Literature in Oxfordshire / World Campus / Spring table of contents / UMass Magazine home page
They were walking along a lane in Oxfordshire, fifteen humans and a dog named Sarah. It was hot, their shoes were dusty, and the prehistoric tomb they were headed for was farther away than they'd thought. Still, they were undismayed. Halfway through their six-week program, the participants in the UMass/Oxford Summer Seminar were reveling in two of the many pleasures of living and studying in Trinity College, Oxford: the green beauties of the English countryside, and ambulatory conversation.
One walker remarked that "the talk tonight is about the BBC." (The outing was taking place on a Wednesday, the day of the weekly formal dinner and guest lecture.) This provoked lively conversation about British TV. Meanwhile, students just back from a trip to Dorset-Thomas Hardy's home county, and the setting for his novels-cheerfully boasted about the fourteen miles they had hiked with UMass English professor and seminar director, David Paroissien.
Then attention veered to the White Horse of Uffington: an ancient and mysterious earthwork, visible from miles around, carved into the Oxfordshire hillside where St. George is supposed to have slain his dragon.
"Probably Celtic from about 300 B.C.," remarked Carolyne Larrington, the seminar's instructor for "Myths and Legends of the British Isles," "though someone recently suggested a date of 1,000 B.C."
"That would make it pre-Celtic," observed Luke Goldstein, a history and legal studies major from New Bedford.
"Yes, indeed," agreed Larrington. "There have always been rival claims. In fact, some scholars think it's a cat."
As this view was contested, the walkers' destination loomed into sight: Wayland's Smithy, a large tomb-mound with stone-framed entrance and forbidding, ten-foot fence of slabs of rock. Sarah explored the potential of these while her owner, Dr. Larrington, explored that of Wayland, the mythic Nordic smith. "Smiths are always important in legends," she noted. "Why is that?"
"Because," proposed Goldstein, "the best smith makes the best weapons."
Craig Deininger, a graduate student in creative writing, had another suggestion. "Because their craft is a metaphor for transmutation," he said. "Smiths release the metal from the ore. They can transform."
In the next day's tutorial, the students explored Deininger's idea and others. Such interplay between countryside and classroom, between experience and inspiration, is exactly what's wanted, says Paroissien: "Field trips make real the landscape the students are reading about."
The long Dorset hike, for instance, "brought alive the reality of nineteenth-century life, when most people got from Point A to Point B on foot. In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Tess walked twice fourteen miles and thought nothing of it." Excursions to see the Royal Shakespeare Company perform in Stratford or London are another occasion for learning: some of the students have never seen an Elizabethan play, let alone an Elizabethan-style production.
These sorts of experiences complement a variety of courses. Seminar participants choose one four-credit, six-week course from such topics as "Shakespeare's Comedies and Tragi-Comedies," "Victorian Thinkers," "Comparative Legal Institutions," or "Issues in Anglo-American Relations. The seminar also offers three-credit, three-week courses on writers such as Hardy and Jane Austen.
Begun in 1966, the Oxford seminar is the brainchild of Ernest Hofer, now a professor emeritus of English at UMass but then assistant head of his department. Having spent two years at Oxford as a graduate student, Hofer wanted to create a program "that would offer the experience of learning in England but give a grade acceptable in American universities. Our program was the first to do that." The program Hofer directed for twenty-six years attracts not only English majors from across the country, says his successor David Paroissien, but students from other disciplines as well. "Many people in the hard sciences have a really strong commitment to the humanities," Paroissien remarks.
Nancy Lape is one such: a chemical engineering major at UMass, she loves English but can't take many electives during the regular school year. "The summer seminar is my chance," says Lape. Last summer was her chance to take "Contemporary British Women Writers," which, like most Oxford classes, took place in her tutor's rooms.
The morning after the White Horse trip found Lape climbing the stairs to Professor Jenny Newman's panelled rooms. There she joined other students perched on comfortable armchairs or the chaise lounge while Newman set about the tutor's task of eliciting ideas. "We've been talking about power," said Newman, holding up Fay Weldon's Life and Loves of A She Devil.. "What are you finding here?"
A spirited discussion of Weldon's novel led to a more general give and take about power. Lape defined the issue this way: "In these novels, women gain power to defeat the patriarchy, but that means they are focusing on male power." Katia Venator-Santiago, a legal studies major, picked up on Lape's comment: "Maybe that's wanting to be like men rather than saying 'I want my own role.'"
On the other hand, observed Newman, "Remember Union Street? There the author is impatient with the notion that women have some mystical, 'female' power. For her, power is power."
Lape then made a distinction: "Power is energy. Dominance is stepping on someone else."
With this thought, class ended. "Please come and give me moral support this afternoon," Newman said smiling as students filed out. The novelist would be reading from Finding Out, her novel-in-progress about a couple of nuns going to university in Liverpool, the city where she teaches for most of the year.
All the faculty of the Oxford seminar are, like Jenny Newman, British academics. Many are fellows of Oxford colleges. Along with small class size-none larger than eight students-a cornerstone of Ernest Hofer's conception of the Oxford program was the opportunity to study with British teachers.
And so it remains. According to Paroissien, himself British-born, the practice "exposes our students to different pedagogical assumptions. English faculty are trained to operate in small groups and foster an atmosphere where there's a real exchange of views."
American students invariably respond positively, Paroissien added, and so they did when we inquired. Lape: "Meeting your teacher and being able to really talk with her is wonderful." Goldstein, of Carolyne Larrington: "I felt more in touch with her. She teaches you as an equal."
As the seminar he founded moves into its fourth decade, Ernest Hofer reflects on how much it has meant to him-and to others, he says. "I'm constantly getting letters from people telling me it changed their lives." David Paroissien asserts that the seminar "just gets better every year." And Luke Goldstein, looking back on his summer, sums up: "Trinity, Oxford-it was amazing. It made me so enthusiastic about learning."
-Claire Hopley
World Campus |
| Outside the International Programs office in Hills South is a most inspiring wall map. On it, hundreds of brightly colored round-headed pins represent all the places in the world where our students are studying, and all of the places outside the U.S. from which they come. The pins for out-ward-bound scholars have blue and enamel heads, and each stands for as many as ten students. There are astonishing blooms of blue in Europe, where the two study abroad prgrams featured on this page are based, as well as in Mexico and Central America and the Asian Pacific Rim. There are also brave little blue flags flying in Australia, Africa, South America, and Central Asia and the Near East. |
It's quite a sight, and we wish it would reproduce at magazine scale. In lieu of that, here's a list of Blue-Pin Countries as of May, 1997. Australia |
On the even years, in the summer, forty to sixty students take themselves across the Atlantic to the south of France. There, under the guidance of UMass faculty members, among the gardens and towers and halls of "La Napoule," a fabulous castle overlooking the Mediterranean, they study art. They sketch, they paint, they confer with their professors, confide in their journals, and laugh and argue with each other. And should the walls of the chateau seem a trifle confining, the beach too bright, there are day-trips to museums, Roman ruins, medieval villages, and the vantage point from which Cezanne painted Mont St. Victoire, as well as a week or so in Italy, touring Florence, Lucca, Pisa, and Siena.
Believe it or not, the students work hard. They may pass the afternoon under a beach umbrella, but most likely they do so with a pencil or brush in hand. Every morning, for their 10 a.m. critiques, they must produce artwork made the day before. Unproductive students could find themselves on a plane headed back over the Atlantic. Everyone is required to keep an artist's journal. If the ones on exhibit at Herter Art Gallery last fall are typical, the journals are taken seriously as a means of learning how to see and to render what ones sees, and to write about those processes. The students can and do request custom seminars, on topics like portraiture, landscape painting, postmodernism or the use of alternative pigments, which the faculty pull together from the books in their suitcases and the castle library.
Three miles from Cannes, the Chateau de la Napoule sits on the site of a Roman fortress, which probably replaced a Phoenician settlement, and was itself replaced by a medieval castle. By the early years of this century, when wealthy American expatriates Henry and Marie Clews bought the chateau, it was tumbling into the ocean. Henry, a sculptor, imported Italian masons to restore and embellish it with his own designs; Marie took charge of the gardens. Today the chateau operates under the auspices of a foundation established by Marie to foster artistic exchange between France and the United States.
La Napoule has been home to the UMass European Summer Art Program for the last ten years, according to program director Paul Berube. Berube says La Napoule is not just for the prodigy, but for the average student, for art and non-art majors alike. Aside from the nine to twelve credits that students can earn, what the six or seven week program gives students is the opportunity to devote hours each day to working on art; to experience a place dear to artists since cave painting was in vogue; and to study in a non-collegiate setting. Within the simple framework provided, the students determine their work schedules, their focus, their goals. They also get to chat up their professors (Berube, Michael Coblyn, and Frank Ozereko last summer) over dinner. Usually the faculty bring their families, so the program offers students a real sense of a home away from home--and a chance to spot exalted profs sneaking down to the kitchen in their bathrobes for their first cup of morning coffee.
In short, if ever there was a summer study program that made you wish you could do it all over again, La Napoule is it.
-Faye S. Wolfe
