How to Get an Oxford English Education for Free

if i had to choose between going to oxford university and studying english literature for three years again or getting sodomized by a bust of the bars for the same duration i'd probably choose the latter that's quite a thing for somebody to say especially someone who's written so publicly about how to get into oxford how to pass the interview stage at oxford how to pass the elat how to um write personal statement that would get you into an elite university i'm quite pro education and pro higher education and i make a lot of my living consulting and helping people and get into the university of their dreams but i do all of this with a real caveat and i hope that this makes me seem a bit more honest because with this caveat is one that i believe i will i have no problem helping people get into university if that's what they dream but i always want to say and i see people's eyes change when i say this they kind of like like i'm crushing some dreams when i say if you want to go to oxford or cambridge or harvard or yale really think if that's right for you because here's the thing now if you want to be a lawyer if you want to be a doctor if you want to be something that really does require a degree great now if you're going to study english language and literature that bit of paper still is quite respectable the oxford bit of paper that you get and you pay through the notes for but you can get the same education for free for free you need a library card that's all you need and you'll get the same education for free and you just need someone to tell you and guide you through and that's what i'm going to do in this video so you can get an english language and literature university oxford university education totally for free and here's how you do it so basically when you go to oxford and you study english it's the course is broken down into three years and for me this will change depending on what college you go to i went to oriole it's a small one it's near christchurch and you know it's near where all the harry potter stuff was filmed but basically your first year at least my first year was an introduction to english language and literature then we did a module that was 1830 to 1910 that's victorian literature then we did a module that was 1910 to the present day that's modern literature and then we did early medieval literature or old english which was 650 to 1350. your second year is there's a module on the english language there's middle english which is 1509 onwards there's renaissance 1509-1642 there's restoration era literature which is 1642-1740 and there's romanticism which is 1740-1832 third year you have a special author module you have shakespeare and you have a special topic so in the first year when you do the introduction to english basically that's learning how to be a critic and you're reading a lot of criticism a lot of theory and you're learning to see literature through lots of different lenses historical psychoanalytical feminist queer all those sort of lenses you'll learn to read through whether that's a good thing debatable i think actually when you get out of oxford you have to do a lot of unlearning because right now there's a lot of common conversations going on in oxford like in the medieval department where they're reading beowulf through like minority lens or they're you know reading it through a feminist lens and the thing is okay you can read and impose whatever you want and uh there's some value in that there's some value in making poetic stuff practical which is what i like to do sometimes but you also have to be cognizant of the fact that a lot of these writers weren't aware like they were very much of their time especially the beowulf anglo-saxon era they were of their time and critics keep trying to take authors like shakespeare out of their time oh environmentalist shakespeare feminist shakespeare no he was of his time anyway so that's what that paper's all about that module you've got a whole module in your final year dedicated to shakespeare that was probably my favorite i had a few favorites i i didn't enjoy a lot of it but i loved the shakespeare module because you read everything shakespeare put out so if you're trying to get an oxford english university education for free you're going to read everything the bard ever produced that's all of his plays all of his poems everything you also get to choose a special topic now i chose the beat generation and i explored writers like jack karak alan ginsberg william burrows and you choose an author you get one author you choose one author and you deep dive into their works and you basically read everything they put out but you have to choose from a list this list changes every few years but when i was studying the list was this these are the special authors that you could choose from you can choose from old english so you can read everything by the beowulf poet or alfred or you can do the exeter book uh you can do middle english and deep dive into chaucer langeland the end town play you can go into renaissance and you could choose spencer that's a fairy queen he could use milton paradise lost and obviously he did loads of other stuff like ariel pajitica and a few others and you know lots of religious type stuff uh and johnson or you can do restoration and your special author could be marvel dryden bunyan i like dryden marvel was okay i suppose you could do romanticism and if you want to deep dive into a romantic author uh when i was doing it you could choose from wordsworth austin or byron cool all good contenders i imagine a lot of people would choose austin she's got a lot to to you work from to learn from wordsworth has a lot as well he has a lot of good stuff and i think wordsworth although he's not my favorite romantic poet that would be either blake or keats if you call keith's romantic i do he's he's interesting nonetheless and his work is sublime if you want a good introduction to that check out tin turn abby or you could choose a special author from victorianism and then you'd be choosing from tennyson dickens or wild now we're getting good now i do like tennyson he's a bit crusty and fussy and fuddy-duddy uh wild would be a good one i had a good friend who read everything produced by wild and he loved it dickens would also be a really good one you know those thickest got a lot of books and they're quite big meaty a lot to get into a lot of history surrounding that so that would be a fun deep dive and if it was me personally i'd do a chronological reading because then you can see how the author develops i'd do that for any of the writers to be honest that would be my recommendation or you could choose from modernism and there's conrad yeats and wolf i chose conrad joseph conrad and i read everything that he produced i even though i don't really like conrad now i am i was fascinated by him and i soaked up everything he wrote and he wrote quite a lot and i liked his theory of art but funnily enough and this is a topic for another day reading conrad that in depth for the aim of a dissertation actually made me quite depressed conrad is quite depressing i do plan on rereading his most famous work heart of darkness but i'm waiting because i think that's going to be foundational that's going to be like a life-changing moment kind of like when you re-read king lear so i'm saving that one and i'm not really looking forward to again conversation for a different day you could also choose a postcolonial author to deep dive into you've got walcott who's poetry i love you've got roth and you've got friel and you can also choose american and you can choose from emerson dickinson and faulkner interesting what else do you need to know about english language and literature oxford well let's talk about term times because if you're trying to get a free sort of version of it you might want to split things up by years and term times so you have three terms in a year michaelmas hillary trinity and each term only lasts eight weeks okay because reading weeks and there's you know that you know weeks off and there's vacation reading and there's all this sort of thing but the course the time when you're actually producing essays and reading stuff is eight weeks which is actually quite a bit less than most other universities and the funny thing is you do more work in less time it's really compressed that is really full-on and what ends up happening is you get to about week four and everyone all of your peers are just exhausted like everyone i know ended up going home or taking a break or having to get out and reset for a few days not only that but it's so full on and it's so intense that every one of my friends ended up rusticating now you don't drop out when you go to oxford you rusticate that means you take a year off and then you come back they wanted me to rusticate i didn't i decided if i'm going to take a year off i won't come back so i forged on ahead and i'm glad that i did so basically you get if you get these huge reading lists every term huge one huge ones for the vacation oh it's christmas i get to have time off no reading list same with easter and in each week you've got to give for me it was about two to three essays and you've got like two to three tutorials you've got tutorials you've got classes you've got lectures tutorials are very intimate and high high stakes pressure but they're kind of nice a small group of just your core peers in a room with a tutor discussing for a few hours sometimes it was a nice day we go out on the grass a class is people from all over oxford all the different colleges and they come together and they sit in a room and it's kind of like a condensed lecture so it's not you don't really get involved too much and then lectures is like you just go to the english faculty and uh everybody from oxford goes there it's really big and you've got someone given a lecture as you know what electors so yeah two to three essays each term the term times are really short so you end up burning out and what happened to me is oxford ended up destroying my passion my passion was always reading it was always art it was always literature and i ended oxford and by the time that i ended my love of reading was so destroyed uh it was so because you're reading so much but you can't really take it in you can't connect it to different things you can't even relish it and enjoy it at least i couldn't i remember taking three thomas hardy books to the library and speed reading them and like i don't remember any of them and now i hate hardy it's like that's not the way you read hardy um you need you you need to take things slow with books you need to get a lot out of them you need to re-read them and it seemed like the reading list was so big and the expectations of us were so uh so grand that we no matter how hard we try we were always disappointing somebody always disappointing the tutor not living up to our potential really really bad so for about a year when i graduated i didn't read a single book i took a whole year off didn't read a single book couldn't stand to look at a book and didn't think i'd pick one up again luckily my passion did come back and about a year after i graduated i suddenly got a weird hankering to like pick up a book like what's this thing that i used to hate and then i got into it and i trained myself to learn reading properly and i'll say i haven't read properly until probably the last few years of my life definitely not in oxford not in university all they really did was me but hey some people want to do that and i would say don't go into debt for that you can just do it for free and here's how what i would prescribe for you if you're trying to get a similar sort of education as a oxford english one is remember that the crux of each week and your reading is centered around an essay so i'd prescribe for you to do an essay or a written something whatever it is a book review each week that's a bit less intense from oxford but then i think that's more realistic if you have a lot of stuff going on if you've got a job and stuff because obviously in oxford they tell you not to take a job not to take a part-time job even in a vacation time you can't take a part-time job which i think kind of screws over the working-class people a little bit uh makes it quite unfair but so what i would prescribe to you is try to write something it could be a book review um i you could do another thing you could turn on a video and talk like what i'm doing now you could do a podcast or something like that but i would say try and make it written because you're trying to hone your writing skills as well and you don't know what you think about something until you write about it so each week you're going to produce something written and an essay okay most people can read a book a week most people can also write one essay a week basically you're just going to be collecting your thoughts and impressions of what you read so make sure you take marginalia that means writing on the page and circling things writing your notes down keeping a notebook tying stuff together maybe looking stuff up and putting together your thoughts on whatever it is you're reading maybe you're just reading one book that's fine you're going to be writing about it my next recommendation is to make it public and what you could do is you could start a website i've got a website benjaminmacavoid.com where i put all my impressions and stuff that i read i even have a newsletter that way you're benefiting more because you're scaling your impressions you're scaling your review so you're not just doing it for you now now you're doing it knowing that people will read it so you don't have a tutor mark in your stuff but you have all the wider world it's open people can read it if you like that puts a little bit of positive pressure on you because you want it to be tidy you want it to be professional you want it to be poignant and then not only that but something could come of it so like for example you could sign up for the amazon associates affiliate program and for each book that you talk about you could put an affiliate link and that means if somebody clicks the link you get a percentage if they buy the book like at no cost to the person buying it so you might get it's not a big percentage but hey it gets things rolling and it starts it gives you a little indication that there is some value to your writing and it maybe you might even show you a way of creating a new business or simply just it's fun to scale your hobbies like if your hobby is reading and then writing about what you read wouldn't it be nice to get a little bit of pocket change as a result of that that's what i'd recommend instead of going into debt and not taking a job and going to oxford just do it yourself and maybe you even learn money from it amazing you could end up building an audience you could end up making friends i've made friends from what i've written up people have reached out to me and then we've met and i i mean that's happened many times you will have a lot of different opportunities thrown in your lap just by having a portfolio of your written work online and available to the world you might have job offers in addition to friendship offers so when you're reading i would recommend you pick one book a week and now in oxford they make a distinction between primary and secondary reading primary is the core text the actual book that you're reading secondary is criticism surrounding it i'd say focus mainly on just the one book that you want just say you're reading tests of derbeville or just say you're eating great gatsby or half darkness or something like that focus on that and your first impressions but as for secondary sources you might want to look things up as you go along maybe there's commentaries online there's criticisms encyclopedia entries or essays that people have written you do it as you go along and add to it but don't get too bogged down with it in oxford we had to really get bogged down with it and i thought that this was actually detrimental to cultivating original thought i would also say don't wait to read shakespeare we had to wait well into our third year to read shakespeare shakespeare is too great to delay reading him so get involved immediately and i'd recommend a shakespeare play once a week once every two weeks however your schedule allows you but read him regularly you can read him in a year by just reading his plays every 10 days or every or once a week my advice would be don't sacrifice understanding and enjoyment to reach an arbitrary deadline i did that many times at oxford and i really regretted it so if you can't finish the book in a week or you have the speed read to get through it slow down take your time make up for it another time there's a lot of books more than you could ever read in a lifetime it's better to take a handful and really appreciate them and understand them rather than just speed read through everything and not retain anything okay this is the modern literature recommended reading list heart of darkness by joseph conrad amazing my recommendation read that in one sitting put some classical music on go somewhere quiet read in one season you'll be rewarded dubliners by james joyce it's a short story collection brave new world by aldous huxley 1984 by george orwell those two are very pertinent to our current times under milkwood by dylan thomas if you can get the richard burton radio play reading go for it that's really good lady chatterley's lover by d h lawrence that's uh had some controversy it was a banned book there was a famous trial about it it's actually quite boring graham greens brighton rock graham green again select whatever you want from green but i'd recommend if you haven't read brighton rock read bright rock a clockwork orange by anthony burgess rebecca by daphne du maurier william golding's lord of the flies salman rushdie's midnight's children and modernism and anthology like i said my personal favorite is heart of darkness if you've already read it and you want to try a different conrad go for lord jim or try the secret agent or under western eyes there is so much great modern literature to choose from it's actually really hard to make that list so modern is anything from turn of the century up to the present moment you might say that it's post-modern after 1965 but we'll call it all modern if none of these authors do it for you then you might also want to check out kazuo ishiguro never let me go is one of my favorite novels christopher logue war music is one of my favorite poems you might want to check out ted hughes ezra pound philip larkin sylvia plath wilfred owen arthur conan doyle henry james ian mckeown muriel sparks zadie smith virginia woolf alan bennett samuel beckett harold pinter of john osborne just a few my recommendations try to get a good mix of plays and poems and prose okay so the english literature criticism recommended list check out paul cobley's narrative you might want to check out how novels work by john mullen that's a good one how fiction works by james wood another really good one mimesis by eric auerbach the sense of an ending by frank kamode or the anatomy of criticism by northrop frye recently i've fallen in love with a critic called harold bloom type his name in check out anything i recommend how to read a book and why i'd also recommend more time at adler's how to read a book both of these are indispensable to must read so i'd actually recommend reading those two before you dive into anything because that will completely revolutionize how you approach the books that you're going to read all right old english literature recommended reading list there's beowulf there's dream of the rude which is nice there's the wanderer there's battle of malden there's the riddles and there's kind of wolf and kynahd okay old english is really really hard it's like a different language so take your time don't worry if you don't understand everything you might want to try j.r.r tolkien's translation and commentary of beowulf he was a lecturer at oxford you might get a sense of how he developed his languages and how he developed his mythology and stories for lord of the rings and the hobbit and also you might want to check out sheamus heaney's translation of beowulf as well okay middle english this is recommended reading list cancer brew towers by geoffrey chaucer good stuff toilets and crusade by geoffrey tulsa i personally didn't enjoy that one but i might try again pearl one of the most beautiful poems in i suppose could you call it english language it's so different you're going to need a specific edition that basically translates it as you go but it's really really beautiful gawain and the green knight that's really good you might want to check out simon armitage's translation le morte d'arthur it's thick but you know tells the round table and that sort of thing quite cool the mortality the morality plays they're really good and piers plowman by william langland renaissance recommended reading list you've got the unfortunate traveler by thomas nash dr faustus by christopher marlowe the collective poems of john dunn i'd also recommend done sermons they're beautiful particularly one called jesus wept the fairy queen by edwin spencer i found that a bore and i couldn't get through it uh duchess of malfi by john webster utopia by thomas more great book essays of sir francis bacon the poetry of sir philip sydney tis pity she's a by john ford the spanish tragedy by thomas kidd volpone by ben johnson and in praise of folly by desiderius erasmus what i'd say is don't worry if you've struggled through these i definitely did just give them a fair crack and move on if you don't really like them you'll find a few things like unfortunate travel was good utopia was good this pity she's a was good um but yeah most of my peers loved the fairy queen by spencer i didn't maybe i need to try it again almost certainly i need to try it again because i love keats and i think keats was influenced by spencer so restoration era recommended reading list okay you want a journal of the play gear by daniel defoe very pertinent to our times you'll see that this whole covered thing has happened before very interesting and we've behaved in exactly the same way um or you might want to choose a different defoe like mo flanders or robinson crusoe paradise lost by john milton i didn't like it at the time but i do like it now uh clarissa by samuel richardson gulliver's travels by jonathan swift uranuco by aphra bane the poetry of andrew marvel marriage alamod by john dryden the poems of john wilmer second earl of rochester they're really funny raunchy rude uh the rape of the lock by alexander pope the country wife by william whitchley that's one that i focused on quite a lot in my second year the pilgrims progressed by john bunyan and pamela by samuel richardson if you're going to read a paradise lost i'd highly recommend you get the sir ian mckellen audiobook recording because it's amazing right we're getting there we're getting there now we're going to do a romantic era reading list we've got the poems of william blake the poems of william wordsworth the poems of lord byron the poems of samuel taylor coleridge the poems of john keats the poems of percy by shelley frankenstein a work called a philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful that's by edmund burke confessions of an english opium eater by thomas de quincy the life and opinions of tristan shandy by lawrence stern the history of tom jones by henry fielding and of course pride and prejudice by jane austen a great era for poetry just get the big anthologies of wordsworth blake et cetera and just work your way through them and feel free to substitute a different austin if you've already read pioneer prejudices like northanger abbey that's a good one now if you want some recommended books for the english language portion i'd recommend the odorless travel by stephen fry mother tongue by bill bryson the english language structure and development by stanley stanley hussey and a history of the english language by albert c bao and thomas cable what you might notice is that there's a real exclusion of world literature like it just is english writers and this is actually the main problem that i had with the oxford english language course the reason i got into literature was because of all the different worlds that opened up to me all the different cultures that i could sample and when i got to oxford suddenly i was closed off and i wasn't allowed to read all the writers i'd fall in love with because to be honest apart from shakespeare there weren't that many if any english writers that i really liked that's a real shame so what i'd say is caveat if you want to read some dostoyevsky russian read dostoevsky if you want to read murukami japanese read murakami if you want to read dante italian read dante we can talk about this another day if you want recommendations for world literature we'll get into it but for now just enjoy knock yourself out don't go to oxford unless you really have a strong reason to and let me know where you're starting in the comments below if you enjoyed this video found it useful please hit the like button because that tells me to keep doing more thank you for watching

Channel: Benjamin McEvoy

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Length: 21min 23sec (1283 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 23 2020