On Literature and Teaching

  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...

  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, ...

  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 ...