This undated draft of Joe’s thoughts on teaching English Literature was written for discussion with colleagues at Winchester: 

1. Why English?

Not a subject like the others it is in a way a sort of meeting ground. Ideally a reorganization of English involves a reorganisation of the Div. system.

2. Because Literature can but it seems to me, be taught in context both in the spatial and temporal. i.e. it can be seen as a member of a group of literatures or as a phenomenon of experience and communication among many and of the expression of historical forces by influences on it (Classical, Biblical, political, fashionable) and its impact on successive literatures. As Baudelaire says: Only by being of its own time can literature be for all time.

3. How does this afffect us?

(a) We should avoid a policy of ‘great authors’ not because they aren’t great, but because their greatness is a function of their effect in their own time and what they have learned from their own time. Matthew Arnold’s idea of the power of the man and the moment. It is far too easy for us to read into e.g. Milton our own preconceptions and prejudices: the accumulated varnish of ages has to be removed before we can see him clearly: Victorian piety has to be removed.

(b) We should in other words train people to distrust teacher’s prejudice: we should not be over-dogmatic. We should try to see an author steadily and whole.

(c) We should try to make sure that the boy sees the difference between fact and interpretation and above all to see the rules by which an author thought he was playing.

(d) This involves a relativist approach to literary fashion and critical theories. This is why the history of criticism is so important. To criticize the critic should be our aim. Not only what does Shaw or Donne or Shakespeare or Leavis or T.S.Eliot say, but why – given his premises does he say it? If the authors of the past have nothing to say to us they are best left alone.

(e) This obviously implies an overall map of literature and its role in society, and above all an undogmatic critical method. The trouble with undiluted old-style Leavis close reading of texts is that it can become an end in itself and lead to ridiculous miscalculations as [say] Leavis on Tennyson.  Some authors are well suited to the method (Donne and the Metaphysicals for example) some less suited to it (Shelley, Byron, Thackeray).  It gives the stupid person a substitute for appreciation of literature by a kind of attraction to its pseudo-scientific pretentions – in which there is perhaps more pseudo than science.  Our greatest sin is to disgust our pupils with great literature. The administration of it in minute doses may kill the patient outright and produce a race of what one of our predecessors referred to as learned cunts.  The complete fire is death as Empson says – There is only limited use of rigour for its own sake. There is something absurd about the Rabbi poring over the Talmud or the Renaissance Grammarian[?] describing the text of Aristotle.  We don’t want to turn out a race of bookworms.

1. Rhetoric.

2. Map of literature and criticism.

3. Wide reading ideally representative selections of the work.

4. Relativist undogmatic approach.

5. Word games of all kinds (précis, crosswords, parodies, translation from foriegn poetry.)

6. Working from the present into the past.

[On smaller sheets, found with the above and possibly part of it:]

1. The year’s work must be extensive rather than intensive – though obviously there is room for both approaches.

2. It is based on themes and periods rather than great poets and where it includes the ‘great’ it should not necessarily intoduce them to the most familiar. In other words its criticism is breadth not quality.

3.  It should encourage boys to see a work of literature as part of a wider setting – both in time and society.   For this reason a purely museum-curator or antiquarian approach should be kept at its lowest level.

4. To instruct by pleasing must be its aim: the soft sell is more important than endlessly misplaced rigour, remembering that the ultimate rigour is death. The greatest crime against education we can commit is to disgust the young with literature from a misplaced Puritan idea that if it hurts them about as much as it hurts you it must somehow be good for them.

5. As the course progresses so its practice of more minute reading should be encouraged,  Particularly important is the habit of consulting works of reference – dictionaries, grammars, &c.

6. The course should ideally – though I doubt whether it can actually happen – be included in a much wider revision of VIth Book Divs.  In this way literature would become part of the wider range of foreign languages, history, geography, semantics, &c.

7.  A thorough ground in ‘Rhetoric’ and the facts of literary movements, biographical dates, grammatical and rhetorical terms, the so-called classical ‘Rules’ and a road-map of Eng. Lit. should be basic.

8.  Course should concentrate on the Modern (or fairly Modern) and work backwards into history, rather than the other way round, though this could only be done when the ‘norm’ of literary theory had been grasped.

9.  The over-use of essay-writing should be discouraged: other forms of written work – the writing of poems, stories, translations, parodies, précis, word games including crosswords should be encouraged.

10.  The use of acting out scenes, even if only in the Div. room, or very much more emphasis on learning by heart.

11.  If we can’t bring the past alive it’s better to leave it alone.  Great literature is only dead because we kill it daily.

12.  The A Level does little harm or is probably no worse than more alternative systems: besides, it gives a chance for the plodder to shine which more inquisitive exams wouldn’t.