On Literature and Teaching

  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...

  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, ...

  In 1881, a Brazilian writer named Machado de Assis published in book form what had been serialized in a Brazilian newspaper: The posthumous memoirs of Bras Cubas ( originally published in Portuguese as Memorias posthumas de Braz Cubas) . It was published in French in 1911 (the first translation of that novel), and only reached the English-reading world in 1953 (even today, the English-reading world is notoriously reluctant to publish translation of foreign works). In English it first appeared in an American translation under the name ‘ Epitaph of a small winner ’, a terrible title in many ways and a great one in others, but it seems that this first English translation was not up to scratch and so a new one appeared in 1997, and then two more in 2020, all under the new title ‘ The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas ’. Translating it was obviously difficult since so far there have been three different French translations, two Germans etc. – but the title The Posthumous Memoirs of ...

 '" 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...