If I do recall accurately, “Close Reading” was my first encounter with the intense experience known as the SEMINAR. In theory, there is nothing worse than sitting in a huddled group of five or six, all of you likely to be complete strangers, or at best new acquaintances studying a poem together that quite frankly is usually a piece of arty-farty verbal diarrhoea intellectually passed off as a masterpiece. Which, if you are like myself, poses a problem because it leaves one with the feeling that you can have absolutely no opinion on the subject matter at hand - to have an opinion gives it a value of consideration that goes against your disdain for it. This particularly makes for somewhat awkward conversation when the tutor decided to address individuals to gain one on one insight – I remember many a time making the mistake of trying to be positive about a piece of text, only to be shot down because I had, according to their divine right of authority as the educator, completely misinterpreted the entire thing.

Now this is the precisely the approach which I blame for breeding the initial heavy atmosphere of hesitation that often accompanies those first few seminars; once someone has been engaged in a fierce verbal duel with the tutor the rest of their comrades are afraid to lose face and fall gallantly alongside said victim, and so tend to keep their thoughts to themselves. Luckily for me, I personally hate to lose an argument and tended to wrangle my line of thinking until the bitter end. Even when I was privately aware that I would be forced to concede the tutor’s victory, I could not resist bickering because English, after all has no single right answer. A young and fresh mind can sometimes be more insightful that a stale studious one, a musing that I recommend anyone to bear in mind for any potential intellectual clash with the often dogmatic ingrained views of the tutor.

Another case in which seminars became memorable, in my personal experience was when, in the arrogance of my youth, I would turn up to Shakespeare tutorials having, at most read the blurb describing the general jist of the play, or I would have googled (that’s a plug!) to get an overview and theme breakdown of crucial scenes, as a last resort. Or sometimes I would have been so weighted down with materials relating to another module that I just simply read the first few and last few scenes of the necessary play for a particular week. With these two literal bookends of knowledge, I could somehow sandwich the huge gap in the middle where I had no clue what was going on. A particularly amusing incident was when, having failed to read anything of “The Taming of the Shrew” except for the very first and very last scene, I was asked to comment on Katherine’s silence at being told by Petruccio they will be married (in scene Three or something of the sort) of which I had no knowledge whatsoever. Put in the hot seat, I decided to wing it and state with abundant confidence that I believed Katherine’s silence signified her refusal to even acknowledge Petruccio by way of continuing to defy his attempts to woo and ultimately tame her, only to then be promptly asked how I felt it contrasted with her speech at the end of the play, which I had somehow overlooked in my hasty attempt to skim read vast quantities of dialogue. Damn. Without giving anything away, I flicked casually to the said page and managed to construct an appropriate answer, thinking we could all move on with our lives and someone else could speak, but oh no no, the tutor decided that my argument was meaty enough to become a pivotal discussion point. For the entire hour.

My lesson to you in this case is always keep your cool because playing by ear can produce interesting debates so long as you stand your ground – but far more advisable would be to read the entire play in the first place.

You see, although it worked out all right in the end, I do not advocate my own early methods. If everyone had taken my approach on that occasion, the seminar would have been a non-starter from the outset. Worst-case scenario is one where your tutor is sitting eagerly in their chair, looking expectant by way of some offering from their students…and silence. Absolute deadlock silence; everyone is too afraid to get it wrong. And so another question is gently thrown up, met with another wall of muted, stale air until, embarrassed by the cringe worthy awkwardness of the moment, you may end up, as I recall I did, cradling your head in hands and screwing your eyes up thinking “no no no no no…”; either that or you will do Anything to break the standoff, usually meaning you will launch yourself into the line of fire with an idiotic muttering, or you will be seen immediately as the “annoying one”, the person who goes on to dominate every seminar with some sort of assumed authority they feel has been earned by carrying the can in that first episode.

There was one girl who had to step into this treacherous position in the first week, and feeling slightly sorry for her, I decided to back her up and give a bit of support when her argument weakened in relation to the tutor’s question. We exchanged a knowing look, a silent contract of mutual defence, knowing that from then on throughout the rest of the seminar we would have each other’s backs covered. Remember this is university: you have paid to be there so when people sit in silence for 12 weeks I have to confess that it absolutely confounds me not to mention annoys me – what exactly do they take away from the whole debacle? I was a good middle grounder; never silent but never outspoken – I always offered a reaction to others’ comments but also took their ideas on board as interesting contrasts or parallels to my own, which made for a far more rewarding atmosphere of banter within the seminar, something I feel is essential in the end, to make the experience worthwhile. I used to come out of seminars feeling quite triumphant as though ground had been covered that I often felt was lost in the labyrinth of information we had to trawl through in lectures.

This abstractness was a major point of frustration for me. According to Kolb’s model of learning I am a “pragmatist” who does not enjoy learning theoretical concepts that have little or no link to reality. I wholeheartedly concur with his theory, as evidenced by a regular feeling of leaving lectures like someone had blindfolded me, spun me around then released the blindfold whilst pushing me forward into a disorientated attempt at a straight line. Some of the material reached proportions of the abstract to the point of becoming mildly ridiculous. I would sit and roll my eyes and try to take notes, but quickly, get lost, sigh in resignation and realize that I would have to do the bulk of the work myself. Which is entirely the point. University is about doing it for yourself. The lectures, I grew to realise, were only designed to go off on a tangent to open up the realm of offbeat possibilities in terms of interpretations; they were supposed to inspire further thinking, not provide all the answers. The sooner I grasped this fact, the sooner I embraced it and enjoyed trying to come to the table (figuratively speaking) in seminars with my own impressive outlook on particular texts or projects.

When you start attending seminars with that little ambitious fire raging inside, determined to see out your point of view, then you are truly interacting and will be so much more richly rewarded by the process than the lazy bums who fester in silence on the sidelines like cardboard cutouts, and panic when the real work begins on essays and exams. Don’t be a lazy bum, be proactive and get yourself into gear from the beginning. You will then be well on the way to being able to cope with deadlines because you are already in the positive mindset of wanting to engage with your subject and challenge existing concepts with your own.