Studying Literature in NUS High: An Account

'Studying Literature in NUS High: An Account'

Annabeth Leow

Hello, delicious friends.

In this post, I will be talking a little about studying English Literature in NUS High School.

For those who are considering taking a Major in English Literature (because Honours modules are not available for Humanities, Arts & Music), or for those who are wondering if they should apply to NUS High to study Literature, there are two things you should know:

a) Very, very few people take Literature. You are almost guaranteed to feel alone sometimes if you have a serious interest in the subject. Physics geeks tend to be the most represented cliques here.

b) We are a very rigorous Literature curriculum, with a wide scope of material and extremely dedicated teachers. (So you can go ahead and be a lit geek anyway.)

It's like a good news-bad news flip, isn't it?

At present, the system is such that, at Year 1 and 2, English Literature is part of the English Language syllabus, while Geography and History are combined into Integrated Humanities. At Year 3, students may pick one subject to follow, while at Year 5, they decide whether they want to continue with it as a subject major, or to do triple sciences, or to do only three subject majors (one maths + two science). Keep this in mind, because I will be describing my experience with the old system, where we could take an unlimited number of Humanities modules up till Year 4.

(Steph and the Class of 2010 could probably tell you about the even older system, with Critical Electives &c., which was replaced two or three years back. Yes, I know it looks like our Humanities syllabus is constantly in flux, but I am assured that the changes made a couple weeks ago - not changes to the structure of the system, but to the course content - will be the last changes for quite a while.)

I entered the school in 2006, and took in that first year the core modules in all three Humanities subjects. I took Introduction to Literature; From Colony to Nation; and People, Place and Nation. I also took an enrichment module in Literature (Reading Narnia, which was about children's literature). The next year, I took the History and Geography core modules (one on the history of Southeast Asia excluding Brunei, and the other on foundational physical geography), as well as the core Literature module (Drama) and an elective (Animal Farm). In Year 3, I took all three Humanities subjects again - The Modern World Between the Wars; Human Population Dynamics; and The Novel I. Last year, I studied The Novel II and Modern Poetry, while this year I've taken Postcolonialism in Literature, and Gender Studies.

From this you can see the immense breadth of our school's Humanities curriculum, a quality that has not been curtailed even with all the changes to the structure of the modular system, and even despite the subsuming of English Literature into the Department of English Language last year. This is, I honestly believe, the strongest point of our school's system - not so much its flexibility, which no longer exists, but its wonderful scope. Rather than sticking with one fixed text to be covered in a year, as so many mainstream schools do, we learn across topics, genres, and movements.

Let me attempt to elaborate by giving an overview of each English Literature module I've studied.

Introduction to Literature

At 101 level - and, I assure you, we were very much at 101 level - we received a grounding in many of the techniques used in literature. This is where we learnt onomatopoeia, the difference between metaphor and simile, the use of metonymy, and so forth. Basic stuff, really. We also read works in short fiction, poetry, and drama. It was quite simple, looking back, but the examples given in the module were very diverse. Among other things, we read James Hurst's The Scarlet Ibis, Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, Dylan Thomas's Do not go Gentle into that Good Night, and Do not stand at my grave and weep. I also remember extracts from Macbeth ('To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow…') and from Eliot's Rhapsody on a Windy Night (which I would revisit many years later).

(If we read Poe… looking back, I wonder whether it would have been amusing or not to read Lovecraft's Shadow Over Innsmouth? Then again, perhaps Year 1 is too young to learn about allegory, racism, and anti-miscegenation bigots.)

Reading Narnia

As the name of the module states quite plainly, this was a module on C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. There were some deficits in the module - I don't think twelve- or thirteen-year-olds, from a variety of religious traditions, and at an age where critical thinking skills are still shaky, are ready to examine Lewis's trilemma ('Lord, Liar, or Lunatic'). In any case, I cannot judge, because this module was never run again. But Narnia was used as a springboard to study other things, too: we looked at children's literature as a whole (this is where I learnt the word 'didacticism'), we did some basic re-mything, and we were encouraged to write a novella aimed at children. I am horrified to reread what I wrote at that tender age, and I imagine the same goes for the other students in that class, but there you go - it was enriching and an exercise in creativity.

Drama

The only practical module I have taken, because the Shakespeare module was cancelled during my course of studies. We did do the Bard, of course, to an extent - I remember we had a workshop where we were divided into groups of seven and told to convey the seven ages of man from As You Like It. We learnt terms to analyse drama - anagnorisis, hubris, harmartia - and we went to two plays: an amateur production of Macbeth put on by the United World College drama troupe (the less said about that the better), and Pamela Oei in Titoudao. The course instructor offered to take us to see Miller's Crucible too; we turned down her offer. (Three years later I would see a semi-professional performance of The Crucible, shivering in my seat, and wonder whether I had missed out on a great opportunity when younger.) In any case, on the self-directed learning front, we also had to use Machinima to construct a contained film piece (the software we used was The Movies, fwiw), and had to adapt and present Haresh Sharma's More (the principal work studied in that module).

Animal Farm

An elective, but an examinable module. In the course of reading Orwell's Animal Farm, we delved quite a bit into history and philosophy. I remember watching not just the Animal Farm cartoon (paid for by the CIA!) while eating KFC, but also the Ben Kingsley Gandhi to learn about oppression and empire. The handouts distributed in that class exposed us to the works of many prominent Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers, such as Descartes and Paine, and of course Marx and Engels, and Aristotle and several other Greeks for good measure. The teacher was the same lady who taught Drama, and we had many bricolage days when we role-played scenes from the book. The point about control of the media under authoritarianism was reinforced by our project, which was to create in-character multimedia presentations about life on the Farm. My group was the press; there were, if I recall correctly, also Internet podcasts and fora, and radio. Test questions in this module included 'To what extent is Molly the only truly free animal in the book?' We also had to discuss the significance of the cat. I still don't know precisely what the cat means, because symbolism is in the eye of the beholder!

The Novel I

This module was the closest I have ever been to studying English Literature as it is done in the mainstream education system. There was plenty of sit-down thinking, and we were taught mainly the origin and evolution of the English Novel (thank you, Defoe; we had to suffer through extracts from Robinson Crusoe). We principally read Pride and Prejudice (Austen) and Hard Times (Dickens). Our projects entailed researching the origins of different genres; the guys, quite predictably, all did Science Fiction, but our group chose Gothic Romance and it was well worth it. (It brought my heart back to du Maurier's Rebecca, after all.)

The Novel II

By this point, the number of students studying Literature had been whittled down to three. It's the loss of the other students, though, because this was a very do-as-you-please module, the learning was very self-directed, and we looked at postmodernism, moving slightly into issues of gender, race, and nation. The two texts studied were Auster's The Music of Chance and Coetzee's Disgrace. The former provoked a lot of discussion on absurdism, and though we were just three of us, our interpretations differed wildly. Who says group-think permeates Singapore school culture? We could get into right arguments over whether or not Nashe had a conscious or unconscious death-wish. The exam questions included one that went along the lines of 'Michael Kochin argues that Disgrace depicts “a world without hope”. Discuss.'

Modern Poetry

Accretion occurred, and two students were left. It was slightly awkward, because the module was not focused on as happy-go-lucky a subject as postmodernism, with its lack of answers. Rather, it was all about the Great War in Europe (we read war poetry, including Sassoon), and its effect on English poetry. The two writers studied were Eliot (Rhapsody on a Windy Night; The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock; and The Waste Land) and Yeats (The Lake Isle of Innisfree; Sailing to Byzantium; and some of his more esoteric myth-poems). Because there was Yeats, we also studied a little about Irish nationalism, and would have watched The Wind that Shakes the Barley if not for a lack of time. The examination piece was The Second Coming.

Postcolonialism

All my classmates had departed to study science, so this was my first module alone. It was a little lonely, and I have to warn those who plan on studying Literature that this may be their fate (or, considering how many of the Class of 2012 are taking Literature, maybe not). I studied a lot of postcolonial theory - Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, mainly, although I wish I had discovered Chimamanda Adichie at that point in time. Among the multitude of texts I studied: Orwell's Shooting an Elephant; Kipling and Blake's colonial poems (The White Man's Burden and The Little Black Boy); Hwee Hwee Tan's Mammon Inc. (a book I do not recommend if you do not have much fortitude to stomach the oversaturation of pop culture references); Gopal Baratham's Sundowner; Andrew Koh's Orang cina bukan cina; Merle Collins's No Dialects Please; John Agard's Listen Mr Oxford Don; Wena Poon's The Man Who Was Afraid of ATMs and Alfian Sa'at's The Merlion. My project was a study of Edwin Thumboo's canon, so imagine how excited I was when he came to visit our school! The exam question was on Claire Tham's Lee.

Gender Studies

The most recent module, and also very good fun. Those who know me will know I have a strong interest in intersectional, third-wave feminism (look up intersectionality in Mapping the Margins, Crenshawe 1989), so I really enjoyed this class. It started with Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour and Susan Glaspell's A Jury of Her Peers, continued with Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, detoured into meta - de Beauvoir's 'Woman as Other' essay from The Second Sex and Rich's Compulsory Heterosexuality - and got really underway with the module project, which was an International Baccaleaurate-style extended essay - four thousand words on a self-chosen topic, which, for me, was 'Subverting the canon in feminist fanfiction'. *grin* Yeah, all things said, this was a pretty cool module. Examination questions included looking at gender presentation in Wilde, and relating either Carol Ann Duffy's Standing Female Nude or Alice Walker's The Color Purple to de Beauvoir's theories.

Gosh, what a wall of text! If you've made it this far, I congratulate you for your passion for lit. I hope that my recollections have given you an overview of what studying English Literature is like in NUS High School.

The methods and texts used are really diverse, so even if you don't like one particular approach, you are quite likely to enjoy the rest of your time in class. Also, the teachers in the department are also friendly and very approachable, so if your interest in literature exceeds your ability to write critical responses, or whatever, they will gladly help you, I'm sure.

(That said, the most important thing is still to keep reading, on your own, outside the classroom. You can't do lit without the ability to read and think.)

I know that the system is not fixed, and that the modules I have taken and texts I have studied will probably not be available to many of the newer students, but the teaching and learning culture is still the same. For example, the Year 2 students are learning about symbolism &c. through watching Burton's Corpse Bride in English class - and I spent two lessons in Gender Studies analysing music videos (now you see why I don't like pop music) - it's a very vibrant culture, and the students who have studied lit have often gone to participate in the Gifted Education's Branch Creative Arts Programme or get published in magazines/anthos. There are lots of opportunities out there for literature students, so hold on if you really like lit. :)

Whether or not you ultimately decide to study literature as a subject major - or if you're still weighing your decision to study at NUS High based on its English Literature culture - I hope you found this article edifying, and I wish you all the best.

Cheers,
nana