{"id":4612,"date":"2026-10-08T15:36:47","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T15:36:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=4612"},"modified":"2026-10-08T15:38:26","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T15:38:26","slug":"on-the-appreciation-of-foreign-cultures-and-why-take-a-degree-in-english-studies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2026\/10\/08\/on-the-appreciation-of-foreign-cultures-and-why-take-a-degree-in-english-studies\/","title":{"rendered":"ON THE APPRECIATION OF FOREIGN CULTURES (AND WHY TAKE A DEGREE IN ENGLISH STUDIES)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I based my last lecture for my elective subject on audiovisual adaptations and production design on Sarah Cardwell\u2019s volume Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel<\/em> (Manchester UP, 2002). In what must have been originally her PhD dissertation, Cardwell vindicates the specific aesthetics of television and focuses on four case studies: Brideshead Revisited<\/em> (1981), Pride and Prejudice<\/em> (1995), The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders<\/em> (1996) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall<\/em> (1996). The first two are absolute landmarks in the history of British TV and of audiovisual adaptation, while the latter are well-made products that have not survived their time. To be honest, I have not seen Moll Flanders<\/em>, and I only know Tenant<\/em> because I\u2019ve taught the novel many years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brideshead Revisited<\/em>, an 11-hours-long, 9-episode miniseries, was broadcast in Spain between January and March 1983 on the public channel now known as La 2 (it was then TVE2). It was immensely successful, being later dubbed into Catalan and issued on DVD. It is currently available from Filmin. As Cardwell reports, it was feared that the slow pace of Brideshead<\/em>, made to be as close as possible to the original novel following a classic fidelity criterion, would cause it to flop. Actually, the opposite happened: watching Brideshead<\/em> apparently accustomed audiences to a different kind of narrative tension, and with its sumptuous production design (by Peter Phillips) and great cast (including Laurence Olivier and newcomer Jeremy Irons) the series captivated the hearts and minds of an unexpectedly large international audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reading about Brideshead Revisited<\/em> in Cardwell\u2019s book brought happy memories of a time when I was younger. I watched the series aged 16 and was fascinated by it, naively believing that it portrayed an England that, somehow, still existed. I don\u2019t quite mean just the England of the novel, which is set between 1923 and 1945, but the heir of that England, the nation capable of producing series like Brideshead<\/em>. I was a very silly, romantic teen then, with a poor understanding of class differences, and Waugh\u2019s subtle story about an upper-class Catholic family facing its decadence in WWII England seemed to me exquisite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charles Ryder, the narrator (the novel are his memoirs), and his relationships with the Flyte children (first his Oxford friend Sebastian, later Sebastian\u2019s sister Julia), touched something in me and in many spectators that other English series had not awakened. The nostalgia that dominated the narrative, and Charles\u2019s realization that the war had ended for ever the Flytes\u2019 privileged lifestyle, were so persuasive that we failed to notice how snobbish the whole concept was. Upstairs, Downstairs<\/em> (1971-75, seen in Spain in 1981-82), the main inspiration for Downton Abbey<\/em> (2010-15), had already exposed the fundamental snobbery of the English upper classes, but even so Brideshead<\/em> revived a romanticized view of England that excluded any social criticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I shared these memories, in a very basic way, with my students, describing to them my impression that the cohort that graduated in English Philology back in the 1980s were under the combined influx of Brideshead<\/em>, the Ivory-Merchant films, Camden Town fashions, British pop music and TV comedies, rather than English Literature. Then I asked them about their choice to take a BA degree in English Studies and to my surprise they mentioned current Britain rather than the USA as their main cultural influence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A student told me that the USA are no doubt the main influence in their lives but that their preferences lean towards Britain, even though, I\u2019ll add, today\u2019s UK has very little to do with the UK of my 1980s youth. I once had the idea of running a survey among the English philologists of my age group to learn what exactly pushed us to pursue that specific degree, but I never managed to find the energy and the time. I wonder what the results of a similar survey among our students would show, at the UAB, in Spain and even all over the territories where English is not an official language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The students mentioned British pop music as a major cultural influence, and I was much surprised to discover that they had been doing what I myself did as an undergrad: take the lyrics of favourite songs and translate them. I thought that was a generational experience connected to the time when LPs dominated the music industry and the spacious inner covers carried the printed lyrics. Well, no, it turns out that the interest in lyrics continues today. Of course, one can translate lyrics of songs from all nationalities, but my students insisted that they were into British, rather than American music. Harry Styles trumps Taylor Swift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What ended up irritating me very much is the realization that our syllabus has not changed since my time: I was very much frustrated as an undergrad to see that the syllabus was all about Literature, excluding cinema, TV and music. I\u2019ve been the first person in my Department to teach courses exclusive focused on these cultural manifestations, but if I stopped nobody else would take over from me. I discussed this problem with a colleague, who defended the need to continue focusing on Literature, but at this point in my career this seems to me utterly ridiculous. The problem is that we can\u2019t get rid of the tradition by which English Studies, as taught here in Spain, must mix Language and Literature. Students are missing today in the degree the same learning experiences I missed forty years ago, and I have not managed to convince my colleagues that the syllabus must be changed. In this sense, I\u2019ll leave UAB as I found it. Amazing!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leaving this matter aside, we will also have to face sooner or later the loss of prestige of the civilizations we are so focused on. When English Philology was inaugurated in Spain, in the 1950s by the Universidad de Salamanca, the UK was fast becoming a post-imperial power (India got its independence in 1947) while the United States had just conquered world leadership in hard contest with the USSR. Now that leadership is being contested by both Russia and China (the strongest contender) and has been much undermined by the erratic policies of President Donald Trump and his MAGA cabinet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The UK flourished in the 1980s under Maggie Thatcher\u2019s mandate as PM (1979-1990) and was at its coolest under PM Tony Blair (1997-2007). However, in the last ten years, that is to say, since Brexit, it has become a political quagmire, and it is not doing culturally as well as it used to do. Perhaps with the exception of music, though its artists are not as appealing as they used to be. I\u2019m in fact at a loss to name the top ones beyond Charlie XCX (yes, I know, Adele, Ed Sheeran, Dua Lippa, Harry Styles, Sam Smith\u2026). Ah, yes, well, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Oasis, Gorillaz, Muse, but they\u2019ve been around for so long and sound so stale\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arguably, the growing interest in areas other than the UK and the USA thanks to Postcolonial and Transnational Studies is the only possible response to the loss of prestige of the two nations. Yet, although the literatures in English found around the world may motivate many undergrad and postgrad students to become researchers, I can\u2019t think of any eighteen-year-old taking English Studies out of a great love of Caribbean, Australian, Canadian or Irish literature. In fact, it\u2019s hard for me to imagine any eighteen-year-old choosing English Studies because they have already read the Bront\u00ebs or Poe and are in love with UK or US literature. The series are no doubt the main cultural product young persons consume in English, together with the movies and, yes, the songs. At the same time, I\u2019m not sure I quite understand what students who have never read in English expect to find in our degree, since we totally ignore what they do like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I understand that Literature gives us a structure which can resist the vagaries of academic fashions and the downfall of the UK and the USA as world leaders. There is, however, a whole world beyond Literature which our students know nothing about. Even the Literature we teach privileges the novel heavily and mainly ignores genres as important as drama (except for Shakespeare). It\u2019s for me rather absurd that we train students in writing academic prose while they know nothing about how a film or a series is made. Or a book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I\u2019m sorry, but I find it rather preposterous that we teach them about the literatures of the past from the Middle Ages to the 20th<\/sup> centuries, without making sure they minimally understand the 21st<\/sup> century, when all of them were born. We get to the present only in the fourth year and we only started to do so two years ago. The UK and the USA they know about have so very little to do with the UK and the USA we teach them about that their confusion must be monumental. It\u2019s not really my job to think of an alternative degree, but I marvel that we\u2019re so resistant to change. Well, actually, I don\u2019t: we\u2019re all of us protecting our areas of research beyond what students might need. My colleagues will tell me that I\u2019m asking for a larger presence of the present in the syllabus because my area is contemporary Cultural Studies. And they would be right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A colleague who teaches German Literature told me not so long ago that the philological impulse is dead, and we will progressively see our Language and Literature degrees die. He may have been bitter because our German Studies minor is in its last throes after years of being successful. In his view, the impulse to learn about a foreign culture is being channelled through degrees such as International Relationships, a degree in which learning languages is seen as a bridge to the present, not necessarily the past, of other cultures. He might be right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The way I see it the problem is caused by a quintessential disfunction: we, the teachers, are stubbornly offering students a traditional, pre-Cultural Studies view of English-language culture, narrowed down to its literature, as if nothing else existed. This is why, in the long run, students, whether they prefer the UK or the USA, will abandon us as they have abandoned other second-language philologies, most spectacularly French. We feel smug because English still is the world\u2019s lingua franca and its competitors (Russian, Chinese, Arab) far more difficult to master. That might change, though. Perhaps what might kill us in the end is the instant ability to translate languages in personal intercommunication using AI, something many current apps can already do. We\u2019ll see (or not\u2026).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sorry about the rambling\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I based my last lecture for my elective subject on audiovisual adaptations and production design on Sarah Cardwell\u2019s volume Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel (Manchester UP, 2002). In what must have been originally her PhD dissertation, Cardwell vindicates the specific aesthetics of television and focuses on four case studies: Brideshead Revisited (1981), Pride […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1137,11,1093,16,18,22,36],"tags":[1540,92,1535,1541,1542],"class_list":["post-4612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemporary-literature","category-cultural-studies","category-english-studies","category-film-studies","category-general","category-literary-studies","category-tv-series","tag-adaptations-series","tag-ba-degrees","tag-brideshead-revisited","tag-uk-prestige","tag-usa-prestige"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4612"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4613,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4612\/revisions\/4613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}