On Literature and Teaching

  Oscar Wilde: ‘It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors’ I was having a discussion with a student not long ago, about a novel and its main character, and how that character – a boy –   changes throughout the narrative. At some point, she exclaimed: ‘Ah, I see, this character has grown – he has developed!’. No, I said, it doesn’t pay to think that way. Instead, you should think: ‘That person has changed, that person has developed’- he’s not a character, he’s not made of cardboard or balsa wood, he’s not a Platonic shadow: he’s real, he lives and breathes like you and me. He’s alive . This idea that a made-up character, in a made-up situation, with made-up parents and friends and occupations, could be real, seems at first illogical. ‘No’ you say, he’s not real: he’s an invention, he’s got no blood in his made-up veins, no feelings in his made-up body and mind – he’s a character in a book of fiction, and as such he cannot exist for himself. His world is th

 There's a science-fiction short-story (by Asimov I think, but I'm not too sure - it could be David Brin) in which an Artificial Intelligence has been put in charge of the world. One of the things it does (among many, i.e. everything) is answer any question anyone may have: about the weather outside, the size of Mars, how much cake is eaten per day or what a word means. In short, the AI takes care of everything, including providing knowledge and information. In a time of Chatgpt, connected coffee-machines and self-replenishing fridges, I guess that story sounds old-hat. The point of it, though, is that one day the AI stops working - I cannot remember why, but it does. Forget about the food supply, machine-led agriculture, weather control and such considerations: the story focuses on what happens to people when their questions cannot be answered immediately. As you can imagine, those people are lost - they just don't know what to do, how to react, they have none of the knowl

  Ask yourself: what do you mean by ‘ Thinking about something ’? Or you can approach that from a different perspective perhaps: is a scientific discovery the result of the thinking that was taking place at the time of the discovery? Or is the discovery an event that takes place after a whole lot of thinking was done, and when the thinking properly so-called is now unfocused? In other words: there’s thinking-about-one-thing , and there’s thinking about a network of relations – about things in their relationship and not just as themselves. In a way, it’s the same distinction we can make between meaning and interpretation, as Lars Svendsen put it rather neatly: ‘ 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 ’ . The act of reading is to accumulate information – then to interpret it. It’s really the same in everyday life: ofte