Can anyone think of any reason why anyone studying the 20th Century novel should not be talked to about James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence?
Interesting question. For starters, there are an awful lot of highly significant authors in the 20th century, most of whom won't fit on a syllabus. There are always too many to include. You may think of some as essential, but I wouldn't say Joyce, or Lawrence particularly, are as striking an absence as Shakespeare would be from a module on Rennaissance drama. And it changes all the time - new names slowly roll in and others get shunted out.
More specifically, composing a reading list, in my experience, is always an enormous compromise - you want texts which are representative and ones which are unusual, some Big Names without which the course would be flawed but also some less well-known things which may have been unfairly neglected, and often some things which indicate cultural shifts as well as having a purely formal or 'literary' merit. And there are practcial considerations - how much have I given students to read, in what genres - Ulysses, for example, is a whacking great commitment. Sometimes there is, at least in my experience, some haggling about repesentation of women writers, queer writers, and writers of colour on the programme - but if you're not addressing those things in a course on 20th century Lit, then I'd say your understanding will be more flawed or lacking than if you're ticking off all the Big Names. There's a lot of feeling that tutors create the canon of texts as we set it, so teaching the same thing the whole time cements certain Big names and makes the chances of other writers being studied ever slimmer - I think that's problematic not only on 'non-literary' political grounds (considerations of sex, race, class, etc) but in literary terms. Many of those writers are good, and they're good in different ways which won't get investigated or acknowledged if the same few people are studied, and eventually become used as exemplars by which other authors are judged.
So I think the idea that Joyce and Lawrence were a shoo-in but have been bumped for spurious gender-related reasons is not the only explanation. It may be an element, but a more complex one than phrasing it that way suggests.
And from the other angle - personally, I would probable only teach Lawrence (if given the choice) for what he says about sex and gender. I don't find him interesting on many other fronts, but I've included stuff by him on programmes specifically about gender and writing because he's so influential and interesting.
And again, personally, I have received complaints every year about the number of women on my reading lists (never, in courses not specifically about women's writing, more than half the authors). Students believe I must be doing something a bit dodgy - a bit non-literary, motivated by some external subjective concern - if the number of women tips over about a quarter. No matter how I explain the rationale behind the list, I suspect my capacity to teach is then in doubt for them, for the whole term.
I've never been convinced that these students then complain about the number of male authors (and white authors) on the other courses - they just accept that those chaps are the writers they need to study to know literature, and anything else is a fudge. So excuse me if I'm prickly on the topic -it's an evolving subject for me, but never a neutral one, because I have to defend ot just my text selection, but my right to teach, fairly regularly.
Hope that helps - it's obviously only my experience, no idea what your tutors are up to. |
