‘That is what we do, isn’t it?’ The Production of University English

In The Production of University English (TPUE) project, English academics and educationalists together investigated how English is ‘produced’ in the everyday classes taking place in a variety of British universities. Here, Susan Bruce describes the project and shows how its methods can be used to shed new light on the interpretative tools which we teach to our students.

Susan Bruce is Senior
Lecturer at Keele
University, where she
teaches Early Modern and
20th-century literature.
She is co-editor (with
Valeria Wagner) of
Fiction and Economy:
New Essays on Economics
and Literature
(Palgrave, 2007) (e-mail
s.e.bruce@keele.ac.uk).

I suppose … debating is one of the big parts of English
isn’t it? It’s being able to express yourself and using language and what you know from literature, and listen and stuff; I suppose that is, that is what we do, isn’t it? (Anna1, Third Year Combined Hons English student April 2007)

Something gets lost in the translation of Anna’s observation onto the page: what doesn’t emerge is the sense of discovery that inhabits her sentence as she speaks it. It’s not just what she says, it’s the way that she says it: her speech is punctuated by hesitations difficult to reproduce in writing, but intrinsic to its significance as an instance of the process (not merely the product) of thinking as it happens in the university teaching space. Anna was answering a question we had put to her class on our third visit to her university (which we call Baxter), as part of TPUE, an English Subject Centre-funded project in which Anna’s class had first participated some months earlier. Detailed more fully in the recent issue of Pedagogy, edited by Ben Knights and Nicole King, TPUE pools the expertise of educationalists (2) and English academics (3) to examine how English is ‘produced’ in the everyday exchanges of the classroom. Relatively neglected as a focus of research, these exchanges are an obvious proving ground for some of the claims English has made about itself: that it demonstrates a ‘continuous concern with social inclusiveness’ (Holland, 2003); that it is ‘oppositional’ (Rorty, 1982) or particularly ‘democratising’ (QAA, 2000) or, conversely, that its role has traditionally been to preserve the orthodox and defend hegemonic ideologies from subversive attack (Eagleton, 1983).

Such scholarship on English is one context of our research. The other is educationalist enquiry into the changes currently besetting higher education (increased audit, standardisation, larger student numbers, the employability agenda – among others). Some have argued that these changes reshape traditional disciplinary priorities and/or have a disproportionate effect on less privileged students. But (again), there has been little examination of their effects at the level of the classroom. So we are trying, then, to examine the interconnections that do (or don’t) exist between the subject matter and self-conception of English and its pedagogic form, and also to assess the relation between the nature of classroom interactions and the differing levels of resources within which they occur. To this effect, we record and analyse English classes in three ‘types’ of universities: ‘post-1992’, ‘pre-1992 non-Russell Group’ and ‘elite’. We pay attention to a variety of modes of communication – gaze, tone, silences, ‘body language’ – consideration of which can sometimes foreground issues other to those which arise from analysis of language alone. From these recordings, we identify key moments which we isolate as clips and/or multimodal transcriptions (figure 1, ‘At the End of the Day’). These we then use as the focus of our investigations, and also as a mechanism of testing our own interpretations against those of the students whose interactions we are analysing.

On the occasion referred to above, we had returned to Baxter to show the students two clips of a seminar devoted to The Merchant of Venice, which we had recorded earlier in the year, during which the tutor, Barbara, had asked the students to conduct a ‘trial’ of the play itself. Dividing them into two ‘teams’, Barbara had instructed each to ‘choose a Portia’ who, with the help of her team, would rally and present arguments concerning the text’s politics: was it, or was it not, an anti-Semitic play? The clips we showed on our return to Baxter were clips we were subsequently to use to investigate two sets of questions. One (addressed in our Pedagogy article) involved the interface between English and issues of democracy and authority. The other (the focus of this essay) was that students sometimes use their interpretations of texts, and their seminar discussions of those interpretations, to articulate observations which are as much about themselves as they are about the texts – which are ostensibly the subject of their discussion. In returning to Baxter, we wanted to ask the students what they thought was happening in the clips that interested us. And, for what it is worth, our Baxter students articulated their understanding of the nature of ‘English’ in terms which broadly underscored the way we’d begun to think about the issue in our Pedagogy essay. Thus for Anna, English is not only about learning to articulate her own opinions, but also about learning to listen to other people’s. Interestingly, she and her classmates maintained that English offered them ‘a lot more freedom’ than did other subjects they were taking: History but also (surprisingly, given the degree of autonomy one might expect each discipline to allow its respective disciples) Creative Writing. Both of these were characterised as wedded to a ‘right and a wrong way to look at the text,’ unlike English, which was a subject if not of infinite variety, at least of infinite hospitality: ‘in English lit,’ one student said, ‘it’s like, your opinions are valid and you can sort of say what you feel’. There are shades here of the familiar student claim that English is entirely subjective, that interpretation has no intrinsic delimitation. ‘What, then, if I said to you that The Merchant of Venice was about a train crash?’ Susan asked, in an attempt to challenge this ‘interpretation-as-absolute-free-for-all’ version of English lit. This perennial (mis-) characterisation of English deserves further research. What do students really mean when they reiterate this ‘anything goes’ claim about English, and what underlies that utterance?  Excitement? Delight? Vertigo? And to what degree is it intrinsically associated with the perception we took this student to be articulating here: the proposition that English offers a particular space not merely for self-expression, but for a kind of self-validation?

That correlation between the articulation of ideational observations and a process of self-validation, dovetailed with our hypothesis that students’ comments about a text may sometimes act as a vehicle for the articulation also of observations about themselves, of which they themselves may not always be conscious. In the clip we showed the students, Lisa begins by arguing that the play establishes a critical difference between Antonio and Shylock – that this difference is value-laden – and that that value is signalled to the audience by a poetics which aestheticises Antonio’s labour and debases Shylock’s. Her tone is a mixture of hesitancy and conviction, the latter quality most pronounced in the final clause of her first intervention:

Lisa: But though they are both merchants, what they are involved in and how they are, um … Their work is described as very different, Um, like, Antonio’s worries over his ships are described in very eloquent and s- s- sublime language about spices, the … spreading out of/on [?] the waves, and the waves enthroned … enthroned with his … uh … silks. But, uh, Shylock is the/a [?] rat sneaking in the dark and the, the … sort of, it’s the, … It’s the difference between the sort of glory and beauty of ships and … the petty trafficking that Shylock does: they’re not the same.

Rhianna counters with an appeal to the prestige conferred on Shylock by his ability to access wealth immediately when wealth is needed. She speaks more forcefully than Lisa, and appears impatient, both with an argument which valorises Antonio when all he is able to do is ‘wait around for a ship’, and – perhaps – with a discourse that tacitly privileges figurative language over the power of the event within the plot:

Rhianna: But, at the end of the day, the amount of money, as he says it himself, as he says somewhere, um, would a, would a dog have 3,000 ducats to give you? Obviously he’s proving it, the fact that the amount, fair enough, Antonio has these ships full of spices and silks, but at the end of the day it’s, it’s Shylock that can just grab 3,000 ducats and give them lend them ****. So obviously Shylock in some ways has, is of, of higher level of, I can’t describe, commerce, that sort of thing because he has more, he has the more money available to him.

[Lisa: Sh-]

Rhianna: Whereas Antonio is waiting … around for a ship. And fair enough, if it comes back he’ll have a lot of money, but … whereas Antonio, Antonio has no money at the minute so he can’t – he can’t lend Bassiano [sic] the money and he has to go to Shylock in the first place. And it’s Shylock that can just give this money away –

[Lisa: Sh-]

Rhianna: without really noticing, so <trails off>

Rhianna had arguably drawn the short straw here, in having to defend the case that the immediacy of Shylock’s access to money trumps the cachet afforded to Antonio and his ships.

In this transcript from the Baxter University class, the details of both verbal and non-verbal communication become evident.

Figure 1 At the End of the Day

And, however artificial it is to extract a clip from the fluid, porous space of the seminar (we all know how discussions in seminars circulate and return and are, almost by definition, inconclusive), Lisa seems to get the last word. With quiet conviction she restates and synopsises her case, concluding with what we take to be (despite the ostensible affirmation with which it is introduced) a correction to the teacher’s attempted gloss on what she is saying:

Lisa: Shylock is a necessary evil. It doesn’t necessarily mean he’s at all respected or gains anything other than the money, whereas Antonio has a lot of respect for, um, his merchanting and his adventuring.

Barbara: Because it’s more extravagant …?

Alannah: And …

Lisa: Yeah, <quieter, trailing to finish> It’s more beautiful.

Lisa never explains what she means here by the claim she finally, after two successive attempts, (‘[Lisa: Sh-]’) manages to utter: that ‘Shylock is a necessary evil’. Perhaps she means that capital presupposes usury; perhaps she wants to suggest that one of the roles of Shylock’s enterprise is to throw into relief the nobility of Antonio’s. What she is clear about though, is that Antonio’s cachet derives not from the relative ostentation of his enterprise, but from its beauty.

Rhianna’s account of the convergence of interpretation and self appeals then to personality, not to class or social positioning, or ideological affiliation.

There seems to be quite a lot at stake in this brief exchange. The ground contested is essentially an argument over the relative merits and status of liquid versus cultural capital: the two students don’t use these terms, but those appear to be the concepts they are invoking. But what is not apparent from the transcript was that the content of this argument may mirror the respective social positionings of the students conducting it. All the students in this seminar were white; all bar one was apparently British; about 80% were female. But although the cohort was in many respects homogeneous, the nuances of the language employed by Lisa and by Rhianna seemed to befit not just the arguments each made, but something expressive of a more profound difference between the two women. Lisa, defending the notion that social standing may be generated by and communicated through a plethora of factors of which liquid capital is only one, often uses two adjectives or examples where one might suffice, and is much more hesitant and exploratory in articulating her claims than Rhianna is. Rhianna, convinced by the claim that money not only talks, but talks louder than any other kind of capital, cultural or invested, employs a language which seems implicitly to reflect her confidence in the material reality of the power that control of liquid wealth confers: ‘at the end of the day’, she keeps repeating, it is Shylock who can produce the readies.

The phrase, ‘at the end of the day’ is one which accepts and validates one factor as determining. Designed to cut through nuances and hesitations and to foreclose on the possibility of multiple determinations, it is often, as it is here, used in connection with an asseveration of financial motives or contexts as ultimately determining and (tacitly but no less ‘obviously’) rational. The same might be argued of the phrase ‘fair enough’, whose employment often functions to close off alternative explanations even as its speaker apparently admits them. And again, insofar as the locution, as it is used here, acknowledges the rationality of Antonio’s behaviour, rationality is again conflated with the pre-eminent importance of material gain: what seem to be otiose actions on Antonio’s part may, in the end, (but only uncertainly) issue in profit, and to the degree that they may, they are rational.

The differences between the two students’ lexical choices, then, might signal more fundamental differences between them: their respective interpretations of the text apparently overlap with their own social positionings. Drawing attention to our interest in the relation between the ‘ideational’ aspects of discussion and its ‘interpersonal’ qualities, Susan pointed out that although this seminar, formulated as a role-played debate, raised special issues surrounding the relation of the students’ arguments to their actual beliefs, both, nevertheless, appeared in this clip to be personally committed to the arguments they were making. Susan did not say explicitly that each seemed wedded, herself, to the value system she was attributing to the play, but she did ask what they considered were the most important ideas in the clip they had watched. Rhianna replied:

Actually, there’s quite a lot about it here, the role of, sort of, the value of commerce and the value of what we class as more valuable sort of thing, like, money-wise or even like person-wise as well: there’s quite a lot of question about that sort of, that sort of, scale of things.

Here (‘what we class as more valuable sort of thing’) there may be repeated the claim that ready money trumps the promise of future wealth, an assertion Rhianna then reiterates:

Antonio has no money; Shylock has thousands and thousands of ducats that he can hand out and not even notice, so therefore Shylock’s kind of the one who has the value at the minute really: you know, it’s all very well saying the ship’s going to come in: that’s like saying, ‘I’m going to win the lottery one day, yes I’m going to be rich’ – but at the minute you’re on two pounds fifty a day … Not quite the same thing essentially.

Close reading is not a strategy that would come naturally to someone wedded to the virtue of the speech of a plain man in his plain meaning; close reading assumes, on the contrary, that meaning is anything but plain, even when it pretends to be so.

The closest we came to getting any of the students to address the possible correlation between their social orientations and the arguments they made – or, at least, the terms in which they made them – came with Rhianna’s affirmation that underlying both her argument and her self-perception was a valorisation of what she characterised as the direct and unadorned: ‘as my friends all know as well, that’s what I’m like, I’m just a very, very blunt straightforward person’, she said. Rhianna’s account of the convergence of interpretation and self appeals then to personality, not to class or social positioning, or ideological affiliation. But her implicit impatience with the extravagant or over-interpretative, and her implicitly ethical valorisation of the ‘straightforward’, rehearses a contest over language and truth that has been played out before, in the text she has been studying, in the verbal jousting of Lancelot Gobbo and Lorenzo. Lorenzo’s similar ethically charged conflation of the honest and the straightforward is encapsulated in his frustrated instruction to the clown to ‘understand a plain man in his plain meaning: go to thy fellows; bid them cover the table, serve in the meat, and we will come in to dinner’ (Merchant 3.5.52–5). His deceptively simple appeal to the plain, the obvious, the direct, has recently been associated with a class interest counter to that embedded in Launcelot’s witty extravagance4; certainly, for Lorenzo, his own plainness operates as a salutary corrective to the suspicious rhetorical extravagance of the Clown. ‘Oh dear discretion, how his words are suited!’ Lorenzo remarks of Launcelot’s wit:

The fool hath planted in his memory An army of good words, and I do know A many fools that stand in better place, Garnished like him, that for a tricksy word Defy the matter. (Merchant 3.5.60–65)

Of Lisa, we were unable to enquire what she thought about the relation between what she argued and the more personal aspects of herself: she came in late, and missed the showing of the clips. But if her lexis differed to that of Rhianna, so too did her method: she paid more implicit attention than Rhianna to the way in which the ‘tricksy words’ of the text may be employed in it to ‘defy the matter’. More of what Lisa says in At the End of the Day – her references to the waves enthroned, to the silks, to rats sneaking in the dark and to the petty trafficking – weaves into her own discourse close paraphrases of, or direct quotations from, the play itself. She is also aware that this is her interpretative strategy of choice: while the others are explicit about their preferences for reading for the plot, or for characterisation, Lisa says that she looks first at ‘the actual words the text is using, the choice of diction’.

Lisa is, in other words, a close reader, and close reading allows her here to articulate something about the text that Rhianna’s account cannot encompass: that there is a correlation in it between the political and the aesthetic – that the latter is not an innocent quality. ‘It’s more beautiful’, she finishes, and she is arguably right that the representation of Antonio’s merchanting at the opening of the play is not only more extravagant, but more beautiful, than the representation of Shylock’s usury. But this observation leads us to a more tendentious proposition, and to a paradox with which we will, for the time being, end. Close reading is not a strategy that would come naturally to someone wedded to the virtue of the speech of a plain man in his plain meaning; close reading assumes, on the contrary, that meaning is anything but plain, even when it pretends to be so. Close reading may embrace values diametrically opposed to those embodied in the phrase ‘at the end of the day’ (for example), which insists on the ultimate readability of action, presupposing a ‘last instance’, by reference to which things will become intelligible, justifiable and clear. We don’t want to align differences of lexis or method in any blunt, one-to-one relation to particular ideological interests – to insist, for example, that an appeal to ‘plainness’ must be connected to non-elite class positions, or only ever characteristic of discourses that seek to legitimate particular forms of market-orientated behaviour. But we do want to begin to raise the possibility that if respective attachments to ‘plain meanings’ and ‘armies of good words’ are, like the aesthetics of The Merchant of Venice itself, not innocent either, that may be something we should bear in mind when we teach the tools of our discipline to a body of students who originate from an ever wider social spectrum. And if here, we have illustrated the methodology we’ve developed, which extends the methods of close reading to the rather different ‘text’ of the seminar itself, in future writings one of the things which we may have to think about further, is that close reading might be as inherently political as any other kind of aesthetic methodology is – however much one would wish to think that it was not.

Notes

1  Names of participating individuals and institutions have been changed.
2  Ken Jones (Keele University) and Monica McLean (The University of Nottingham).
3  Also participating is David Amigoni (Keele University).
4  Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare’s Extravagancy’ Shakespeare (1: 1–2), 2005 June–Dec, 136–53.

Newsletter Issue 14 - April 2008

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

© English Subject Centre - ISSN 1479-7089

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