Chairing the English Faculty

A Newsletter of the Faculty of English 99 WestWest RoadRoad Volume 10, 2010 Chairing the English Faculty his is an opportunity to preen that reaching an audience outside the during the past four years, and a relief and to moan, so let me begin academy seems to count as ‘impact’; we now that they are over, to return to Twith the latter. Several black have to provide evidence that we have Sophocles, Shakespeare and Henry words sent shudders down my spine changed people’s lives, or as it is now James, to talk about them with sharp- during my four years as Chair but called, ‘behaviours’. It is particularly minded students, to let great writing the blackest was ‘impact’. About this disheartening to find the argument re-tune one’s sense of language and its time last year the Faculty was invited rejected that the greatest impact we capacities. And clean out the garbage. (a euphemism) to take part in a pilot in English have on the world beyond scheme for assessing the impact of the academy is through the students On some brighter notes: there is research in English ‘on the economy, we teach, and that this teaching is nothing like being Chair for learning society, public policy or services, vitally nourished (or ‘underpinned’, who all your colleagues actually are, all culture, the environment or quality to use the jargon) by our research. 80 or more of those active in teaching of life’. I have spent a fair amount of That doesn’t count, we are told. To for the Faculty, what they do, where time in routine drudgery but this was say that we feel out of kilter with the their expertise and passions lie. The something else. Anyone innocent of ethos, principles and public policies new Faculty building has made a such developments over the last two that increasingly dominate treatment difference, to be sure. It is harder than decades should know that ‘research’ of the arts and humanities would be it was in the old days to go for years has become an increasingly important an understatement. And we are the without ever meeting the notorious element in the funding arrangements lucky ones (probably) –– in English, Professor X or the legendary Dr Y. It for all Universities; that this research in Cambridge –– compared to smaller has been particularly heartening –– undergoes elaborate assessment at outfits and subjects such as our unique with no disrespect to more senior and intervals slightly longer than those Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, familiar figures –– to see the arrival between the Olympics or the World and Celtic, because of the (current) and the development of many younger Cup, but subject to a similarly endless popularity of our subject amongst colleagues; by comparison with most cycle of speculation, expectation, benighted young school-leavers not yet others, the Faculty’s age-profile is hysteria and recrimination; and that ready to devote themselves to subjects happily youthful. It would be invidious preparations for the next one, a mere more obviously conducive to ‘economic to name names but I will say that there four years away but already absorbing benefits’. But of course there are ways has been a welcome readiness to get vast quantities of time, energy and of getting that changed. involved in Faculty outreach activities, anxiety, entail a new requirement to to contribute to the University’s prove the beneficial ‘impact’ of (a A more minor moan. Of the lesser Festival of Ideas, to create the proportion of) our research on the injuries inflicted by the office of Cambridge Authors’ web-site (www. world outside the academy. Chair nowadays, the most lowering english.cam.ac.uk/cambridgeauthors/), is the effect on your own writing, and so on. Finally, the past four For those eager to gauge the and perhaps even thinking, of the years have certainly been made more enthusiasm with which this last has language of modern bureaucracy, bearable, and at times even fun, by our been greeted by those of us working all the prioritizing, operational wonderfully experienced, long-serving on new editions or interpretations of implications, outcome indicators, (I was going to say long-suffering) Euripides, Spinoza, William Blake or impact beneficiaries, incremental assistant staff, our dynamic new(ish) Christina Rossetti, such as we expect significance, and levels of robustness. Librarian and her staff, and the two to provide ‘Book at Bedtime’ listening I have become particularly allergic to wise, patient Administrators with if not actual reading for top business the vacuous phrase ‘going forward’, whom I have cordially wept –– with executives and government ministers, particularly in a climate where we are grief, chagrin, relief and occasional joy. I refer you to the already classic essay resisting pressures to go backward in the TLS (13 November 2009) by my down a dark alley with a firing squad Faculty colleague Stefan Collini. Not at the end of it. It has been a lifeline Adrian Poole www.english.cam.ac.uk concluding report that in his opinion it in a range of faculties and departments MPhil in is now ‘the best one-year postgraduate across the arts, humanities, and degree on audio-visual media in the social and historical sciences. The country’. English Faculty currently provides two Screen, Media, modules, both concerned, evidently, Students are admitted to the with literature and media: one on and Cultures programme from a variety of academic ‘Sacrifice in Film and Literature since backgrounds. Some have already World War Two’, taught by Alex he University’s MPhil in Screen studied the history and theory of Houen, and one, which I teach, on Media and Cultures began media, most haven’t. The Michaelmas ‘Naturalism in Literature and Film’. Tas a collaboration among Term core course on ‘Critical Both arise out of the recognition that researchers in disciplines across the Approaches’ provides an introduction it doesn’t make sense to teach the arts, humanities, and social and to the basic ideas, methods, and literature of the last hundred years historical sciences who discovered that historiographical concerns which have or so in isolation from those media they had an interest in common: the shaped the interdisciplinary study of which have most decisively shaped saturation of cultures around the world screen media as it is today. The focus the ‘screenscape’ we all now variously by screen media of all kinds, from film throughout is at once on the medium- inhabit, poets included. through television and video to the specific ‘language’ of the filmic, gameboy console and the internet chat- televisual, or new media ‘text’, and on ‘Sacrifice’ examines how writers and room. What might careful historical and theoretical enquiry, drawing upon a variety of methods and forms of knowledge, have to tell us about life today in the middle of that saturation? Based since 2006 in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, and taking advantage of expertise from as far afield as Sociology, Social Anthropology, and the Judge Business School, the programme is interdisciplinary not only in ambition, but in its very structure. The MPhil has proved as stimulating and productive an academic experience as I’ve had in more than thirty years’ teaching at universities in Britain and the United States. From the outset, it became apparent that successful applicants (from China, Russia, Serbia, France, and the West Indies, as well as the US and the UK) had chosen the course because it offered them, through its combination of interdisciplinary breadth and intensive one-to-one supervision, something they could not find anywhere else a broader understanding of the cultures film-makers have drawn on notions in the world. That sense of taking in which that language has become of sacrifice when depicting political part in a new intellectual adventure embedded, and which it has done its conflict, particularly the Vietnam has consistently generated, in their part to shape. The organization of War, the Cold War, the ‘Troubles’ in research and writing, approaches to classes reflects this emphasis on ideas Northern Ireland, and the so-called screen media that would not have been possible under more traditional ‘film and methods; but students have none War on Terror. Much has been written studies’ or ‘media studies’ disciplinary the less to develop a broad knowledge about substitution and exchange as models. Each year around 40% of of the history of screen media from being at the heart of sacrifice – whether those graduating from the programme 1895 to the present. in terms of a victim standing for a have continued to the PhD, either in community, or of mortals giving life Cambridge or elsewhere. Professor Lent term involves something of a to the immortal. One of the main aims Colin MacCabe, External Examiner Diaspora, as students choose two of the course is to consider how such during its first four years, said in his optional modules from what’s on offer exchanges bear on particular 2 aspects of literary and filmic figuration on seats in front of the pavilion, the (including realism, lyric, symbolism, Remembering soothing sight of green and white and the sublime). This raises another displayed before us. Although hardly question: if a documentary can an enthusiast by temperament, Frank play a role in turning a person into Frank was a cricket-lover, always reading the a martyr; if an poetic elegy can be scores in the sports pages and watching instrumental in wrapping mortalities Kermode the TV highlights. He had played in political idealism, do we need to regularly while a lecturer at Reading see these kinds of aesthetic works as rank Kermode (who died in in the 1950s (‘I was never any good’), performing something of the labour Cambridge on August 17, 2010) and one of the times his hangdog of sacrifice? If so, in what ways does was one of the most well-known look would hang most doggishly was F when we talked about the fact that I that labour vary according to medium and highly-respected literary critics still played and he didn’t (‘Of course, and genre? Classes generally involve of our times.

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