Demanding: Morrissey
23 May 2014
Morrissey insisted last year that his autobiography be published as a Penguin Classic. Now the former Smiths singer’s claim to literary merit has been given academic weight.
Final-year Cambridge English Literature students taking yesterday’s practical criticism paper were faced with the opening paragraph from Morrissey’s tome. Beside it was a passage by 16th-century pamphleteer Thomas Nashe. Students were asked which would most encourage reading on. Given the choice between a writer of Elizabethan erotica and a man once described as “the most cantankerous, whingeing, self-martyred human being who ever drew breath”, The Londoner can’t imagine who we’d pick.
