Well, a lot has been going on since we all arrived here. For those who have stumbled upon this, I and 19 other PhD students are sequestered in Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden attending a week-long programme of events on the intersections of Literature, Science and Culture run by Salford University and funded by the AHRC. I suppose I should probably have mentioned this yesterday.
Broadly speaking, the disciplines represented here are English and History, although the English students are in the majority and the History students are divided (some against their will) into History of Science and History of Medicine. Nearly everyone here concieves of themself as working in at least one other sub-field. Every night five of us give ten-minute presentations on our work (I was one of the lucky ones who got to go first, and mine is in a previous post), and it’s genuinely stimulating to see what other people are up to in their similar-yet-different areas.
One thing that today made me realise anew was how impossible to pin down English itself is. Given our interests and the fact that we’re signed on for the same degree (some of us will admit to this less readily than others) you’d expect the English students here to be more or less on the same page, but as soon as we were made to sit down and create a poster (yes) of what we considered our disciplines ‘concerns, methods and vocabularies’ to be, we ran into a massive brick wall.
This is surely the problem of subdivision in action – but in this convivial atmosphere, and between students, these divisions can, I believe, actually be a strength. The same encouraging kind of diversity which I’m spotting in the magazines I’m reading can provide us with a useful mix of perspectives here – as long as everyone comes to the table in a peaceful, good-natured way and no egos are on the line. Watching Stephanie Snow glossing the History of Medicine from 1500 (quite wonderfully, by the way), I was reassured by the way that some of the things I’ve been thinking about from a literary perspective map onto (or are mapped onto by) this more social perspective.
That last parenthesis, of course, returns us to an issue raised by Dr. De Groot in response to my previous post – does this model of English perpetuate its role as an appropriator, as a ‘user’ of history, sociology, marxism, postmodernism… science? Is it possible to add to the knowledges provided by all these other fields without presuming upon them, detracting their practices, and above all, ‘creating orthodoxy and closing up debate’?
I don’t have a particularly compelling answer to this question, other than that I hope that conducting oneself with awareness of this potential problem may be half of the battle to solve it. It seems to me that English always seems to be either ‘irrelevant’ or ‘presumptuous’ – and that in that sense it can never be immune from criticism (nor, perhaps, should it be). Sharon and I had a brief conversation about this yesterday, and in consequence of it I suspect that it’s better to take a stand for something which really could be useful than it is to dismally accept the ‘uselessness’ to which we have already been confined by the majority of normal people.
English Literature’s mercurial nature, its ability to be everything and nothing, is, appropriately, its great strength and its great weakness. A great deal of cautiousness is indicated, and, as today reminds me, an enormous amount of sensitivity, but to get anywhere there are moments when we must be bold.
There were a couple of other things which popped up today, but having spent myself on the above subject I intend to retire for the evening. Perhaps I shall mention them tomorrow…
Will Tattersdill