On Literature and Teaching

[This follows on from last week's blog - the first two points were 'Don't focus on the wrong thing', and 'All fiction is metaphorical'] C] All fiction is true to life Seen in the light of point B. ( All fiction is metaphorical ), that would seem counter-intuitive: how can something be both metaphorical and true to life? Isn’t the clue in the word ‘Fiction’? That is a discussion we can leave to theorists (even though it pays to remember the parallels between the usual chronologies of narratives and life); what matters most to us is that all fiction comes from life, and all fiction therefore reflects life. It doesn’t mean that all events, characters and the rest are true, that they exist in the world as themselves. Yet they do, in many ways, because fiction is the product of a mind at a certain time – a person, basically – and so their thinking is necessarily constrained by being in the world at a certain time . It follows that everything in fiction will b

  Interpreting fiction: Five basic principles to start generating ideas (1)  (Today the first two principles, next time the following three) So there you are: there’s a text in front of you, right there on the table or on your lap, it’s a poem perhaps, a short-story or a novel, and the question you have is: What on earth is this about? And slowly but surely the famous cry will soon erupt from your lips: I don’t get it! You read the words and you understand them, but you have that nagging feeling that you’re not seeing ‘what you’re supposed to see’. You stare and you re-read, but no, it’s not happening. You don’t ‘get it’, you don’t know ‘what the message/meaning is’. There’s no magic formula to solve this problem, no smoking gun you can always find, no short-cut to the themes. Terminology is not going to help much, and reverting to jargon will only obscure what is already opaque. Looking it up online will only restrict your own input, and will fix in your mind interpretatio