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Materiale di riferimento Studenti frequentanti:
- Programma per 6 cfu: Conoscenza degli argomenti trattati a lezione (unità didattiche A e B). Manuali
- G. Ludbrook, English for History and Philosophy, Venezia, Cafoscarina, 2000, ISBN: 88-85613-90-X
- P. Thompson & D. Ronder, Past Simple: Learning English through History, Study Book, Garnet Education, 2012, ISBN: 978- Materiali e slide delle lezioni sul sito Ariel del corso di Civiltà e Lingua Inglese. Testi consigliati
- J. M. Swales & C. B. Feak, Academic Writing for Graduate Students: Essential Tasks and Skills, Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press, 2012, ISBN: 978- 0472034758
- Un testo di grammatica inglese di livello intermedio/avanzato, per esempio: R. Murphy, English Grammar in Use, A Self-Study Reference and Practice Book for Intermediate Students of English, Cambridge University Press, 2012, ISBN 978- 0521189064 Structure of the exam 6 CFU: Written test, duration 45 minutes. Reading comprehension exercise (at the level of Past Simple ) with multiple choice questions; multiple choice questions on material and topics covered during the course. Pass mark 50% Oral exam: contextualizing and analyzing a text taken from either from Ludbrook or from examples discussed in the lectures. Final mark: out of 30. This mark will be based on the oral exam, but if you do very well on the written test you will receive an additional mark of 1. 9 CFU: Written test, duration 1 hour. Reading comprehension exercise (at the level of Past Simple ) with multiple choice questions; multiple choice questions on material and topics covered during the course. Multiple choice questions specifically on the English language (grammar / lexis). Pass mark 50% Oral exam: contextualizing and analyzing a text taken from either from Ludbrook or from examples discussed in the lectures, including questions about language, grammar and lexis. Final mark: out of 30. This mark will be based on the oral exam, but if you do very well on the written test you will receive an additional mark of 1. Below is a lists of texts to prepare for the oral exam. Please choose one and prepare an analysis of it. Find out as much as possible about the text, the issue it examines and the author. Look carefully at the language used. It will be helpful to consider the style in which it is written and the way in which
the writing is organised. Find a number of phrases or sentences in the text that seem to you particularly important or interesting. Please think about how the text relates to any of the broader issues discussed in the course or in Past Simple.
- Winston Churchill, ‘Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat’ , May 13th^ 1940, https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125391/1019_Churchill_blood_toil_tears.pdf You can listen to the speech here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TlkN-dcDCk
- The King James Bible, ‘Original Preface’, 1611, in English For History and Philosophy , ed. Geraldine Ludbrook, pp. 75-
- ‘Statement of the Levellers’ and ‘Women's Petition’, 1649, in English for History and Philosophy
- William Dalrymple, review of The British in India , The Guardian , 27 September 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/27/the-british-in-india-by-david-gilmour- review
- Neal Ascherson, ‘Bye Bye Britain’, London Review of Books , 24 September 2020.*
- J.R. Seeley, extract from The Expansion of England (1883).*
- Fintan O’Toole, ‘A ‘precious union’? The Brexiters don’t care about Northern Ireland’, The Guardian , 19 October 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/19/brexiters-theresa-may- northern-ireland
- Enoch Powell, ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Birmingham, April 20 1968, https://www.enochpowell.net/fr-79.html
- Matthew Arnold, extract from ‘Equality’, 1878.* Copies of the asterisked texts are below. J.R. Seeley, extract from The Expansion of England (1883) But history ought to look at things from a greater distance and more comprehensively. If we stand aloof a little and follow with our eyes the progress of the English State, the great governed society of English people, in recent centuries, we shall be much more struck by another change, which is not only far greater but even more conspicuous, though it has always been less discussed, partly because it proceeded more gradually, partly because it excited less opposition. I mean the simple obvious fact of the extension of the English name into other countries of the globe, the foundation of Greater Britain. There is something very characteristic in the indifference which we show towards this mighty phenomenon of the diffusion of our race and the expansion of our state. We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. While we were doing it, that is in the eighteenth century, we did not allow it to affect our imaginations or in any degree to change our ways of thinking; nor have we even now ceased to think of ourselves as simply a race inhabiting an island off the northern coast of the Continent of Europe. We constantly betray by our modes of speech that we do not reckon our colonies as really belonging to us; thus if we are asked what the English population is, it does not occur to us to reckon -in the population of Canada and Australia. This fixed way of thinking has influenced our historians. It causes them, I think, to miss the true point of view in describing the eighteenth century. They make too much of the mere parliamentary wrangle and the agitations about liberty, in all which matters the eighteenth century of England was but a pale reflection of the seventeenth. They do not perceive that in that century the history of England is not in England but in America and Asia. In like manner I believe that when we look at the present state of affairs, and still more at the future, we ought to beware of putting England
vastly increases our dangers and responsibilities. Our colonial Empire stands on quite a different footing; it has some of the fundamental conditions of stability. There are in general three ties by which states are held together, community of race, community of religion, community of interest. By the first two our colonies are evidently bound to us, and this fact by itself makes the connection strong. It will grow indissolubly firm if we come to recognise also that interest bids us maintain the connection, and this conviction seems to gain ground. When we inquire then into the Greater Britain of the future we ought to think much more of our Colonial than of our Indian Empire. Matthew Arnold, extract from ‘Equality’, 1878 Mr. Hamerton is an excellent observer and reporter, and has lived for many years in France. He says of the French peasantry that they are exceedingly ignorant. So they are. But he adds: "They are at the same time full of intelligence; their manners are excellent, they have delicate perceptions, they have tact, they have a certain refinement which a brutalized peasantry could not possibly have. If you talk to one of them at his own home, or in his field, he will enter into conversation with you quite easily, and sustain his part in a perfectly becoming way, with a pleasant combination of dignity and quiet humor. The interval between him and a Kentish laborer is enormous." This is, indeed, worth your attention. Of course all mankind are, as Mr. Gladstone says, of our own flesh and blood. But you know how often it happens in England that a cultivated person, a person of the sort that Mr. Charles Sumner describes, talking to one of the lower class, or even of the middle class, feels and cannot but feel, that there is somehow a wall of partition between himself and the other, that they seem to belong to two different worlds. Thoughts, feelings, perceptions, susceptibilities, language, manners,—everything is different. Whereas, with a French peasant, the most cultivated man may find himself in sympathy, may feel that he is talking to an equal. This is an experience which has been made a thousand times, and which may be made again any day. And it may be carried beyond the range of mere conversation, it may be extended to things like pleasures, recreations, eating and drinking, and so on. In general the pleasures, recreations, eating and drinking of English people, when once you get below that class which Mr. Charles Sumner calls the class of gentlemen, are to one of that class unpalatable and impossible. In France there is not this incompatibility. Whether he mix with high or low, the gentleman feels himself in a world not
alien or repulsive, but a world where people make the same sort of demands upon life, in things of this sort, which he himself does. In all these respects France is the country where the people, as distinguished from a wealthy refined class, most lives what we call a humane life, the life of civilized man. Of course, fastidious persons can and do pick holes in it. There is just now, in France, a noblesse newly revived, full of pretension, full of airs and graces and disdains; but its sphere is narrow, and out of its own sphere no one cares very much for it. There is a general equality in a humane kind of life. This is the secret of the passionate attachment with which France inspires all Frenchmen, in spite of her fearful troubles, her checked prosperity, her disconnected units, and the rest of it. There is so much of the goodness and agreeableness of life there, and for so many. It is the secret of her having been able to attach so ardently to her the German and Protestant people of Alsace, while we have been so little able to attach the Celtic and Catholic people of Ireland. France brings the Alsatians into a social system so full of the goodness and agreeableness of life; we offer to the Irish no such attraction. It is the secret, finally, of the prevalence which we have remarked in other continental countries of a legislation tending, like that of France, to social equality. The social system which equality creates in France is, in the eyes of others, such a giver of the goodness and agreeableness of life, that they seek to get the goodness by getting the equality. Yet France has had her fearful troubles, as Sir Erskine May justly says. She suffers too, he adds, from demoralization and intellectual stoppage. Let us admit, if he likes, this to be true also. His error is that he attributes all this to equality. Equality, as we have seen, has brought France to a really admirable and enviable pitch of humanization in one important line. And this, the work of equality, is so much a good in Sir Erskine May's eyes, that he has mistaken it for the whole of which it is a part, frankly identifies it with civilization, and is inclined to pronounce France the most civilized of nations. But we have seen how much goes to full humanization, to true civilization, besides the power of social life and manners. There is the power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty. The power of conduct is the greatest of all. And without in the least wishing to preach, I must observe, as a mere matter of natural fact and experience, that for the power of conduct France has never had anything like the same sense which she has had for the power of social life and manners. Michelet, himself a Frenchman, gives us the reason why the Reformation did not succeed in France. It did not succeed, he says, because la France ne voulait pas de réforme morale — moral reform France would not have; and the Reformation was above all a moral movement. The sense in France for the power of conduct has not greatly deepened, I think, since. The sense for the power of intellect and knowledge has not been adequate either. The sense for beauty has not been adequate. Intelligence and beauty have been, in general, but so far reached, as they can be and are reached by men who, of the elements of perfect humanization, lay thorough hold upon one only,—the power of social intercourse and manners. I speak of France in general; she has had, and she has, individuals who stand out and who form exceptions. Well, then, if a nation laying no sufficient hold upon the powers of beauty and knowledge, and a most failing and feeble hold upon the power of conduct, comes to demoralization and intellectual stoppage and fearful troubles, we need not be inordinately surprised. What we should rather marvel at is the healing and bountiful operation of Nature, whereby the laying firm hold on one real element in our humanization has had for France results so beneficent.
Neal Ascherson, ‘Bye Bye Britain’, London Review of Books , 24 September 2020 In 2019, Boris Johnson became prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In 2020, he shrank into being prime minister of England. For the second time in less than seven years, the union is in trouble. But this time the problem needs a new question. Forget: ‘Should Scotland be independent?’ The Scots will take care of that. Ask instead: ‘Who in the rest of Britain needs this union with Scotland? And why?’ Through the long Covid months, it was only England that Boris spoke for, and spoke to, at those teatime briefings from Downing Street. Meanwhile, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland did their own devolved things. Drivers crossing the Severn into Wales faced courteous police questions. Nicola Sturgeon declined to rule out controls on the Scottish border if there were a fresh surge of infection ‘down south’. All three devolved governments had divergent policies over quarantine for incoming travellers, while England – finding its own voice – did something different again. Time after time, Westminster failed to consult or warn the leaders of the ‘home nations’ about abrupt U- turns in English pandemic strategy. The United Kingdom was growing disunited not only in word but in deed. It wasn’t only independence-minded Scots who noticed that their country was handling its own coronavirus crisis confidently and – after some horrible early mistakes, principally to do with care homes – more effectively than England. Mark Drakeford, first minister of Wales, confirmed the growing recognition that decisions made in England were made
for England, and that ‘home nations’ could and should stand on their own feet (‘we now have a three-nation approach from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland’). Meanwhile, back in London, nobody tried to claim: ‘We are all in this together’ – the slogan used in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and defaced by the monstrous unfairnesses of ‘austerity’. This moment will pass. Covid-19 will gradually disappear from newspaper front pages, and Johnson will return to being a ‘British’ prime minister. And yet the union will never be the same again. A saucy genie of empowerment has escaped from the bottle. As John Curtice wrote in the Herald in July, ‘all the lives of everyone in Scotland have been affected by the devolved government in a way they’ve frankly not been in the previous 21 years of devolution.’ The Anglo-Scottish union was under new strain anyway. We can see now that devolution made sense only in the context of EU membership. The Scottish, Northern Irish and Welsh governments lent some of their powers to Brussels, but now London is proposing to take those powers – industrial subsidies, agriculture, fishing – for itself rather than let them revert to Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh. The Scottish government is preparing to fight this tooth and nail, now that the Internal Market Bill has been published. The machinery of devolution itself has also rusted. Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh complain that their civil servants are increasingly left in the dark by Downing Street and the Cabinet Office, while the Joint Ministerial Council meetings seem to have shrivelled into a formality. The Dunlop Review, which considered the ways in which the UK government ‘through its institutional arrangements’ might meet ‘the challenge of strengthening and sustaining the union’, was handed in before Christmas; leaks suggest it proposed many urgent reforms, but apparently it may never be published. Instead, Whitehall departments are planning to set up and loudly publicise their own ‘British’ spending programmes, running parallel to the operations of Scottish and Welsh ministries. That was the real motive for the sudden additional funding for the Northern and Western Isles announced during Johnson’s one-day visit to Scotland in July – a reminder of who really calls the shots in the UK. Rhetoric about ‘strengthening’ the union really means centralising the UK state, so that no alternative source of power can challenge the ‘sovereign’ absolutism of the Westminster parliament. Remember 1986? With a scratch of her pen, Margaret Thatcher ended the democratically elected self-government of English cities. She did it because some of the six ‘metropolitan authorities’, London especially, were daring to pursue their own un-Thatcherite policies. And she got away with it. In a constitutional republic, she would have been impeached. This sort of monarchical atrocity has a long record in the Anglo-British state, which is still, in its dark innards, a 17th-century kingdom. ‘Our precious, precious union’, Theresa May used to wail as she flapped up and down the shires. But precious to whom? And why? Who in England really cares about the union with Scotland? Come to that, what might other islanders in the British archipelago gain if the Scots left it? It depends on whom you ask. For many years, the southern attitude to Scottish independence seemed to be mild: slightly pained but not alarmed. English people old enough to remember the Second World War often said: ‘Seems a pity after all we’ve been through together. But it’s their right, isn’t it?’ Nobody seemed to have given much thought to the value of the union. This April, 40 per cent of a UK sample – which means an even higher percentage of English responses – told YouGov that they felt they had ‘nothing in common with people in Scotland’. Last year, another
the role taken by bourgeois parties on the Continent, denied English popular nationalism a chance to mature into a radical, modernising force. Instead, it has been deliberately defined – by Farage-loathing Conservatives as much as anybody – as the politics of a xenophobic rabble which must at all costs be kept on the fringes. Those are some of the motives for keeping unionism alive. All are negative. But who (leaving Scotland aside) will gain if the union breaks up? To begin with, English Tories
- even if they don’t recognise it. The government has no economic or party political reason to bother about Scotland. The SNP apart, the Scottish parties that could in theory reinforce a Westminster coalition against Johnson’s administration are pitifully weak. And his parliamentary majority means that he doesn’t need the few Scottish Tories to help him stay in power. A great many English voters are convinced – inaccurately – that Scotland enjoys a heavy and unfair subsidy from the English public through the Barnett formula. ‘Allowing the Scots to make their own laws, while freeriding on English taxpayers ... is simply unjust,’ Johnson wrote in the Telegraph in 2001. ‘They will come cap in hand to Uncle Sugar in London,’ he went on. ‘And when they do, I propose that we tell them to hop it.’ Some political small change could be earned by supposedly making the Scots pay their own way through independence. More interesting is the following wicked thought, never quite absent from the English Tory mind. Getting rid of Scotland, with its hostility to English Tory rule, could give the party eternal political dominance over the other nine-tenths of the UK. A giddying prospect! So why wait for the Scots to choose their independence? Why not boot them out right away? A brilliant example lies in recent history. Václav Klaus levered the Slovaks out of Czechoslovakia in 1993 in order to secure his own unchallenged command over the Czech Republic. Like the Scots, the Slovaks were pesky obstacles to his Thatcherite policies, clinging to a strong interventionist state and subsidies for their massive public sector. To dodge blame for ‘losing Slovakia’, Klaus cunningly provoked the Slovak negotiators into making impossible demands whose rejection made independence unavoidable. William Hague seems to have toyed with this idea when he was opposition leader between 1997 and 2001. But neither he nor David Cameron were brutal and ambitious enough to go for it. No one seems very interested in an English parliament and few people think much of Cameron’s ‘English votes for English laws’ amendments to Commons standing orders. The mass mobilisation of the Brexit vote in 2016 offered right-wing Tories a chance to tame and absorb inchoate English nationalism, to transform it into a disciplined movement under middle-class leaders and with a broadly Conservative programme. The capture of Brexiteering ‘Red Wall’ formerly Labour constituencies in the 2019 election renewed that chance. But, for the class-drenched motives I suggested above, the Tories seem unwilling to take it. Since 2016, it has been clear that Brexit will never bring a cloudless British independence day. Once again, the Scottish presence is spoiling things. The truth is that since devolution nothing has gone right for Ancient Britons. By introducing democracy into the autocratic union of 1707, devolution revealed the elephant in the room: the colossal population imbalance, with 85 per cent of the union’s inhabitants living in the English ‘partner’. Relative size suddenly came to matter, inflaming contests over sharing resources or legal competences or representation abroad. In this new perspective of
asymmetry and mutual suspicion, ‘partnership’ has been discredited as a recognisable description of intra-UK relationships. Devolution also floodlit something that had seemed irrelevant: the fact that there was no English parliament. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland could now identify and tackle some of their own national needs – but was this at the expense of unrepresented English taxpayers? A malevolent sense of victimhood has entered English nationalism, a feeling that the nation that created the UK by force or statesmanship, and which contains the overwhelming mass of its population, wealth and infrastructure, has to stay gagged while freshly promoted provinces make impudent, ungrateful demands. In Scotland’s 2014 referendum campaign, one apparently humble word became the deadliest weapon. The word was ‘normal’. Again and again, at pro-independence gatherings, I heard people say: ‘I just want my kids to grow up in a normal wee nation, like other countries.’ By this they meant a country which took its own decisions for better or worse, which could feel that its future was in its own hands. But they also meant that the UK was ‘abnormal’. Looking south, they saw a confusing polity with no clear sense of identity or agreed law of state, whose component parts no longer felt any reason to cohere, whose third-rate lawmakers (unelected by Scots) increasingly lacked respect for truth or integrity, and had no vision for the future beyond their own electoral survival. At the core of the abnormality was England’s difficulty in accepting its Englishness. Not all Britishness is a deceit – any Czech or Italian visitor to Manchester, Swansea, Glasgow, Derry or even Cork will be aware of a common linguistic culture with strong variants – but in politics the moth-eaten remnants of imperial Britishness form a blindfold against the 21st-century world. Britain is an imaginary realm, floating in a category above mere nation states; England is a European country like its neighbours. Britain is exceptional and must express itself in superlatives (‘world-beating’, ‘global leader’, ‘most efficient on the planet’); England is a medium-sized country with first- rate scientists and rotten management. Britain dreams of becoming a heavily armed, swaggering pirate power, defying international rules; England is a minor, sceptical nation with a taste for satire and democracy. England must be liberated. But Brexit, and the cynical chauvinism of the Johnson government, and the xenophobia of the Faragists, can’t achieve that. It’s the union with Scotland that holds the decayed Ukanian fabric together. End it, and the unique intimacy between England and Scotland – Alex Salmond’s ‘social union’ – can flourish in a confederation of independent states. End the timed-out union, and allow England to encounter itself at last.
