Question:
One of the most active posters on it.cultura.lingustica.inglese, an
Italian website about English, has expressed an interest in doing a
degree in English Literature in the UK. Well, specifically, he's
expressed an intention to apply to Cambridge to do it.
I've done obvious things like suggesting he look at the English
department's web site, but Cambridge's English department web site
doesn't say much about what potential applicants should consider
reading/doing. ("read widely" is about it)
I've (obviously) suggested that this person ask questions on the internet, and contact admissions people at Cambridge (or elsewhere)
directly, but I thought I'd kick/shame him into turning up here by
starting a thread myself.
Someone else has suggested that he look at STEP papers in English.
My understanding is that only Maths asks people to do STEP at all, but
I suppose looking at the papers would give an idea of the standard
involved. He could also look at A-level papers and ask himself if he'd
be _very_ good at them.
How would a British university go about making offers to applicants
from Italy? Would an offer be made on the basis of the
grade out of sixty in the Matirita' exam? That would seem tricky,
given that the maturita' was a rather odd exam the last time I looked
at it, being based on two subjects not of the candidate's choice. If
neither of those happened to be English, the grade might not be of
much interest for admissions purposes. The maturita' might have
changed since I last paid any attention to it.
Would English Literature pose special problems for a non-native
speaker? Even having something like Cambridge English Proficiency
wouldn't necessarily help much with Shakespeare or Chaucer, I
suspect, but I freely admit that my undertstanding of what English
Literature is all about is close to nil. I know that Italian degrees
in the UK are full of Dante and Boccaccio, but perhaps if I chose to
do a degree in Italian Literature in Italy they'd expect greater
understanding of Dante and Boccaccio than a UK university would. And
greater competence in writing about them.
I'm sure someone here will know a non-native English speaker doing a
degree in English Literature in the UK. Comments/advice welcome.
Answer:
Aha! After about a year of reading a.u.a, at last, an English
Literature thread
I think the emphasis is on reading *chronologically* widely. The
unusal thing about the Cambridge course is that it has a very wide
historical sweep and only spends about one term (I think) on lit after
1800! I would guess that most wannabe English students read good 20th
and 19th century authors (Lawrence, Orwell, Austen, Dickens...)
whereas Cambridge want their applicants to have read something a bit
earlier. For example: in my first Cam interview for English, the only
thing I said that impressed one of the interviewers was that I'd read
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (he seemed less impressed when I told
him it was a translation and not in Old English, though!) and the
first of the two unseen poems I received was (I later discovered, as
the copy I saw didn't have a name to it) "Go and Catch a Falling Star"
by John Donne. The second poem was a more modern one.
I would say, read some Romantics, something Old English (e.g. Beowulf,
Sir Gawain...) and at least one Shakespeare play you have not already
studied. Oh, and (and this will be the ultimate challenge for a
non-native English speaker) some Robbie Burns.
And when I say "some", I really mean "lots of". To the point where you
can recite whole poems from memory.
Didn't you find the English department website much use? Try 'The
Virtual Classroom' which is excellent practice for learning how to
comment on previously-unseen, uncredited, undated poetry.
I would suspect that the university itself has a procedure for making
offers to foreign applicants. If the worst came to the worst, they
would probably just weight the interview a bit more.
IIRC, foreigners need extremely good results on English proficiency
tests to be allowed to study English in the UK. Obviously! But if you
were particularly skilled in the art of English literature you'd be
extremely unlucky not to ace such a test anyway.
Even having something like Cambridge English Proficiency
I would guess that, presuming the person had excellent (modern)
English language skills, Shakespeare and Chaucer would present no
further problems than they do to native English speakers! With the
former the problem is unusual sentence construction (unusual words are
almost always glossed) and the latter with unusual spellings and far
more unusual words.
but I freely admit that my undertstanding of what English
The key would be that, in Italy they'd have been reading these Italian
authors since high school, whereas non-Italian speaking candidates who
later learned the language would only have been reading these books
since about A-level time (?). Therefore this Italian chap would have
to read a lot more outside school to make up for the fact that the
average Englishman will have read and studied far more English
literature just by going to school everyday.I would have thought that the numbers of foreign students studying
English Lit would be much, much lower than studying other subjects in
the UK. If you wanted to do Italian at uni, for example, your first
port of call would most likely be Italian courses at British
universities. To do an Italian course in Italy would be far more of a
challenge. To do an Italian course at that really good Italian
university, you know, the one Ian Duncan Smith pretended to have gone
to, would be The Ultimate Challenge, the academic equivalent of that
bit at the end of Gladiators with the assault course, where they're
being chased by big steroid-enhanced men with names like "Hawk". But
good luck to him though!
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