I want to study Oxford’s “English Language and Literature” without going in debt for it. So far I’ve found a couple of PDFs which provide quite a reading list and the course’s structure, but it’s no course content. I’m really curious if there’s a place for what I’m looking for.
It sounds like you found everything you’re going to find without paying for a professor. What you’re looking for is where the money comes in. The professor is the one that teaches you the things you’re supposed to learn, not the books. Yeah, you can read the books yourself, and you’ll get something out of it, but you won’t learn everything you would from a professional, and you have a strong chance to learn things wrong without guidance.
Yes, education should be available to all, but this isn’t the answer. Definitely pirate (school) books, though.
Unfortunately I don’t have enough IQ to study at the required pace nor the money to get in, nor the desire to physically go there. Also I’m not sure if it’s a practice to record lectures nor if it is allowed for students to download them, that’s why I’m curious if there’s such a resource or if it’s a thing or not. But logically speaking no one in their right mind would go and leak such expensive material. So what I actually want are the assignments and the course papers of course so I can actually get the specific ebooks and read them.
So the thing is with Oxbridge is that they are tremendously overhyped, in that much of their prestige comes from the fact that they’re self perpetuating prestige machines at this point — they have their pick of the best and the brightest, from all over the world, and their name holds a heckton of power in the research world too, resulting in somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy
Regarding lecture recording, I know that this wasn’t commonplace before COVID; disabled students who needed this for access reasons had to wade through a lot of nonsense to get that, even after it was officially a part of their support plan. Something I found very silly was that there would often be people(non students) who were hired by the disability service to attend the lectures and record the lectures for students with health problems that prevented their attendance, on a per student basis. It was an administrative nightmare, especially for the disabled students. They apparently pulled their shit together and did a proper rollout of lecture recording during COVID, for obvious reasons. People I knew were salty that it took a global pandemic to lead to change, but hey, progress!
Generally lecture materials such as PowerPoint slides would be available on the virtual learning environment (which I assume is the case for recordings too), but I think a big reason why you can’t find stuff online about this is that lectures are fairly “meh” quality, especially compared to other universities’ (now that I’ve seen the quality of undergraduate teaching from multiple angles). I speculate that the lack of availability of study materials from Oxbridge is because anyone who graduates has an incentive to continue to perpetuate the prestige that they’re now benefitting from, so it would be a bad look to be sharing lecture materials. I genuinely mean it when I say that if you could have complete access to the English literature section of the online materials, you’d be disappointed. No doubt you’d find the syllabi and materials useful, but I wager you’d be surprised to see how mediocre some of it is
Unfortunately, the real meat of the teaching at Oxford or Cambridge is something that’s far harder to record or share, and that’s the tutorials system. This involves a small group (2-4) of students discussing problems or essays with a tutor, usually in college. The tutors are often academics who are renowned in their field, so it’s really cool to get such in depth teaching from them. Tutorials would be weekly, give or take, and they would typically involve writing a multiple page essay for each one (and also do other work that was typically less frequent and more centralised). The pace of it was insane, and whilst I think the pressure can be good for output, I always hated how I never had time to go back and review or rewrite old work based on tutor’s feedback — the pace was just too frantic.
I fucking loved the tutorials though, partly because the tutor for my subject at my college was one of my favourite people I’ve ever met. I always came out of a tute feeling like I’d done a workout, but for my brain. I never really felt like I understood the material until I’d done the tutorial on it (ideally the tutorials are meant to be after the lecture content on them, but sometimes it didn’t work out that way, and you had to scrap by). The discussion aspect of the tutorials were especially key in the humanities, because it forces students to argue their viewpoint.
That brings us back to you, and the question of how one could emulate the effects of a tutorial (which would be tricky even if you had all the material). Even if you had a list of tutorial essay questions that you could work through, they’re not the kind of thing that are marked with a rubric. Even the official grade boundary guidance for exams are frustratingly vague, because they rely a lot on the experience of the tutors. Without someone like a tutor to mark your work and push your understanding in the tutorial after, it’s much harder to do that kind of in-depth learning. That being said, a key thing is producing something, I think. It was a hellish rhythm, but weekly tutorials were great at making me produce something. It was super uncomfortable at first, because I didn’t back myself enough to really try to put my own opinions through in my essays, but by being forced to argue my side, I improved. Even if you don’t have someone to mark work/discuss with you, when you read a piece of literature, try to formulate your own ideas and write them down. If you need some prompt style questions to get you going, then search for resources for particular texts online.
The discussion aspect of tutorials can also be replicated somewhat just with a reading group of motivated and intense nerds. Being able to access or create something like that may not be easy for many, but the format isn’t the big part — having external viewpoints to challenge your own is.
I can ask a couple of people who I know about if they have any old downloaded resources, even if it’s just exam question papers (because I realise that it’s useful for calibration purposes if nothing else). So I can ask the right people, what’s your current age or education level, and are there any particular areas of English literature that you’re interested in?
Beautifully put. You’re totally right on the fact that deep learning comes from getting quality feedback, but luckily for me I get easily deconstructed even with a bit of criticism, so I’d say finding a study group is probably enough, just the fact that I’d put out my authentic work for someone else to see is already huge for me. That said, It’d be nice if you could ask for some resources, I’d take whatever I can get. I’m 18 btw. And I’m particularly interested in how to study a piece of literature, so I’d say lit theory?
Why not just read textbooks and lit history books then? You should be able to find ebooks or physical books at your local library, if you’re interested in doing it more at your own pace. It won’t be the exact course, obviously, but it sounds like that isn’t a critical factor for you.
If you want an actual course curriculum, MIT publishes theirs, and it includes English lit: https://ocw.mit.edu/
You might want to look into doing a class audit. It’s free. You essentially just sit in on a course and learn and everything, but you don’t get a real grade or credits.
As far as recording lectures, there is probably someone taking the course that might be willing to do it for you, but other than that, it’s not something you typically see available anywhere. It may be a licensing thing or something like that.
Seriously, look into auditing.