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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol 35 no. 20. 1972

Pompous Enticements

Pompous Enticements

The old 'B' course, now ENGL 111;211;etc is for students who feel they have little enough imagination to major in English. It is planned to give a background to the major writers in the English tradition. Professor MacKenzie distributed to the English 111 class this year an elaborate justification for the course, including, among such pompous enticements as "Each poem, play or prose work offers immediate human rewards to those able to enter it with a mind alert to the experience it embodies" a statement of the two main aims of the course: "First, particularity, shown by your skill in reading, and talking or writing about single works; second, generality, shown by your ability to compare and contrast such works, both to heighten your sense of their individuality and at the same time to establish their similarity as expressions of a society different from, but formative of, our own." We have here the confusion of aims that turns this course from one that could possibly have considerable importance to a student of social history to one that frustratingly fails to satisfy study in any direction.