i know, came as a surprise to me, too. i’m (minor) public school scum, and served my undergrad time at one of the posher oxford colleges; that said, my subject year was quite evenly split, and all but one of us took the theory option. i was the only one who kept it up in any way after that year. my current employer uses a singularly weird structure for theory papers, which means that while the entire first year take a seriously watered-down paper with a theoretical element, very few actually do an entire term-long pure theory course, and even fewer take it for finals, so we’re all teaching beckett and eliot to make ends meet.
it’s worth noting that the public school theory kids don’t tend to be hugely posh; they’re upper-middle, rather than upper class, if that’s a fair judgement to make, and whilst i think it’s fair to say they’re more likely to attempt adventurous arguments, they tend to be the more nerdy-but-cool types; none’re what i’d class as arrogant.
it’s perhaps worth noting what happens with modern drama, since i think the situation’s analogous. i was sent three extremely good student by a college, including an old etonian, a man one from one of the london independents, and a woman one from a northern comprehensive. for the tutorial, both men wrote extensively on beckett, pinter and sarah kane, taking very abstract, violence-and-presence routes, with a little hint of politics, while the woman went down a feminist-marxist route, writing on pinter and osbourne, with a fair bit of historical background thrown in; in the class at the beginning of the week, dealing with brecht, the men’d gone in for alienation on an abstract, formal level, while the woman’d been interested in the historical circumstances surrounding the composition of the plays. even removing gender influence from the mix, and the slight possibility that they knew what i’d like from previous contact and the preparatory reading and would’ve written differently for someone else, this is pretty typical of the way schooling seems to influence approach: independent schools encourage more abstract thought, while the state institutions emphasise the importance of historical context.
this seems to mean that the few pure theory kids we get tend to line up on private/state lines with depressing regularity, with the public schoolers going for deconstruction, and the state school pupils heading straight from classical marxism and feminism. the only real exception seems to be the post-colonial stuff, and i’d put this down to the multicultural stream in GCSE, AS- and A-levels. bit of a bastard, that, since PoCo’s the one thing i’ve never really got up to teaching standard... |
