The Record 2009 - Keble College - University of Oxford

The College at Large
critical thinking and writing which were thrust upon me when I
arrived in Leeds. I do not believe that I would have learned the
necessary principles and practice from the narrow specialization
of a doctoral programme; they were taught me — on the run, so
to speak — by a slightly older colleague, the Coleridge scholar
J P (Peter) Mann, to whom I owe many debts and with whom
I remained on the closest terms of friendship until his death at
the age of 78. I was six years in post before I published my first
academic paper (on Ben Jonson’s Sejanus and Catiline), a length of
time that would not now be tolerated. I am here contending that
this was a more testing apprenticeship than would have been
provided by working on a doctorate, its topic creamed from the
shallows of my twenty-one-year-young ignorance and vanity. I
was well into my forties before I achieved a general breadth of
knowledge and a trained sensibility sufficient for undertaking
scholarly and critical work with the necessary degree of depth
and clarity.
During my final period at Boston University, I co-founded,
together with Professor Sir Christopher Ricks, the Editorial
Institute. Our chief motive stemmed from our reaction to that
general tendency of graduate degrees in English and American
Studies, to which I have already sketched my response. We
shared the view (I believe) that in the past quarter of a century
too much emphasis has been placed on theoretical methods of
approach, coupled — oxymoronically — with the cultivation of
a wild subjectivity of interpretative animus (by which I mean,
to put it crudely, the exploitation of a perceived rectitude in the
chosen author(s) for having anticipated the thesis-writer’s third
remove weltanschauung or an attack on the author(s) for having
failed to anticipate all that the student takes to be self-evidently
‘relevant’).
Christopher and I envisaged a programme (or program) in
which graduate degree candidates would edit, with full textual
and historical apparatus, a work chosen in consultation with
the directors. My own emphasis was mainly on examples of
seventeenth-century philosophy and theology, though I also
directed MA work in twentieth-century studies. It seemed to
us that this period of graduate work should be an opportunity
for students to establish a solid sense of period: a grasp of its
politics, economics, philosophy, theology, technology, as well
as of its own particular or peculiar literary conventions. This
would be for many their first opportunity to acquire a grasp of
such essentials.
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