Teaching student teachers to teach literature

I taught PGCE (graduate teacher education) for only four years and keep thinking still, six years later, of how I might have done it better. I wish I’d had it clearer then how one might approach ‘teaching' a text like a poem, novel, part of a novel, story or non-fiction text treated as literature. Yesterday for some reason I started thinking how I might have laid it out in a session. Here’s a rough sketch.

Ask the group (the student teachers) the following questions about a text it’s proposed to teach in school:

1. What do you think it’s important to notice, feel, mark, note or register about this poem etc? what noticings (etc) would in your view constitute an adequate reading or mean the kid has ‘got’ the poem?

Two notes to add here:

(a)        Distinguish between the noticings etc that a school student or reasonably responsive English speaker might be expected to come to on his or her untutored own, through such resources as a lay person brings to bear, and those that might result from concepts (‘scientific’ lit crit concepts) and knowledge that an English teacher might impart. Consider, as a possible general rule: should we be starting with the first sort? (A whole discussion is needed on this.)

(b)        ‘in your view’, I said above but you have to take into account that that might not be their view. See below.

2.        What would need to go on between you, the class and the text for those noticings to occur, those aspects or features to be felt? What processes and activities might you instigate?

1. How then will you know what has been registered, noticed, marked or felt? How will you get those results, that learning, to show? This is a question about evaluation, in the sense not of grading but on ‘formative’ evaluation or getting the information by which to proceed effectively.

Now the only way a student’s experience can show, so you can be aware of it, is if it’s materially manifested in an overt sign, which may be anything from a smile or uneasy shifting in the seat to an essay. Whatever it is that’s happened in the students has to come out in the open and enter the ‘space of appearance’ in Hannah Arendt’s phrase. A whole lot of discussion is therefore required on the forms of productive activity that could be encouraged in the classroom which will indicate what has been going on in the student’s head.

I suggested in point 1 that teachers begin by identifying the things they think students should ‘get’ in the text but observed in 1(b) that students might well have a different take. Now you don’t want to preempt or cut off reactions that are different from the ones you think they should have that are the same as yours, or give the sense that yours are right and theirs somehow not legitimate. Devising forms of productive activity that will allow responses to appear that you’d no way of anticipating is a difficult matter and one of the hardest and most important thing English teachers have to learn to do.

        4.        There’s an extra complication: it may take some form of expression for the student to become aware of the nature of his or her response. For it to become known to the experiencer, the experience may need to be manifested out there, in the public (accessible to others) ‘space of appearance’, in, for instance, spoken or written words. Indeed, it may only be when ‘semiotically anchored’ or attached to signs that some sorts of experience may be said to come into existence at all, or at any rate definite existence as realities to be mentally entertained and contemplated. It may be in giving expression to the response to a text that the response happens ‘in the first place’.

And here we have to note that the notion of ‘expression’ is profoundly misleading, as if something that’s inside (mental, psychic) gets outside, by a process of ex-pression, pressing out. In fact there’s no way that what’s inside, a thought or feeling, can itself be made visible or apprehensible since what is perceptible is material and those inner occurrences aren’t. (Except that some thoughts are already ‘encoded’ internally in language to varying degrees….)
What actually happens in so-called ‘expression’ is that to whatever is ‘inside’ is added something else, something of quite a different, namely material, order.


As a responsible PGCE tutor I would want to supply references to articles and books in which the authors give serious thought to, and report their classroom experiments relating to, (a) forms of production to give ‘expression’ to responses, ones that could be set up without preempting those responses; and (b) the theoretically difficult issue of the disjunction between experience and the expression of it and the way in which it may only be in expression that experience may be said to come fully into existence at all.

But I'm now so out of touch with the whole business that no such references come to mind. But I'm also willing to bet that none of the main ‘method books’ on English teaching of the last, what, twenty years, at any rate in Britain, have anything substantial to say on these issues.

Unsatisfying literature

A long intermission, that was: high pressure period for inspecting and writing up data (book on the research -- Walworth and two other schools -- due November) so I haven’t felt like extra writing on top. The pressure has eased for the time being so no reason not to resume -- I.e to use this forum to do my musing -- with Wolf Hall.

Wolf Hall is a historical novel by Hilary Mantel about Thomas Cromwell and his relations with, at the political level, his two employers, Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII. My previous reading had been Canada by Richard Ford. After finishing Wolf Hall I realised that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d read two terrific novels in a row: I was absorbed in both and admired them immensely, and still do in retrospect.

I resolved after Canada that I’d read it again, as I increasingly do with novels. (I haven’t done it yet because I lent it to someone who I haven’t seen to get it back from, but I certainly will.) While reading Wolf Hall I was certain I’d reread that too -- but in the following days and weeks I haven’t felt so sure and haven’t felt the urge to start. There’s something importantly different about the two books, it seems, and getting at it seems of interest as a way of understanding something significant about English.

I've always felt inadequate -- under-educated -- in dealing with literature. I didn’t do A level English and when I switched to English at Oxford the ‘course’ was something of a joke: we read the books, wrote essays, and that was about it apart from the odd seminar with good young lecturers like John Carey. I did no thinking about what literature was, what poetry was etc., and I never had any help with reading ‘difficult’ 20th century poetry beyond The Waste Land; no one showed us and I'm still floundering with much modern poetry, though I like reading it. I feel there must be a key, an essential way of approaching it that, once you’ve got it, will banish many obscurities and show the motivation behind elements for the inclusion of which I can see no logic. And now I'm floundering thinking about those two novels.

Both are beautifully written, in different ways. With Mantel I wasn’t expecting much from the writing (I've never read anything else by her): this was a ‘historical novel’ and it would all be in the story and the characters. The description, scene-setting etc would be adequate -- functional -- but the prose would be flat. It wasn’t: the sentences were lovely, the texture was such savouring it was a large part of the pleasure. This was quality writing, I realised, as well as being a great story, the people in it fascinating and often sympathetic, the dialogue sharp and witty. (What’s more, the research behind the book had clearly been thorough; I felt confident that if you wanted to know about Tudor England, this would be a trustworthy place to start. Needless to say, I don’t really know that.)

But now, looking back, I'm not sure what it all amounted to. Was my reading essentially just a series of richly enjoyable and stimulating imaginative experiences, appreciations of beautiful texture -- and if so, what’s wrong with that and what else would it be if it wasn’t that? (The terrible judgment, ‘entertainment’, springs to mind.)

There are other good books, also well-written, that I ended up feeling the same way about. They all fall into the category of ‘genre fiction’. There are detective novels (Chandler, Parker etc), books like Robert Harris’s Fatherland, stories set in World War II and Cold War novels; Le Carré, of course, but I'm thinking particularly of an author I read more recently: military, espionage, USSR, Fall of France--Alan Furst’s The Polish Officer and Night Soldiers -- both well written and not just functional but, like all the others, I enjoyed them immensely but they left little behind except some scenes and situations that are still powerfully present to me. Wolf Hall seems, after this short time gap, to fall into that category; Canada doesn’t, though that, too, has left vivid impressions of the city of Great Falls, the boy’s world, the misery of the unbroken miles of Saskatchewan wheat fields.

Canada is more austere. The voice of the narrator (middle-aged man recalling his adolescence though one feels his voice hasn’t changed much in those years) is speechlike -- but not slangy -- and eschews literary types of expression while still doing all the descriptive work that was needed. Perhaps the quality the book has could better be described as formality, despite the relative informality of a style that owes much to speech. The language is of course written language in that it continues for the length of a book and is organised in paragraphs and chapters, and no doubt in features of syntax which I’d need the book back to demonstrate. Whatever its characteristics, it is above all consistent: the book establishes a decorum in its diction (see Donald Davie, Purity and Diction in English Verse) and sticks to it, with an effect overall that’s poetic. In Wolf Hall (and Furst) there is a pervasive poeticness -- exhilaratingly figurative and evocative -- but that’s a very different matter and doesn’t leave the lasting deposit in the mind that Canada does.

It’s something like -- this is the idea I'm playing with: the difference between a book that’s poetic and a book that’s, in effect, a poem, poetry.

Did some such distinction -- poetic, non-poetic -- lie behind Leavis’s distinction between the ‘Great Tradition’ of English fiction and less worthy writers like Trollope and Wells?

However, my judgment of books on one reading are unreliable. All this will have to be revised, no doubt, when I get round to re-reading, though whether I'll do that with Wolf Hall -- at least soon (I can’t see myself holding off reading the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies) -- I can’t say.

I wonder whether it’s its poetic character that makes for my willing re-reading of Kipling’s rather unregarded Kim over most Trollope, say, though I generally enjoy Trollope (the good bits, anyway), and for my satisfying rereading of Carlyle’s French Revolution (see marginal links). Will reflect.

How literature should be studied

What I do with books might suggest what English teachers might try to do with their literature classes.

The issue of principle or theory at stake is whether ‘just reading’ is enough and if not, what’s needed beyond what we see people doing with books on the bus or tube.

There are certain obvious things to be said.

(1) Life’s too short and not all books deserve more than a quick reading.

(2) In my experience, the main thing that needs to be done with a huge proportion of kids in secondary schools is simply getting them to read more fluently and get through more books. They don’t read well enough and they don’t choose to read. Leaving school unable to read well is far more serious than missing out on literary appreciation or analysis.

For myself, I've evolved a procedure to meet my own needs as a reader, though I'm very irregular in practising it, most of my procedures aren’t maintained for long and none are completely satisfactory. In addition, what I do these days is probably influenced by needs arising from failing memory -- I simply don’t remember what I've read as I used to.

Here’s the sort of thing I've been doing recently while reading Kafka’s Castle (re-reading, I think, but I'm not sure). Every so often I break off and write notes on ‘what strikes me’ -- that’s as good a formulation as any, and a measure of vagueness is desirable in specifying procedures, especially when a teacher is proposing them to kids, so as not to foreclose interesting variations one may not have thought of.

Note that I'm not studying the novel, as for an exam or to write an article, though I think my notes would be useful, though insufficient, for either purpose. I'm reading for pleasure and find that making notes enables me to get more out of the book.

Here’s the sort of thing I write:

• Amalia dominating the household of Olga and Barnabas—what’s that about? goes nowhere...
• Constant physical difficulty in moving: encumbered, deep snow etc—as in bad dreams.
• The ‘gentlemen’ and Castle officials: temperamental, secretive, dissembling—hiding, pretending to be someone else.
• What did K. come for? Who is he? Does he have a past? Above all, why does he stay and not simply go back?
• interminable delays—waiting for a result for years, until old age.
• The officials are human, have appetites, break rules—and behave like children or animals—‘the continued shouting in the dark stalls’.
• The Castle isn’t a castle in fact but just an untidy settlement of ‘hovels’.
• Ambiguity about whether a bureau is actually in the Castle, or a servant is really a Castle servant. Semi-official messengers etc, gradations and subtleties, uncertainties of status. ‘X is not a real messenger,’ etc.
• People age quickly—a lifetime’s ageing in a couple of years.
• The servants dictating into the air and the clerks without being asked or even glanced at taking it all down.
• Extreme disparity between absurd claims for the ‘authorities’’ efficiency, infallibility and sensitivity—as believed for instance by the landlord and landlady—and the accounts of their extreme childishness and selfishness.
• The stuff of bad dreams or nightmares: being trapped in vulnerable situations; losing time -- morning becomes late afternoon unnoticed; going to sleep in evening and finding it's afternoon on waking up surrounded by people.
• Claustrophobia: getting into small spaces: the clerks behind the counter at the castle. Sleeping under the bar, constantly being crowded by people.
• The officials spend a lot of time asleep. So does K. but is still constantly tired.

So what is the sort of thing I note and what use does it seem to be? Not so much impressions as things that are there, in the novel, features or aspects that give it the character it has. I note things, in the sense of notice. Things on the whole other than plot, character and structure; more themes, images, pervasive representations.

Because I lack a musical education I feel deprived of any means of getting a grip on classical music when I listen to it. I couldn’t write notes like those above because I don’t have the language. More seriously -- or, rather, an aspect of the same thing -- I don’t have the concepts; I lack the names and therefore the things -- I don’t know what it is I'm hearing. I can’t identity bits, parts, elements, aspects; I can’t make the necessary distinctions and fix them in memory so as to recognise repetitions and variations; because I don’t identify the elements my ability to memory is impeded. Without a functioning memory I can’t get a grasp of structure.

In noting the features of the novel I render myself able at the end to say what was in the novel, in a way I find harder when I haven’t made notes, and that’s without re-reading the notes. It’s not the writing down that makes the difference; it’s the registering you have to do in order to have the content that can be written down.

So in English, reading literature: I would argue they don’t need theory, not in the first place -- just a way of grasping what’s there, noting and registering it. They should come away with a sense of what the book was, what was going on it it. Explaining what was going on with the help of categories like gender, post-colonialism or psychoanalysis seems to me secondary, something to be brought in later, after they’ve given the text a good going-over with whatever resources they have to hand. Your help in enhancing those resources, allowing different features to become apparent in the text, will be best appreciated when they’ve got as far as they can under their own steam.

What I'm arguing for at a more general level is that English teachers take seriously something that John Dixon was onto in the mid-1970s, in his final, added chapter in the third (1975) edition of Growth through English: that simply, as it were, picking things out and naming them, putting them into language in the first place, was the primary act of abstraction on which all the higher operations like generalising and explaining were dependent, and should be the first concern of English (which meant in the early years, up to about year 9 I imagine, a focus on ‘enacting and narrating’ -- 117). There’s something out there: the basic intellectual move is, in the face of that something, to set up something ‘in here’, in the mind, in language, a symbolic something you can work with (for instance, through reasoning) as opposed to the actuality that you can’t work with, or not in the same ways.

English and the ordinary

In his book Wordsworth and the Formation of English Studies (2003) Ian Reid argued that what we do, or until recently did, in school English had its origins in Wordsworth. Wordsworth, that is, rather than Matthew Arnold, as has often been claimed.

I felt a bit uncomfortable in acknowledging that there was truth in what Reid said since I've never felt much in sympathy with the Romantics. (Just lately I've begun to find Wordsworth both more interesting and more rewarding as a poet, not least thanks to Stephen Gill’s biography.)

Reid seemed to be right: even English at the London Institute of Education in the 1960s, emphasising as it did the importance of language in mental development and saying little about schools of literary study, owed more than a little, perhaps by way of F.R. Leavis, to Wordsworth and the Romantics. Parts of that Romantic heritage now look worth reasserting.

***
What triggered this posting is a coincidence of reading some Wordsworth and talking to a friend who’s been teaching the Welsh Board A Level Lit that allows the teacher to choose – freely, not from a list -- a group of thematically linked books for a big coursework assignment. This year Richard has had outstanding work from an unpromising group around the theme of Madness (with a feminist or gender edge) and the books Jane Eyre, Emily Dickinson’s poems, Syvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Ken Kesey’sOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, all works he values highly. When I heard that list, I found myself feeling uneasy, despite the scheme’s evident success. Something quite deep in my formation as an English teacher was objecting. So what I'm doing here is examining my reaction.


In the second, 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads (in which his contribution outweighed that of Coleridge) Wordsworth included what he claimed were innovative lyrics and ballads such as Simon Lee, Old Man Travelling, The Last of the Flock, The Old Cumberland Beggar, Goody Blake and Harry Gill and The Idiot Boy. According to Gill (pp.140-1) these were innovative in relation both to his earlier poetry and to popular works that were full of incident, sensation and colourful character (though doesn’t add that poetry of the type Wordsworth was promoting wasn’t lacking in the magazines of the time). Whereas his own poetry had in the past followed eighteenth century models in ‘work[ing] from the general to the particular’…. [t]he ‘figures and incidents’ serving identified abstractions such as ‘Truth’, ‘Justice’ or ‘Freedom’, ‘[the] new poems… originate in a particular observation of a figure or an incident and they concentrate on it intensely, as if depicting it in all its particularity will unveil its significance’ (quotes from Gill, p.140).

Those ‘figures and incidents’ were, moreover, ordinary, as Wordsworth saw it: regular, uneducated rural people doing and experiencing things (including economic and political oppression) that were part of normal life outside the cities. Part of his purpose was pedagogic, in a moral and political sense: the audience in whom he sought to ‘raise awareness’ was ‘the legislating, voting, rate-paying, opinion-forming middle class’, and ‘…what the reader’s awakened sensibility was asked to comprehend was the pathos, tragedy, or dignity inherent in the burbling of an idiot boy, in the gratitude of an enfeebled old man, or even in the shuffling gait of an old Cumberland beggar.’ It was necessary to look to unsophisticated people in their ‘natural’ (i.e. rural) state (in ‘”low and rustic life”’) to discern ‘”the primary laws of our nature”’ (188).

He had to explain this purpose in his Preface because readers ‘who had thrilled to fast-moving incident, machinery [of plot, presumably], and colour in translations of German ballads or in Gothic fiction such as Lewis’s The Monk’ would not understand the point of poems about ordinary characters and unsensational incidents. For Wordsworth, it represented a corruption of taste that readers’ emotional responses could be aroused only by striking incident (so that even Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner was open to objection). We should learn to be moved by the sort of ‘”human passions, human characters, and human incidents”’ that could be found in ordinary people and ordinary lives, and a job of poetry, beyond ‘”producing immediate pleasure”’, was to help to teach us: ‘Wordsworth could never have spoken of a purely literary act. For him poetry was a moral agent or it was nothing’ (189).

Wordsworth explains that, in Gill’s words, ‘[h]is work will be found unlike the poetry of the day…in language, in subject-matter, but above all in its tendency to disclose the quiet, the simple, the unregarded aspects of human nature. It is a poetry of discrimination, in which “the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation and not the action and situation to the feeling.”’

By that he means, I imagine, that the situations engage us not because they are in themselves noteworthy but because they happen to characters with whom and to worlds in which we have, through the poetry, become involved. ‘”For the human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants.”’


NOW note the connections with the English taught in schools in the 1960s and 70s. The first was a pronounced favouring of ordinary life over exotic incident, of relations and transactions in the familiar urban neighbourhood rather than thrilling action and spectacular evil in the imagined worlds of detectives, spies, ghosts, pirates, space, boarding schools and stables.

Second, the point in addressing characters and situations from ordinary life was to observe them with some intensity so that ‘depicting [life] in all its particularity [would] unveil its significance’. Bad secondary modern textbooks of the 1950s contained scenes from ordinary (usually rural or small town life) [1], but in the children’s writing valued by the ‘New English’ of the grammar and comprehensive schools and in the favoured authors such as Lawrence the descriptions were so vivid as to appear charged with significance, suggesting a sort of transcendence in the way that descriptions of nature had in Wordsworth and still did in Laurie Lee, Ted Hughes and writing from progressive primary schools (Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire, the West Riding). You didn’t have to go to the worlds of heroes to escape banality: wonder and marvellousness was there all around you if you only looked.

Third, there was a moral and political agenda, and I think a decent and admirable one. In Southwark and Bermondsey, for instance, where I started teaching in Walworth School, the working class kids in the schools, were, many of them, like their families, quite simply ‘the salt of the earth’: honest, generous, warm, responsible, intelligent. (You can get the flavour of them from Tommy Steele’s terrific autobiography, Bermondsey Boy.) But nothing that was around for them to read reflected them and their lives. What they read from popular literature and saw on television related to worlds other than theirs and people unlike them and it could often be through an English teacher that they first encountered anything representing scenes that felt closer to home (even though they might be geographically distant, as in extracts from Sons and Lovers).

In English the lives they knew, including their own, could be their own subject-matter as writers and in writing about them they could confirm and reinforce a belief that the everyday qualities of people you knew embodied values that counted.

We don’t now use the term ‘virtue’ without embarrassment except in philosophical circles, but the concept is valid and necessary. Without being preachy, good teachers still teach virtue by setting examples, acting as models and creating a moral climate in which good qualities are valued. It seems right also that English should still, as literary education always did, induce reflection on virtue and promote it by representations in books; and, since we’re not educating Roman aristocrats or Renaissance princes, that the models should include admirable people and behaviour from ordinary life.

In fact one could argue the need is now all the greater since the qualities that make figures from popular culture into young people’s models often have little to do with virtue.

Certainly, the lives of ordinary people are now more widely and adequately represented than they were sixty years ago, in television and film as well as novels, but the need for working class school students to write themselves into a conviction of their own people’s worth is as pressing as ever. (The fact that the working class is now far more ethnically diverse doesn’t remove the issue but calls for a principled emphasis on those qualities that count as virtues in enlightened -- i.e. Enlightenment-derived -- philosophical traditions.)

So I still value books that confer dignity on ordinary lives and that teach children to find significance in the ordinary as well as the extreme and exotic, and to find pleasure and stimulation in depictions of regular existence – in relationships, settings, dialogue – and not just in action and incident, in ‘fast-moving incident, machinery, and colour’. For its espousal of those aims the ‘New English' of the 1960s retains my respect.

In university English studies, meanwhile, I rather get the impression that it’s been precisely ‘action and incident’, or at any rate ‘colour’, that’s been getting the attention: plot, in which Leavis showed little interest; the melodrama of Gothic; revenants, cyborgs and dopplegängers; the marginal and abnormal: madness, deviance... The ‘quiet, the simple, the unregarded aspects of human nature’ no longer get much of a look-in.

I've indicated why I think that loss could be unfortunate: it’s important that literature take interest and recognise value in the lives of people who are not rich, privileged or powerful.

But some considerations weigh the other way.

First, granting that it’s a good thing for literature and English to remind us of what’s admirable in the ordinary that’s under our noses, the qualities of ordinary people in their ordinary lives, we no longer have the equivalent of Wordsworth’s simple, good rustic existence to point to. The virtues no doubt still exist but no discrete group is their reservoir. The working class is criss-crossed with divisions of many kinds and everybody has influences and discourses flowing through them from all over the place, not least the global media and internet. You can’t now have a working class English curriculum that draws in the same unproblematic way for its moral exemplars on a single shared community and its values.

Second, what literature does an adolescent need? It’s still true, on the one hand, that Lawrence is worth reading, at least for me (I don’t know about today’s school students). Recently, impelled by something I read about him in the paper and curious to know how he’d read now after many years, finding I still had Sons and Lovers, I turned to a random page, started reading and found an hour had passed in complete absorption. I was struck by how real, how vivid, how definite and specific the people and relationships were, and how clear Lawrence was about what being a strong woman meant in terms of her responses, initiatives, offerings and refusals. That and the electric tension in the dialogue. In fact, the dialogue and, more generally, the drama, were what made the book a terrific read.

That can’t be said, on the other hand, about much that’s been written about growing up in working class communities. The prose is often drab, the world evoked banal and petty – and unexciting for both students and me. Sometimes, reading such stuff, I feel a terror of ever being trapped inside such petty, restricted, claustrophobically local worlds and long for a dose of Shakespearean kings, Byronic adventurers, Huckleberry Finns, Augie Marches (that’s Saul Bellow’s magnificent novel), little Oskars (The Tin Drum) and Midnight’s Children. The values behind Wordsworth-Lawrence-Leavis-Sillitoe-New English are Protestant -- and inclined to be dour. The books are short on comic exuberance. The carnivalesque humour and wildness of Shakespeare and Dickens has disappeared. The fecundity and richness of life manifested in Wordsworth’s natural world (though hardly his human one) and in English nature poetry generally aren’t mirrored in those accounts of mother getting ready to go out or father on his allotment: ‘from his pocket he drew the many-coloured seed packets…’ – who cares?

As a teenager I didn’t on the whole read the books Leavis would have wanted me to. Rather what I was after was precisely other worlds, worlds different from mine, those of Steinbeck, Iris Murdoch, Sartre’s France under occupation, Hemingway’s Spain, Holden Caulfield’s family-free adventure (including prostitute). It was a bit later that I read The Bell Jar and that was equally powerful. As for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I've read that for the first time in the last week and my friend is right: it’s a great novel, in the exuberant Huckleberry Finn, Catch 22, Saul Bellow tradition – and a terrific moral exemplar. I'd give that to adolescents with no hesitation. And be confident I was doing my job as an English teacher. (American Psycho still to go.)

Yes, these books explore experiences and situations outside the run-of-the-mill ordinary and so violate the pedagogic programme of Wordsworth and of aspects of 1960s English. But so they need to, even within the terms of English as a moral education, not simply because of the appeal to students of the extreme and outré but because knowing the human condition includes seeing it in extremity.

[1] Medway, P. (1990). Into the sixties: English and English society at a time of change. In I. Goodson & P. Medway (Eds.), Bringing English to Order: the history and politics of a school subject (pp. 1-46). London: Falmer.

Beyond 'first-order' reading

In an exchange we've been having about ‘literacies’ in language and other media/modes, Mark Reid, who works in film education, writes

I think you can similarly go beyond basic, automatic decoding of moving image, into higher, more sophisticated shapings in film. We see it so rarely though - it's to do with style, - i think style in film is as intrinsically important as it is in prose, but just as hard to capture - and making the 'film sentence' (the phrase is Anthony Minghella's) speak with the voices of other films, heteroglossia-style. I watched a film called Birth over xmas, twice (this is rare for me!). Every frame is freighted with resonances from other films, and way beyond a crude 'postmodern collage' sense; it speaks with the voices snatched from other films. 'Reading' Birth is richer if one has seen films like Rosemary's Baby, The Shining, not arcane stuff, just cineliterate work. (And also richer if you've read Henry James and Edith Wharton - or seen the two or three very good film 'versions'.)

Right, I'm sure – I don’t have the cineliteracy to check it for myself. And it offers another way into one of my interests, what’s involved in education in literature.

Up to a point, people who can read (in the usual sense etc) can follow a story, just as at one level we can all follow a film (we can see what this frame is an image of, we know without working it out that there’s a lapse of time between these two). So what is there beyond that point? what is education in these things at a more advanced level? Mark indicates two things (they overlap but I think they’re separable in theory): style and intertextual allusion (frames that are already partly familiar from other works).

In written prose and poetry, the style is working on us, presumably, whether we’re aware of it or not, and intertextual allusion probably the same if we’ve read the other works (or examples of the other genres). Literary education – as opposed to just reading -- works to make us consciously aware: not for its own sake – because analysis is good, or because that sort of exercise is scholarly or rigorous or ‘proper academic study’; but to enhance our experience of the work. Admittedly some sorts of analysis can ‘kill a work’, as they say, but the idea is that the student notices more of what’s there.

What’s happening is that an aspect of the novel or poem (say) starts to present itself to us even though it isn’t there: no amount of looking at what is there -- this sentence or scene – will find the similar sentence or scene from Pride and Prejudice. Only the recall of Austen will do that, the bringing to mind of something that isn’t there, another book that’s not on the desk in front of me but is still on the shelf or in the library or given to Oxfam years ago.

When we start being aware of texts as the visible parts of vast webs, our experience stops being simply of the immediate words and sentence, and starts to be something abstract, a set of relations that aren’t available to direct inspection. The concrete presence of what’s before us gets less substantial and takes on the character of a shadow or echo or the presented front of something big behind it that’s not visible. What immediately presents itself ceases to be all the reality there is.

But then, if the process is going well, the opposite phase of the oscillation kicks in and we snap back to what’s in front us, which now appears both more concrete or tangible and ‘freighted’ with a sense of the abstract network of relations it’s enmeshed in. And then back again, and so on.

Style of course is partly a matter of which resonances get activated. But it’s also characteristic lexical choices, sentence shapes, types of transition from sentence to sentence and prosodic patterns (sound and rhythm). Again, the patterns those things form aren’t there in the immediate way that a particular sentence is in a spontaneous reading; we construct them unconsciously and, if education is doing its stuff, perhaps consciously as well.

Lasantha Wickrematunge

Once in a while we get a great piece of journalism. When this happens, schools – which most likely means English -- should make their students aware of it. For English teachers there are two reasons why.

The first is that English should participate in the education of democratic citizens by making young people aware of what's being said by people who can say things well about interesting public issues.

The second is that English is concerned with knowledge. It’s often forgotten how much students learn in English, not about language or literature but about the world. This is why it so often seems to encroach on territories that are the object of specialist disciplines, particularly sociology, political science and cultural studies.

We don’t teach those disciplines because we stop short of systematic instruction in concepts and methods; but there are other ways of engaging with the world of public affairs than those of academic scholarship. Our students are using those modes whenever in their English lessons they talk and write about crime or racism or youth unemployment or game shows. Good journalism shows us these non-specialist but disciplined modes of engagement pursued to a professional standard. It provides the model for an important class of work in English.

Now: this week, how many English teachers have read with their students the posthumous editorial by the Sri Lankan newspaper editor Lasantha Wickrematunge? As the Guardian explained on 13th January, ‘This extraordinary article by the editor of the Sri Lankan Sunday Leader was published three days after he was shot dead in Colombo’ ; in it he predicts his own murder by government agents. The text is here.

It’s a fine piece of writing. It’s a magnificent rallying cry in defence of a free press. It’s a powerful protest against tyranny and the cruelty of governments insufficiently restrained by law and democracy. It’s a beautiful example of the quality of the English written in many places outside the predominantly Anglophone world of Britain, North America, Australia, New Zealand etc.

Do political essays get read at all in English lessons outside a few Orwell pieces? Does anything contemporary in this genre ever get read? In the 1950s grammar schools our English teachers used to bring in the latest article that had struck them in the New Statesman, Guardian, Spectator, Listener, Observer etc., and would read them to us with an invitation to argue. If that practice has died it should be revived.

English and the existential abyss

Philosophie Magazine, September issue: The editorial this month explains that they’ve hitherto kept away from thématiques existentielles, out of a fear of appearing to offer trendy nuggets of wisdom. Now they’ve decided they can’t avoid going beyond ‘theoretical thought’ to take on ‘lived thought’.

I like their concluding sentence: ‘L’ambition est de montrer qu’on peut traiter des vertiges existentiels avec des outils différents de ceux de la psychologie.’ Our ambition is to show that existential vertigos (Loss of existential bearings? vertiginous glimpses into the abyss?) can be addressed with other tools than those of psychology.

In my adolescence, one of those tools was literature. Less the literature studied in school than that in circulation in the sixth form, some of it introduced to us by Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (1956), including, I recall, Camus and Dostoevsky. Also Salinger, Sartre (fiction and plays), Beckett and Kerouac, and contemporary French plays put on at Bradford’s amateur Civic Theatre: Anouilh, Giroudoux, Cocteau. Films in a similar vein were shown there, equally powerful in their effect on us.

English, too, like philosophy in French schools, should be addressing, shouldn’t it, young people’s experiences of existential vertigo.

What was Modernism about?

What was it about modernity -- the modern condition, post-Darwin and post-photography -- that led painters in the late 19th century and early 20th to reject traditional depiction as false and to see a fragmented surface and shamelessly displayed brushwork as truer?

Although I'm very drawn to modernist art, fiction, poetry and architecture, I struggle to understand modernism even in a single art form, let alone what the forms have in common. Why suddenly, at that point in the history of painting, did Cézanne feel he had to show objects as if their structure was really flat plates make his brush strokes visible with little pretence at representational illusion?


Why in 1907 did Picasso, apparently against his conscious intentions and to his own bafflement and unease, feel impelled to paint the fragmented bodies of the Demoiselles d’Avignon?

(And why did Schönberg feel he had to reject the scales and harmonies that had served for so long?)

Here is Henri Matisse’s 1905 painting, ‘Woman with a Hat’:


Writing about it, T.J. Clarke suggests that representation (e.g. of passion in faces and bodies) had become cheap and facile with the commercial multiplication of images. Modernism (this is me now, not Clarke) emphasises the surface and the unbridgeable gap and difference between paint and reality; the traditional illusion -- verisimilitude -- was an illusion that didn’t work: once you looked at it closely, as paint, it became uninteresting in that the paint marks and painted shapes weren’t worth looking at in themselves. Just as direct expression was an illusion, the new sense of the semiotics of representation -- that it was always (just) signs you were dealing with (a brush mark isn’t a flower or a shadow) -- meant that honesty required you should acknowledge that you were dealing in signs. More than that: you should recognise that there was no access to reality, or certainly no way of representing access, except by signs that in themselves were meaningless, or, if they had meaning, whose meaning belonged to a different order than representation, that of their formal relations, their geometry, for instance.

Something had to be made of the signs themselves, the signifiers: they needed to become meaningful in themselves by being put into a relationship, in the way that musical notes, themselves meaningless, are placed into relationships so as to bring about -- well, to say meaning is to evade the issue: let’s say relationships or patterns that work on us in such a way that they seem right and suggest significance. (I realise that isn’t good enough. There’s a book by Edward Rothstein, Emblems of mind: the inner life of music and mathematics, that I may return to for help.)

Painting was still, up to the First World War, say, a search to capture reality, no doubt about it -- see Van Gogh’s letters: he’s obsessed not with brush marks but with what he could see, with catching the colour and feel of corn in a particular light. But what this involved for him was the search for a new system of signs which could ‘capture’ life -- somehow, despite being just signs. Working on the signs, the formal medium, was the way to rediscover reality -- hence Matisse’s wish, as Clarke puts it, for a form of art that would come to exist on the far side of formalism’. ‘The human [would] only be found again… by pressing on towards the human’s opposite.’ He describes how you can see that formalism at work in the hat and face: they’re made out of a language of separate signs -- shapes, curves, strokes, colours.

In their compositions framed by their new formalisms, artists showed us reality as we hadn’t seen it before and that we immediately had to agree it really was like. With the impressionists, sunny and breezy days came to be realities in a new way.

In the same way Pound rejected the easy sludge of Georgian and Victorian mellifluous verse and forged a new language in which the parts were bright, sharp and hard-edged, as in Provençal poetry-- single syllables; clear, consonantal boundaries; non-iambic stress patterns (see earlier entry on Pound and Kenner). The verse appeared constructed from discrete combinable bits, and yet produced beauty by their formal relationships as well as eliciting, and appearing to reflect or even to be directly mapped off, a vividly sensed reality.

That leads to another set of questions about modernist literature -- and about why it was so strikingly neglected by exponents of the ‘New English' in the comprehensive schools of the 1960s and 70s; a topic for another posting, this one having gone on long enough.

New Model Criticism

Critical approaches that treat literature as documents (of a historical context or ideological interest) are insufficient. I liked Colin Burrow’s critique of recent historicist studies of, accompanying new canon of, 17th century literature. He calls this approach New Model Criticism, after the New Model Army, and claims that the new canon eexcludes anything, like Paradise Lost or Marvell's ‘The Garden’, that doesn't reward analysis as 'acts or events, or testaments to political self-positioning' and that 'treats context as a matter of the events of a particular month or week' -- thus excluding poems that 'might be about emotions, retreats, imaginings, ethics, domesticity or what it is to be a poem', while including 'newsbooks, speeches, Instruments of Government'.

The New Model Criticism, while claiming to be an all-embracing, dehierarchised method that opens up whole new worlds of discourse to critical attention… in fact radically closes down the possible range of works that could encourage critical attention. With works like Paradise Lost, which adopt as part of their rhetoric a gaze extending beyond the present moment, and imagine their readers abroad, in the future, in lands or times unknown, this kind of criticism can break down, or be reduced to seeking sedimentary layers of topicality in their composition, each of which must address and can only address its own time – which again should ideally mean a week or a month.'

Burrow, C. (2008). New Model Criticism. London Review of Books, 30(12), 24-25.

Saintsbury: second thoughts

I'm beginning to see why the 20th century went off George Saintsbury (see a couple of recent entries). I've been looking at another book of his essays, in which he writes on literary figures about whom I know nothing, like John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1853) and Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-1839). Among Praed’s poems ‘the peerless Letter of Advice…is as much the very best thing of its kind as the Divine Comedy.’ Rashly, since I haven’t read Praed beyond Saintsbury’s extracts, I'd say that was unlikely.

It’s passages like the following, with enough quotation from Saintsbury’s admired works for us to get an idea of his judgement, that are really are a let-down. Is it just a change of taste since the Victorians (and some of my own English teachers) that makes this sort of poem seem childish and uninteresting?

I haven’t checked to see if F.R. Leavis commented on Saintsbury but I think he would have said S. was a dilettante, not serious. I 'm afraid such a judgement might have been partly fair. Saintsbury romps through the whole of literature, English and French, giving marks. ‘X is better than Y but not quite up to Z or his own later a.’ What often seems to count for him is that a work is the right length for its content, expressed without awkwardness, well-managed in prosody, well-balanced, moderate and sane; that the writer, in fact, writes like a gentleman (a criterion he explicitly invokes here and there). He sees reading as a source of pleasure and cultivation, a central aspect of the good life--the good life of leisure, that is--but not, perhaps, of anything more fundamental—such as life, or the quality of human relations, as Leavis would have it. But Leavis’s puritan criteria excluded a great deal of literature that most of us, and most critics, value.

Saintsbury in the end was prepared to violate all his gentlemanly criteria in valuing Hazlitt, about whom he was in a minority in being right. He was terrifically perceptive on pre-19th century writers, such as Milton (no gentleman); and in his judgment the best poet of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was another non-gent, Blake. Those were not the judgements of a dilettante.

Saintsbury again

I recommended Saintsbury in my last entry so here are a couple of chunks. One of my recent discoveries is the pleasure of essays, 18th and 19th century style. These extracts are from Saintsbury's 1895 essay on William Cobbett, whose Rural Rides I've read parts of long ago, and greatly enjoyed, and his Grammar, recently reissued, which is opinionated and often wrong but very readable. I offer these less as affording unusual insight than as a good read.

"...Let it be added that this vast mass [74 works] is devoted almost impartially to as vast a number of subjects, that it displays throughout the queerest and (till you are well acquainted with it) the most incredible mixture of sense and nonsense, folly and wit, ignorance and knowledge, good temper and bad blood, sheer egotism and sincere desire to benefit the country. Cobbett will write upon politics and upon economics, upon history ecclesiastical and civil, upon grammar, cookery, gardening, woodcraft, standing armies, population, ice houses, and almost every other conceivable subject, with the same undoubting confidence that he is and must be right. In what plain men still call inconsistency there never was his equal. He was approaching middle life when he was still writing cheerful pamphlets and tracts with such titles as The Bloody Buoy, The Cannibal’s Progress, and so on, destined to hold up the French Revolution to the horror of mankind; he had not passed middle life when he discovered that the said Revolution was only a natural and necessary consequence of the same system of taxation which was grinding down England. He denied stoutly that he was anything but a friend to monarchical government, and asseverated a thousand times over that he had not the slightest wish to deprive landlords or any one else of their property. Yet for the last twenty years of his life he was constantly holding up the happy state of those republicans, the profligacy, injustice, and tyranny of whose government he had earlier denounced. …

… Only mention Jews, Scotchmen, the National Debt, the standing army, pensions, poetry, tea, potatoes, larch trees, and a great many other things, and Cobbett become a mere, though a very amusing, maniac. Let him come across in one of his peregrinations, or remember in the course of a book or article, some magistrate who gave a decision unfavourable to him twenty years before, some lawyer who took a side against him, some journalist who opposed his pamphlets, and a torrent of half humorous but wholly vindictive Billingsgate follows; while if the luckless one has lost his estate, or in any way come to misfortune meanwhile, Cobbett will jeer and whoop and triumph over him like an Indian squaw over a hostile brave at the stake. Mixed with all this you shall find such plain shrewd common sense, such an incomparable power of clear exposition of any subject that the writer himself understands, such homely but genuine humour, such untiring energy, and such a hearty desire for the comfort of everybody who is not a Jew or a jobber or a tax eater, as few public writers have ever displayed. And (which is the most important thing for us) you shall also find sense and nonsense alike, rancorous and mischievous diatribes as well as sober discourses, politics as well as trade puffery (for Cobbett puffed his own wares unblushingly), all set forth in such a style as not more than two other Englishmen, whose names are Defoe and Bunyan, can equal." (40-42)

The other, later extract is about Cobbett’s views:

"It is evident that if he possibly could have it, he would have a society purely agricultural, men making what things the earth does not directly produce as much as possible for themselves in their own houses during the intervals of field labour. He quarrels with none of the three orders,--labourer, farmer, and landowner--as such; he does not want 'the land for the people,' or the landlord's rent for the farmer. Nor does he want any of the lower class to live in even mitigated idleness. Eight hours' days have no place in Cobbett's scheme; still less relief of children from labour for the sake of education. Everybody in the labouring class, women and children included, is to work and work pretty hard; while the landlord may have as much sport as ever he likes provided he allows a certain share to his tenant at times. But the labourer and his family are to have 'full bellies' (it would be harsh but not entirely unjust to say that the full belly is the beginning and end of Cobbett's theory) plenty of good beer, warm clothes, staunch and comfortably furnished houses. And that they may have these things they must have good wages; though Cobbett does not at all object to the truck or even the 'Tommy' system. He seems to have, like a half socialist as he is, no affection for saving, and he once, with rather disastrous consequences, took to paying his own farm labourers entirely in kind. In the same way the farmer is to have full stack yards, a snug farm house, with orchards and gardens thoroughly plenished. But he must not drink wine or tea, and his daughters must work and not play the piano.

…But though there is to be plenty of game, there are to be no game-laws. There is to be no standing army, though there may be a navy. There is to be no, or the very smallest, civil service. It stands to reason that there is to be no public debt; and the taxes are to be as low and as uniform as possible. Commerce, even on the direct scale, if that scale be large, is to be discouraged, and any kind of middleman absolutely exterminated. There is not to be any poetry (Cobbett does sometimes quote Pope, but always with a gibe), no general literature (for though Cobbett's own works are excellent, and indeed indispensable, that is chiefly because of the corruptions of the times), no fine arts--though Cobbett has a certain weakness for church architecture, mainly for a reason presently to be explained. Above all there is to be no such thing as what is called abroad a rentier. No one is to "live on his means," unless these means come directly from the owning or the tilling of land. The harmless fund holder with his three or four hundred a year, the dockyard official, the half-pay officer, are as abhorrent to Cobbett as the pensioner for nothing and the sinecurist. This is the state of things which he loves, and it is because the actual state of things is so different, and for no other reason, that he is a Radical Reformer." (59-61)

Saintsbury, George (1895). ‘William Cobbett’ in Essays in English literature 1780-1860, second series, London: Dent.

In praise of Old Man Saintsbury

‘Orwell observes that “at that time [the 1920s] there was, among the young, a curious hatred of ‘old men’…every accepted institution, from Scott’s novels to the House of Lords, was derided because ‘old men’ were in favour of it”.’ (Jane Stevenson, Edward Burra: Twentieth-Century Eye, p.58). That attitude to Scott etc took until the 1960s to get into exam syllabuses (in the 1950s Scott’s Old Mortality was still an O level text), but it seems to have dominated the ideas of intellectuals, and students, ever since the '20s.

Rarely since I was an undergraduate did I, till recently, read anything pre-1800, except some drama and poetry. Recently I found myself having to teach an existing course called ‘Analysing Written Discourse’. Since ‘discourse analysis’ in linguistics—the intended content--seemed (and seems) thin fare, not least because it largely confines itself to dreary media and political writing of no lasting interest, I thought I'd include literary prose, which got me reading about its history and then going back and reading Bacon, Addison and Steele, Gibbon, Burke, Paine, Macaulay and Lamb. (Hazlitt I had already discovered, no thanks to my education.) I was surprised at the pleasure I got from the feel and texture and flow and flare of this stuff, and realised what people—including our abler school students—were missing in not reading such older texts. Unlike, say, Shakespeare, they don’t present great difficulties to the reader, except sometimes in syntactical complexity.

If I never for many years went to prose literature of the 18th century and earlier, in literary criticism I read nothing before 1920. So I missed an actual 1920s old man (then in his seventies and eighties) who earlier had been a most important writer on literature, George Saintsbury: 1845-1933, professor of rhetoric and English literature at the University of Edinburgh, author of innumerable books on English and French literature, a man who had read everything and no fool. A few years ago I bought his Short (818 pages!) History of English Literature in a second-hand bookshop and ever since have been in the habit, whenever I want to know about some English author or period before 1900, of looking there first and often finding perceptive criticism as well as the facts. For my course on analysing literary prose he was invaluable, in a way that I don’t know any subsequent critic would have been. Since then I've had other books of his from the library, one of the pleasures being the volumes’ history:


That's another Saintsbury book. Sir Sidney Lee, it must be said, did not deface his books with marginalia.

For all that Saintsbury was a Victorian when he wrote his Short History (1898), I have no difficulty in accepting many of his views and observations. I think he’s a good guide, and English teachers would find him a more useful source of insight into the older literature they teach than recent guides which focus on authors’ ideologies and class, race and gender positionings. Saintsbury is interested above all in the quality of the writing in a work, its style, the effects it achieves and what is to be had by reading it. And his own writing, if not always elegant, is often sharp.

Going to Saintsbury is a way of escaping from the academic pedantry of recent times-- as A.C. Grayling, writing about Hazlitt, explains. Saintsbury, he says, was able to appreciate Hazlitt because he (and A.C. Bradley)

"wrote before the twentieth-century turn to academic criticism… which, in making and continually widening the gulf between ‘the world of journalism, where new literature is fostered or starved, and the world of scholarship, where old literature is interpreted and canonized,’ is not concerned with taste, but with technique; not with the common readers’ or viewers’ response to books read or plays or paintings seen, and their connection with life as lived, but with specialist academic interest in methods and classifications, schools and ‘-isms’, unconscious influences, supposed hidden meanings, patriarchal oppressions, deconstruction of texts, and multiple readings. For Hazlitt this latter enterprise would have seemed futile pedantry. Literature, theatre, art and philosophy were in his view matters of direct concern to the experience of life; they made a practical difference; therefore they were to be encountered, and evaluated, and responded to, not only with discrimination and thought, but with feeling. They were to be tested on the pulses, and everything they taught of character and the human condition made a difference to the perceiver’s heart and mind." (Grayling, 2000, The quarrel of the age: the life and times of William Hazlitt, 250)

A great rant. Whatever university courses choose to do, English teaching in schools should side with Grayling, Saintsbury and Hazlitt. In doing so it will find Saintsbury a help in being rigorous in a different way. He’s able to write about style and the way that sentences go in a way that no modern critics do that I know of, except Tom Paulin (who, not coincidentally, has also written a book on Hazlitt). I know there’s more to prose literature than style, but unconsciously at least style has a big effect on us, and it does no harm to bring that sense into consciousness. In this Saintsbury’s learning is a great support.

He’s also good on style in poetry, where he understands metre and rhythm, e.g. in Milton, the scope of whose Paradise Lost called for spacious verse paragraphs. Again, it’s only in the last five years that I've read Milton—how he got missed at university I don’t recall; he is, of course, terrific (except when he’s awful), and I wish someone had made me read him earlier, e.g. for O level. You do have to work a bit at Saintsbury, and look things up; when necessary he’s quite prepared to get technical (I did mention ‘rigorous’):

“… with these… provisos, every line of his can be scanned with perfect strictness as an iambic of five feet in which the following feet are admissible, strictly speaking, in any place--iambus, trochee, anapaest, dactyl, and tribrach while a redundant syllable is allowed in the last. With such precision, and on the whole such judgment, did he apply these principles, that in a certain sense English prosody up to the present time has gone no farther.”

(In his big book on English prosody--the sound and rhythm of poetry—he really goes to town on feet, caesuras, enjambements etc. His original readers with their classical educations would have known the specialist terms.)

Here’s an example that shows one sort of thing Saintsbury does well; it’s a summary of Milton’s contribution to the development of English verse:

“He represents -and almost exhausts--the fourth great influence in English prosody. We have already seen how Chaucer gathered together and put, with an immense contribution of his own, the results of the struggles of Middle English towards such a prosody, and how his example, followed blindly and with a tongue as stammering as the eyes were dim, lasted for more than a century till the changes of the language put it for the moment aside ; how Spenser, partly returning to it, partly gathering up de novo the results of the experiments of his immediate forerunners and the general influences of the Renaissance, gave poetry a fresh start; and, lastly, how the dramatists, and especially Shakespeare, suppled and shook out the texture of the decasyllabic line, varied its cadence, stocked it (on the principles of equivalence or slur) with a great number of new foot combinations, while the lyric and stanza poetry of the fifty years between the Calendar and Milton's “Three and twentieth year” sonnet almost exhausted the possibilities of less uniform verse….

Just at this time came Milton, a poet with an exquisite ear and extraordinary science of form, great learning in his own and other languages, and a predilection for the special form of non dramatic blank verse which, managed as he manages it, at once counteracts the effect of the sharp snip snap couplet and of the wandering, involved, labyrinthine stanza. He tightened up the metre without unduly constricting it; he refined the expression without making it jejune. And in particular his need of an extremely varied line to construct his paragraphs and supply the want of rhyme music, made him, without adopting the sheer abandonment of the late dramatic verse, resort to every artifice of metrical distribution to avoid monotony.”

‘Suppled [sic] and shook out’ – good, eh? And what about ‘the sharp snip snap couplet and [] the wandering, involved, labyrinthine stanza’—though better still without ‘involved’. I didn’t know about the four great influences in English prosody, and now I'm glad to know.

Or is it just me that doesn’t find this stuff intolerably dry and boring?

Feeling, knowing and writing

In Saturday’s Guardian Zadie Smith wrote brilliantly about George Eliot’s Middlemarch
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,,2281931,00.html .
Here are some quotes and some comments. (I hope I'm not violating anyone's copyright -- this is educational, after all. Well, self-educational at any rate.)

Experience, for Eliot, was a powerful way of knowing. She had no doubt that she had learned as much from loving her partner George Lewes, for example, as she had from translating Spinoza. When Dorothea truly becomes great (only really in the last third of the novel, when she comes to the aid of Lydgate and Rosamund), it is because she has at last recognised the value of emotional experience:

"All the active thought with which she had before been representing to herself the trials of Lydgate's lot [. . .] all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power: it asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance."
….
In order to be attentive to Fred [Vincy], Eliot had to take the long way round. It was a philosopher, Spinoza, who first convinced her of the importance of experience. It was theory that brought her to practice. These days, "writer of ideas" has become a term of abuse: we think "Ideas" are the opposite of something we call "Life". It wasn't that way with Eliot. In fact, her ability to animate ideas is so acute she is able to fool the great Henry James into believing Fred Vincy a commonplace young man who was wandered into Middlemarch with no purpose. Nothing could be further from the truth.
….
Doesn't she seem to solve the head/heart schism of our literature? Neither as sentimental as our popular novelists, nor as dryly cerebral as our experimentalists. Under the influence of Spinoza, via an understanding of Fred, she thought with her heart and felt with her head. It's a fictional procedure perfectly described by one of her creations, Will Ladislaw:

"To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion - a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only."

This seems as good support as any for the argument that literature, or let’s say imaginative writing in the school English classroom, can be a means of setting down a sort of knowledge that is as real as facts. To have ‘no shade of quality' escape one’s awareness is an achievement of cognition, an apprehension of what is actually out there. Feeling is a way of knowing; to which we can add that imaginative writing (fictional and autobiographical writing and poetry) can be a way of articulating that feeling/knowledge, an alternative way to the discursive statement conventionally associated with knowledge.

The poet’s—or the child’s or adolescent’s--quick discernment, instant emotional response (or slow persistent sense) is a knowledge that can’t immediately be stated; it may be able to be stated eventually, after time, or it may not. Such knowledge can still ‘come out’, however, and make itself communicable (and thus more consciously available to the knower herself) through being written into representations of real or imagined experience, i.e. through, for instance, fiction or autobiography or poetry; or film or drawn graphic story.

"All the active thought with which she had before been representing to herself the trials of Lydgate's lot [. . .] all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power: it asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance."

Exactly—and this is relevant for assessment in education: the criterion for the presence of knowledge isn’t only whether we can state it (in answer to a question or in an essay); it’s also whether it functions as ‘a power’ that generates correct perceptions and prevents us seeing things wrongly. To be knowledgeable can be not to be at risk of seeing things wrongly, not to have delusions and misapprehensions; it needn’t just be to be able to say what is true.

One more thing about that quote: Smith says that George Eliot knew she had learned as much from experience as from philosophy. But note that it’s through ‘the active thought with which she had before been representing to herself the trials of Lydgate's lot’ that ‘all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power’; reflection is involved, an effort to represent the experience, at least to oneself internally. In education and specifically in English, talking and writing can be a vehicle for such thought.

It’s that sort of philosophy that lay behind much important innovation in and refreshing of English teaching from the mid-1950s to the 70s. It underpinned in particular a large body of impressive children’s writing and enabled a great many students to be motivated. In the long run, it’s true, many of us who were involved in that movement have concluded that as a rationale for English it wasn’t enough. But that doesn’t mean that what’s replaced it represents progress—in some ways what we have now seems a return to ‘the day of our ignorance’ in which we stumbled about ineffectually before that burst of new thinking.

Part of what was missing is what Zadie Smith leaves out. To write Middlemarch, or to be Ladislaw’s poet, it isn’t enough to have the feeling that amounts to knowledge; you also have to be skilled in engaging with semiotic stuff—words and their multiple and slippery meanings, associations and colourings, syntax, sounds—and make an artefact with it. The arts of rhetoric come into it as well as Romantic theories of expression.

English for the dawn of sanity: bats

Here’s one of my opinionated ideas about the sort of thing English should be doing once we’ve got the government off our backs. This is the sort of thing I'd be trying now if I were teaching in a comprehensive school again.

Kids of all ages are receptive to philosophy. Science and RE quite obviously give rise to philosophical issues, but English should get in there too. (That certainly calls for a longer discussion; part of the idea is that we should expand our concept of literature to include a much wider range of texts, beyond fiction, poetry and drama -- and travel.)


http://www.flickr.com/photos/14939179@N00/521926383/

Consider the case of bats. Give your students the following three paragraphs (and the extra ones below if you think they might be up to it). (Some students, if not all, should be exposed to this sort of prose, but in a context where you’re there to help them with it.)

I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all, they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience. I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.

I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion.

Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications.

That’s Thomas Nagel, 1974, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ http://members.aol.com/NeoNoetics/Nagel_Bat.html

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A more familiar form of the same problem is explaining what sight is to someone blind from birth. For all the dissection of human organs of sight or bat organs of sonar, no one can convey in words what it is like to see or ‘sone’ (we need a verb) to someone who has not experienced them.

Let the kids have a go. ‘You’re a bat with human speech: explain what the world is like. Remember that you can’t use words like ‘see’ in your explanation because you’ve no idea what seeing is like (except in expressions like ‘It must be something like what you call seeing’).’

Knowing that bats use sonar is like knowing that we use sound waves and vibrating tympanums or light waves; but our experience isn’t of waves: we hear and see things, the world, not vibrations and excitations.

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To do a good job of explaining his or her experience, our talking bat is going to have to find equivalents for the range of our sense terms: we not only see but look at (that view is nice to look at); we hear and listen (to); think of the different senses of feel (feel a touch, feel the door to find the keyhole in the dark). But no array of terms will do it for us, because experience is incommunicable unless the listener already knows something close to it.

Nagel’s point is that there’s no ‘just’ about experience: you can’t say that seeing is just having light impact on our retina etc., in the way that you can, in some sense, say that heat in an iron bar is just the excitation of atoms, or mass is just energy. No Martian analysing our eyes would get any idea of seeing from them; no inspection of tissues would show what pain is like. No examination of brains shows what it is like to have a mind.

The general issue is about conscious experience: what is it, how do we know what has it and how can science deal with it? (Does a computer have it? Could it?)

Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny it even of mammals other than man.) No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe. But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism. There may be further implications about the form of the experience; there may even (though I doubt it) be implications about the behavior of the organism. But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism. / We may call this the subjective character of experience.

For good measure, if the class is interested, throw these at them:

And if there's conscious life elsewhere in the universe, it is likely that some of it will not be describable even in the most general experiential terms available to us.

….in contemplating the bats we are in much the same position that intelligent bats or Martians would occupy if they tried to form a conception of what it was like to be us. The structure of their own minds might make it impossible for them to succeed, but we know they would be wrong to conclude that there is not anything precise that it is like to be us….

Does it make sense… to ask what my experiences are really like, as opposed to how they appear to me?

It’s good for students, too, to be exposed to those typical philosophical moves: ‘Does it make sense to ask or say X?’ and (elsewhere in the article) ‘It’s hard to attach any meaning to the idea that…’

Finally, no harm in imparting a bit of basic know-how about academic life. In fact, if you’re hoping that students will go to university from families that have never sent anyone there, the more of that you do the better. Like, What is a university? What’s it for? What is a department? What are degrees? What’s a professor?

To that end, tell them the provenance of the article: The Philosophical Review LXXXIII, 4 (October 1974): 435-50.

It’s a journal. What’s that? Show them one – it’s not exactly a magazine. Talk about the role of publication in academic life. What are the Roman numbers (can they read them? Should they not be able to? Teach them!) Explain volume and issue and page references. How can a single journal have 435 pages? It doesn’t – the volume does. Etc. Don’t make a meal of it, but miss no chance to let them in on these secrets of the ways of (parts of) the adult world. I know you’re an English teacher, but don’t be afraid to tell them stuff.

That’s what I now think. I’m afraid I didn’t always.

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