Madam, - John Waters fails to take the broader view in his analysis of the change in the Leaving Certificate English syllabus (Exam Times, June 9th). The new approach of the Department of Education is surely a reflection of the ongoing debate in university departments of literature about what exactly it is they should teach.
When literature emerged as a university subject in the late 19th century, its proponents regarded it as a reservoir of value, a bulwark against the supposed vulgarity and increased secularisation of industrial England. For the poet Matthew Arnold, the purpose of studying literature was to be exposed to "the best that is thought and said". In the early days, universities followed this approach by teaching survey courses of the "great works" of literature.
The problem with this was that once you decided a particular work was great there was nothing much left of interest to be said about it. There was also the issue of who decided what was to be included in the canon and on what criteria such decisions were made. In comparison to subjects like philosophy or classics, English literature was regarded as a lightweight subject, a course for dilettantes, and dismissed as "chatter about Shelley". In the 1920s and 1930s, the Cambridge critic F.R. Leavis attempted to adopt a more systematic approach to the teaching of literature, assessing works for their moral seriousness. But this too caused difficulties, most famously witnessed in his book The Great Tradition, which included just four writers and one novel by Dickens. As Martin Amis pointed out, if you followed Leavis, you would only ever to need to buy about 10 books. Again, the problem stemmed from the fact that who "made the cut" was down to individual preference and consequently mired in subjectivity.
It wasn't until after the second World War, when changes in the higher education system in England meant that more colleges taught literatures courses, that the thematic approach which John Waters criticises begun to appear. Away from the cosiness of Oxbridge, the idea that there existed an immutable canon of literature was rejected as too restrictive and lacking in academic rigour.
Because there was then no established methodology of study discrete to literature departments, a new generation of critics was obliged to borrow from history, linguistics and philosophy in order to introduce a more professional approach to research and teaching.
Given the lack of any defined method of study, it is no surprise that modern English departments were particularly open to the new methods of interpretation suggested by Marxism, feminism and later post-colonialism.
It is something of an irony, then, that Mr Waters regards the new English syllabus at Leaving Certificate level as being the product of a feminist agenda and a recipe for subjectivity when it is clearly influenced by the effort of university departments to get away from the ambiguities of appreciating "great books" to a more professional, and necessarily objective, approach to the subject. - Yours, etc,
DAVID BROPHY, Warrington Place, Dublin 2.