Professor in English
at the University of
Glamorgan, Jane Aaron
teaches Welsh writing
in English modules to all
three undergraduate
years and at MA level.
Her recent publications
include
Nineteenth-Century
Women’s Writing in
Wales: Nation, Gender
and Identity and the
co-edited essay
collection
Postcolonial Wales.
In the tenth issue of the English Subject Centre Newsletter Gerard Carruthers published a paper, first given at a study day in 2005, which closed with an exhortation to his colleagues to ‘seize the “centre” ground for Irish and Scottish literature’. To doubt the centrality of these literatures, which are ‘as valuable (not more valuable) than any other “canon” of literature in terms of skills to be practised upon them, and of cultural and historical knowledge to be derived from them,’ is, he argues, to succumb to ‘residual “British”’ or “English” assumptions about “wholeness” or “bigness” of culture, which revisionists in Irish and Scottish studies, as much as anywhere else, can no longer accept.’(1) Carruthers was preaching to the converted - a workshop of scholars and critics of Scottish and Irish literature, many of them engaged in teaching their specialisms beyond the borders of their respective originating nations. At the University of Manchester, for example, where the study day was held, Scottish literature is currently ‘embedded’ in year 2, 3 and MA English programmes.(2) In a Welsh context, however, these substantial concepts of ‘centrality’ and ‘embeddedness’ cannot as yet be said convincingly to denote the position of Anglophone Welsh writing within higher education English teaching, even within Wales itself. Why that is so and how the situation might be remedied are questions which need addressing, and I’m glad to have the opportunity to do so briefly here.
The Welsh Joint Education Council markets its English literature GCSE and A Level courses in England as well as in Wales, but shapes its requirements differently for each country. One of its GCSE assignments requires students to choose an author ‘from different cultures and traditions’, and schools in England are invited to study an Anglophone Welsh writer as a possible option here. But writers from England are not listed as ‘other’ in this way for students in Wales; indeed, it would make little sense if they were, given the predominance of writers from England in the rest of the syllabus.(3) At A Level, schools may choose to teach the work of Welsh writers as an optional item in the syllabus, but the opportunity seems rarely to be taken. When I last attended a south Wales study day for sixth formers, none of the half a dozen or so schools who had sent students to the English literature workshops were teaching any Welsh authors at English A Level. One teacher explained to me that she felt she would be disadvantaging her students if she chose to offer them a Welsh writer for study, as she had no expertise in that area herself. She was well aware that the examining board would expect from her pupils an understanding of the context in which an author’s work was written which she felt she could not adequately provide, or not at least in comparison with the wealth of critical and contextual material she had at her disposal in the case of the more familiar non-Welsh authors on the syllabus. The fact that one of the optional Welsh authors on the syllabus came from the same south Wales valleys town as that in which she taught, and in which she, and her pupils of course, had been reared, was not enough to make her feel confident of taking that step into the ‘unknown’ world of Welsh writing in English.
Clearly, the onus here is on the higher education institutions of Wales to adequately arm prospective teachers of English with an expertise in Anglophone Welsh writing as part of their literature degree. First introduced in 1971, in Trinity College, Carmarthen, modules in Welsh writing in English are now offered in all but two Welsh higher educational institutions, yet only in three of them is the provision as substantial as the University of Manchester’s teaching of Scottish Literature. Further, given that the Welsh modules are always optional, the same problems of choice arise for university students as for school teachers: will they risk opting for a subject in which they more often than not have had no prior preparatory instruction at school level, and which is less well supported by secondary critical and contextual material than most of the more familiar literary options? But if they do not opt for these modules in sufficient numbers then, given the market-led exigencies of contemporary higher education institutions, there is limited opportunity for the discipline to develop so as to create new academic posts in the field, thus furthering the production of critical and scholarly research and publications on Welsh writing in English.
It is difficult to envisage any way out of this vicious circle except for the Welsh Assembly Government to make the teaching of at least one Anglophone Welsh text compulsory at English A Level, a step which the Scottish Parliament took with regard to Scottish literature and the sixth form English syllabus some time ago, in the early months of its existence. No doubt the current growth in the teaching of Scottish literature at higher education levels is in part the consequence of that directive. The Assembly would be well advised to announce in advance its determination to make such an innovation, thus providing universities with enough time to ensure that students planning to become teachers of English in Wales acquired the necessary expertise as part of their literature degrees. A few years’ notice would also allow for the preparation and publication of further contextual and critical studies to support the new development. Such a move would constitute a logical extension of the Assembly’s current support for English medium writing in Wales: a policy review it conducted in 2003 led to the establishment and funding of the Library of Wales project, ‘designed to ensure that all of the rich and extensive literature of Wales which has been written in English will now be made available to readers in and beyond Wales’, according to the series’ blurb. Edited by Dai Smith, currently Professor at the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales at Swansea University, the Library has to date published nine titles, and intends to publish a further five annually during the coming decade, thus helping to solve one former major occupational hazard for teachers and academics in this field, that is, the propensity of titles to slip abruptly out of print and become unavailable for teaching purposes.
All would not be plain sailing, however, even were the teaching of Welsh writing to be made compulsory in Wales within the English Literature A Level syllabus. Gerard Carruthers’ article points to two schools of thought, that of the Marxist and the aesthete, which have historically opposed the teaching of a ‘national’ literature in Scotland and Ireland at higher education institutions, the first from the point of view of a socialist cosmopolitanism which sees the national focus as narrowly bourgeois, and the second from the point of view of aesthetic ‘greatness’, which sees it as promoting ‘inferior’ works of art for vulgar nationalist reasons.(4) Both of these oppositions have been active within the Welsh system too, but current changes in the nature of English as a discipline weaken their arguments. In the case of the aesthetic opposition, criticisms of the traditional ‘great works’ canon as severely limited in its representation of social diversity, from the point of view of class, gender and ethnic difference, have gained general acceptance; further, the notion that teaching literature is about inculcating standards of good taste has been discredited in favour of a model in which the emphasis is on learning how literary language operates. Welsh writing in English provides as varied an array of exemplary models of complex language usage, ripe for detailed critical analysis, as any other literature. And for students in Wales, its immediate relevance to their own situation helps them to make sense of their experience, and that of past generations, while diminishing the sense of distance between author and reader in a manner which can prove inspiring; for readers elsewhere it provides a window on a generally under-represented aspect of British life.
The Marxist opposition, on the other hand, rests upon the assumption that to teach a ‘national’ literature is to promote an essentialist and homogenous view of national identity, but in fact Welsh writing in English has always worked against the assumption of any such unification. Inevitably from its outset a hybrid construction of English and Welsh cultures, it emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century as a strong corrective to middle and upper class bias within the traditional concept of ‘British’ literature. Texts like the Communist novelist Lewis Jones’ Cwmardy (1937) and We Live (1939), or Idris Davies’ explorations in poetry of the 1926 strikes and the depression which followed them, rooted as they are in the south Wales industrial communities to which their authors belonged, are vivid and compelling in their representation of the class conflict which went on to form modern post-war Britain. As a site of cultural tension, it is also rich in texts which focus on the liminal nature of border identities; books like Margiad Evans’ Country Dance (1932) or Raymond Williams’ Border Country (1960), for example, are centrally concerned with exploring the complex psychological history of those border communities which make up a good third of the Welsh population.
Both of those last two titles, along with Lewis Jones’ fictions, feature in the new Library of Wales, but from another point of view that series has as yet proved less than representative, as Margiad Evans is the only woman writer in its lists. In fact, however, in recent years the view of Welsh culture as strongly masculinist has been out-moded, with many influential female voices winning prominence: it was a woman, Gwyneth Lewis, who became the first Welsh National Poet in 2005, while in the same year Gillian Clarke was made Cardiff Capital Poet as part of the capital’s anniversary celebrations, and a young novelist from the south Wales valleys, Rachel Trezise, won the first £60,000 Dylan Thomas Prize in 2006. Many contemporary Welsh writings also explore the reality of Wales’ ethnic diversity, focusing , for example, on the Irish population of Merthyr Tydfil (Desmond Barry’s A Bloody Good Friday, 2002) or Newport (Catherine Fisher’s Altered States, 1999), or on African-Welsh identities (Charlotte Williams, Sugar and Slate, 1999) and the long-established mixed-race communities of Cardiff’s docklands (Leonora Brito’s Dat’s Love, 1995, or Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place, 2000). Teaching such texts as these underlines the heterogeneity of the Welsh population and helps to establish the inclusive nature of contemporary Welsh civic identity. Modules which include such material may be in a broad sense ‘nation-building’ but they certainly do not promote any essentialist or exclusive concept of the nation. Introducing students to this body of literature is a very rewarding experience, but it is to be hoped that, within Wales at any rate, changes will soon be implemented in the idea of what should be taught as ‘English’, so that the wealth of anglophone Welsh writing will not come as such an unexpected surprise to literary undergraduates. Essays which begin ‘I was born and have lived all my life in Porth [or Merthyr, or Aberdare, or Blaenclydach, or Ystradgynlais, or as the case may be], and have always loved literature, but before taking this module I’d never heard of local writer Gwyn Thomas [or Glyn Jones, or Alun Lewis, or Rhys Davies, or Menna Gallie, or whoever]’ should really belong to the bad old pre-devolution days and to a past educational order.
Notes
1. Gerard Carruthers, ‘Revisionism in Irish and Scottish Literature: How far can we go?’, English Subject Centre Newsletter, 10 (2006), 10.
2. Murray Pittock, Teaching Scottish and Irish Literature, ibid, 44.
3. See Greg Hill, ‘Sisyphus goes to school’, Planet, 161 (2003), 82-5, for a more detailed account of Welsh writing in English in the WJEC syllabus.
4. Carruthers, Revisionism in Irish and Scottish Literature, 8.
