On Literature and Teaching

  On beauty, taste, and ‘hearing the performance’ (Part 1)  The philosopher of music Peter Kivy establishes a useful distinction which, although originally applied to classical music, can serve equally well to contextualise the discussion that follows. It is possible, Kivy argues (2007), when listening to classical music, to hear the music but not the performance. What he means is that any given musical score is both played and interpreted: played , because the notes are there, along with most dynamics (e.g. loud vs soft, crescendo, accents, tempo), and any instrumentalist will play what is written. Interpreted , because there is space enough for a musician to give their own twist to those notes and indications – taking a passage more slowly than indicated, playing legato instead of staccato, accentuating this note rather than that one, and of course changing the tempo.  So in the words of Kivy, a performance is a token (a sort of example) of the music-type, and each perfor

 (Part 2) Of course, an easy way to partition the town is to view it in terms of nationalities: French Literature, Japanese Literature, English Literature . But as the landscape of the town makes clear, blood relations supersede geography : Murakami claims Raymond Carver as a major influence on his own work, and Joyce admired Ibsen so much he wrote him a fan letter when he was 18 (where he doesn't shy away from telling Ibsen that, being old, he'll soon die and that he, Joyce, is ready to move in that space :)). That is probably why it is so difficult to determine what the literary character of a nation is; after all, there are neither stylistic, aesthetic, narrative or structural resemblances between Fielding, Blake, Dickens, Eliot, Sassoon and Kingsley Amis than there are between Martin Amis, Ishiguro, Magnus Mills or David Mitchell. And in fact, Mills and French author Toussaint are much closer to one another than Mills and Ishiguro, or Toussaint and Claudel. Eliot has more