Yet Martin Amis, in theforeword to The War Against Clich ,reminds us that one of the historicalvulnerabilities of literature , as asubject of study, is that it has neverseemed difficult enough ..Interacting with literature is can join in, because words(unlike palettes and pianos) lead adouble life: we all have acompetence .1It s a fair bet that mostEnglish teachers have at some pointbeen embroiled in arguments about whether their subjecthas any intellectual validity, or whether it s all just aboutreading things into texts and making them meanwhatever you want them to.

3 It often seems that I ve spentmost of my professional life trying to prove that english isindeed problem is nothing new. When english Literaturefirst became a university subject, many people questionedits right to be considered a proper academic discipline: english was, after all, simply a question of chatter aboutShelley . One detractor, Freeman, commented thatthe study of literature was all very well in its own way,perhaps amusing, perhaps even instructive, but .. notquite of that solid character which we were used to lookfor in any branch of a University course .2As a result,supporters of academic english had to prove that theirsubject was difficult enough to gain parity with disciplinessuch as History and the sciences. Yet one of the tensionsthat english literature has had to endure is that itssupporters have, historically, been unable to agree on theprecise nature of the difficulty to which english can orshould lay claim.

4 And some critics and teachers haveargued that the very notion of difficulty is elitist thatEnglish is one subject that should allow everyone to joinin, posing challenges that test personal understandingrather than academic knowledge. Consequently, thespecialist knowledge associated with english can easilyseem something that the subject is almost afraid torecognise: a source of embarrassment, rather than thegrounds on which the discipline is founded. Since theintroduction of Curriculum 2000, and the subsequentreform of english literature at A Level , this tension hasresurfaced encompassing questions of contexts, critics,and what exactly it is that A Level english should beaiming to s easy to answer questions about the nature ofliterary study by drawing on arguments about thesubject s beneficial qualities.

5 Liberal humanists wouldrefer to the Arnoldian desire to bring about harmony bypromoting the best that has been known and thought ;devotees of a more radical stance Bethan Marshall s Critical dissenters might point to the need to questionaccepted viewpoints and challenge the primacy of thetraditional canon. Yet in focusing on what the subject cando, such arguments tend to ignore the more fundamentalissue of what the subject actually is: in more sophisticatedterms, the epistemological question of what it is thatmakes english literature a discipline of knowledge. Intheir book Politics and Value in english Studies,Josephine Guy and Ian Small ask two questions that areCarol Athertonis A Level english Co-ordinator at Bourne GrammarSchool, LincolnshireThis article is partlybased on a paperdelivered at the english SubjectCentre s conference The Condition of the Subject , 19 July literature ?

6 Context and Criticism in A Level english LiteratureCarol Athertonargues that we have underestimated the significance of literary Criticism in A Level english literature . at the heart of the problems concerning the disciplinarystatus of english , namely, what body of knowledge doesEnglish teach; and how is that body of knowledgeauthorized, taught and examined? 3 The difficulty ofachieving any final answer to these questions is partly toblame for the problems of identity from which Englishliterature suffers: as Cox s multiple subject models,Marshall s Rough Guide to english Teachers and anynumber of introductions to literary theory all attest, oneof the most striking features of english is its plurality. Curriculum 2000 The new specifications introduced in September 2000initially seemed to offer a way of solving these use of the now-infamous Assessment Objectives,and their emphasis on the contexts of production andreception, established an official version of EnglishLiterature that was intended to close the gap between ALevel and higher education, introducing students to thetheoretical ideas that inform the study of english atdegree Level .

7 Some of the initial reactions were verypositive. Robert Eaglestone commented that A Level isvery far from matching in an appropriate way theshape of the discipline in HE .. However the new(specifications) do seem to have been designed to bridgethis gap 4. Pamela Bickley noted that the newspecifications would allow far less scope for indulging in the This poem makes me feel sad school of literarycriticism .5It was hoped that students would beencouraged to see texts as the products of very specificcultural formations, and to interrogate their own stance asreaders. All this would constitute a radical break with thepast: Peter Buckroyd of NEAB warned english teachersthat A-grade students would fail if schools continued toapproach the subject in conventional the new specifications have also had theiropponents.

8 Many of these critics have focused onAssessment Objectives 4 and 5, which demand,respectively, that students should make judgements that are informed by different interpretations of literarytexts by other readers and show an understanding of the cultural, historical and other contextual influences on literary texts and study (at A2, students should also be able to evaluate the significance of these contexts).Inevitably, these objectives became associated with twoparticular types of secondary text:literary Criticism , and historicalbackgrounds. Shortly after QCA s newsubject criteria were published, theEnglish teacher Richard Hoyescomplained, in an article in the TimesEducational Supplement, that studentswould spend so much time reading books about books that they wouldforget about the books teacher, Mike Craddock, hascontended that the new specificationsbetray a need on the part of QCA to control too much and quantify in toospecific ways a subject that ought tohold its special place in thecurriculum because of its very independence.

9 8 Craddockequates the reading of literary Criticism with spoon-feeding: if our students are to be engaged in the searchfor something more than a materialistic world andconsumerist age offers them , then we must get theminvolved in that search so that they can find their ownmeanings and identities, not just tell them what to think .9 There are a number of problems with this view ofEnglish, and what it entails for a subject whose claim todisciplinary status has always been contested. InCraddock s article, A Level english literature appears lessan academic discipline than a process of personaldiscovery: the scholarly knowledge that helps constitutethe subject (in the manner specified very clearly by AOs4 and 5) is downgraded in favour of an understanding ofthe meanings, dreams, identities, realities, truths of onesort or another that we care aboutand need (although Craddock doesnot specify exactly who we are).

10 10 Secondary reading, whether in theform of Criticism or historicalcontexts, provides ready-madeanswers which pop up in essays as mangled Critical truisms : itsubstitutes for the authenticexperience of literature an artificialprocess that is dominated by thedemands of english different?Yet this vision of english seems, tome, to be asking too much. Inseeking to exempt english from therequirements of secondary reading, itdemands that the subject should betreated as a special case, set apart fromthose other A levels that involve the use of such course, the reading of literary Criticism and the use ofhistorical contexts presents us and our students with anumber of problems. Students need to be introduced toways of handling this material, and to the process ofplaying arguments off against each other: they need tosift out what is relevant, and find their own Critical 2004It was hoped that studentswould be encouraged to seetexts as the products of veryspecific cultural formations,and to interrogate their ownstance as readers.