On Literature and Teaching

‘ Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting the time to pass, Sir, one just wishes one had more of it ’. Alan Bennett: The uncommon reader (2007)  In the 1970s, a new movement developed in Science Fiction, originally mostly in England and then in America: a movement called the New Age – nothing to do with the social movement though. New Age then meant bringing Literature and Science Fiction closer together: bridging the gap between what was then perceived as very distinct fields of writing. Then? I’m not sure much has changed since, despite closet SF writers like Margaret Atwood coming clean, most notably in her 2011 book of essays ‘ In other worlds ’, where she (finally) admits to what we had known for a while: that she had used and still uses SF tropes herself.   And so she owned up to what we SF readers have known all along: mainstream writers are not afraid to use typical SF tropes while claiming that what they write is ...

 To h ave your cake and eat it : AI, The Dunning-Kruger Effect and Critical Thinking There is a very nice, very French expression: ‘ Vouloir le beurre et l’argent du beurre’ , which in English is simply ‘ To want one’s cake and eat it too ’: both point to the impossibility (or the greed perhaps) of wanting two opposed things at once. So you have butter, you want to keep it and eat it, but at the same time you want to sell that butter to make money. Can you have both at the same time? Can the cat be both dead and alive? The recent, barely believable hypocrisy displayed by the Tech Bros and their AI companies is an interesting starting point. They now call for ‘Regulation of AI’ because the pace of its development has been too rapid [1] . Well yes, I wonder who pushed that development, and who put AI out there without ever having thought the consequences through. It’s not new of course (DDT, tobacco, pollution) but it does still rankle. What is ever more painful, however, is th...

  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...

  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...

  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’...

 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...

  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...

  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...