On Literature and Teaching

  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’...

  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...

  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 ...

  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 ...

  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...

  Over the last few decades, a lot of publications have appeared on the importance of using literature at schools – or, in more general terms, the importance of literature tout court . So variously, literature has been found to be good for empathy, perspective-taking, language development, culture, historical knowledge, personal growth, critical thinking, citizenship or both at the same time . Of course, we are all aware that at the same time, reading is declining (for example in England , in The Netherlands , in France ), parents and educators complain young people don’t read, can’t read, won’t read, even if we can all see that those same parents and educators must, by definition, form part of this non-reading public. Do as I say, not as I do. So we can see it coming, not because we can predict the future but because that future is already here: reading literature is a niche activity, one undertaken by a very small subset of our populations and largely upheld by education syst...