{"id":640,"date":"2019-05-24T11:22:02","date_gmt":"2019-05-24T11:22:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/?p=640"},"modified":"2019-05-24T11:22:02","modified_gmt":"2019-05-24T11:22:02","slug":"early-days-with-the-professor-of-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/early-days-with-the-professor-of-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Early days with the Professor of Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Dennis Walder<\/a>, Emeritus Professor of Literature\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I used to travel to Walton Hall for meetings I was fortunate to have Arnold Kettle, the Head of Department and sole Professor, sometimes invite me stay in the rambling old Kettle house in Aspley Guise.\u00a0 After an evening discussing the politics of the day, we would listen to Arnold\u2019s favourite opera singers, as he produced disk after disk from his vast collection.\u00a0 He was hugely knowledgeable about opera (as is his elder son, Guardian<\/em> columnist Martin Kettle).\u00a0 At breakfast he would have two newspapers beside him \u2013 The Morning Star<\/em> and The Times<\/em>.\u00a0 The first time I noticed this I enquired – Why The Times<\/em>? \u2018You need to know what the opposition is thinking,\u2019 he replied.<\/p>\n

Arnold Kettle was a prominent Communist, and knew he would never be appointed to a chair in a conventional university such as Leeds, where he had been Senior Lecturer for many years despite his eminence as a literary critic. His students there included Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong\u2019o, and it is striking that just prior to the OU he was briefly Chair of the English Department at the University of East Africa, Dar-es-Salaam. A few years ago at the University of Namibia I met one of his former students who recalled how Kettle had brought local African texts into their curriculum for the first time. \u2018We are doing the same,\u2019 he said proudly.<\/p>\n

Kettle was the OU\u2019s first Professor of Literature \u2013 not of English.\u00a0 He chose the broader title for the Department too, believing literary study should range more widely than the standard English Department fare.\u00a0 \u2018You cannot say you know about the novel if you haven\u2019t read Balzac and Flaubert and Tolstoy and Turgenev, \u2018 he would say, \u2018in translation if need be, as well as Dickens, the Brontes and James.\u2019 He set up what became our massively popular full credit 19th<\/sup> Century Novel course, with an appropriate range of writers and issues. \u00a0And helped me to introduce texts from the former colonial territories into our curriculum, despite opposition.<\/p>\n

Another early appointment, Brian Stone, a drama specialist, was a war veteran with an artificial leg, whose politics could not have been further from Arnold\u2019s.\u00a0 Brian provided the other side of the dialectic, remarked Arnold. There were many disagreements, not just between them. But everyone\u2019s commitment to the idea of the course team, the most original and challenging departure from how conventional universities created and taught their courses, was profound. Nick Furbank, from King\u2019s College Cambridge (E.M Forster\u2019s friend and biographer), and Graham Martin from Bedford College London, were the next appointments, and a formidable group they were.\u00a0 The emphasis initially was on more senior, experienced academics to translate their teaching into the new format, although soon there was also a young appointee, Cicely Havely, fresh from Oxford.<\/p>\n

Course Team Meetings often ended up, as we used to say, with \u2018blood on the floor\u2019 \u2013 especially when creating the first multi- and interdisciplinary courses. But, as I discovered after my appointment, you soon got used to colleagues from other discipline areas critiquing your work, and the result was plain to see, as we began to come across well-thumbed copies of our course materials in other university libraries, despite the unusual A5 format of the \u2018units\u2019, and the initial disdain of other institutions. My own PhD supervisor at Edinburgh University seemed embarrassed to confess he was taking a bunch of our materials with him when he went to the States to teach a semester. \u2018So well written,\u2019 he muttered.<\/p>\n

Initially drawing external examiners from established chairs elsewhere ensured growing acceptance of our \u2018standards\u2019, although there were some surprises on both sides.\u00a0 At one exam board I was chairing on the 19th<\/sup> Century Novel Course the external reluctantly agreed that a paper was a First, adding, \u2018but it\u2019s not a transcendental<\/em> First!\u2019<\/p>\n

In any case, Kettle did not believe that we as teachers of literature should be concerned overmuch with firsts.\u00a0 As he said to me once, \u2018The students who are going to get firsts can look after themselves; what we should be concerned with is teaching the majority, who will not get Firsts.\u2019<\/p>\n

Kettle was wise and subtle, and, as a chair, would keep his comments to a minimum.\u00a0 His expression was often hard to read, which could be intimidating. So too was the fact that he had a phenomenal memory.\u00a0 He could on occasion be cutting: once when a distinguished BBC colleague who always arrived late and with a hefty bag slung over his shoulder, came into a course team meeting with the usual commotion, Arnold turned to him: \u2018Come for the night, Alasdair?\u2019<\/p>\n

He had a healthy skepticism about how much you could teach literature through television.\u00a0 The real work was done through the printed materials, textbooks and the marking of student essays. His own academic background was relatively traditional, through Cambridge and Yale \u2013 although his Yale PhD was unusual in those days.\u00a0 I once asked him about his Yale experience, and he said that while there he met the one person who had left the most lasting impression upon him of anyone he had come across:\u00a0 the great bass baritone singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dennis Walder, Emeritus Professor of Literature\u00a0 When I used to travel to Walton Hall for meetings I was fortunate to have Arnold Kettle, the Head of Department and sole Professor, sometimes invite me stay in the rambling old Kettle house … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-department-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":641,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions\/641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}