English

Director of Studies:

Dr Sophie Read (the rhetoric of religious language in seventeenth century literature)

 

Other Fellows in English:

Dr Gavin Alexander (literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries)

Dr Helen Crawforth (twentieth-century literature and philosophy)

 

Number of students admitted each year: 6 – 8

University Website: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/

 

Introduction

For five hundred years people from Christ’s College have contributed to English literature.  Lady Margaret Beaufort, the foundress, translated books from French, and sponsored early printers of English books. In the 1550s or 1560s the students ‘in Christes Colledge in Cambridge ’ acted one of the earliest English comedies, the bawdy Gammer Gurton’s Needle (printed in William Tydeman, Four Tudor Comedies, Penguin Classics). In the 1950s a recent fellow, C.P. Snow, wrote a set of psychological novels, including The Masters, set in a college suspiciously like ours. In between the college was famous for its writers such as Henry More and William Paley who wrote generously on philosophy – a subject which some students still opt to study within the history of English ‘writing’.  Poets in college included the modern comic poets C.S. Calverley and Gavin Ewart, the seventeenth-century royalist John Cleveland and his famous contemporary John Milton, who went on to write the greatest long poem in English, Paradise Lost, and the most moving defence of the freedom of the press, entitled Areopagitica.

There is also a long tradition of the study of English literature by people from our college.  Among the earliest students was John Leland who was employed by Henry VIII to study the medieval literature in the monastic libraries that Henry was destroying. Leland went mad under the strain of the job of being the first English literary historian. Another Christ’s student, George Puttenham, wrote the first major work of literary criticism in English, The Art of English Poesy, published in 1589 (excerpted in Gavin Alexander, Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, Penguin Classics). When people began studying English literature in universities in the Victorian period, one of the pioneers was a fellow of the college, W.W. Skeat – in whose honour we give a prize for the best first-year results. Skeat was the first person to study Chaucer’s and Langland’s poems in a methodical way. More recently, critics who have been fellows of the college have included L.C. Knights and Christopher Ricks (who remains an honorary fellow). We hope that you will join us in this tradition.

 

English at the Universityof Cambridge 

The course (called a ‘tripos’) is a course of literary criticism, of reading, thinking about and writing about great drama, verse, fiction and non-fiction. In the first two years (called Part I), you will follow the thread of literature in English from the writers of the fourteenth century who first dared to write in their mother tongue to those who sought new ways of representing reality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. You will be required to range widely from the Middle Ages to the present, studying the full range of periods, but within that range there are few ‘set texts’: just in each period you and your ‘supervisor’ (a sort of personal tutor) will pick and choose the literary works or philosophical or cultural questions which seem most of interest. Alongside this story, you study the theory and practice of criticism and either some literature from other cultures which have influenced English literature or the science of linguistics.

In the third year (part II) you will study tragedy from ancient Greece , through Shakespeare and Racine to Edward Albee and Sarah Kane. And you will then have many options for further study: specialist options on (say) medieval dream-visions, the Civil War, Victorian culture or modernist short-stories; literature from America , India , Africa and elsewhere; moral philosophy or aesthetics; or the links between literature and theatre or the visual arts.  Finally, you will write one or two dissertations of 7500 words on a literary topic of your choice – a chance to conduct really original research and thinking. The dissertation can relate English literature to foreign literature, another art-form or linguistics if you so wish. Recent topics have included travel in medieval drama, prostitutes in the eighteenth century and Auden’s poetry about animals.

The course is hard work but exhilarating work, combining a thorough training in the essentials of English literature with freedom to explore your own interests. You have the freedom to explore works and ideas with freedom, because it is not until the end of the second year that you have examinations and write assessed coursework. In the third year there are examinations on tragedy, practical criticism (the close analysis of unseen passages) and your chosen optional papers. A table listing all the papers is given at the end of this document.

 

English at Christ’s College

Teaching is normally based in college, although for some papers it is conducted by somebody from another college with a special interest. You will be taught in one-to-one and two-to-one ‘supervisions’, or meetings rather like conversations, for each of which you prepare a short essay or other piece of work as a talking-point. We pride ourselves in English at Christ’s on our ‘supervisions’, for example taking special care over people’s writing-skills. You will also have classes in groups of 6-8 in college and of 10-20 in the central Faculty of English for some papers (for example Shakespeare), giving you the chance to debate with other students. The Faculty of English runs further lectures and seminars, from which you choose the ones most interesting to you or most relevant to the reading you are doing. However, this teaching will fill only a few hours of the week. You will spend most of your time – we expect thirty hours a week – reading and researching, following the guidance of your supervisor.

 

 

 

Enthusiasm for literature and cultural life underpins everything that we do, for literary studies merge work and play to a curious degree. We have had summer supervisions on Milton ’s prose-style beneath the mulberry tree planted in the year of his birth. We have had evening seminars with guests telling us about Tolstoy or with recent films for discussion. We have an annual Middle English mistranslation competition, an annual trip to The Globe and more bacchanalian revels at our annual dinner, Christmas party and garden party. In 2008 we celebrated Milton ’s four-hundredth birthday with lectures, plays and a reading aloud of all of Paradise Lost in one day (!). The students launched a website for year 12 and 13 pupils who want to learn about Milton, called Darkness Visible at http://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/darknessvisible/ and themselves taught classes on Milton to visiting year 12 pupils. (See http://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/milton400/).

The English students also independently act in plays, such as Romeo and Juliet in the Master’s garden, design theatrical costumes professionally, sell their paintings and hold grants for the visual arts, sing or play in orchestras and musicals, read Dryden aloud on Radio 4, or participate in University Challenge. Some have energized student politics or written journalism for student newspapers and occasionally the national press. In 2009 a poet in residence, Ruth Padel, arranged various events about creative writing, for some of the students write creatively, and have even won prizes for or been published. They have been awarded travel grants – of which Christ’s College has many – to do social work in India or visit Italy to brush up a language or visit museums.

After graduation one or two stay at Christ’s for MPhils and PhDs, recently in subjects from Renaissance literature and painting to Nabokov’s novels; others study topics further at other universities, from the Enlightenment in Harvard to postcolonial writing in Belfast. Most, of course, go into all manner of other professions: barristers and business people, PR consultants for diamond dealers, radio journalists, kindergarten teachers in Italy, schoolteachers in inner cities, and many other things. All take with them the memory of three years of reading the works of some of the greatest minds, and of stretching their own minds to be independent, creative and searching in work and play forever.

 

What we are looking for

We are looking for your enthusiasm for literature and for signs that you are a ‘self-starter’, ready for independent study. Most importantly, you should be a keen reader. You should want to spend a week reading four or five plays by Shakespeare or Beckett (say). You should already read good books – and decide what you think count as good books – beyond the ‘set texts’ of school. In whatever genres or periods interest you, you should enjoy thinking exactly about the ways in which writers use words, with intelligence, with sensitivity and with a sense of humour.

You should have intellectual curiosity. You should relish the opportunity to have a ‘supervision’ or conversation about your interests, whether with a professor sharing her years of knowledge or with a brilliant young graduate student developing radical new ideas, hoping to learn from them and to teach them something in turn. You should enjoy a whole class uncovering the language, metre and politics of one poem in depth. And you should enjoy a research-project in which, over weeks in the rare book library, you become the expert on whatever curious question you choose.

Our offers are usually A*AA at A2 Level, or the equivalent in other qualifications. Neither we nor the Faculty of English in Cambridge overall have any fixed rules about which other subjects you should have studied, beyond the requirement to study some English literature A2. At Christ’s College, we select each of you on your abilities in English studies alone. However, we do have recommendations in choosing A2/IB subjects which will prepare you for the course. We find that people with ‘combined’ English language and literature A2 frequently are not as as well prepared when they arrive as people with ‘single’ English literature A2. There is no need to study English language A2 separately as well as English literature A2, out of only three subjects, as that might be a slightly narrow preparation. Overall, we would encourage you to consider traditional academic rather than practical or vocational subjects, in order to improve – and to prove to yourself – your ability to read widely in independent study, to conduct critical analysis of primary texts or scientific data, and to engage with long and complex traditions of intellectual thought. We would also recommend a foreign language at A2 – no matter what language – as a way to sharpen your ability to understand the English language and its literature, as well as being a useful tool for the student of the humanities and a useful skill for life. The University of Cambridge has recommendations on A2 or IB subjects which prepare you for academic study.

 

In Part I alongside English literature, you take one other option. 

(1) You might study literature in French, German, Italian, Greek, Latin, Old English (known as Anglo-Saxon), medieval Latin, Anglo-Norman or early Middle English, which you read in the original, but about which you merely write essays in English. To study French, German, Greek or Latin, you would ideally have an AS or A2 in your chosen language; for the others (including Italian) we offer classes ‘from scratch’.

(2) Or you might study the linguistics of English with special reference to the history of the language and its literary style. To study this option, you do not need to English language A2; most begin from scratch.

 

The process of admissions
Firstly, when you submit your applications, on your personal statement tell us mostly about your literary, academic and other cultural interests, so that we can discuss them with you at the interview. These interests are of most concern to us in judging your preparedness for the course. When we receive your application, we will ask you to send to us two essays written for English teachers at school and marked by them. These essays should be samples of your normal schoolwork and not specially prepared projects. (You should keep photocopies for your own reference.) It is likely that you will be invited for interview in November or December. In your interviews we might well discuss the essays, as we would in a ‘supervision’. We may also offer you a short passage or poem to read and discuss on the spot (‘unseen’ or ‘practical criticism’). We will certainly ask you about your interests in literature in general beyond your set schoolwork. In addition, we will ask you to sit a short written test, probably at lunchtime on the day of your interviews.

 

Who we are

Dr Gavin Alexander studies sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. He has written a book about the influence of the Elizabethan courtier, soldier and writer, Sir Philip Sidney, Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586-1640 (Oxford UP, 2006), and has edited an anthology of Elizabethan writing about the art of poetry, Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (Penguin Classics, 2004). Among his special interests are music in Renaissance literature and rhetoric and verse-form in all periods.

 

Dr Helen Crawforth studies and teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, literary criticism and philosophy of language. She recently completed a PhD. on the poet and critic William Empson – one of the earliest students of the Cambridge English tripos, and author of books such as Seven Types of Ambiguity. Her other interests include the linguistic philosophers Austin, author of How to do things with words, and Wittgenstein.

 

Dr Sophie Read worked formerly as a publisher. Her main research interest is the rhetoric of religious language in seventeenth-century poems and sermons, but she also works on and teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. She has written essays on puns in the work of Shakespeare and Lancelot Andrewes and on contemporary poetry, which is her other academic interest.

 

Precise details of the course

Further information on English at Cambridge

 

Part I (years 1 and 2)

Compulsory papers 1 – 5 and two of papers 6 – 8, 10.  For one of papers 2 – 4 you may submit a portfolio of coursework and for another a dissertation, instead of sitting the examination.

1) English literature and its background 1300 – 1550

2) English literature and its background 1500 – 1700

3) English literature and its background 1688 – 1847

4) English literature and its background 1830 – present

5) Shakespeare

6) Literary criticism

7) European languages and literatures

8) Language for literature, 1300 – present

10) Early medieval literature 1066 – 1350

It is also usually possible to ‘borrow’ papers from the course in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic.

 

Part II (year 3)

Compulsory papers:

1) Practical criticism

2) Tragedy

Then one dissertation plus either two of the following or a second dissertation and one of the following:

3) Chaucer

4) Dreams and visions 1066 – 1500

5) Special period 1500 – 1547

6) Special period 1847 – 1872

7a) Shakespeare in performance
7b) Literature, culture and crisis 1631-71

7c) Lyric poetry 1790-1830
7d) Modernism and the short story

8) Moralists (moral philosophy from Plato to the present)

9) History and theory of literary criticism

10) Commonwealth and postcolonial literature

11) American literature

12a) Literature and the visual arts
12b) Literature since 1979

New options are regularly introduced in papers 3 – 12.  It is also usually possible to ‘borrow’ papers from the courses in modern languages or linguistics.

 

A typical workload in years 1-2

  • one supervision (in pairs or alone), for which you write an essay of about 1,500-2,000 words most weeks
  • one class in practical criticism or critical theory (in a group of three or four), for which you write one or two short timed essays each term
  • one fortnightly class on a foreign literature or on English linguistics (in a group of six to twenty), with some preparatory homework
  • one seminar for wider study (in a group), for which you prepare one or two short oral presentations each term
  • roughly five or six lectures, chosen from any on offer that interest you
  • about thirty hours of reading and private study to complete the above
  • about half and hour a day practising skills in a foreign language or the analysis of English language

English at Christ's


Dr Gavin Alexander: literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.


Dr Sophie Read: the rhetoric of religious language in seventeenth century literature.


Dr Helen Crawforth (meaning and form in twentieth-century literature, literary criticism and philosophy of language).

College Open Days

Undergraduate Admissions Open Days 2012

Wednesday 4 July (all subjects) Booking now open
On Thursday 5 and Friday 6 July the College will be open from 11.00-5.00 in conjuction with the University Open Days. No College booking is required but you must register with the University.
Tuesday 25 September (all subjects) On-line booking will open at the end of July

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