Thursday 2 April 2015

William Morris on the Syllabus

As an undergraduate in English Literature at Bristol University between 1975 and 1978, I never encountered any William Morris at all on my degree scheme. We did plenty of Victorian poetry, including Browning, Tennyson, Arnold and Hardy, but Morris’s Defence of Guenevere poems, which certainly had all the qualities of edge, concretion and irony to appeal to the Empsonian predilections of my tutor Moira Megaw, never got a look in. And though the Department as whole did have a culturally militant stance towards ‘technologico-Benthamite civilisation’ (Leavisite codeword for capitalism), since it was staffed by second-generation Scrutineers like Roy Littlewood, that certainly did not extend to having a socialist utopia like News from Nowhere on the syllabus.


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.

4 comments:

Dave said...

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!

Tony Pinkney said...

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!

Alan said...

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.

Tony Pinkney said...

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!