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Literature games: the OULIPO and how teachers can benefit

  The authorial intention: OULIPO and the transformation of literature The OULIPO is a group of writers, scientists and poets that was founded in 1960 in France by two men, one of whom remains very famous to this day: Raymond Queneau – the other was François Le Lionnais. You probably know Queneau for one of two things (or both, of course): Zazie dans le métro , and Exercices de style ( or perhaps, too, for his Cent mille milliards de poèmes - A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems) . The first is a slim, quirky novel that mixes registers and tries to transcribe spoken vernacular language, and the second is a magnificent exercise in writing technique: one simple, banal scene told in 99 different ways according to grammar, tone, style and more. Incidentally, teachers and learners of literature should all have a copy of Exercices de style : it has been translated in more than twenty-five languages so you should be able to find a copy you can read. Queneau had studied philosophy but he...
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'Holes' (L. Sachar) and the need for complexity in fiction

  Holes and the need for complexity Louis Sachar ‘ Holes’ is a Young Adult novel that was an enormous success around the world (more than 6 million copies sold). Published in 1998, it has won multiple awards in various countries, it was translated in many different languages and was even adapted for the cinema. Is it a good book, pleasant to read, well-put together, efficiently narrated? Yes, without a doubt. The pace is good, it never slackens or loses coherence, and there’s a hint of complexity in the narrative structure as well, with unannounced flash-backs that are at first difficult to link to the main story. It reads very easily of course since it’s for younger readers, but at the same time there’s no real feeling of the author talking the reader down: it feels like he’s taking the reader seriously, and not treating them like a child. Yet, what I would like to focus on here is how much of a missed opportunity this novel also is. I liked it well enough, but I do thin...
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The most extraordinary literary hoax - and what it means for literature teachers

  What does a poem mean? The extraordinary Ern Malley hoax T.S. Eliot, surely one of the giants of English poetry and a founding father of the modernist language for it, was once asked what he meant with the line (in his Ash-Wednesday (1930) ): ‘ Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree ’. Eliot’s answer? ‘ I mean ’, he replied, ‘ Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree ’. Conclusion? Don’t ask the author what they meant. Other conclusion? The meaning you’re looking for is not for me to tell you about, it’s up to you to determine. Whether it’s the same as mine or someone else’s is immaterial: you are reading the text, make of it what you want! Those two conclusions are still baffling for some people, and when they are not, they remain difficult to internalize; witness how many times we speak in terms of ‘ The author means that… ’, or ‘ The author suggests that ’. Witness how many times we talk of a book ‘ being about this or that ’, about ‘ the book’...
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If the text is a cage...do teachers just open the door, or should learners find the key?

 One common question often asked to learners by teachers of literature is: What is the theme of this text? (or any variation like ‘what is this text about?’). Sometimes, learners will be given a choice of possible answers, or asked something like: ‘ Which of these four answers best expresses what the text is about? ’. There is a problem, though, with this type of questions, however you frame them. In fact, there are two problems that I can see. The first problem is that this does not encourage readers to generate their own interpretations: if you ask them ‘What is this text about?’, you plant the idea in their minds that there is only ONE answer possible. That, in turn, makes the reading feel like a treasure-hunt, except you’ve got no map, no shovel, and the island you’re on is the size of Australia. Good luck. If you ask: ‘ Which of these answers correspond best to the theme? ’, you again deny the readers the right to generate an interpretation themselves, and you run the ris...
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The inexplicable power of Gertrude Stein

  The inexplicable power of Gertrude Stein In her ‘ What is remembered’ (1963), Gertrude Stein’s long-standing partner Alice B. Toklas writes that ‘ Richard Wright was another of the American writers who visited Gertrude Stein after the war. He had long been an admirer of ‘Melanchta’, the second story in ‘Three lives’, which he considered one of the most important influences on his own career’ . Later, Susan Sontag, in her ‘ Diaries’ , will write about ‘Melanchta’ being her favourite short-story – not her favourite by Gertrude Stein, but her favourite tout-court. (‘ Three lives ’ was published by Stein in 1909). And then you have T.S. Eliot telling three successive correspondents (‘ Letters’ volume 2), in 1924: 1.        ‘Miss Heap sent me two manuscripts of Gertrude Stein; they are quite meaningless to me. It seems to me to be nonsense’. 2.        [a month later] ‘I have read [Stein’s manuscripts] through severa...
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Pros and cons of using Young Adult Literature (YAL) in class

  For a few months now, I have been re-reading novels in order to find out which ones I want to use in class next year. It’s for a Master’s module on contemporary literature, and the texts I’ve been using over the last few were: ·        Barry Unsworth: Morality play ·        Magnus Mills: The forensic records society ·        Samuel Beckett: Endgame ·        Jamaica Kincaid: The autobiography of my mother ·        Charles Yu: How to live safely in a science-fiction universe But I want to change, and it’s not easy: first because it’s hard to kill your darlings, and that’s what you do each time you change the list. But second – and more importantly – because texts are tools as much as they are themselves: it’s about what they give us as novels, and what we can do with them as tools in class. And that distinction is really c...
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A literature curriculum is not just random books and personal preferences

 A few months ago, I was talking to secondary school teachers about the literature line at their school. By ‘literature line’, I mean the way literature teaching is organized over one year and also over the years, how it is (or not) seen as a line of continuous development, and how texts are selected and on which criteria. One of them told us – and this happened so many times in the past that this example will have to stand for many – that she intended to put a book on the reading list of her upper-form kids (havo 5 in the Netherlands, which prepares for Professional universities but not full-blown academic universities). Which book? Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song . Even the other teachers around us were…shall we say surprised? Now, don’t get me wrong: everyone who has read that novel praised it, thought it superb and profound and all those things. But everyone who has read that novel knows about its idiosyncrasies as well: run-on sentences, absence of clear dialogue marks, missin...
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