seminar prep

how does the essay try to reframe how we understand Englishness?

• it tries to rewrite the history behind being English, esp on the global stage, of colonialism and superiority, etc

• “the red cross seems to offer the English solidarity, but can such solidarity avoid the hostility to others it has so often entailed?"

• “could it be…so that the quest and struggle for an ideal Englishness becomes premised on a vulnerable openness?”

what are your experiences of ‘Englishness?’

• pub culture

• football & sports in general eg Olympics, tennis n Wimbledon, etc

• traditions eg fish n chips, roast dinner, primary school assembly singing

what are some of the ways the text of Redcrosse uses language and performance ways to consider nationalism?

• uses many rhetorical questions followed by instructions of conviction, to re-think what it is to be for England

  • “we have a flag…sometimes it speaks of vicious hatred”

  • “what is this country called to be, and to become? Beyond the simple answers of the propagandists, let us dedicate ourselves today to a poetic quest”

  • “we are so many different sorts of people; let us enjoy each other’s otherness”