Do undergraduates today, in either English or Politics departments, get any better exposure to Morris? There is certainly more interest in Gothic than in literary realism these days, which might make a space for him; but on the other hand, a whole series of new areas has come into focus – literary theory, science fiction, African literature, women’s writing, and so on – which now take up a good deal of the undergraduate’s time in English studies. I think the honest answer is that we simply do not know how much attention Morris’s work gets on the university syllabus in the early twenty-first century. So we need a national and international survey of Victorianist colleagues in literature departments and Left-leaning colleagues in Politics or Sociology to see which Morris texts are getting taught, and, in the longer-term, to encourage more of them on to the syllabus.
Posts
4 comments:
Glad to see the social sciences get a mention- sociology does tend to be left leaning and it comes from a different place epistemologically than Eng. Lit. I feel that much of your frustration at narrow historicism comes from this- we learn about the social, political, cultural mechanisms underlying themes rather than focusing on individuals themselves. So Beverage as a figure in the Welfare state is important but no one focuses on his personal life, who he was married to etc. - it's irrelevant.The 'narrow mindedness' you frequently write of stems from this. It is inevitable that a focus on ‘William morris’ will yield the kind of annoying inward focus you dislike- that’s why I switched to the social sciences (social policy in my case). Focus on the social/political forces themselves –rather than the individual!
Thanks, Dave - that certainly sounds right. I suppose I've been thinking/hoping that after the 'literary theory revolution' of the 1980s, even Eng Lit had opened up to issues wider than the author him or herself. Perhaps it did for a brief while, but you're probably right to suggest that it may have closed back down again since in some ways - at least in the world of Morris studies. More power to the elbow of the social sciences then!
Tony, I did my first degree in Eng Lit but subsequently bought a book called ‘Political and economic forms of Modernity’ which is part of a series of books overseen and edited by the late great S.Hall. It has helped me to understand the world in which I live and features theorists such as Raymond Williams, JS Mill, Enlightenment figures etc but no Morris. And I agree with Dave that literature is great in terms of understanding society subjectively but doesn’t do the job of describing the social/cultural and economic forces underlying society. I heartily recommend this book , it’s still available for only a few pounds on Amazon but is out of print so will be gone in time. It may be too late to find a new intellectual home but one can always reach out to other disciplines in one’s spare time.
Stuart Hall is a great hero of mine too, Alan - I put up a post after his death, don't know if you'll have seen it: http://williammorrisunbound.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/farewell-stuart-hall-1932-2014.html Yes, interdisciplinarity is important. That would be the advantage of taking utopia, rather than just Morris, as a starting point. Perhaps I should change the title of my blog too away from the personal!
Post a Comment