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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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Co-creation with GenAI: the fallacy that needs debunking

  The author and techno-specialist Cory Doctorow reminded us recently  that there are at least two ways to look at human-machine interaction, and it’s worth quoting the paragraph in full: ‘In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete. A reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine. For example, an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras that monitor the driver’s eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver’s mouth because singing is not allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they do not make quota. The driver is in that van because the van cannot drive itself and cannot get a parcel from the curb to your porch. The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman spee...
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Can novels be 'too simple'? The case of Magnus Mills and the 'hidden depth' in Literature

  Occasional readers, or reluctant ones, or those dealing most regularly with texts without enormous literary value, are often stumped when it comes to novels where little happens, where characters are not – in E.M. Forster’s formulation – ‘round’, and where the plot is little more than a vehicle for exploring an idea. Such texts are then described as ‘being about nothing’, or ‘boring’, and the final gesture will be either one of dismissal – ‘I don’t like it, it’s crap’ – or incomprehension tinged with bewilderment: ‘I don’t get it, what is it about?’. Those reactions are pretty common when it comes to Magnus Mills, author of some fifteen novels so far as well as several works of short-stories. But such reactions also remind us of what most people expect from ‘Literature’: it’s got to be well-written ( Oh, it’s so beautiful! ), preferably with epigrammatic pronouncements on Life and Human Nature, with characters that evolve and learn, it’s got to be a lesson in living-your-life, ...
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