On Literature and Teaching

 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...