Spencer Fancutt

Spencer Fancutt graduated with an MA in English and American Studies in 1995, and now lives and works in Japan.

Spencer has done fabulously well since graduating from Dundee University with a Joint Honours MA in English and American Studies in 1995. Before his mortarboard hit the floor he moved to Japan, where he has been ever since using his considerable talents in essay writing on life in Japan; teaching English as a Foreign Language, and Literature as a Not-Foreign Language at Aoyama Gakuin in Tokyo; and translating manga for Top Shelf, an American publisher. He still has time to play extremely average squash, and to talk about himself in the third person.

None of these things, except the squash, would have been possible without four years of intensive mind-expanding in the English Department at Dundee. Reading novels for four years might sound wonderful for someone with an aversion to hard work, or for those who go around saying 'veritable plethora' a lot, but for a secondary school student with an undecided career plan and a love of language, it really lets the dogs out. The course texts allowed me to explore the greatest thoughts of the greatest writers of many different periods and styles, in many books that I would not have touched previously (anything over 200 pages without a firearm in it). The small tutor group sizes saw to it that you did your homework as it was very difficult to bluff your way through a seminar unprepared, except for Critical Theory where you were in no better a position for meaningful contribution if you had read the Derrida before you arrived than if you had come directly from a rave.

A few highlights: my socks being blown off in my first seminar, with Prof Stan Smith on Auden's "The Shield of Achilles"; Keats nearly getting my head kicked in when my own Keatsian effort was discovered by its recipient's boyfriend; Dr Robb showing great restraint when presented with my marvelous comparative essay on the dramatic techniques of Oliver Twist and "Tam O'Shanter"; another essay by Borges allowing me to shamelessly invent an entire bibliography and several footnotes in exploring his relationship with fact and fiction.

Vonnegut, Carver, Coover, Marquez, and Rushdie now jostle on my bookshelves next to Shelley, Bronte, Elliot, Hogg, Stevenson, Said, Foucault and countless others. The poets are angst-ridden in the loft, the dramatists plot and complain in the closet, and Kafka is on his own under the fridge where he feels most comfortable. They are all members of the family due to the course at Dundee.

After watching On The Waterfront, I took on the position of student rep for the department, which I could not and will not recommend more strongly. It did give me the opportunity to go to polite parties with staff and overhear nuggets like, "He says he's a socialist, but he's got a pedigree cat," and to see normally staid professors drinking highly impressive amounts of wine with impeccable savoir-faire while quietly disparaging Virginia Woolf out of earshot of the Women Writers lecturer. Finding out that these strange creatures were, in a sense, human, gave me the notion that teaching English might not be all that bad after all, and became a factor in my decision to move to Japan.

My love of the English language and literature has continued to grow, and I haven't stopped writing poetry and essays since. When I did my second Masters at Sheffield in Advanced Japanese Studies, it was literature translation that I chose for my thesis which earned a distinction even though I passed the other papers by the skin of my teeth. It has led most recently to the translation of a 400-page book (AX Volume 1: A Collection of Alternative Manga) released in July, 2010, which just goes to show how very clever I am.

All in all, I owe a huge debt not only to the Student Loans Company, but more importantly to the English and American Studies departments for nourishing mind and soul, and would highly recommend the course to anyone who thinks university is first and foremost about firing the imagination and finding out what this humanity thing is all about, before you go learn a trade.

Spencer writes at: http://shuppan.sunflare.com/essays/fancutt.htm