And I would still prefer students to read the whole of the original novel. I guess as a teacher I would like to make my own selection of excerpts. I just bought Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist for my eight-year-old nephew in an abridged form. We often abridge classic books for children in the U.K.

It is a ‘real book’ apparently but modified by experts.

Yes, I can see the point when looking at the publisher’s information. It must be a popular text for students learning English.īARFIELD: I did not know that existed. There is a new one from Penguin of Mrs Dalloway (late 2021). SAEED: It sounds a little like what you created with your excerpts from Mrs Dalloway was something like the concept of abridged graded readers in ELT (English Language Teaching). I could indulge myself and even experiment. Compared to a two-hour seminar in a typical British university this was really luxurious. I also had some sixty hours to teach it over the course of twelve weeks. Though I expected the students to read the novels in its entirety. However, I taught Mrs Dalloway quite selectively, looking at key passages and not the whole text. My colleagues rationalised my decision by the logic that I was British, and possibly knew the people in the Ministry in Baghdad.

Relations between the KRG and the central government in Baghdad are seldom easy. There is a very strong legacy of authoritarianism and centralised bureaucracy in Iraqi education. They were about the anxiety that the text was not on the Baghdad Ministry of Higher Education’s approved list of modern novels to show British culture (which is how literature tends to be seen in an Iraqi English degree). Did you finally work them out?īARFIELD: In fact, my colleagues’ mysterious reservations about Mrs Dalloway had nothing to do with modernist difficulty, as I had originally thought. SAEED: You said that initially you did not understand your colleagues’ reservations about teaching Mrs Dalloway. In this second and final part of the interview, the pair discuss the wider contemporary resonances of identity in Mrs Dalloway with transcultural perspectives, and the pedagogical methods which inform this. In Part I of this interview, published in our October issue, Steven Barfield and Alan Ali Saeed discussed the students of Sulaimani University’s interactions with Mrs Dalloway and with modernism more broadly. Alan Ali Saeed, Sulaimani University, and Steven Barfield, London South Bank University

The kurdish bike by alesa lightbourne