INTERVIEWED on BBC2’s Newsnight programme on November 29, 2011, I was asked by the broadcaster Gordon Brewer a most egregious question; in what I…
Alec Guinness as Macbeth and French actress Simone Signoret as Lady Macbeth in a production of the Shakespeare tragedy, 1966
“I want somebody to be able to sit in a Scottish school and think, I can succeed, being myself, from my country, using the language that I use, being the person that I am, and that’s very difficult to do if you don’t see images of your country in movies, if you don’t see them on television in a widespread, meaningful and powerful way, if you’re not reading Scottish texts or hearing the Scottish voice as a voice of success.
The central authority of London as economic power and English as the language of authority prized English literature, and later American literature, as most valuable in education. I imagine most schoolteachers of English in Scotland have studied “English” literature in undergraduate degrees, and many will have encountered American, Irish and “postcolonial” literatures through their institutional education.
This made the 2012 government directive an ambiguous thing. It might be welcomed as a wonderful opportunity, correcting a situation of neglect and one might argue intellectual and institutional suppression – or it might be resisted as an imposition from on high, under-resourced and authoritarian. The second concern, arising from the idea that the teaching of Scottish literature in schools is an authoritarian imposition upon teachers as well as the young folk they teach, was often expressed as the desire to keep the options as open as possible.
He’s using the word “culture” here in more than one sense. Remember the Gaelic word “dùthchas” which I’ve talked about before in these columns – it indicates the interconnections between land, people, and culture.In these interconnections, “culture” is indeed something that “doesn’t happen just by itself” and the health of those living arises from the fluent activity in those interconnections between their locations and their productions.
But McEwen’s description is probably too tight to accommodate all the writers listed in what I’d have as my own “loose canon” so we have to revise it. Clearly, there are literary, artistic and cultural values that cannot be constrained to political and religious priorities. Secular priorities of free speech and toleration are reciprocated by works of literature and art.
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