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English

• See also: Faculty of English website
• English at Murray Edwards College - what are we looking for?

English at Murray Edwards College

"English at [Murray Edwards College] is a wonderful, powerful and compelling subject. It allowed me to explore my passions for Literature and then to structure them into clear essays and arguments. I could not have imagined studying anything else anywhere else." (Former student)

In the first two years of an English degree at Cambridge (Part I of the Tripos) undergraduates study literature from Chaucer's time to our own. In the third year (Part II) they build on this broad, chronological grounding with a compulsory paper on Tragedy, and choices from a list of more specialised options - such 'Literature and Visual Culture', 'The History of Literary Criticism' or 'Modernism and the short story'. One important element of English at Cambridge - Practical Criticism - is common to both parts of the Tripos, and thus has a special centrality throughout the three years. Students also write a dissertation of their own choice in both Part I and II.

All undergraduates reading English at Cambridge follow this general pattern of study. They are all students in the Cambridge English Faculty, attending lectures and classes on the main Arts lecture site and using the rich resources of the English Faculty Library and the University Library itself, one of the three great research libraries of the country. Within this structure, however, the core of a student's work is the college-based 'supervision'. Here the student meets, usually once a week as one of a pair, with a specialist supervisor who provides individual direction for a particular paper and discusses the week's essay in detail. Students also have more general access through lectures and classes, and sometimes through specially-arranged supervisions, to all those teaching English in Cambridge, whatever their college.

In Murray Edwards College, where we aim to admit ten students a year, there are three Fellows in English:

• Professor Heather Glen (who has published on Blake and the Brontës and is currently writing on Wordsworth, and who teaches mainly nineteenth-century subjects)
• Dr Raphael Lyne (who has written on Shakespeare and renaissance poetry, and who teaches sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature, and Tragedy)
• Dr Leo Mellor (who works on war writing and Modernism, and who teaches nineteenth and twentieth-century literature).

The first requirement for anyone intending to read English at university is a passion for reading. Without that there is little point in committing oneself to three years in which one is required to do little else but read, reflect on, and write about seven centuries of poetry, drama and prose.

Plainly, not everyone who simply 'enjoys reading' will be a suitable candidate for an English degree. Students reading English at Murray Edwards College need to be able to reach beyond impressionistic, personal responses to works of literature on the one hand, and dependence on received critical views on the other. Our emphasis at Murray Edwards College is rather on encouraging students to establish their own individual identity as readers by developing their powers of close reading and technical analysis of texts, and also by helping them to get their bearings in the wide variety of critical approaches and theories available to students of literature today. In recent years Murray Edwards College students have been very successful in exams by finding their own critical voices in this way. The great majority achieve 2:1 or better (38 of 39 from 2004-7) and firsts are common (10 of 39). The Finalists over the past two years have done especially well, with 40% of Finalists gaining 1sts in 2009 & 44 % in 2010 (4/10 & 4/9). The average for female students studying English across the University has been around or below 20% for the last 3 years.

All our students have chosen to study English at A-Level or an equivalent qualification within other education systems. At Murray Edwards College we have students from a wide variety of academic backgrounds. In selecting for admission we attach more importance to the qualities of mind which are needed to enable students to get the most out of the course than to any particular choice of A-Level subjects. Drama or Theatre Studies are acceptable within a broader academic profile which also includes more conventional academic subjects such as English or History.

To find out what a current student thinks of studying English at Murray Edwards see our student profiles.

What students do next

Other web pages show more about the careers of students from this College who studied your subject in the past.

Selected Internet Resources

The English Faculty has produced a web site called Cambridge Authors which is ideal for people considering studying English at University. It was mostly written by Cambridge students, and offers a variety of resources and approaches relating to ten authors who studied at Cambridge, from Marlowe to Zadie Smith.

Dr Mellor - Updated July 2010.