On Literature and Teaching

 '" Free as a bird ", we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement. But, alas, we forget the dodo . Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded. Something analogous is true of human beings'. (A. Huxley) Victor Hugo once quoted an acquaintance of his, R. Girardin, who told him something that makes even more sense to us today: 'What is most dangerous and most to be feared is not the abyss, but the slope ’. Profound words, which remind us of what Montaigne said: ‘ La mort n’est rien, le mourir est tout ’ – Death is nothing; dying is everything . What Girardin pointed out to the French poet (and novelist) is that while one may fear the gaping hole and the unknown that lies at its bottom, the main problem is the descent in that hole, the sliding in towards that gaping hole – that fear, that unknown, that ending. ...

  Understated perfection:  a loving appreciation of Penelope Fitzgerald When Penelope Fitzgerald sat down to write her first novel, she was already into her 50s. Born in 1915, educated – among other places – at Oxford, having worked at the BBC, a theatre school and a crammer school, having had children and led a somewhat peripatetic life with her husband, she first published non-fiction and then a first novel in 1977, at the age of 52. After that came a remarkable series of nine novels, most of them short, some of them historical, several of them (partly) autobiographical. What happened? And more importantly: what makes her an exceptional writer? It's certainly not unusual for writers to, as the phrase goes in Writing Workshops, ‘use what you know’ to get started: use your own life, your own memories, the people you know or knew, situations you went through – then novelise it all, put it through the fictional grinder and there you go. Silly advice? Perhaps, but not in her ...

Are there books that are good, that are actually very pleasant to read, that have a lot of obvious literary qualities with a solid narrative architecture…and yet that flatter to deceive? Are there novels that, once finished, feel less than what they could – or perhaps should – have been? I first read Jonathan Coe many years ago, with his Dwarves of death (1990), then went back to his first novel, and finally hit the jackpot with what I still think is his best novel, What a carve up! (1994). That last started a sort of series where novels are not necessarily linked except through a family (the Earnshaw), the epitome of everything Coe obviously feels is wrong with England: rich, entitled, greedy capitalists with no regard for others, certainly not for the poor – in a word, for all those who are not like them. Them? Eton-educated, nepotists, exploiters, leeching from the top, sucking the life and money and happiness from those below them, all without the merest sense of morality. All ...

  Resisting cognitive outsourcing with literature Although there has not yet been enough time to know for certain, an increasing number of scientific studies on the effects of GenAi (like Chatgpt) on the brain are beginning to appear, and one term keeps coming back: Cognitive outsourcing . What that means is simply that the cognitive effort required for certain tasks is delegated to the machine: you outsource your thinking, so to speak. 'So to speak' because ‘Thinking’ really needs to be better defined: the vaguer your terms, the vaguer your thinking with and from them. ‘Thinking’ involves not only the logical tools necessary in analysing, drawing conclusion, making connections: it’s also to do with your desire to use such tools, your dispositions towards implementing thinking skills to understand the world. In that sense, when it comes to GenAI use, Cognitive Outsourcing really means leaving all those aspects of thinking to the machine. The problem is what those scientific...

  Fiction as a safe place When it comes to citizenship education, a great many approaches can be taken, depending on which aspect of it you want to emphasise, or work on: you may be interested in the ‘Norms and values’ aspects, and want to come to grips with the workings of the democratic system, say. Or you may want to concentrate on the skills needed, for example communication skills; or you may focus on global citizenship, aspects of culture and inter-cultural communication and multi-cultural societies. Or you may be more interested in attending to critical thinking and its development in your learners. One issue any such approach will have, however, is that of loyalty. Loyalty to a family, loyalty to traditions, loyalty to a belief (system), loyalty to a culture. The bond that loyalty creates is strong, and will often override such notions as objectivity, multi-perspectival approach and willingness to consider different viewpoints. Thus when discussing, say, Dutch democracy...

    The NRA, the infamous American National Rifle Association that defends the right to bear arms, has long used what is known as a ‘False analogy’ to back up its claims that everyone should have the right to buy, carry and use a weapon, however dangerous. This analogy runs like this: ‘Guns are not the problem: people are. Guns on their own do nothing, it’s how you use them that is the problem’. It’s a false analogy because by the same reasoning, nothing is a problem on its own, and the ones responsible are the users. So the analogy continues: you don’t blame hammers for being a potential weapon to kill with, why should you blame guns? If no-one uses guns to kill other people, guns are simply…not dangerous. I keep seeing the same sort of disingenuous, mendacious and illogical reasoning used when it comes to AI, especially GenAI (like Chatgpt): AI is not the problem, you are. AI is a wonderful thing, it’s the users who don’t understand it, misuse it, abuse it, fraud with i...

  Short, even very short…but powerful One constant problem for teachers of literature at secondary schools is to do with preparation: that of the learners as much as that of themselves. Learners, when asked to read a text in advance, will usually turn up not having done so; or if they have, it was probably just a glance, or a quick read-through, maybe a few minutes only before the lesson started. (To be fair, I’ve know the opposite albeit only rarely, when a student would read the texts so much in advance that they’d sort of forgotten everything about them when lesson-time came round). We all know the consequences of that non-reading-in-advance problem: what to do in class if no-one’s read the text? Some solutions spring to mind of course, like handling the text then and there when class starts for example. But that often leads to more problems because those texts will usually be too long to be read in class, or will at least take up so much time of said class that there will...