Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Class on pornography

Call this English lit?

When Mark Jones and Gerry Carlin showed their students video porn all hell broke
loose. Here they explain why their coursework features hardcore sex alongside
Burroughs, Blyton and Joyce

Tuesday February 03 2004
The Guardian

It is not often that a university English course grabs the front page of a Sunday
tabloid. But the single class we teach on pornography did, after a student apparently
boycotted the lecture and then anonymously informed the local press. "What the
Dickens are they teaching?" was the outraged but entirely reasonable question directed by the newspaper at a course which degenerated from Joyce's Ulysses to video porn in
less than 10 weeks.

What on earth could we have been thinking of, inviting students to watch pornography
with the same serious intent as they would read poetry? Though its appearance on an
English curriculum may be seen as controversial, it already has a secure foothold in
the academy. In fact, it is everywhere, on university courses around the world, in
women's studies and law degrees, through philosophy, sociology and psychology, to the
history of art and cultural studies. And no wonder, when our culture is saturated by
images which though not always pornographic clearly want to be. From the new men's
magazines Zoo and Nuts, to Granada Men and Motors and whatever holiday resort is
Uncovered, the mainstream media now trades in softcore. Meanwhile, hardcore porn-ography has become quietly decriminalised and tacitly accepted.

But on an English degree?

Well, perhaps. Unpopular Texts is the paradoxically popular optional course on the
third year of our English degree that has been pilloried in the press. A dark
spectrum of material selected from all areas of culture has passed through its seminars.
Self-evidently literary and experimental works by James Joyce, William Burroughs and
DM Thomas rub shoulders with Enid Blyton's long unavailable The Three Golliwogs.
Modernist masterpieces labelled degenerate by the Nazis share exhibition space with a
September 11-themed issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. Also pressing for space in this
perverse pot-pourri are the outrageous rebellions of punk, the harrowing nuclear
apocalypse television drama Threads and the notorious video nasty Cannibal Holocaust.
Most contentious of all, perhaps, is the white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries,
which students are asked to read online rather than buy.

Eclectically offensive as they are, these works and events demand a sustained focus
on the ways in which we can or should police the shifting boundaries of what is
acceptable. The object of mixing together these high, low, and ambivalent cultural
products is not to suggest a meaningless levelling of values and aesthetic judgments. The construction of values and judgments is precisely what this mix invites us to
reflect on. These are works which generate extreme responses. Students have expressed disgust, outrage, fear, empathy, resistance and political engagement in debates that often overspill the boundaries of the classroom. In dealing with these effects together as a class, we have realised that this is probably the most morally aware course that either of us have ever taught.

Pornography is the final session of the course and is still, apparently, the most
sensitive. It is only over the past three years that we have shown explicit video
clips of pornographic films in class. And even amid the extremes of representation that
feature on Unpopular Texts, pornography seems to require special treatment. A secret
ballot of the students is held before the class is taught, to decide whether to
include visual material, and in what form. Of the various options - print-based,
electronic, video tape or none - students have always opted overwhelmingly for video. A
lecture and edited clips from broadcast documentaries describing the production,
consumption, censorship and potential harm of pornography is followed by a coffee break
which offers the opportunity for escape.

Adequately prepared, the students watch 20 minutes of video. It might be expected
that the passive act of viewing would be followed by the active work of analysis. But
we have found that porn doesn't allow this to happen so simply. Two minutes of
pornography is titillating. Ten minutes is boring. Extend the viewing in this environment
and critical analysis is the only option left. Watching pornography in a classroom
becomes a Brechtian experience, causing discomfort and alienation. Porn then reveals
not just flesh, but also its formal conventions, its repetitive narratives, its
tableaux of power, its cold ideologies, its descent into bathos.

In marked contrast to the occasionally sepulchral seminar experience, teaching
pornography in this way galvanises the class. In the past we - like, we are sure, many
others in higher education - have taught pornography without the use of communally
viewed sources. We found that these discussions were abstract and anecdotal, as thin on
informed comment as they were evasive of certain key issues. To debate sexual
objectification without examining a specific instance of it seems, in retrospect,
ludicrous. Even cowardly.

Commercial porn is on our English course not because we are trying to canonise it.
Or because we think that all culture is equally valuable. Pornography is there
because it has become a naturalised part of our environment. Like other phenomenally
lucrative businesses, it is in the interests of the pornography industry to avoid
scrutiny of its practices, products and environmental impact. It affects us all and we need to take account of that.

It is the purpose of universities to know and interrogate all aspects of the world
of which they are a part. It is their responsibility to make this knowledge available
to all. We and our students are not walled off but embedded in the society to which
we belong.

· Mark Jones and Gerry Carlin are senior lecturers in English at the University of Wolverhampton

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