TDR Interview: Diane Purkiss

By Emily Ghods | Saturday, December 8, 2007

Professor Diane Purkiss is an Oxford don, and a lecturer and tutor on English literature, classical Greek influences on Renaissance literature, and the Western canon generally. She has been published extensively on Shakespeare, and her book Shakespeare and the Supernatural will be published next year by Routledge; on a related theme, her The Dissolution of the English Monasteries will be published by HarperCollins in 2010. She also publishes children’s literature under the pen-name Tobias Druitt with her twelve-year old son Michael, and has an interest in folklore and myth as a result. She sat down with The Dartmouth Review last month for a chat about literature, both English and American.

The Dartmouth Review: What does an undergraduate at Oxford who is studying English read, and do they all read the same works? I believe the academic system here is much different than what it is in America.

Professor Diane Purkiss: All the undergraduates who would describe themselves as “reading English” follow similar programs, until their third year when they have a number of options to choose from. In their first year, they all do a mix of the following: they all do “Paper One: An introduction to literary studies,” they do either Anglo-Saxon or Middle-English, they do either Victorian or Modern literature, and then they choose one of those options that they did not do before, or select a paper—or class—from a rather short list of options, which includes a special list of authors like Christina Rossetti and Seamus Heaney. Alternatively, they can do a paper on literary theory. What most students do is Victorian, Modern, Anglo-Saxon, and an introduction to literary studies and that’s in their first year.

At the end of their first year, they’re examined on that in an exam called, “Honor Moderations”—always known as “Mods.” At the end of Mods, if they pass, they go into their second year and do an absolutely laid down program about which they have no choice whatsoever. They all do Medieval literature, Renaissance literature, Civil War and Restoration literature, 1740-1832 literature (whatever you want to call that), they all do a paper called the history of the English language—and that’s their second year.

At the end of their second year they do an extended essay on the history of the English language, then in their third year they all do Shakespeare—and they all have to do it—and then they choose from a list of special authors. Usually, the authors are predominately canonical figures, though some modern figures who can be viewed as potentially controversial make it on to the list, like Philip Roth or Harold Pinter. Generally, these are potential or actual Nobel laureates.

TDR: Given that Oxford English students have a regimented academic course laid out for them, are there any authors that the students should be reading or studying, but are not?

DP: It’s difficult, because all of those papers would be taught differently at different colleges. When I do the Renaissance paper, for instance, they all read Thomas More, but they would not necessarily be doing that at every college at Oxford. The way I do the Civil War paper, they all have to read Milton, and that would not be the case if someone were teaching the paper, and focusing much more on restoration drama than I do. What I aim to do, and what most Oxford tutors aim to do, is to introduce them to a reasonable slice of the literature of the period they have to cover, and invite them to make their own choices towards the end of that period of study.

TDR: In your classical mythology lecture series, your literary touch-point seems to be the literature of the English renaissance—you always referred to it. Would you put Renaissance literature at the center of the English literary canon?

DP: Yes, I would say that it is the most crucial period for English literature because it is a period that is both the longest ago period that is still easily accessible to us as readers today—most people find Middle English, for instance, outside Chaucer, to be a fog; but you do have to learn it, so outside of a tertiary institution most people are not going to get much further than Chaucer, and if they do, they read translations, which is a whole separate topic that we do not want to open just now. Any Renaissance author can be read by anyone, so in that sense it is the period from which we are the most remote to which we still have access, and I think that’s really important.

One of the main things that the humanities have you do is to encounter ideas you couldn’t have had yourself. There is really little point in reading literary texts from any literary period that simply pat you on the back for being yourself. The whole point about studying literature, or the humanities, is to come across ideas that you may find shocking, or dismaying, or exciting, or adventurous, and that’s never going to happen to you if you stick to the kind of syllabus that happens to evolve for the study of secondary [high school] school children. There, the goal is to make literature accessible and not to frighten or startle the poor little darling. I think literature should absolutely shock you.

TDR: You’re talking about the critical point of studying the humanities and reading literature, but at Oxford and Cambridge, if you are not studying English or the Classics, you can leave college without ever having read Virgil or Shakespeare. What do you think of that?

DP: It worries me, with regard to English students, that many of our students arrive at Oxford with very little knowledge of any literature outside the English canon. For example, they’ll be studying the Renaissance but they won’t read Montaigne; or they’re doing the 19th century and they don’t read Victor Hugo. That’s really dismaying for me.

In a way what you’re really asking me is why do students read less than they did in the past, why are they less ambitious, and how can we change that?

I feel sorry for students, and I say this with sympathy and not condemnation, but one of the problems with students today is that they are so horribly anxious about everything, in a way that my generation never was. So it is very difficult to open any topics to them like classical mythology, because it takes a lot of courage for them to go to a lecture series on myth, to acknowledge that they are beginners and that this is a subject that they need to know more about. If the lecture is then pitched fairly basically, the students can feel almost hurt, “O.K., this is proof that I am illegitimate here,” and creep away miserably. I hope that didn’t happen with my lecture series on myth—obviously.

But I am planning on doing another lecture series on Judeo-Christian thought and history because I think that this is just as needed, that that is another gap in the life of their minds. I think that most students are equally frightened when presented with a Christian text, and it does not help when we teach it from the standpoint of religious controversy, which is the way the academy tends to present it. They actually need to know who those guys in that painting standing over there are, and why they might be important to us, and why it all mattered so much to Dante and Herbert and Milton and Swift and Tennyson and Eliot.

I think that they need to know those stories from the Bible, just as much as they needed to know those stories from the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and the Metamorphoses. I think it’s really important to start reintroducing that type of stuff into the students’ course of study, and start reintroducing some sense of comparative literature to people. I am a great believer in foundational humanities courses, but we’re light years away from ever offering one here, and the justification for that is this: people—tutors and professors—assume that this is being done by the schools, but it isn’t being done by the schools, and to think that it will be done by the schools is very naïve.

TDR: By “foundational humanities classes” do you mean classes that the entire student body would take, or just students reading English or the Classics?

DP: Yes, the entire student body. I am in favor of a sweeping series of classes for everyone which would include an introduction to Western philosophy, something solid and worthy on art history, and something solid and worthy on European literary movements. I think that would actually be better than some of our first year offerings, and could be done reasonably easily as long as they were done in a lecture series, with slides, and some attention to detail. It could be very fruitful, but nobody does it because the professors think it is somewhat demeaning, that it is like school teaching. I think this is increasingly a worry, because there is such a gap now between what many schools offer and what we expect from first year students.

TDR: What about a student who is studying the sciences or medicine and would argue that they do not need to study the humanities for their own future success in their respective fields?

DP: Well, those students exist and they exist everywhere, but I don’t think it would kill anybody to go to a lecture series, just like I don’t think it would kill English readers to go to a lecture series on science. The goal is the access to knowledge, making knowledge available to people. This doesn’t mean spoon-feeding knowledge into them, or providing them with the knowledge that they would need for their entire lives. The idea is to warm the area up enough for them so they feel equipped to pursue it if they feel curious, rather than actually telling them what the last word on any subject you are teaching is.

TDR: Has the system at Oxford always required students to specialize as they do immediately upon arrival?

DP: Yes, the modern university has always been like this. The course that used to be the foundational humanities class was Greats, also called “Lit-Hum,” literariae humaniore—the classics—meaning the literature, history, and thought of Greece and Rome.

What ended up complicating its progression at Oxford is that so few secondary schools now provide classical languages, so the course became more and more inaccessible to students. The course is trying to reinvent itself now for people who haven’t done either Latin or Greek, but it remains to be seen whether the reinvention will take place—I have a niece doing this program now at Oxford. She is studying classics without having learned Latin or Greek at school, but she is doing daily Greek lessons to catch up. And it is a difficult, challenging language, I know, because it is one of my beloved languages.

Her course of study is Lit-Hum, and the current students of Lit-Hum are experimenting with the reinvention of what was the foundation humanities class for all Oxford students. Gladstone did this program, for instance, and so did Oscar Wilde and C.S Lewis. Nothing else really counted, and reading English literature was a life of embarrassing ease and sloth by comparison.

Partly because of this inheritance, it is the case that study here has been intensely specialized and more akin to American graduate schools than to what a four-year or liberal arts college would offer. There never has been the equivalent in Britain of an American liberal arts college; we don’t have Great Books courses for instance.

TDR: Are you a proponent of a Great Books course of study, then? Of instituting a core curriculum?

DP: Yes. I think that the problem with the British education system of early specialization is that it asks students to make decisions at a very young age, having not equipped them with the resources to make those decisions. If you come from a very ropey state [public] school, or indeed a ropey independent school, and you haven’t been taught the humanities very well, it is very difficult to choose your three A-level subjects, which are the courses you decide upon taking at secondary school.

It’s quite possible to have someone who has randomly done English, History, and Biology, who may know nothing at all about French literature or very much of anything except those three subjects. Then we thrust them into the fast-stream of European culture at Oxford and it’s quite tough.

Your A-level subjects are meant to prepare you for those subjects in college which you still study, though they seldom do that. The kinds of books that are set for English A-level are very close to the kinds of books that people are never going to look at even once in tertiary school [college], mainly middlebrow novels from the Booker shortlist.

TDR: Given that students are making these choices at such a young age, do you see them making wrong decisions often?

DP: I see people who are pretty unhappy, and they come in two kinds: the ones that are very bright—and we tend to select people for potential rather than achievement, and our admissions process is very different from that in America; you don’t get any points for being an alumnus’s daughter, for example. What I’m looking for, if you were a candidate sitting in my interview chair, is not what you know but what I can teach you. Obviously I am not almighty God and I often get things wrong, but what worries me is that we frequently get people who are in fact really capable and could learn really well, but are so under-confident and so intimidated by the catch-up task that lies before them that they are almost failing before they start.

The other group of very unhappy people I worry about are those who just aren’t enjoying the courses as much as they’d hoped because it all goes by too fast for them, because they never really get grounded in the courses, because it becomes mechanistic for them to produce essay after essay efficiently rather than intelligently. That worries me a lot.

TDR: You mentioned Philip Roth and some more controversial figures of the literary canon earlier. In terms of American literature and its reception in England, who is respected, who is not respected, and who deserves respect?

DP: I don’t know really, because I don’t know very many American literature scholars and what they think about American literature. But if you are talking about normal and intelligent readers, then for my own part—not that I’m speaking for an entire class of readers—American poetry is now the best lyric poetry in the English speaking world. The late 20th century has seen a stupendous flowering, from the 1960s on (from the New York School on), of great poetry; I would rather read John Ashbery than any British Isles poet, except Geoffrey Hill. He’s the only poet standing on par with the guys still publishing in America. I also really like Anne Carson.

I would also say that the American novel and short story are in pretty good shape, in better shape than they are here. I really like some innovations with the graphic novel—I think Spiegelman’s Maus is a masterpiece, though I wasn’t a big fan of his post-9/11 pieces.

These days, however, my sense is that the American literary market is closing down, that it is now very difficult to begin as a writer in America. Publishers don’t want to publish intelligent fiction, they want to public non-fiction and children’s books. I actually heard Philip Roth complaining about this: the moment when the American public was willing to engage in very difficult books is now over. It’s worrying that many of the practitioners I’m citing today, like Roth and Ashbery, are quite elderly. I’m not seeing an exciting group of people my age or your age coming through.

TDR: Are you attributing this to how publishing firms are catering to the public, or to a lack of imagination on the public’s behalf?

DP: Well we don’t want to go all De Tocqueville about this, do we? But I will anyway: you just can’t help sounding like that if you’re criticizing US cultural life.

There’s something about America that’s automatically going to produce a broad stream of democratic culture. For example, it seems to me that American drama on television is by far the best that’s produced, and far ahead of British television, which is just a bunch of rubbish to me. I’m guessing that the creative talent in America that would once have gone into novel writing is now going into television writing, or even advertising.

Americans themselves, and perhaps this is the problem, seem unconvinced of their cultural leg-up on Europe. Americans themselves seem surprised if I say “but your lyric poetry is great,” “but your television and drama is much better than BBC drama,” “but your PBS channel is doing more interesting documentary work than we are,” “but you have all these great, but ageing novelists.”

Americans look at me, when I say this, in almost dismay like “Oh, we don’t need to cringe?” No, you don’t need to cringe, really! That may be the problem: if you don’t think that one of your selling points is high culture, than there may be an impulse to abandon it.

I think we must always be patient. I don’t see a school of interesting young novelists in England either; the only place I see an interesting group of young novelists is in France and Germany. Maybe with more time, some Americans will evolve and come up. This is not to say that all of your great writers are elderly. I’m a great admirer of Tobias Wolff, who’s a wonderful short story writer, and his one novel, Old School, which was also a memoir, was very enjoyable. I think that perhaps there’s a problem with the New York book scene, which seems to be more about who you know than whether you’re any good. A lot of the critical apparatus seems to be devoted to a kind of coziness, rather than getting to grips with whether authors are writing well or not, so people who are not so talented tend to get valued quite a lot. I’m really thinking of people like Susan Sontag here: to a European, her reputation is really quite mysterious, since all her books, fiction, and essays seem banal and predictable. But I think her reputation is due to the misapprehension, on behalf of her American readers, that she sounds European—so it actually arises from the cultural cringe that I just mentioned.

TDR: If you could assign your students to read publications that are more literary and critical, which would you choose for them? The TLS? The New Yorker?

DP: I would never assign my students the TLS because it’s a drone-in really. It’s for specialists, and it’s well located in the Senior Common Room [graduate lounge] because then you can just read the articles that are about your discipline, and the others are rarely worth reading, which is a terrible thing to say about a literary journal! Really, the articles should all be worth reading, especially if they are not in your specialist area, and the one that is more like that in England is the London Review of Books.

I would have also said that the New Yorker is a bit middle-brow for me to be recommending it to students. It’s great to read it on a plane, that’s the way I’d describe it—and it sometimes has very interesting and penetrating pieces, but sometimes it is very flim-flammy.

TDR: Given that many Americans get their slice of culture from magazines like the New Yorker, what do you think of the poetry or short stories being published in that magazine?

DP: I think it’s often very unambitious. I think it’s always been a bit middle-brow, and therefore not very interested in the cutting-edge of experimentation, and you wouldn’t expect it to be because it publishes mainly established people: it doesn’t pick anyone up, until they’re also fairly well regarded as well. So that particularly lends to a heaviness around the middle.

TDR: As far as experimentation and deviating from the canon in style or subject matter—an Oxford student here reading English was telling me that the only American writers that Oxonions see as legitimately having earned their spots in the canon are Henry James and T.S Eliot. What are your thoughts?

DP: That may be true of the faculty as a whole, but not true for individual people in it. Most people under 90 years old would have a wider view than that. The problem is that until recently, the “English degree” at Oxford did literally mean British Isles literature. The reason for that is professors thought it would be impossible to cover both British and American literature—but now, there are two American papers since there are now American authors on the list of special authors; Americans are also now included in all period papers, so already things are changing.

I also wouldn’t say that most people are despising of American literature; rather I would say that most people respect it. But you must remember that most people on the English faculty specialize in periods before there even was American literature. So you have to respect the fact that if the sun of your zenith is John Donne, you’re unlikely—that is, it’s not unfeasible, but it’s unlikely—that you’ll be enthusiastic about the experimental American novelists of the early-middle to late twentieth century.

TDR: Who are your other favorites in American poetry or fiction?

DP: In poetry, I admire James Merrill and Frank O’Hara, as well as John Ashbery which I mentioned earlier. In fiction, I’m a big fan of the Beats on every kind of level. I like Roth, I like John Updike. Those two are very bloke-ish though, I want to say at this point, and I’m racking my brains to find a woman I can put aside them.

I like Sylvia Plath’s short stories, and her poetry. I’m not so keen on the Bell Jar, but she is clearly an interesting writer, and a great letter writer and diarist.

I quite like Toni Morrison, but I think that she’s also now overrated. It’s unfair to diss someone who is quite an able writer, just because they are overrated, but I do think that there is a natural correction that sets in: she is very good, but she’s not absolutely stellar, and she’s now being treated as if she’s absolutely stellar. I also think that her early novels are better than her later ones, which is always a depressing thing to say about a writer.

I’m also not a fan at all of Maya Angelou or Alice Walker. I can’t line up with the politically correct agendas that have pushed those two forward to literary fame. I think it is lovely that there are intelligent African American writers writing, and I think it’s lovely when anyone talented writes—but I don’t find either of those two talented, so it’s a bit of an embarrassment.

In general, the living authors I admire are apt to be European or from the school of magical realism, like Roberto Calasso or Mario Varga Llosa.

TDR: You mentioned African American writers. What about Zadie Smith?

DP: No. I think she is horribly overrated.

TDR: Why does she receive so much press, then?

DP: She’s incredibly pretty. Many of my male students fancy her. I think, also, that she ticks a certain box in the British establishment which wants to pretend that we are all living in a multi-cultural society now, and that we’re not high-brow. That said, I love some British-Indian writing. Vikram Seth is much more talented than Zadie Smith. Or Anita Desai, who has serious and heavy talent. I also like other immigrant writers—W.G Sebald, for example, was the real thing.

DP: What about Doris Lessing, who recently won the Nobel Prize in literature?

DP: She’s O.K. Her books are never less than interesting. But in general, I am not a fan of the big, baggy, solid philosophical treatises that are thinly disguised as novels, which we in Britain are so fond of producing. I’m not a fan of Iris Murdoch either—that entire school I don’t like.

TDR: From a much broader vantage point now, do you see any parallels among our current artists and writers and those from previous literary eras, or parallels among current literary heroes from those of the past?

DP: The main one I really see is with the late Elizabethan writers, and the parallel between that era and the twentieth century’s obsession with an exhausted paradigm. For the Elizabethans, it was first humanism and then Protestantism.

The twentieth century was an era when people hoped that there would be a solution to political misery, and that it would take the form of either Marxism or Fascism. Of course, both of those turned out to be unfeasible—practically and ethically. That left writers with a backlog of human misery to write about, but with no way of pulling it into shape.

This brings me your question about heroes. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ hero is really the anti-hero, and this is the first time we see this in the history of Western literature, and I think it is what has contributed to some of the problems in literature that we were talking about earlier. It was the realism developed in the first parts of the twentieth century taken to an extreme that produced the anti-hero, and that realism leads to a simplicity about contemporary literature that is unsettling.

Something horrible has happened to the novel. It’s a genre that was invented to do three things: to tell people how to live—what to buy, how to eat, what to read and think about; to tell people about goodness and its pursuit, and to portray a whole society in its many layers. Thanks to the malign influences of some very heavy talents—I blame Henry James, really—novelists have abandoned all but the first of these.

TDR: Henry James, really?

DP: Yes. He had a talent for taking a small group of people and really exposing their characters, and seeing how their lives intertwine, and making it all very moving and powerful—but then his lesser followers did it, and did it with less talent, so much so that the contemporary novel has become mundane by his influence.

Look at the books on the best seller lists: they are about people like yourself doing things that you yourself do on a day to day basis. Shopping. Dating. Working. Those best sellers are a sort of manual on living, giving you advice on the rudimentary plodding of your life.

As an Oxford don, I feel I have the right to employ a bit of arrogance from time to time: I do not need simpleton authors giving me advice on matters that I or anyone else am a much better judge for myself anyway—whether I should buy that car, or take that job. By describing things familiar to their readers, the authors are not exciting or shocking or moving their readers; and in short, readers do not learn anything when they read.

Why would you want to read about people only like yourself, anyway? I think that’s boring. The joy of reading literature, or studying the humanities in general, is the joy in discovering an idea that you would not have come to on your own, and this only happens when new and unique characters and circumstances are written into existence for you by a talented writer. If you’re reading a glorified version of your own life, where is that epiphany that Joyce was talking about?

TDR: On that note, then, what are your thoughts on the Harry Potter phenomenon?

DP: It’s too soon to say whether the overall impact of the books will be good or bad. It’s been accompanied by a lot of anecdotal theories about kids reading like never before, but the plural of anecdote is not data, and you could argue that most of those kids would have been reading something else if Harry had not appeared on the scene. They’ve certainly given kids a lot of pleasure, which is a fine end in itself, though what puzzles me is the adult investment in them. I think there’s something odd here that should perhaps be a wake-up call to writers for adults. The Harry Potter books are very badly written—flat, banal, and clumsy prose—so it’s hard to see why adult readers are so hooked. I suspect it’s because children’s books are now in some ways the only true novels—the only ones that offer serious moral issues and proper attempts to represent society. I think some adults are in flight from serious adult fiction because it’s no longer giving them what they want from a novel.

TDR: Any last words?

DP: Yes, readers need to challenge themselves.

TDR: Thank you, Professor Purkiss.

TDR Interview: Diane Purkiss

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