I posted earlier on ‘English teaching, Romantics and Moderns’ in the light of Ian Reid’s book on the influence of the Romantics on English teaching. Ian immediately responded, but (like most people) was unable to post his comment -- procedure too cumbrous. Our exchange is now quite old since I've been away for a while but with his permission I reproduce it here, lightly edited.
Ian, 4 September:
Anyway, my lost-in-space comment was mainly to say (1) that I don't disagree with your remarks except that I don't see them as "problems" for my line of argument, just strands in the fabric I've tried to exhibit; and (2) that modernism's lack of significant impact on English teaching shouldn't really be surprising, because it has relatively little resonance (compared to Romanticism) with the self-shaping "sentimental education" that for most teachers and students has continued (albeit with variations) to be the major focus of "English".
Me, 4 September
Good of you to respond, Ian -- thanks. (1) fair enough. (2) -- this is not a comment on the book or your response -- it seems to me to take some explaining why people with a literary education and a keen interest in literature, who 'kept up' assiduously with developments in writing -- Britton, Rosen, Dixon -- and who would have been well aware of modernism and would have read the key texts -- were so unaffected by that whole revolution that their belief in the 'sentimental education' you rightly refer to should have continued in such an untroubled way?
When I think of it though I don't remember Harold [Rosen]-- my PGCE tutor who I knew well -- even referring to, let alone getting excited by, any modernist text. The stuff he liked was Dickens and stirring tales of revolutionary struggle -- Arturo Barea on Spain, Sean O'Casey's autobiographies (lots of autobiographies, in fact -- including Gorki).
In his case, it may have been the right-wing politics of Eliot and Pound and Proust's difficulty (for a start) that put him off -- but why not Joyce and Kafka? Though I recall he did read a quite 'difficult' (in a modernist way) poem by Charles Causley with us, and was an admirer of Miroslav Holub -- who I suppose you'd say was in the modernist tradition. And Britton was keen on Wallace Stevens and Malcolm Lowry.
Perhaps they found certain modernist works ok but didn't buy the whole rejection of, for instance, realist narrative -- nor see any implications in it for English teaching -- so had no hesitation in promoting it in kids' writing in school. Nothing could be more anti-modernist, come to think of it, that Britton's position (quoting Lady Chatterley) that novels were essentially the same thing as gossip....
Rosen certainly bought into Wordsworth's view of the child and was fascinated by and accorded great value to children's experience -- but I'm sure would have been appalled by Wordsworth's manifesto on education in Book IX of The Excursion, as I was when I read it a few days ago, possibly for the first time -- can't trust my memory now. How did intelligent people in the 20th century not find that stuff simply silly and offensive? (I didn't feel that way at all about the Prelude, needless to say, when I re-read it recently.) You're very clear, though, that Dixon, at least in his Bretton Hall period, was a serious Wordsworthian. Must ask him about it when I see him next.
Is it just my problem that I'm a bit perplexed by those people's position on modernism? As you can tell, I'm just floundering in all this. Perhaps they were simply right to stick with the essentially Romantic approach to childhood and education -- and after all there was no modernist position on education in the way that the Romantics -- the movement that it arose in opposition to -- had a view on it -- as they had a view on the state.
Ian on 5th September ends with a very strong point:
Yes, but I suppose another way of understanding the conundrum about modernism is to recognise that (despite some well-known oppositional gestures and dismissive rhetoric) it often tended to intensify certain elements in Romanticism. Think e.g. of Virginia Woolf’s emphasis (and Joyce’s) on epiphanic moments, or Kafka’s on the existential anguish of guilt-ridden individuals, etc.
Much of modernism could thus be seen in Harold Bloom’s terms as a combat with its inescapably influential Romantic parent.
Showing posts with label Romanticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Romanticism. Show all posts
Tuesday, 27 September 2011
Friday, 2 September 2011
English teaching, Romantics and Moderns
I've been carefully re-reading, for our history of English project, Ian Reid’s Wordsworth and the Formation of English Studies. It’s of particular interest because there’s an extended discussion of English at Walworth/Mina Road School in the 1950s and 60s, including accounts of some key teachers: Arthur Harvey, Harold Rosen and John Dixon.
His claim is that all these teachers, and teacher-educators at the Institute of Education and King’s, right back to John Dover Wilson and including Percival Gurrey and James Britton, were heavily influenced by Romantic values and ideas that sprang originally from Wordsworth’s poetry. The problems with his story are, first, that these people, for all that they had in common, had many important differences and were influenced, differently, by ideas that came from places quite other than Romanticism, and second that -- as Reid fully acknowledges -- Romantic ideas had been so thoroughly absorbed that they were no longer felt to be ideas or a theory but were simply the common-sense air that everyone breathed. How could a thinking English teacher not have been a Romantic if that was what you were if you didn’t espouse some moribund and atheoretical hangover from Augustan convention and classical rhetoric?
A question that continues to intrigue me -- it falls outside Reid’s remit -- was not how teachers were (still) influenced by Wordsworth but what they made of the liveliest literary movement of their own century, Modernism. If university-educated English teachers were a key group within that part of the society that seriously read literature, how can their work have been, to all appearances, so utterly unaffected by Ulysses, Kafka and Pound? Eliot got in there through certain exam syllabuses, maybe some Yeats too, but, as far as I can see, few others. Gabriel Josipovici (click on his name in the labels at the side) complains that British novelists still continue to write in nineteenth century genres. Well, it seems accordingly that kids in English lessons wrote nineteenth century narratives and Romantic poetry, as if the vast upheaval of Modernism had never taken place.
It’s possible to think of explanations. For instance, it’s not easy to see what teachers could have done with Modernism if they’d wanted seriously to build it in, in setting writing tasks, for instance; it may be that Modernist texts are simply too difficult for younger readers; or the Modernists’ sense of the exhaustion and irrelevance of nineteenth century forms wasn’t and couldn’t be shared by readers who hadn’t read enough of it to have grown weary.
His claim is that all these teachers, and teacher-educators at the Institute of Education and King’s, right back to John Dover Wilson and including Percival Gurrey and James Britton, were heavily influenced by Romantic values and ideas that sprang originally from Wordsworth’s poetry. The problems with his story are, first, that these people, for all that they had in common, had many important differences and were influenced, differently, by ideas that came from places quite other than Romanticism, and second that -- as Reid fully acknowledges -- Romantic ideas had been so thoroughly absorbed that they were no longer felt to be ideas or a theory but were simply the common-sense air that everyone breathed. How could a thinking English teacher not have been a Romantic if that was what you were if you didn’t espouse some moribund and atheoretical hangover from Augustan convention and classical rhetoric?
A question that continues to intrigue me -- it falls outside Reid’s remit -- was not how teachers were (still) influenced by Wordsworth but what they made of the liveliest literary movement of their own century, Modernism. If university-educated English teachers were a key group within that part of the society that seriously read literature, how can their work have been, to all appearances, so utterly unaffected by Ulysses, Kafka and Pound? Eliot got in there through certain exam syllabuses, maybe some Yeats too, but, as far as I can see, few others. Gabriel Josipovici (click on his name in the labels at the side) complains that British novelists still continue to write in nineteenth century genres. Well, it seems accordingly that kids in English lessons wrote nineteenth century narratives and Romantic poetry, as if the vast upheaval of Modernism had never taken place.
It’s possible to think of explanations. For instance, it’s not easy to see what teachers could have done with Modernism if they’d wanted seriously to build it in, in setting writing tasks, for instance; it may be that Modernist texts are simply too difficult for younger readers; or the Modernists’ sense of the exhaustion and irrelevance of nineteenth century forms wasn’t and couldn’t be shared by readers who hadn’t read enough of it to have grown weary.
Friday, 31 July 2009
Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Jewish Diaspora
Amos Oz again, A Tale of Love and Darkness. There’s an aspect of his subject-matter that’s certainly of general historical and cultural interest, but is also relevant to my current preoccupations with what underlies our ideas about the teaching of English in schools.
The Jews he writes about, including his own parents and ancestors back to the eighteenth century, were divided on the Enlightenment, either loving or hating it – loving it as releasing them from what was seen as the superstition of orthodox and mystical religion, with the fearfulness and devious it was thought to promote in Diasporic Jews, or hating it as threatening the appreciation of all that could not be encompassed by rationality.
Oz’s father was decidedly of the rationalist Enlightenment persuasion. He despised Shmuel Agnon as a ‘Diaspora writer’: ‘his stories lack wings… they have no tragic depth, there is not even any healthy laughter but wisecracks and sarcasm… pools of verbose buffoonery and Galician cleverness’ (66). (Galicia: ‘a historical region in East-Central Europe, currently divided between Poland and Ukraine’ – Wikipedia.)
Note that ‘healthy laughter’: Enlightenment – away with stuffy and fussy conventions, euphemisms, avoidances and indirectnesses – abandon waistcoats, ties and old world formality for the open necks and shirt sleeves of the blonde and tanned young Kibbutzniks. Away with ‘sarcasm and cleverness’, ‘the complexes and complexities so typical of the shtetl’ (36). Against the unhealthy Agnon contrast Tchernikowsky, the admired poet who wrote ‘shamelessly about love and even about sensual pleasures’.
‘In keeping with his temperament of a rationalistic Lithuanian Misnaged [opponent of Hassidic Judaism], he loathed magic, the supernatural and excessive emotionalism, anything clad in foggy romanticism or mystery, anything intended to make the senses whirl or to blinker reason’ (66). Hasidic tales were cases of the despised ‘folklore’.
‘My mother used to listen to him speak and instead of replying she would offer us her sad smile, or sometimes she said to me: “Your father is a wise and rational man; he is even rational in his sleep.”’
At the end of his life, though, Oz’s father ‘gradually succumbed, like someone finally releasing his grip on a handrail, to the mysterious charm of Peretz’s stories in particular and Hasidic tales in general’ (37).
(And, as an aside: where did the previous generation, still in Eastern Europe, think the Enlightenment was to be found? Where else but in Germany:
Some eighteen months before the Nazis came to power in Germany, my Zionist grandfather was so blinded by despair at the antisemitism in Vilna that he even applied for German citizenship. Fortunately for us, he was turned down by Germany too. So there they were, these over-enthusiastic Europhiles, who could speak so many of Europe's languages, recite its poetry, who believed in its moral superiority, appreciated its ballet and opera, cultivated its heritage, dreamed of its post-national unity and adored its manners, clothes and fashions, who had loved it unconditionally and uninhibitedly for decades, since the beginning of the Jewish Enlightenment, and had done everything humanly possible to please it, to contribute to it in every way and in every domain, to become part of it, to break through its cool hostility with frantic courtship, to make friends, to ingratiate themselves, to be accepted, to belong, to be loved ... (101))
But an Enlightenment rationalist outlook like that of Oz’s father could coexist with a variety of romanticism. His mother, on the other hand, had been formed by a different, debilitating version:
Both my parents had come to Jerusalem straight from the nineteenth century. My father had grown up on a concentrated diet of operatic, nationalistic, battle-thirsty romanticism (the Springtime of Nations, Sturm und Drang), whose marzipan peaks were sprinkled, like a splash of champagne, with the frenzy of Nietzsche. My mother, on the other hand, lived by the other romantic canon, the introspective, melancholy menu of loneliness in a minor key, soaked in the suffering of broken-hearted, soulful outcasts, infused with vague autumnal scents fin de siècle decadence. (241)
Something in the curriculum of the school she had attended in the twenties in Lithuania,
or maybe some deep romantic mustiness that seeped into the hearts of my mother and her friends in their youth, some dense Polish/Russian emotionalism, something between Chopin and Mickievicz, between the Sorrows of Young Werther and Lord Byron, something in the twilight zone between the sublime, the tormented, the dreamy and the solitary, all kinds of Will-o'-the-wisps of 'longing and yearning', deluded my mother most of her life and seduced her until she succumbed and committed suicide in 1952. She was thirty-eight when she died. I was twelve and a half. (203)
The Jews he writes about, including his own parents and ancestors back to the eighteenth century, were divided on the Enlightenment, either loving or hating it – loving it as releasing them from what was seen as the superstition of orthodox and mystical religion, with the fearfulness and devious it was thought to promote in Diasporic Jews, or hating it as threatening the appreciation of all that could not be encompassed by rationality.
Oz’s father was decidedly of the rationalist Enlightenment persuasion. He despised Shmuel Agnon as a ‘Diaspora writer’: ‘his stories lack wings… they have no tragic depth, there is not even any healthy laughter but wisecracks and sarcasm… pools of verbose buffoonery and Galician cleverness’ (66). (Galicia: ‘a historical region in East-Central Europe, currently divided between Poland and Ukraine’ – Wikipedia.)
Note that ‘healthy laughter’: Enlightenment – away with stuffy and fussy conventions, euphemisms, avoidances and indirectnesses – abandon waistcoats, ties and old world formality for the open necks and shirt sleeves of the blonde and tanned young Kibbutzniks. Away with ‘sarcasm and cleverness’, ‘the complexes and complexities so typical of the shtetl’ (36). Against the unhealthy Agnon contrast Tchernikowsky, the admired poet who wrote ‘shamelessly about love and even about sensual pleasures’.
‘In keeping with his temperament of a rationalistic Lithuanian Misnaged [opponent of Hassidic Judaism], he loathed magic, the supernatural and excessive emotionalism, anything clad in foggy romanticism or mystery, anything intended to make the senses whirl or to blinker reason’ (66). Hasidic tales were cases of the despised ‘folklore’.
‘My mother used to listen to him speak and instead of replying she would offer us her sad smile, or sometimes she said to me: “Your father is a wise and rational man; he is even rational in his sleep.”’
At the end of his life, though, Oz’s father ‘gradually succumbed, like someone finally releasing his grip on a handrail, to the mysterious charm of Peretz’s stories in particular and Hasidic tales in general’ (37).
(And, as an aside: where did the previous generation, still in Eastern Europe, think the Enlightenment was to be found? Where else but in Germany:
Some eighteen months before the Nazis came to power in Germany, my Zionist grandfather was so blinded by despair at the antisemitism in Vilna that he even applied for German citizenship. Fortunately for us, he was turned down by Germany too. So there they were, these over-enthusiastic Europhiles, who could speak so many of Europe's languages, recite its poetry, who believed in its moral superiority, appreciated its ballet and opera, cultivated its heritage, dreamed of its post-national unity and adored its manners, clothes and fashions, who had loved it unconditionally and uninhibitedly for decades, since the beginning of the Jewish Enlightenment, and had done everything humanly possible to please it, to contribute to it in every way and in every domain, to become part of it, to break through its cool hostility with frantic courtship, to make friends, to ingratiate themselves, to be accepted, to belong, to be loved ... (101))
But an Enlightenment rationalist outlook like that of Oz’s father could coexist with a variety of romanticism. His mother, on the other hand, had been formed by a different, debilitating version:
Both my parents had come to Jerusalem straight from the nineteenth century. My father had grown up on a concentrated diet of operatic, nationalistic, battle-thirsty romanticism (the Springtime of Nations, Sturm und Drang), whose marzipan peaks were sprinkled, like a splash of champagne, with the frenzy of Nietzsche. My mother, on the other hand, lived by the other romantic canon, the introspective, melancholy menu of loneliness in a minor key, soaked in the suffering of broken-hearted, soulful outcasts, infused with vague autumnal scents fin de siècle decadence. (241)
Something in the curriculum of the school she had attended in the twenties in Lithuania,
or maybe some deep romantic mustiness that seeped into the hearts of my mother and her friends in their youth, some dense Polish/Russian emotionalism, something between Chopin and Mickievicz, between the Sorrows of Young Werther and Lord Byron, something in the twilight zone between the sublime, the tormented, the dreamy and the solitary, all kinds of Will-o'-the-wisps of 'longing and yearning', deluded my mother most of her life and seduced her until she succumbed and committed suicide in 1952. She was thirty-eight when she died. I was twelve and a half. (203)
Sunday, 23 November 2008
More excuses
No recent blogging: partly I’ve been out a lot, partly I've been doing a lot of writing otherwise, so don’t much feel like writing the blog as well.
I've been reading, scribbling and thinking around a paper that Jan Derry gave to our English Theory Group. She was arguing for certain conclusions that would follow for education from an ‘inferentialist’ epistemology and a correct understanding of Vygotsky’s roots in Hegel. One implication was that the imparting of knowledge in education is a matter of making the student familiar with the relevant ‘space of reasons’, a fuzzy and ill-defined but rich and complex zone of facts, concepts, ideas and associations.
I can’t briefly explain inferentialism, a promising recent line in philosophy associated with the names Sellars, Macdowell and Brandom. In the context of English, though, we non-philosophers were able to see, for instance, that if knowledge is as those philosophers say, you can’t effectively teach a single scene from Macbeth -- which, sadly, some schools try to -- by explaining what each line means. The only way is via a broad exposure to Shakespeare in lots of different guises and contexts. The kids have to begin to be at home in the Shakespeare ‘space’.
I've also been looking at a couple of books on Romanticism and the origins of English Studies in English universities and schools. According to Ian Reid (Wordsworth and the Formation of English Studies, 2004) the whole enterprise was a Romantic endeavour, and continued to be heavily influenced at least into the late 1960s by Wordsworth’s poetry and his notions on education and development, national culture, religion, childhood, creativity and imagination. At the end he speculates briefly on how it might have been otherwise: if, for instance, English had taken its lead from the teaching of rhetoric in the Scottish universities (Adam Smith taught rhetoric), or from the teaching of practical English in the Dissenting Academies (sort of FE colleges for non-conformists heading into business) or had shaped itself as cultural studies without the current exclusive fixation on popular culture.
When you think of it, it’s not at all obvious why ‘imaginative literature’, and especially poetry, should be at the centre of one the central subjects in compulsory mass education.
What else? Well, with some colleagues I'm working on the history of English teaching in London schools in the post-war years 1945-65. This involves interviewing former teachersand students from, eventually, three schools. At the moment we’re concentrating on Walworth School, founded in Southwark as an experimental comprehensive school in 1946. (We’ve recently talked to someone who was a pupil in that first year.)
Finally, last night I went to a benefit bash in Bermondsey for a taxi-driver with cancer -- a vastly ambitious do, attended by, it seemed, 150-200, organised by extended family and friends. Quite a few ex-Walworth people were there, including some I'd once taught. Here’s a story that’s not unusual: R was in a ‘remedial’ (joint bottom stream) class; literacy levels were low; these kids -- as always when you create such groups (we later abolished them) -- weren’t expected to go anywhere much. R is now a manager in one of the big train companies with 400 people under him; his daughter has a Masters degree. He didn’t do much in school because he didn’t see any point -- which doesn’t mean he wasn’t getting anything out of it.
Our research is throwing up loads of stories like that. Because the school tried to give a decent education, whether or not the pupils were obviously benefiting at the time, when motivation kicked in (at work) some of what had been taught turned out to have taken. At least, so I like to think.
I've been reading, scribbling and thinking around a paper that Jan Derry gave to our English Theory Group. She was arguing for certain conclusions that would follow for education from an ‘inferentialist’ epistemology and a correct understanding of Vygotsky’s roots in Hegel. One implication was that the imparting of knowledge in education is a matter of making the student familiar with the relevant ‘space of reasons’, a fuzzy and ill-defined but rich and complex zone of facts, concepts, ideas and associations.
I can’t briefly explain inferentialism, a promising recent line in philosophy associated with the names Sellars, Macdowell and Brandom. In the context of English, though, we non-philosophers were able to see, for instance, that if knowledge is as those philosophers say, you can’t effectively teach a single scene from Macbeth -- which, sadly, some schools try to -- by explaining what each line means. The only way is via a broad exposure to Shakespeare in lots of different guises and contexts. The kids have to begin to be at home in the Shakespeare ‘space’.
I've also been looking at a couple of books on Romanticism and the origins of English Studies in English universities and schools. According to Ian Reid (Wordsworth and the Formation of English Studies, 2004) the whole enterprise was a Romantic endeavour, and continued to be heavily influenced at least into the late 1960s by Wordsworth’s poetry and his notions on education and development, national culture, religion, childhood, creativity and imagination. At the end he speculates briefly on how it might have been otherwise: if, for instance, English had taken its lead from the teaching of rhetoric in the Scottish universities (Adam Smith taught rhetoric), or from the teaching of practical English in the Dissenting Academies (sort of FE colleges for non-conformists heading into business) or had shaped itself as cultural studies without the current exclusive fixation on popular culture.
When you think of it, it’s not at all obvious why ‘imaginative literature’, and especially poetry, should be at the centre of one the central subjects in compulsory mass education.
What else? Well, with some colleagues I'm working on the history of English teaching in London schools in the post-war years 1945-65. This involves interviewing former teachersand students from, eventually, three schools. At the moment we’re concentrating on Walworth School, founded in Southwark as an experimental comprehensive school in 1946. (We’ve recently talked to someone who was a pupil in that first year.)
Finally, last night I went to a benefit bash in Bermondsey for a taxi-driver with cancer -- a vastly ambitious do, attended by, it seemed, 150-200, organised by extended family and friends. Quite a few ex-Walworth people were there, including some I'd once taught. Here’s a story that’s not unusual: R was in a ‘remedial’ (joint bottom stream) class; literacy levels were low; these kids -- as always when you create such groups (we later abolished them) -- weren’t expected to go anywhere much. R is now a manager in one of the big train companies with 400 people under him; his daughter has a Masters degree. He didn’t do much in school because he didn’t see any point -- which doesn’t mean he wasn’t getting anything out of it.
Our research is throwing up loads of stories like that. Because the school tried to give a decent education, whether or not the pupils were obviously benefiting at the time, when motivation kicked in (at work) some of what had been taught turned out to have taken. At least, so I like to think.
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