Michael Redmond, Comparative Literature

Well, Comparative Literature offered me something that wasn't given by English, I think. I mean I took English in secondary school and in college but there was always something lacking and when I came to the University of Kent I found that there were so many more authors, so many more books and ways of thinking that I hadn't seen before and it was kind of like a little treasure trove that English just didn't really give me. 

I think it's the bigger worldview that you can get from studying comparative literature, you're keyed into a whole new way of thinking about books, as a part of a whole rather than separating them into English or foreign literature. You get an overlook of authors, times and places that you wouldn't often see elsewhere or you wouldn't get to know but actually have quite a lot of value behind them. The course challenges people in the way that they drag them from a very rigid way of thinking, as I said earlier with the idea of just studying English, you don't get a very big view of anything, you don't really challenge yourself in the worldview and it's very much handed to you on a plate sometimes with your themes and your methods of literature that are given. With Comparative Literature you get to actually, well it's in the name, compare, so you get to see things from multitudes of time and also compare them and in doing so you kind of analyse it on a deeper level and gain a greater understanding of our literary tradition.

My most interesting piece of work that I'm still deeply fascinated by today was an essay on women in Greek tragedy, mainly in literature and theatre. And it was interesting in the way that it was an exploration into two very specific ways Greek society viewed women they were either plotting, maniacal witch like figures or pious, docile, housewife kind of figures, and my argument was how that transitions to our modern day when interpreting their theatre. So I've read a lot of work such as Seneca's Medea or Sophocles' Agamemnon, which focused on witch women, brutal she-wolf like figures, which really were the core part of my essay. 

I cannot praise the library enough, it's got such a wide variety of texts and academic materials that you can use to construct your essay and I cannot stress enough the fact that you should be borrowing books. Students, of course, have the pressure on them to buy and buy and buy all of the books for their seminars but the library has a very well stocked resource of them, so if you're ever lacking a text it's best to go there. And the library system of booking out computers is easy, even if you have a broken laptop you can go and rent one or you can use the computer rooms. 

Well, when I graduate I am intending to take on a Master's and from there I'm balancing the idea of doing a doctorate, I thought while I'm young I might as well get it all out of the way first and then go straight into it, but one part of me really wants to sign up and get my teaching degree and go into teaching.