Nearly there!

It feels like I’ve been working towards getting an Open University degree forever, not just for the last five years. Actually, the process started in 1999 when I first contacted Edinburgh University about studying there. I managed one glorious year studying English and Scottish Literature but by then grants had been abolished and tuition fees were being introduced. There was no way we could afford for me to continue: I had to shelve my academic ambitions and get a job.

Fast forward a few years and my husband’s new business is doing well enough for me to reduce my working hours. However, the prospect of returning to frequent 50-mile drives each way to Edinburgh no longer appealed, so I approached the OU. And to cut a long story short, here I am with just 3,000 words standing between me and a BA (Hons) in Humanities. I have until noon on 23^rd May to deliver my final assignment for the A300 20^th Century Texts module. This is an EMA, an end-of-module assessment. It’s worth nearly the whole of the rest of the assignments put together and will influence how good a degree I get.

I’m lucky, I can afford to spend a lot of time on my EMA. I don’t work fulltime, I have no children to care for. I salute those who do, and are still determined to study. I must limit my time on Twitter and this will be my last blog post (yes, I know they aren’t very frequent anyway!) for a good while. So, in the spirit of sharing, here’s a summary of the task which lays ahead of me.

You are the sole judge of a new literary competition in which you have to choose the best novel of the twentieth century. The preliminary shortlist is made of up several texts from the A300 module and one novel of your choice.  In an essay of 3,000 words:

1. Elaborate the criteria to be applied in choosing your winning novel. This discussion must be informed by the theoretical and critical debates in the study material.
2. Analyse two of the novels, the one you think should win the prize and one of the others.

I’m going to write about Pat Barker’s Ghost Road, which is a set book, and Robert Jenkins’ The Cone Gatherers, a wonderful Scottish novel.

Wish me luck!

Aspirations

Some things are impossible to explain. Like why I find the Scots accent irresistible, how I can be middle-aged when I still feel 22, and why it’s so important to me to gain something many of you had by the time you really were 22: a degree.

In my early 40s I studied English and Scottish Literature at Edinburgh University. It was a lovely time, unfortunately cut short by a lack of funds (grants had already gone, fees were just coming in, an idiotic bureaucrat ‘forgot’ to process my application for a bursary). I took a job which I hated, and to console myself I started to write seriously in my spare time. Yet that dream of achieving a degree never went away.

Several years later we were a lot better off but I could no longer face regularly driving 50 miles each way to Edinburgh. So I applied to study with the Open University. My time at Edinburgh gave me credits which meant I ‘only’ had to do four courses to gain a BA (Hons) in Humanities with Literature (though sadly without a specifically Scottish element). I was self-employed by then, and could work half the week, study the other half.

I did three courses in as many years, my favourite being History of Cinema and Television. My husband enjoyed all that mandatory film-watching; I hated having to take exams again. My marks were pretty good, once I stopped being pulled up for writing lines and paragraphs which were ‘too short’ (they probably lacked sufficient adverbs and adjectives as well). So I’m well on the way to achieving dream number 2: getting a degree.

However, dream number 1 – being a published novelist – still rules. I took 2011/12 off to complete my first novel, start my quest for an agent and begin writing book two. This week, as June became July, I faced a big decision. Is this the right time to embark on my final year of study, the most important course of them all, the one which decides how good a degree I get?

The answer had to be ‘yes’, even though it means I must be more organised. I’ll have to go back to designating set days for specific tasks, abandon the luxury of fiction-writing every day. And you know what? I think this will concentrate my mind, make me more productive, not less.



Arrgh!

Another choice: which course? I swithered between A300: 20^th century literature – texts and debates and AA316: The 19^th-century novel. Heaney, Woolf, Ginsberg, Du Maurier, Eliot and Brecht versus Austen, Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Flaubert and Conrad. Conrad? Memories of A-level English all those years ago flooded back, of wading through Nostromo and hating every line of it.

The reading list for A300 also includes a Scottish classic, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, as well as sci-fi in the shape of Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Finally, the clincher: while both courses require six Tutor Marked Assignments (essays), only AA316 has an exam at the end of it. A300 has an End-of-module assessment which is done at home at one’s own pace.

Decision made. A300: 20^th century literature – texts and debates, here I come! Eventually, I hope, earning the right to hire one of the fetching gowns seen here for my graduation ceremony.

Nineteenth or twentieth century literature: which would you choose?