[Hardy-l] Tess discussion

[Keith Wilson]

My point is that all engagement with what 'really' happens must relate directly to the text and not what any reader might have done in Tess's place. 
 
Jane Thomas
 
Apologies for misinterpreting Rosemarie's "speculate outside what is given in the text itself" as meaning speculate about events/character-information not given in the text rather than what was meant, namely speculate about what a reader would have done in a character's situation.
 
Jane's reminder (above) is very salutary, not just in relation to the direction taken by this Forum discussion but in relation to the study of English literature more broadly.  Skewed focus on what a reader might have done in a character's place -- generated in part by ill-thought-through exercises in "identity" criticism-- is another thing that has gone dramatically wrong with much of what calls itself English studies, leading students to place prime emphasis on themselves rather than on the texts they are supposedly studying.  I've even heard of classrooms in which the first thing students have to do is summarise their own "subject positions" (i. e. personal circumstances), so that it is clear to everyone what the subjective context is that informs their reading of the texts.   Lying behind this may originally have been a laudable desire to deconstruct hegemonic modes of interpretative discourse that privileged those attitudes (often male, European, middle-class ones) that a critical mainstream had tacitly declared to be normative. Among other positive things, this enabled engagement with neglected texts, bringing out of the shadows many non-canonical works that reflected the experience of traditionally more marginalised social groups.  But the intellectual benefits of that laudable enterprise risk being lost in the free-for-all that now often encourages students to subordinate texts to themselves.  This has given the false impression that literary works have to be made relevant to students' own experience to be accessible to them -- thereby obliquely (well, fairly directly actually) insulting students' intelligence by suggesting that they don't have the imaginative/intellectual capacity to engage productively with worlds and situations substantially different from their own.
 
Perhaps the recent drifting into the personal/anecdotal in what started as a discussion of the television Tess reveals some of the same subjectifying tendencies outlined above.  It's not surprising that it should have been brought about by a film adaptation, since time and again we hear film directors and script-writers say when interviewed that they have worked on a text to make it "relevant" to a modern audience  (i. e. like many modern teachers of English with their students, they subordinate the original material on which they are working to the perceived predilections/capacities of their viewers).  It's OK for film-makers to do this, I guess -- it's not their job to introduce viewers to a literary text within the context of an intellectual tradition but to entertain them in sufficient numbers to sell their product on the international market. People who have a prior knowledge of or interest in the novels of Thomas Hardy form a very small percentage of those who keep that market lucrative. It's also the case that for British film-makers the competition for the essential television dollars of the North American networks may well be East Enders or Coronation Street  -- i.e. upmarket soaps: excellent examples of the sub-genre (far better writing and acting than North American equivalents), but soaps nonetheless.  But if many teachers of English have now drifted, for whatever once laudable reasons, into doing much the same thing in a desperate pursuit of "relevance"  -- when they have been employed, in theory at least, to educate supposedly intellectually-engaged students in a serious discipline -- it's time to re-examine the educational priorities that keep this self-made off-shoot of the entertainment industry afloat.  
 
Best,
 
Keith Wilson       
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