O learn to read what silent love hath writ,
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.’             
Shakespeare Sonnet 23

Interested in books? Reading them? Writing them? Talking about them? Studying them? Are you fascinated by what makes a best seller? A classic? A turkey?

Well, if so, you’ve struck it lucky; you’ve come to the right place!

The RJC Lit Team comprises all sorts of people - youngish, oldish, long, short, tall, flat, round, grey, blonde, black, bald, bold and shy – but we are all one in a shared  passionate obsession: books! And we are all hoping to live up to Roger Rosenblatt’s claim in The Odd Pursuit of Teaching Books that “Two, perhaps three, teachers in a lifetime stick in the mind, and one of them is almost always a teacher of Literature”.

We share the same desire to communicate our passion to people like you; to inspire a love of Literature through both a rigorous formal study of texts and, where possible, participation. During your time with us you will have the opportunity to live Literature through theatre trips, film screenings, performance, the RJC Literature Week and perhaps best of all - by joining the Literature Trip to the UK. Somehow reading the end of Hardy’s Tess of The D’Urbervilles in a Singapore classroom doesn’t quite compare to experiencing the same passage recited while dwarfed by the monolithic Stonehenge.

Back home in Singapore we spend our time at RJC looking lovingly at words and how they work; studying closely the techniques of those whose words seem to come to them so easily, those who are beset - as we are - by what T.S. Eliot called “the intolerable wrestle with words”. From them, we seek to improve our own writing, raise the quality of our own written response both to literature and life. We believe Alexander Pope when he says:
 
‘True ease in writing comes from art not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.’  

Why bother some would say. But, you see, we believe all this writing things down matters. Why? Well, Phyllis Rose summed it up for us in her book Parallel Lives:

‘ I believe we need literature which, by allowing us to experience more fully, so imagine more fully, enables us to live more freely.’

For us, Literature is the subject, more than any other that makes us aware of what it is to be really and truly human.  So, if you want to live life more freely, experience life more fully, come and learn to read and “dance”, with us.