English Studies at the University of New England: A Report from the Field

In one of the first exchanges between Robyn Penrose and Vic Wilcox in David Lodge's 'Nice Work', Wilcox argues about the value and meaning of work. Dr Robyn Penrose, a temporary lecturer in English literature and expert on the industrial novel of the mid-nineteenth century, has been appointed the University of Rummidge Faculty of Arts Industry Year Shadow. ... Nestled in the beautiful New England tablelands, the University of New England (UNE) may seem a long way from the Rummidge of Thatcher's Britain or the Darkshire of 'North and South' and the 'Condition of England' debates to which Lodge's intertexts refer: indeed many a new appointee to UNE has harboured Mrs Thornton's fantasy of a leisurely country life with oceans of time in which to indulge in a classic or two. But twenty-five years after Lodge used the conflict between the university and industry as a synecdoche for the condition of England, and more than a hundred and fifty years after Elizabeth Gaskell wrote of the brutal effects of the industrial Revolution, another kind of 'revolution' is transforming the relations between industry, economics and literary value. That 'revolution' is changing the way 'UNE, Australia's oldest provider of distance education, does business.' Coloured by 'the taint of realism', these reflections on the state of the English discipline nationally and at UNE are therefore focused on the ways in which the relations between economics, academic labour and the 'nice work' of professing literature are played out in curriculum design and planning in the online, blended teaching environment.