Between Education and Legitimisation.
Traditionally A BA (Hons,) in English Lit qualified
you for nothing. It meant you had undergone a course of study, had presumably
learnt something about English Literature, and could write a coherent essay to
a generally agreed standard. You could
argue the course trained you as an academic literary critic, but that was
hardly a career path open to the hordes that graduated. It proved you had attained a standard in your
chosen field. You were unlikely to have said or written anything original in
the three years it took you to get your degree but that didn’t matter.
There was an assumption that to teach in
the University environment you had to at least do a Master’s degree, with the
implication that you had mastered the subject by producing work that “made an
original contribution to the Field”. Then you could compete for the jobs
available. But the percentage of students who began their BA who ended up
teaching in a university must have been tiny.
When Literature was mooted as a university
course in England at the turn of the last century, there was serious dissent in
the academy from Academics who could not see how you could define the body of
knowledge (step one in running any course) and how you could then assess that it
had been mastered (step two). Moreover how could someone studying “gossip about
Shelley” be on an intellectual par with the students in the science department
mastering the emerging discipline of Quantum Physics?
The
fact that literary studies managed to overcome these objections, riding the
back of inflated claims for the importance of “Literature” in general and
poetry in particular, is one of the
great con tricks in academic history, but by mid-century the process was
creaking: did anybody really need yet another PhD on The Waste Land, or on Yeats?
The creaky process was temporarily redeemed
by the advent of theory, which not only made equally inflated claims for its own
self importance, but gave PhD candidtates new ways of either saying the same
old things about the same old texts or, in Terry Eagleton’s phrase, writing
about pubic hair.
Exactly what the point of studying
literature at University was, whether critical or theoretical, despite various
attempts to justify it, remains vague. It was useful for teachers and anyone
who needed a high level of literacy in their future profession: Journalism, the
civil service, the diplomatic corps, various types of admin’, advertising,
sales, publicity, publishing, copywriting …anywhere eloquence and linguistic
sophistication were useful, but where
there was no clear body of required knowledge or skills necessary before you
started.
But the point of this is that literary
studies were never a professional training course: they weren’t even a good way
to learn about writing literature.
So when creative writing came along, belatedly to the university, it had to justify itself by fitting in
with the existing academic models: there had to be undergraduate courses, and Masters
degree, and PhDs. And they had to fit
into the existing paradigms just as literary studies had. Whether or not that paradigm was relevant or
appropriate for learning how to write poetry, was, ironically, irrelevant.
There were, theoretically, three options:
“Education” on the lines of the English Major, “Professional qualification” or
“Apprenticeship”. The apprenticeship model was never going to happen: the idea
of studying the craft of poetry, as craft, just didn’t sound dignified enough.
But It could never be a “professional”
training course as far as poetry and prose fiction were concerned because there
was no profession to be trained for.
Courses can be developed and run to prepare students to
be Lawyers and Doctors and Engineers and Teachers. Students exit the university with a piece of paper that said they have the required knowledge and basic skills to be eligible for consideration for employment in the relevant field. They compete on the Job market, and then they go work and if they
are good there are career structures they can rise through.
But there was no “employment’ for the tyro
poet and the University could issue whatever paper it liked, it didn’t change
the fact that legitimacy as poet was
reliant on one of Bourdieu’s three groups and was unpredictable and erratic. Having
a PhD or an MFA in creative writing did not guarantee the quality of your poem,
and whether or not anyone can tell the
difference between a poem written by
someone with academic qualifications and a similar one written by someone with
none, is a moot point.
That was until creative writing courses
became popular, needed to be staffed, and hey presto, in the sealed acoustic of
the academy a career path opened that not only sidestepped Bourdieu’s three
types, but is well on the way to replacing 1 and 2 and not only does confer legitimacy within the terms
of the institution, but has increasing implications outside it. Not the least is the essentially conservative nature of any education process.
It is, as I wrote in a previous post, the difference between legitimisation and education. The latter is what should be happening, the former is what should not.
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