Thursday, November 19, 2015

Why don’t literature students read any real literature before college?


There was an article with the title above, published some time ago.

It provoked the following:

My first Lecturer in English at university was someone who had just returned to India after completing his studies at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar - Dr Brijraj Singh.

As a result of the first tutorial essay that a fellow-student and I turned in (tutorials in those days had two students to one teacher), he discovered that neither my colleague nor I knew anything about the foundations of English Literature, which are the Bible and the Greek Classics.

So guess our first reading assignments, which we had to complete in a week each.

Dr Singh went on to become also a Fulbright Scholar.

A great man and an inspiring teacher, without whose instruction I would still be much more of an ignoramus than I am.


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