The Literature After the Exam

The idea

The exam ends, and the literature it samples does not. This course has followed English literature from the Old English scop to the postcolonial novel: Beowulf's heroic code and the exile's elegy; Chaucer's pilgrims and their ironies; the Elizabethan sonnet and Shakespeare's stage; Donne's arguing conceits and Milton's justifying epic; Dryden and Pope's couplets and Swift's masks; the novel's rise from Defoe to Austen; the Romantics' imagination, from Blake's contraries to Keats's odes; the Victorians' monologues, doubts and great realist novels; the Modernists' fragments and streams of consciousness; and the writers after nineteen thirty, in Britain, Ireland and the former empire, who answered all of it, from Beckett's waiting tramps to Achebe's Okonkwo and Rhys's Antoinette. Along the way it taught a set of methods: how to scan a line and name a form, how to read a conceit, a monologue, a satire and a critical argument, how to date a passage and name its author, and how to read a description of a work you cannot yet quote. Those methods will outlast the questions. The best next step is the one the board recommends: read widely in a good anthology and in the major novels it excerpts, and return to the poems that held you. Read "Tintern Abbey" again in five years, as Wordsworth returned to the Wye, and the poem will have changed because you have. Then read the writers this course could only describe, now that you know where each of them stands.