On Literature and Teaching

‘Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them’ (A. Huxley) We would be fools not to try and anticipate (and predict) the future when it comes to what we do and what we love. I’m a teacher, a teacher-trainer in fact, and I love books and what’s in them – and no, it doesn’t mean I love every single book ever published nor does it mean that I read everything and anything. When it comes to what I read personally, I’m pretty demanding in fact, both in terms of content and form. When it comes to teaching with a book (Teaching with literature), I’m obviously more flexible since that teaching is related to learning aims – typically, cognitive and social – and so form and content are important in what they can do to me and my students, and what we can do with them. The point is: I think those two things are massively important: Education, and Creation. Now it’s become very clear in the last ...

  One of the most famous questions asked in linguistics – and there are a few – relates to the way language might influence our perceptions, and in particular whether the language you speak restricts your perceptions, or at least forces you to perceive in this way rather than that way. That’s what is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, with more or less strong versions. And while the strong version of their hypothesis (that the language you speak influences your perceptions) has largely been abandoned, milder, so-called weaker versions have been shown to operate in the world. When Frederic Jameson, the literary critic and theorist, wrote his seminal book ‘ The Prison-house of language’ (1972), he was partially referring to that idea, something Barthes or, of course, Derrida, were keen to emphasise as well. You inherit the language you speak: from people, from history, from a culture – the language you speak every day is not transparent, it is loaded, it carries ways of thinking th...

 At the heart of every literature class, there are some questions we hardly ever hear asked, or even acknowledged. Yet, in order to determine what we do, why and what for, it is essential that we do ask those questions, however uncomfortable they may make us feel. Ignoring them means missing the very point of our classes: why do we do what we do, what do we want to achieve, and the most important of all: do we in fact achieve what we claim? Can we achieve it?   Q.1: How difficult is it to read fiction? That is something we tend to forget, especially if we like to read ourselves: reading is not easy, and it’s one of those things where the reward might be long delayed, or, in any case, will take long to reap. Reading is time-consuming: chronophage , as we say in French, it eats (devours) time. Watching a complete episode, with a beginning, middle and end, of a series on Netflix will take 45 minutes; in that time, you will have read, what, 20 pages of a normal quality n...

  In a previous blog, I quoted Lars Svendsen in his ‘ The Philosophy of Boredom’ : ‘ Information and meaning are not identical. To simplify, one could say that meaning consists of assembling small parts which fit together to form a bigger whole, whereas information is the opposite ’. Any teacher worth their salt will have seen through this and will have related it to a well-known principle of learning: inductive vs. deductive methods. So let’s see whether this can be applied to reading books, too – and why it matters to do so. After all, 'meaning' is what we're after... As a reminder – and perhaps simplistically –   deduction is the formulating of examples from a rule; induction is the formulating of a rule from examples. In the class, deductive teaching often takes the form of a teacher writing/explaining a rule (e.g. How to form the present perfect) and asking learners to apply that rule across a body of examples/exercises. Inductive teaching would be learne...