2009 sees the centenary of one of the most important works in the history of Modernism, Filippo Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto." In celebration, the Tate Modern recently held a major exhibition on Futurism which I heard and read much about, but sadly missed. This year, however, is certainly a good one on which to teach a course on Modern Literature, which I am currently doing for the first time.

I prepared my first tutorial for the course around the theme of "Manifestos for Modernism." Whilst many of the literary and artistic legacies of modernism can be traced back to the Victorian period, making the periodisation implied by the term "Modernism" somewhat problematic, there is no doubt that Modernism made itself known as a break with the past through a whole raft of self-conscious essays, statements and editorials explaining and justifying the new aesthetic and rebelling against the Victorian tenets of realism. Not only do we have Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto," but also the "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting," the editorial manifesto in Wyndham Lewis's Vorticist magazine Blast, Ezra Pound's "Imagist Manifesto," and Virginia Woolf's essays such as "Modern Fiction," to name but a few that spring immediately to mind. Tangentially, and somewhat earlier than these, we also have arguably the most important manifesto of them all, Marx's Communist Manifesto.



All of these manifestos shout, rebel against the establishment, stake a claim for the new and the youthful and the energetic. Just read the rhythms and bold, urban metaphors of the opening two paragraphs of Marinetti's piece:

We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.

Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls.

Marinetti goes on (naively, with the hindsight of World War One) to celebrate the anarchic power of technology, especially the automobile as a symbol of liberation:

We went up to the three snorting machines to caress their breasts. I lay along mine like a corpse on its bier, but I suddenly revived again beneath the steering wheel - a guillotine knife - which threatened my stomach. A great sweep of madness brought us sharply back to ourselves and drove us through the streets, steep and deep, like dried up torrents. Here and there unhappy lamps in the windows taught us to despise our mathematical eyes. `Smell,' I exclaimed, `smell is good enough for wild beasts!'

And we hunted, like young lions, death with its black fur dappled with pale crosses, who ran before us in the vast violet sky, palpable and living.

It is startling to read a work like this. It is also, to my mind, vitally important that we look at the manifestos for modernism, as well as the literary and visual aesthetics that resulted. This is because, in the present moment, we are able to accommodate modernist art and literature fairly smoothly, blunting the radical edge it once had. What our postmodern age lacks is a sense of the really reactionary art work, the truly rebellious, and as a consequence modernist works from the pre-war period can seem conservative rather than stimulating.

Consider the case of contemporary or "modern" art (that is to say, work produced over the last half century or so). Modern art galleries today are generally happy places, integrated into cities (such as my local, the Baltic). They have cafés and baby changing facilities and are places to take granny visiting on a Sunday afternoon. The accessibility of art in the UK is something to be celebrated. However, integrated into public life in this way, art rarely disturbs or shocks; it does not occupy a place in the avant garde of culture in the truest sense of that term. With the possible exception of images of naked children - such as Tierney Gearon's I Am the Camera, which led to a police raid on the Saatchi gallery - rarely does art raise the hackles, or seem to break with a tradition that can be traced back to the dawn of Marinetti and his fellow modernists.

Contemporary art draws on the full spectrum of horror, sex and violence in a vain attempt to cause outrage in a culture that is used to seeing all laid bare on the daily news, or in cinema; responses to images neatly and safely confined in a gallery are, therefore, typically liberal and mild. One knows that the visionary or rebellious artist has been incorporated by society when Samuel Taylor Wood struts down a red carpet hand-in-hand with a 19 year old hunk, wearing a ball gown that would not look out of place on a Hollywood actress. Now Wood is a brilliant artist who probably knows full well the irony that she is part of celebrity culture. Her video of David Beckham sleeping is one of the most haunting installations I have seen at the Baltic. But that is precisely the irony: how can one offer a critique or observation of contemporary celebrity society, which Wood seemed to want to do in this piece which cast Beckham as a kind of sleeping beauty, when the artist is a celebrity themselves? Marinetti and other modernists put themselves against the mainstream of society, which they saw as bourgeois and decadent, and producing art which was smugly realist rather than subversive. In the postmodern period, rather than artists and writers being reactionary, rebellious, or strongly analytical of a society from which they separate themselves, the artist and their works have become folded in with society.

Back to modernism, then. And the trouble with studying modernist aesthetics is that it seems - well - less than modern, in the sense that the manifesto writers proclaimed it to be. In a modern art gallery, one may grumble of a Damien Hirst that "It's not art." But rarely, if ever, would that viewer say the same of Picasso's Guernica. T.S. Eliot was recently voted the Nation's Favourite Poet. Unless people were voting purely on the basis of having read the Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, this must be a striking indication that The Waste Land, in its day so groundbreaking and visionary, now seems fundamentally normal, accessible. The same goes for Ulysses, regularly voted the most important novel of the twentieth century, and recently claimed as a being a work for "ordinary blokes." In a postmodern artistic culture that expresses itself to excess in a vain attempt to differentiate itself from the "noise" of a mass media, the modernist poem, painting or novel may even seem quiet and controlled.



In one of the most important essays about postmodernism, Frederic Jameson's "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Jameson talks about the way modernism was passionately repudiated

by an older Victorian and post-Victorian bourgeoisie for whom its forms and ethos are received as being variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive, and generally "antisocial."

Jameson goes on to argue, however, that in the postmodern era - with the folding of subversive art into wider culture that I have mentioned above - such attitudes have become archaic:

Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly, they now strike us, on the whole, as rather "realistic," and this is the result of a canonisation and academic institutionalisation of the modern movement generally that can be to the late 1950s.

Whilst modernist writings were once seen as radical, today the radical is the canonical mainstream. Thus the single most important thing about teaching and learning modernism is, it seems to me, to recapture the sense of energy, verve, and sheer guts that drove many of the modernist writers and artists.

When teaching my topic on manifestos, I asked a question to illustrate this point. Although modernism is often associated with the avant-garde elite, the Bloomsbury group rather than the common reader, Marinetti's "Futurist Manfisto" appeared not in some niche literary periodical, but on the front page of Le Figaro. Just consider that for a moment.

Le Figaro is and was a respected, fairly conservative newspaper. In 1909, it was arguably the most prominent daily paper in France. To publish a "Futurist Manifesto," with all its anarchic sentiment and glorious rebellion on the front page is something the word "chutzpah" was invented for (the Hebrew word appropriately acknowledges that unlike other modernists such as Pound, Marinetti campaigned against anti-Semitism). Just imagine the Frenchman, chocalat au lait in hand, spluttering croissant crumbs across the broadsheet, as he scans from reading about the King's activities in the Elysses Palace and the Caillaux conspiracy, to the sweeping, assertive, bold and brash statements of the Futurist.

An indication of how far we are from the possibility of such a shocking juxtaposition today comes when we try to hypothesise a modern parallel. Thinking of our newspaper is easy: the equivalent of Le Figaro of 1909 must be the Daily Telegraph.

But who is to appear on the front page, dominating that left hand column, incongruous alongside the picture of a soldier returning from Afghanistan, or David Cameron wafting his hands? Where is our modern Marinetti? Who would be his parallel today?

In my recent tutorial, someone sensibly suggested Nick Griffin. But the bumbling leader of the BNP, though certainly anarchic, would also utterly lack any of Marinetti's imagination. As already mentioned, Samuel Taylor Wood has already graced the front pages in her ball dress, so she is too well-known to qualify. Damien Hirst would be a bit predictable, and might just be trying to raise the value of his works. Turning to the literary arts, one might think of the fiery Norman Mailer, or the quirky Thomas Pynchon. But the former has now passed away, and the latter's more recent fiction like Inherent Vice seems almost, dare one say it, accessible. All these examples are also past their 50s. Marinetti was just 33 when he published the "Futurist Manifesto," and there is a definite sentiment across the modernist manifestos that to be physically old is also to be tied to the ideas of the past, whereas it is the young who must carry the flag of modernity.

My lack of examples is not intended to bemoan that we no longer have a new generation of truly reactionary, truly modern artists. It is, rather, to highlight - - within a postmodern context whereby the modern seems fairly traditional and conventional - just how radical and thrilling that early 1900s moment was. It was a true paradigm shift in the arts, ranking alongside the advent of perspectivism in painting, or the rise of the novel. Where our next paradigm is coming from, that will take us beyond the post-modern, I for one do not know. Any ideas?

Labels: Literature, Marinetti, modern art, modernism, Photography and Art, postmodernism

One of the pleasures of university life is the three months in summer when students depart, and rather than having to swim against a tide of preparation and marking, one actually gets to tread water, reflecting on what has gone before, and planning new strategies. For module conveners and heads of department, such planning usually means revising reading lists, syllabi, lectures, and exam papers in the wake of a burden of student feedback forms and external examiners' reports. But not being elevated to the position of a full-time academic, in my humble role as a part-time tutor, I get to reflect more modestly on my own teaching experience, and plan subtle but perhaps more exciting changes to my own teaching methods.

Over the summer, then, one plan I have implemented has been to build myself a personal website to showcase my research and CV and, rather less vainly, to support my teaching through technologies that are not offered by the university's central virtual learning environment. For example, having moved to an online calendar, I post my free/busy information so students can check when they can meet me if they need an appointment. I also offer anonymous teaching feedback questionnaires. However, the most exciting element of the website is my new Twitter account.

Long one of the Twitterati under the not-so-pseudonymic alibrown18, this coming academic year, I will be using another Twitter account purely in support of teaching (I will not give it out here, precisely because it is designed for my students, not the use of you, Joe Public). In this blog post, I explain my rationale behind using Twitter, and anticipate some of the problems and potential benefits as a technological aid to traditional teaching and email contact methods.

Rationale

One thing that surprises me as a teacher is how few emails I get asking intellectual-type questions, where a student is struggling to comprehend material and wants some help, or where a student is carrying out their own research for essays and would like some pointers. There are far fewer than one might have expect given that they have so little contact time with me over the year. Of course, just about once a minute I receive an email along the lines of "my printer has broken, can I have another month to write my essay?" but it is rare for a student to ask me something less practical, and more discursive. Whilst this might suggest that I am unapproachable, or that I give off the whiff of "I'm too busy doing research, now leave me alone," I would prefer to think that I give the impression to students that they are welcome to ask me any questions they would like, to discuss essays or other concerns. Why, then, do so few approach me with questions that indicate fresh engagement or problems with their course content?

One clue might lie in the style of the relatively few discursive emails that I do receive. We live in a culture in which, so we are told, students would write essays via text speak and emoticons if they could get away with it. Given this, I am always surprised that when I receive a email from a student, they are most often carefully-crafted, literate, and considered. Students are usually apologetic for having "bothered" me, even if the question being asked was worthy and interesting. Coupling this with the fact that I receive fewer dialectical emails than might be expected, my suspicion is that students are put off from asking intellectual questions for fear of sounding stupid. They do not want to seem to be asking that question that might be deemed too simple, and hence too much of a bother to a busy tutor. Thus students may get so bogged down in worrying about how they can express their question, that few of them actually do so, not being prepared to write through a careful email expressing their thoughts.

As a very different form of electronic exchange, with a 140 character limit the very nature of Twitter defies extended talk. It is, however, potentially very useful for precisely the reason that intrinsically no question or comment a student poses there can be a deep one, though it may nevertheless point towards hidden complexities and undercurrents of thought in the student's mind. The additional level of informality might encourage more hesitant, or less articulate, students to use this medium instead of email. I can at this stage imagine messages like, "Help. I really want 2 write about science in Conrad's Secret Agent. What should I read?" or "Is the passage in Pride and Prejudice on p.49 free indirect discourse?"

Naturally, such questions would require an extended, probably emailed, reply. But the important issue here is about opening a channel of communication between student and tutor, encouraging the student that the tutor is approachable and open to an exchange of ideas, thoughts, and recommendations.

A second motivation for using Twitter lies in the efficient way it can be used to share contemporary media stories, web links, or one's current reading. My thoughts on this benefit were sparked when in the middle of the last academic year I read Elaine Showalter's article in The Guardian review, showcasing her new book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. At the time, I was teaching an American fiction course, and it struck me as apt that Showalter had touched a nerve about the masculine bias in American literature. Almost certainly, some of my students will have picked up on the article, or on one of her radio and web features around the time. Yet most may not have done.

Using a quick, informal tweet to direct students to the article would have made clear that this was neither essential reading, nor necessarily my view on the state of American literature, but that it might be of interest nonetheless. Based on my serendipitous research experiences of happening upon books in Oxfam or articles in the London Review of Books that sent my writing off into new and fertile fields, I firmly believe that research in the arts is as much about luck and the unexpected discovery than the predictable approach through the established reading list. Because of its brevity, tweets containing links or recommendations have the sense of happenstance about them. For example, I could only have posted: "Article by Showalter on which women writers are important in American Lit. http://bit.ly/H9fC4" It is then up to the student to read and decide for themselves what their opinion on this new criticism is.

On that note, a more ephemeral epistemological possibility might be raised through the use of microblogging teaching aids. Literature departments have come a long way since Arnold, Leavis, Eliot and their like populated their "great tradition" with dead, white, European males. Whilst many bemoan the postmodern, postcolonial, postfeminist relativism that was - and still is - the reaction to this tradition, there is no doubt that today, English studies is in perpetual flux. The "canon," such as it is, shifts with the cultural climate and the intellectual tide. Just as Showalter's A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing shook up the notion of the male tradition by perceiving a female line of literary inheritance, a new work by a major critic like Showalter will get noticed, will shift the boundaries of the discipline, will break the silo of "American Literature."

Yet in spite of the undermining of the tradition, even the best lecture courses can be slow to turn with the tide, perhaps introducing one or two different books a year, and certainly not rewriting material to reflect issues currently in the news, blogosphere, or literary media. The lecture course, doing its job of teaching efficiently and reliably week by week, has its place. Indeed, arguably the key merit of literary studies is its comparative stability. By discussing a common body of the best texts of a culture or time, a literature course sends a community of readers, who become workers, thinkers, and leaders, out into the world with a common humanistic framework derived from those books. But the lecture course that is the bedrock of such an idealistic (perhaps, today, slightly naive) ambition does not necessarily impart to students the sense of their subject today as dynamic, with long-cherished authors up for critical grabs, with new authors just waiting to be explored.

Now I would not suggest that Twitter, for all of its powerful Streisand effects on the media, is by itself capable of carrying a new culture into English studies. Nor indeed would such a revolution be a good thing. The whole beauty of posting subject news to Twitter is that its informal nature means that any links or reading suggested there will not fundamentally contradict central reading lists carefully constructed by module conveners. It will be clear that these reading lists and lectures are the core of course content. Yet any contemporary tweets may also inspire students' independent learning, encourage them to explore the less well-known books on course lists, and invest in them the sense of literary studies as a discursive game, rather than a one-way process where they suck well worn information out of eminent academics. What I would hope using Twitter will do as a teaching aid is to convey in students the sense of their subject as being alive in wider critical and lay society, so that individually students feel free to imagine new ways of approaching established texts. Additionally, if I use it to post my own reading as I prepare for teaching, this might convey the excitement of independent research in a way that could enthuse students.

Why Twitter?

Twitter is, of course, just one of many web tools that might help to support learning. Why, then, is it potentially better than any alternative platform or content sharing facility?

As I have already said, Twitter's 140 character limit is ideal for encouraging students to open communication spontaneously, rather than worrying about contacting a tutor to ask a potentially (to them) silly question. It also makes it easy for me to share links to articles or books, without feeling that I have to write a long email or blog post justifying my suggestion, and without implying that my suggestions are certainly better than those on reading lists.

Besides brevity, another benefit of Twitter is its simplicity. I can easily use a browser plugin (such as Echofon) or my mobile phone to post links or responses to students, without having to log-in to any university email or content management system.

Further, students can also follow my Twitter feed passively. I have in the past considered using Facebook as a teaching support, because it is ubiquitous among the student community and has straightforward facilities for discussions, such as the wall and message boards; it also has an events system which could be used to remind students of deadlines or meetings. However, feedback from my students on their tutorial questionnaires strongly suggested that students would see my use of Facebook as a breach of private walls. Firstly, students use Facebook to escape work, not to do it. Secondly, in order to create a teaching group, I would first need to befriend students and vice versa, meaning that we might be tempted to snoop on each other's profiles.

Twitter, however, requires no such exchange of personal details in order to allow a feed to be followed. Indeed, anxious students can actually "block" me from following them, whilst still being able to see me. I can also use Twitter's API to post tweets to my static teaching website (and one would hope that existing virtual learning platforms, such as the dreaded Blackboard, will make use of this architecture in future) so students can check there even if they are not signed-up members of Twitter. Tweets can also be followed as individual RSS feeds corresponding to a hash tag. So, for example, I can assign #drama to one module, #modernism to another, and students can follow only those feeds relevant to their subject. That Twitter is by nature a public medium also means that other students not directly taught by me can pick up on my feeds, helping to offer "parity of provision" between students taught by different tutors.

Finally, the use of the "retweet" convention would allow students to use my Twitter feed to share their own discoveries with their peers, without those students having to log on to a discussion board or compose a justificatory email. Such retweets could also be anonymised, if students fear being tagged as the class "geek," whilst they can be moderated more easily than a discussion board, if I feel the content is unsuitable or irrelevant. Indeed, such moderation, which would require me to contact the student explaining why I have not passed their suggestion on, might also draw out that the student is not engaged with the course reading in the best possible way.

The Test

Of course, all the above are hypotheses conceived in the dreamy days of the summer vacation. It may well be that students do not use Twitter to contact me with sparks of doubt or questions. It may be that few make use of my feeds on current subject news. It may also be that my university comes down on me for daring to use a technology that does not come under its official virtual learning environment, and for doing something that goes beyond the normal expectation of a tutor.

But I feel that, being early in my career, and not having the burden of a full-time academic job and associated admin and research, if I do not try these things now, I may never; or, rather, if it does work, I will be able (quite selfishly) to promote my technological innovation as an aspect to my CV, rather than something expected of a university tutor as will increasingly be the case over the next decade. At the moment, Twitter is surfing the wave of the Web 2.0 era, the hottest new technology since, well, Facebook last year. It would seem a real missed opportunity not to test how microblogging can work as a teaching tool.

The final question, though, because it is so cutting edge, is what the test of its success can be. Despite the mass of publicity, not everyone is familiar with Twitter, and despite being tech-savvy, students might think my use of the medium is a bit alien and strange. Perhaps they will not use it just because it is not yet prominent in their consciousnesses, the way Facebook is, and I would be wrong to be deflated if uptake is slow. A key problem of testing how my Twitter posts are used is that, whilst being open so that students can follow feeds in a number of ways without having to "befriend" me, this makes it impossible to apply metrics. How do I know whether my students are following me, or just random strangers? How do I know how many students without Twitter accounts are visiting my static website and actually reading the feeds there? How do I know how many have subscribed to the RSS feeds with a reader?

Further, if students do not use it to contact me with their questions, or to share their reading with their peers, does this suggest something intrinsic to many students (that they do not really want to actively engage with their learning and the intellectual potential of their subject, but simply want to pass the course), or does it suggest that this technology too has failed to unlock their discursive sides? If a few students do actively use it to chase up my reading suggestions or to ask questions, will my efforts taken to reach these few have been worthwhile, or are those the same students who would have excelled as learners anyway?

There is, at this stage, only one thing to do. In a couple of days, I have my first meetings with my students, when I will introduce my new website, and direct them to my Twitter stream. I will, quite shamelessly, get their feedback and thoughts. And hope that I will also, in a year's time, be posting here that it has been a resounding success. Wtch this spc. x.

Labels: Literature, teaching, twitter, University Life

As a young, so-called literary critic, it is nice to know that my literary tastes and acumen are up there with the best. I had just written a review of A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, when I came across James Wood's essay on it in the London Review of Books. "James who?" you ask. Oh, you know, only the Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard.

Wood writes about Byatt's "teacherly, qualifying authorial judgment[s]." I said of the novel that its style shares much with her didactic, academic essays. Wood writes, in a lovely phrase, that "Whenever a detail could be selected at the expense of another one, Byatt will always prefer to buy both, and include the receipts." I wrote that "Byatt's cultural references dominate to its detriment." Both Wood and myself reached the same general conclusions: that this is in many ways a remarkable work, a faithful - perhaps too much so - recreation of the Edwardian period, which sacrifices psychologically realist characterisation on the alter of intellectual fascination. Or, as Wood puts it rather better, "Byatt's characters are themselves her dutiful puppets, always squeezed and shaped for available meaning."

Now as if I was not feeling smug enough at having framed a broadly similar response to Wood, although my view of the novel is perhaps slightly more positive in the end, along comes Adam Roberts, blogger at the esteemed literary organ, The Valve. Roberts notes in his review that "by its end this novel certainly builds a considerable degree of heft, which gives its soap-like family births-and-deaths actual emotional momentum. But density can very easily become stodge, and it often does so in this book." This is essentially the same judicious balance both myself, and Wood, appear to have reached.

Which makes it all the more surprising that The Children's Book was not only on the Man Booker Prize longlist (one might have well expected it to be there; it seems entry is almost automatically conferred on anyone who has previously won the prize, as Byatt did with Possession in 1991) but then jumped through to the shortlist of six. Though undoubtedly a work of great historical value, can this really have been one of the most readerly novels of 2009? Certainly, it would not have been a worthy winner, though it is, reservations aside, a worthy book.

I have just posted my full review to The Pequod, and with the two other reviews by Roberts and Wood, it should be clear why the book, though a feat of intellectual engineering, does not quite work as a novel: Review of A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book.

Labels: A.S. Byatt, Literature, The Children's Book

I went to see The Winter's Tale last weekend, but a strong production (see postscript) could not conceal the cracks in Shakespeare's original, and my prior impression of the play was confirmed: it is something of a mess.

The problem begins with Leontes, and his swift turn from love and hospitality towards Hermione and Polixenes, into deep jealousy, anger, and rejection. The whole reversal occurs so swiftly that it plunges the entire court, and audience, into bewilderment and fear. This production was particularly good in presenting advisers, suited like government spin doctors, who are left baffled, and torn between loyalty to their king and morality towards his wife and children. Shakespeare here seems more concerned with the effects of jealousy and false accusations on family and court, rather than with establishing any feasible or extended motivation for them in Leontes.

To rationalise his actions, we are supposed to perceive, embedded in Leontes' early lines, that he has long been harbouring suspicions about Hermione's and Polixenes' relationship, and so he instructs his wife to ask his brother to extend his stay to see if she can persuade him, whereas at Leontes' request he would not. This hidden strategy lends irony to Hermiones' bantering that she will make Polixenes stay as her prisoner, if not as her guest (for Hermione will subsequently end up imprisoned by Leontes). When she succeeds in her persuasion, there is also an irony in Leontes' noting that the only other time she spoke to such good purpose was when:

Three crabbed months had soured themselves to death
Ere I could make thee open thy white hand
And clap thyself my love. Then thou didst utter
"I am yours forever."

It is as if Hermione's entreaties towards Polixenes can be successful only if they are tinged with the love she formerly expressed to Leontes.

The problem is that these ironic connections are embedded deep in the language, and do not quite emerge in the moment of dramatic speech. Instead, Leontes becomes a sort of Iago figure, malign (or a "tyrant," as he is repeatedly called), but without just motive; yet unlike Iago, of course, Leontes actually develops as a character, from vindictive jealousy to repentance.

Such a reverse movement happens in the trial in Act Two, when Leontes is forced to admit his mistaken accusation of Hermione and the now exiled Polixenes. Having reiterated his indictment of Hermione, the oracle of Apollo announces that:

Hermione is chaste, Polixenes blameless,
Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant, his
innocent babe truly begotten, and the King shall live
without an heir if that which is lost be not found.

Duly, in rushes a servant to announce that the young prince has been found dead, Hermione swiftly follows (or appears to), and Leontes utterly repents. All this happens within the space twenty lines. The problem here is the explicit reliance on Fate as the motivational trigger. Whilst many of Shakespeare's tragedies involve the intervention of forces beyond human control (one thinks of the missed letter that condemns the "star crossed lovers" of Romeo and Juliet, or Hamlet's encounter with the pirates that finally turns him back to kill Claudius), fate seems somehow plausible, acting as it does through physical forces or other characters. In A Winter's Tale, however, Fate is presented in its purest form, delivering absolute judgement on Leontes and more or less despatching thunderbolts from the heavens to kill the young prince, and seemingly Hermione too.

The power of fate is clearest in Paulina, a kind of nurse-like figure to Hermione, and the one who fakes her death. Paulina is perhaps one of Shakespeare's most powerful female figures, maternally appealing to Leontes to "soften" at the sight of his new born, innocent child, whilst being possessed of the masculine boldness to confront him and his male courtiers. As she argues, she alone can defend Hermione and bring Leontes to see the truth:

The office
Becomes a woman best. I'll take't upon me.
If I prove honey-mouthed, let my tongue blister,
And never to my red-looked anger be
The trumpet any more.

Yet the influence of fate diminishes the striking (Elizabethan?) independence of this woman. At the trial scene, after the "death" of Hermione, Paulina confronts Leontes, telling him:

I say she's dead; I'll swear't. If word nor oath
Prevail not, go and see: if you can bring
Tincture or lustre in her lip, her eye,
Heat outwardly or breath within, I'll serve you
As I would do the gods. But, O thou tyrant!
Do not repent these things, for they are heavier
Than all thy woes can stir; therefore betake thee
To nothing but despair. A thousand knees
Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting,
Upon a barren mountain and still winter
In storm perpetual, could not move the gods
To look that way thou wert.

Of course, we are to believe here that Paulina, at the apex of her apparent anger at Leontes, is also plotting his redemption, for Hermione is not dead but merely appears so. Certainly, the opening four lines above are loudly echoed in the final scene, when the statuesque Hermione comes alive. Thus is Paulina's plan, hatched in the moment of Apollo's judgement of Leontes in Act 3, realised and completed in Act 5.

Yet as the final couple of lines above indicate, the plan is actually one exercised by the gods, with Paulina as their mere agent of action - a kind of daemonic intermediary - rather than the independent figure she appears at first to be.

In order that her plan can reach its climax at the end, with her famous request that "you do awake your faith," the wheels in the intervening acts must be turned by something larger, something metaphysical. Thus that other divine power, Time, sliding over sixteen years, moves us from Sicily to Bohemia, where Perdita coincidentally meets Florizel. Florizel blesses, "the time/When my good falcon made her flight/Across thy father's ground." The weaving of the web of hidden connections that link Perdita, the shepherd child who is actually Leontes' princess daughter, to Florizel, Polixenes' son, is of course typical of the comedies, and so The Winter's Tale switches out of its tragic mode, into the more festive one. It is this mode that allows Perdita to unveil Hermione to a reunited audience (Leontes and Polixenes, Florizel and Perdita), as the final mark of the forgiving of Leontes.

In Shakespeare's earlier comedies, fate or the fairies are given licence to act, because they entertain. Because they are agents of laughter, contemporary viewers can suspend their disbelief, allowing them to do their matrimonial work. However, in another late play, The Tempest, Shakespeare has Prospero admit that he, reduced to a mere human once again, lacks such "Spirits to enforce, art to enchant." Similarly, in The Winter's Tale the awakening of faith demanded at the end in order to have the wish-fulfilment of Hermione's resurrection seems to admit that in life, unlike in art, fate does not act to happy endings, and is instead beyond human control. Such an admission puts these two plays contrary to a modern, secularist mindset, for which such a submission before fate seems unreal, and contrary to the liberal humanist idea that people have the power to change themselves.

The central problem with A Winter's Tale, then, lies in Shakespeare's representation of Fate. On the one hand, the limited rationale behind Leontes' anger, and the way in which this focuses our attention less on the origins of jealousy than on its bewildering effects, seems to present a world in which things happen that cannot be rationalised or predicted. People behave strangely, erratically, turning their emotions on the head of a pin, quite as we would expect of people who live in a world ultimately controlled by the gods. The achievement of Shakespeare's tragedies, by contrast, is to show that actually humans behave in self-motivated ways, often opting to laugh in the face of providence, just as they may do against other characters who try to swerve them from their determined course of action. Macbeth's fate is predicted for him at the beginning, yet we do not feel that Macbeth is a mere puppet of providence, but that he alone has reached the end foretold, and therefore he merits his downfall.

The intervening movements of the The Winter's Tale - as it switches from the tragedy of Hermione's apparent death, to the comedy that will see her resurrection - seem to substantiate the view of the world as driven by higher powers, with even intelligent and independent women such as Paulina actually mere daemonic agents for providential whims. Such a view is enforced by the comedic trait where the right lovers, typically disguised, are brought together. However, in spite of its comic plot, The Winter's Tale seems to also suggest that humans, like Paulina, can act to judge human behaviour, even that of kings; judgement and reward are obtainable within this world, without recourse to prayer. The only problem is, the final reward of the reawakening of Hermione, whilst deeply moving, could only happen in a fatal world, or the world of the theatre controlled by the playwright, that is a metaphor for the world authored by the gods. The human reality that the theatre, especially the tragic theatre, should embody is kept at arm's length by the metadrama. Reconciliation can only happen in art, not in life, and especially not in one authored by higher powers.

As a member of the audience, such ambivalence seemed to me to be acutely problematic. I am sure that there are critical readings that might offer a more coherent account of Shakespeare's vision in The Winter's Tale. Indeed, noticing the ambiguity embedded in Leontes' language right at the beginning, which points to the existence of his jealousy even before the play begins, accounts for his sudden switch when I read the play, whereas it seemed unaccountable in performance. There is, surely, therefore much more that can be said about the play as a text, which points to Shakespeare's logical strategy. Nevertheless, as a theatre spectacle, the unevenness of the switch from tragedy to comedy, the ambivalence with which characters seem at once independent and then driven by powers above them, means that the whole does not quite hang together. Perhaps the ultimate problem is that this twenty-first century viewer, rationalist and atheist, simply cannot awake his faith to the overwhelming force of fate in the way Shakespeare originally intended.

Postscript: The production I went to see, which was a co-production between Headlong Theatre and the Nuffield Theatre, is on tour across the UK until 28th November. My intrinsic reservations about the play aside, this is a strong performance, fairly faithful to the original but updating the setting to a decadent, roaring '20s Sicily and Bohemia. Golda Rosheuvel as Paulina is particularly convincing as a decisive woman, which is perhaps why I noticed so critically the ambiguity about her also being the puppet of fate.

Labels: A Winter's Tale, fate, Literature, Shakespeare

I have just posted a review of an interesting novel by Karen Joy Fowler, entitled The Case of the Imaginary Detective (also published as Wit's End in the United States). The novel - a sort of detective fiction, but really concerned about authorship and the nature of writing - was quite interesting in a postmodern vein. However, the review I wrote used the novel to think more generally about the way in which the postmodern has become subsumed into contemporary culture, so that it is no longer radical or strongly intellectual, but available to writers and readers in more mass-market fictions.

The review was first published in the new literary journal The Critical Flame 2.1 (2009). Since that journal has now gone into a new issue, I thought it acceptable to cross-post the review to The Pequod now. The first paragraph is below, or jump to the full-length review.

I was sent Karen Joy Fowler's The Case of the Imaginary Detective (published in America under the title Wit's End) by someone from Penguin, who had noticed from The Pequod that I was interested in postmodern literature. She promised that this novel was about author ownership, and whether a character belongs to readers or authors, ontological questions which seem prominent in postmodern literary fiction. But the novel has left me wondering whether, in fifty years time looking back to the present, literary critics will remark that postmodernism ended when nobody noticed it any more, because it had slipped into the mainstream. In many ways, the most interesting thing about this book is the fact that its postmodern elements are so unremarkable. I do not mean that Fowler is not capable of writing in an interesting way, but rather that the postmodern has lost any radical edge it once had, becoming essentially normative, so that Fowler, writing a mass-market novel, probably never even realised she was writing in line with its codes.

Continue with the full-length review.

Labels: Karen Joy Fowler, Literature, The Case of the Imaginary Detective, Wit's End

The Times this morning reports on the grammar stickler Stefan Gatward who, exasperated by living in a street which was signed "St Johns Close," went around painting apostrophes in the correct location, so that the sign reads, correctly, "St John's Close." Whilst cheered on by some neighbours, others called Mr. Gatward a vandal. One, he explains, even "tried to tell me that the Post Office would not deliver to the street if you put an apostrophe on the address."

It is now six years since Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation was first published, providing a militant call to grammar sticklers everywhere. Whilst I do not rate that book particularly highly - Truss seems too severe in describing "proper" language, whereas language is the product of social consensus rather than anything that can be defined from the top - I do appreciate the importance of correct grammar, and can understand why Mr. Gatward might have been so annoyed, wielding his paintbrush in protest.

The key reason for using grammar properly is that it gives a positive impression of the writer, leading the reader to be more confident of the validity of his or her arguments, opinions, or actions. What does it say about a council's efficiency if they cannot produce accurate road signs? What did it tell me about the government's views on the War on Terror when I received a badly-written response from the Home Office a few years ago? It is because grammar implies much about the writer as well as being an aid to the reader that I mark with a heavy red pen on university English Literature essays. If students cannot use language properly themselves, why should I trust their critiques of other authors' use of it?

Another perfect example of why grammar matters arrived in the post yesterday. This was, sadly, a warning of redundancy sent to Mrs. Ishmael. The letter contains numerous errors. The letter invites her to a meeting on "either the 19th of August However..." There are two sentences missing full stops. The letter explains the "principals" (not principles) by which selection for redundancy will be made. It points to section 15 of the staff handbook, which contains information about redundancy; in fact, the relevant section is 13.

So how do you think my Mrs. Ishmael and I felt when she received this letter? Here she was, at risk of losing her job in spite of her excelling in her role, whilst the middle manager who would make that decision was incapable of using language appropriately, and had not even bothered with a basic proof read in such a personally important document.

Labels: grammar, Literature

When a drunk member of the audience, cat-calling and muttering much of the way through a performance, is more coherent that the play on stage, you know you are in trouble. Heartbreak Productions' version of As You Like It, which is touring outdoor venues across the UK this summer, starts off promisingly, but ultimately degenerates into a farce, forgetting its linguistic roots and becoming a musical bawdy - and a badly sung one at that.

The premise is good. As the audience munches on cous cous and Italian breadsticks beforehand, the stage set places us in a hippie camp in the 1960s, with rainbow spinners and Beatles soundtrack, whilst the cast mingle with the audience and proclaim peace, man. Once the play opens, though, the stage is transformed into the grey state of oppressive Duke Frederick. The cast emerge, changed from their colourful wool cloaks into brown trench coats, wielding loudhailers and throwing torches over the audience. A poster of the Duke glowers above. Choosing the 1960s as the setting for this comedy makes sense, with the dichotomy between free love and totalitarian Communism appropriately matched to the rupture between the life of the court in Act One of Shakespeare's comedy, and the festival passions of the Forest of Arden in the later Acts.

However, having hatched this conceit, director Peter Mimmack and his young cast let it loose with decreasing restraint. Whilst the first act sticks fairly closely to the language of the original, it starts to introduce folksy sing-songs and audience interaction. The court wrestler, for example, leaps on stage like some anachronistic Hulk Hogan, and exorts the audience to support him. His duel with Orlando is laugable, as the thing is made like a hammed-up WWF fight, with only the pretense of contact. Whether this is bad dramatic acting, or part of the plan, either way the ambiguity of the wrestle, that Orlando actually kills his opponent but Rosalind is unreserved in her affection for him, is lost.

However, it is the language which suffers the most violence. In the interval, we are told to wave our right hands in the air whenever we hear the word forest, and to rock a baby whenever we hear the word love. Martext, the country vicar in Shakespeare's original, becomes a loved-up American preacher who acts like some sort of perverse Widow Twanky, urging the audience to join in. The whole thing becomes a pantomime, as we listen for the cues rather than hearing what is said. Soon, Shakespeare's play turns into the soundtrack of the 1960s, with songs by Bob Dylan, the Beatles and other old favourites. Anyone of middle age must take a nostalgia trip when characters break into song rather than keeping to speech. By the end, Ganymede's revelation that she is in fact Rosalind, which neatly ties up her relationship with Orlando, and ensures Silvius and Phebe form their unlikely partnership, is not delivered through speech at all. Instead, we are all told to get to our feet and sing along with "All You Need is Love." No, all I need is some of the transformative but subversive magic that comes with all Shakespeare's comedies, the pleasure of revelation and satisfied relationships that is tempered by the fact that we are, ultimately, aware that this is pure wish fulfillment. Whilst Jacques would have it that all the world's a stage, this metaphor only works so far, which is precisely the point of this play: it ends as we would like it, but not as we could have it in reality. But instead of these complexities, we get childishness.

I may sound snobby here, so I will make clear that I do not agree with the drunken woman who kept shouting "It's not Shakespeare," implying that Shakespeare's plays should be treated as revered relics that cannot be tampered with. Shakespeare may transcend his historical moment, but it is only through adaptation that we can keep imagining his possibilities in our own times. So I am by no means against adaptation or liberal interpretations. Last year, I saw a remarkably effective version of Cymbeline produced by Kneehigh Theatre, which used radio-controlled cars and largely dispensed with the original language entirely. It may not have been Shakespeare in any pure sense, but it certainly helped to convey the mood of what is probably Shakespeare's most chaotic and unstructured play. As Heartbreak's director notes in the programme, As You Like It poses similar problems, with a series of self-contained love scenes not really integrated with the action of any over-arching plot. But the reason for the success of Kneehigh's Cymbeline was that it had the boldness to do away with the language almost entirely: it was an interpretation, not an adaptation. Heartbreak's As You Like It simply does not know where it stands. It opens as adaptation, and a clever one at that in transporting the play to the 1960s; but it ends as interpretation, and a daft one too. And because we have sensed the possibilities of Shakespeare's play in the language that is offered, such as the deeply troubling and metatheatrical nature of Jacques the melancholy jester, the spill into music and adlibbed interaction holds up badly in contrast. The whole thing is, frankly, a mess.

It is not helped by the fact that Dan McGarry as Orlando lacks the eloqution when the play does opt to stick with the original language. His words slur together, perhaps appropriate for a teenage rebel but hardly helpful in an outdoor setting with naturally difficult acoustics. There are a couple of better performances. Michael Sabbaton as Frederick and a Welsh Corin is excellent, but miscast as Frederick, for his wiry frame does not convince that he could ever be a Stalin-esque dictator. Helen Rynne as Rosalind/Ganymede is also quite effective, transforming from a doe-eyed girl to a chippy lad - though the old cliche of dressing a woman as a chimney sweep with a Cockney accent is a very sad one.

At the end of the play, the cast, back in their free-loving colourful costumes, exort us all to spread the word of peace and tell our friends about this production, which is on tour around the UK until the 30th August. If you are gathered by the camp fire of this blog, I have one phrase for you: don't do it, man.

Labels: As You Like It, Heartbreak Productions, Literature, theatre review

Over at the American Spectator, the British philosopher Roger Scruton has been having an eloquent grumble about the state of the humanities, entitled Farewell to Judgement.

Scruton complains that in an attempt to justify their coexistence with the sciences at universities, the humanities have faced a crisis of legitimation. If the sciences offer knowledge that explains the world, what can the humanities present as their raison d'etre? The response has been an ideological turn, with the humanities justifying themselves by their political radicalism. As Scruton notes, this led to a problem for English studies, which is the informed cultivation of something that might otherwise be seen as a leisure interest:

Unlike women's studies, which has impeccable feminist credentials (why else was it invented?), English focuses on the works of dead white European males whose values would be found offensive by young people today. So maybe such a subject should not be studied, or studied only as a lesson in social pathology.

The brave new world faced by English studies is not one recognised by Scruton's generation. For him, literature offers a way of perceiving those human universals that, in a writer like Shakespeare, transcend historical circumstances to sympathise with a deep human nature, even if the superficial politics look very different to ours. When Shakespeare invites judgement, it is not a political one. Instead:

We judge Shakespeare plays in terms of their expressiveness, truth to life, profundity, and beauty. And that is how you justify the study of English, as a training in this other kind of judgment, which leaves politics behind.

Scruton says that the other aim of English studies was the judgement of "taste," established through careful emotional criticism, taught by the likes of R. P. Blackmur, F. R. Leavis, William Empson and T. S. Eliot, "who had raised the study of literature to a level of seriousness that justified its claim to be an academic subject." Now, however, Scruton laments that:

When judgment is marginalized or forbidden nothing remains save politics. The only permitted way to compare Jane Austen and Maya Angelou, or Mozart and Meshuggah, is in terms of their rival political postures. And then the point of studying Jane Austen or Mozart is lost. What do they have to tell us about the ideological conflicts of today, or the power struggles that are played out in the faculty common room?

Scruton seems to have things both ways. On the one hand, he argues that literature offers access to human universals, whilst on the other he complains that because Jane Austen cannot tell us about contemporary ideology or power struggles, the point of studying Austen - if we are going to focus on political rather than aesthetic values - is lost. Resolving this double standard of universality points us to the factor Scruton overlooks in his lament about the state of the humanities.

Whereas Scruton perceives that judgements of value and politics must be mutually exclusive, so that Jane Austen both is and is not universal in her value depending on which side you come from - the political or the aesthetic - I do not see any such binary. I do not see the binary because I am, in my own critical and teaching approach, a historicist. Historicism allows one to perceive the universality of underlying aesthetic or humanistic values, without this entailing that political values must be similarly universal; or, to look at it another way, just because political values today are historically different does not automatically mean that the work must be aesthetically compromised.

Take the case of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. As most famously expressed by Chinua Achebe, this novel that has come in for a great deal of political criticism, because of its alleged racist tendencies, as Conrad refuses to offer black characters a voice, other than those of cannibal grunts. It is an ideal case of Scruton's "dead white European males whose values would be found offensive by young people today."

Except my students - like myself - do still read and enjoy Conrad today. They are very adept at perceiving that even if Conrad's political values may be suspect, this is not to say that his aesthetic values should automatically be condemned. Students generally recognise that his artistic techniques in representing Africa as an inscrutable, dark place of the Earth - what Leavis called Conrad's "adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery" - must be held in aesthetic admiration, even if the political work to which those techniques are directed, the denigration of Africa as a "dark place of the Earth" and the consequent elevation of European culture as one of enlightenment, may be troublesome from a postcolonial point of view. Students appreciate that Conrad's stylistic traits, such as "delayed decoding," his use of a frame narration, and metafiction, are a masterful way of allowing Conrad to represent Africa in his own way, and to convey his personal, sensual impressions to us as readers who have not necessarily travelled up the Congo. We may not like what he says, or allegedly says, about blacks, but we can admire the way he says it as part of the wider impressionistic purpose of the novel. The crucial intervention here, between political and aesthetic values, is historical awareness, the understanding that Conrad was operating in a different political framework to our own time and that, because we could not have expected him to be of a postcolonial mindset in the late nineteenth century, we can accept that he did the best possible aesthetic work he could under his different circumstances. What would be most surprising of all about Heart of Darkness is if a novella first published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, read solely by European civilised males, were to be actively anti-colonial. I should add, as a caveat, that I do not agree with Achebe that Conrad was a racist, and my own view - which I will not elaborate on now - is that he very cunningly undermines the status of his anticipated readership. But even if a modern student or Achebe do think Conrad's political values were wrong, and are inscribed as such in the novel, that does not preclude one holding a different view of his aesthetics. To keep the aesthetic and political in mind simultaneously, what is required is a historical consciousness, as well as a critical acumen.

Which leads me on to another problem I have with Scruton's argument. Scruton later laments that:

Departments of musicology are now “into” pop music and Heavy Metal, and refrain from creating the impression among their students that they regard the Western canon as anything more than a piece of musical history. I recently had the experience of teaching a course on the philosophy of music to young people in a British university, and was acutely aware at every moment of the resentment that now greets any criticism of pop.

This is symptomatic of the humanities' opening of that door to modernity labelled "cultural studies," where instead of looking at dead, white artists, literature, music, art departments encourage their students to look at what is going on in the contemporary cultural world. The problem with cultural studies is its tendency to conflate popularity with quality. Further, as Scruton shows, because pop music is popular amongst those studying it critically, any suggestion that it might not be as good as Bach or Beethoven is taken as a personal affront, thus making judgements of value very difficult. The only thing that can be done is the relative comparison of one pop artist against another - which students readily do in pubs and bedrooms - rather than saying with critical acuity that this pop artist is inferior to Bach.

I appreciate Scruton's criticism here, but his view is based on an experience of cultural studies done badly. There is nothing in principle wrong with studying the contemporary. However, it is only by tapping in to the historical moment in which a particular work of art is produced - asking, why this piece of art, why this style, why now? - that we can hope to perform the separation of politics from value that Scruton desires. Politics can be taken more broadly than just ideology, to mean the social, technological, economic factors that inform a person's beliefs and experiences in any given moment. At its best, the aim of cultural studies should be not primarily to look at what is popular per se, but to ask how that popularity acts as an indicator of what is significant in a culture at any given time. This allows cultural studies to model a moment clearly, and to use this as the basis for making value judgements.

Given the things that matter and inform a contemporary society, which works are doing the best job at this time of responding to, elucidating and - if politically radical - seeking to change that moment? Scruton is right in that cultural studies can fall for the trap of thinking that if something is popular, it must be good. But if, as I believe it should do, cultural studies makes its first point of attention the historical circumstances of the time, and only then asks what works are doing the best job within these circumstances, it can achieve the aesthetic value judgements which literature, music or art departments used to do in the days of Leavis, Eliot et al. Whether looking at canonical works, or looking at the present time, then, the important factor that Scruton overlooks in perceiving a tension between politics and aesthetics as the subject of study is the way in which the historical can mediate between the two objectives. It provides a bedrock from which value judgements of older works can be made, even if their politics seem alien, and from which value judgements of the contemporary can be made more objectively, even if they seem too familiar and a part of who we are, and thus beyond any potentially stinging aesthetic criticism.

Labels: aesthetics, cultral studies, Literature, Roger Scruton

I am currently marking my way through 70 exam scripts, for a couple of the introductory English Literature modules at my university. This blog post is the confession of this examiner, perhaps a bit risky if you find out who I really am, but nevertheless I hope worth making public as a way of demystifying a process between the end of the exam and the publication of marks that students do not often see or even understand.

If I remember my own, not-too-distant days correctly, students might want to imagine that examiners treat their scripts as sacred objects. A student has attended numerous lectures and read numerous books over the year, poured over revision notes long into the night, and then spent a few hours hunched over a desk in some dismal hall, frantically trying to pour out knowledge in the hopes that that brief exam will do justice to all the hours of work put in over the previous year. With this much invested on a few sheets of paper, surely examiners deal with them reverently, in a darkened room, with the white paper subject to the glare of an anglepoise lamp, as the examiner interrogates and teases that script to give up its worthy marks?

The reality is somewhat different. Naturally, I look after exams with the utmost care, and mark them as conscientiously as I can. However, there are certain unavoidable practicalities of marking, and of human psychology, that mitigate against any such pure, religious process described above.

The big practical issue is time. With a large number of scripts to be marked in a brief period, it is simply not possible to spend hours on each one. It would be nice if I could read an essay carefully, and then go for a walk, take a shower, and massage my temples as I try to weigh up whether to give it 66 percent or a 67. But that does not - it cannot - happen. Even marking a qualitative, essay-based subject like English, having read an essay I tend to place my mark quickly and instinctively. At my university, we work from very detailed guidelines that explain the characteristics that should be present in an essay for it to merit a First, 2:1, 2:2 or lower, with each band sub-divided into two, for example, a high 2:1 (65 to 69 percent) or a low 2:1 (60 to 64 percent). It is very rare that I ponder deeply what percentage to give an essay. Essays usually fall easily into a band, and the pressure of having perhaps a week to mark 50 scripts leaves me little time to deliberate at length whether it needs a 64 or a 63.

People often grumble that an essay-based exam cannot be marked as objectively and as fairly as something like mathematics, with a right or wrong answer. Certainly the personality of the marker may have an effect on a percentage point here or there. But on the whole it is always surprising from my examiner's perspective how easily papers drop into one of these assigned bands. The moral for university students, then, is not to lose sleep over percentages. It is the band that says everything about what sort of student you are, even if you are frustratingly just on the borderline. In many ways, a 69 percent is the most horrible mark an examiner has to give - and in the last few days I have been heard shouting at papers, because I was frustrated that a good student was not quite there, and could see that with a little nudge and feedback the student could go on to improve in subsequent essays. But my 69s are below that glass ceiling not because a few tiny details were overlooked by me, the examiner, not because I was tired, or because my football team had just lost, but because it read, argued, reasoned, discussed, evidenced in ways which said 2:1.

With this caveat about the band being everything, I will admit to some of the other factors that an examiner faces that may well lead to small variations in marks.

Imagine this scenario. I have just read two First-class essays. The third essay I mark is going to have to do something impressive not to look weaker in comparison (for those of a mathematical bent, this is an effect called regression to the mean). Perhaps I will dock it a few more marks than I might have done if marking it in isolation, because it compares worse against the previous efforts. But in the alternative scenario, marked after two solid but not particularly remarkable 2:1 essays, perhaps suddenly essay three looks better than that localised average. I know that I must be guilty, at times, of marking relative to other essays, rather than against the single standard of the mark scheme.

Luckily, there are a few ways to negate this effect. One of the most hotly debated is that fad of the 1990s, the bell curve. Perhaps I get a run of three weak essays before lunch, and then suddenly give three Firsts after lunch. Is it that I am in a better mood after my break? Is it that I have remembered those three earlier, average essays, so that those that come later are bound to look more positively in their light? I do get anxious when runs of unusually high or low results happen - as they have done this year - and that is why I find the bell curve a useful check. I may perceive that my marks are being affected by local circumstances, but taking a larger sample of my marks, I can see that they have fallen out in a normal distribution. Usually, there is a statistically good range, with a smattering of 2:2s and Firsts, and the majority bunching around the mid 2:1.



The reason that the bell curve, or normal distribtion, comes in for debate is that it is tempting to mark for the curve, rather than to construct the curve on the basis of marks. Out of ten essays I have given three 66s. Better make the next one a 59 or 71 just to smooth out the graph. This is a real risk for the individual examiner, whilst institutionally it may be tempting to adjust marks across the board to create a smooth curve with its apex at the point the university suspects most candidates should be at. In my institution, with most students coming with excellent A-levels, we would expect more high 2:1s and Firsts than another institution with a lower achieving intake, so our marks tend to have a peak around the high 60s.

Now I do not know - or have reason to believe - that my own institution does any sort of retrospective adjustment to bump our averages higher than the national baseline for English Literature degrees, but if they did the problem would be clear. Just as I get funny moments marking when there have been no Firsts for ages then three come along at once, an institution could quite feasibly have consecutive year groups which seem to achieve comparable marks, until one year is comprised of an unusually bright or slightly less well-performing group. By shoving that bell curve to fit expectations based on previous experience, the institution is engaging in a sort of social engineering, making results fit students, rather than the other way around, so that the unusually bright or underperforming group is down or upgraded unfairly. This is precisely the sort of complaint about "grade inflation" long levelled at A-Levels and GCSEs, and increasingly at universities. But as an examiner, I can sympathise with the faith in statistics and the normal distribution, because it offers subjects like English an objective foundation for marking, helping to cancel out those personal factors that do come into play, no matter how hard one tries to contain them.

The bell curve aside, students need to remember that the mark they get is not dependent on the individual examiner because other, less controversial, controls are there to restrict the impact any one examiner can have. I have admitted that time, my mood, marking an essay relative to previous results, the effect of statistics, all can affect what percentage an essay achieves, even though I would hope that these would not affect which broader band an exam falls into. But once they leave my hands, exams are filtered through layers of double-marking, moderation by other examiners from within the institution, oversight by external examiners outside of the university, anonymous exam codes, board meetings, appeals procedures, publicly displayed marks so that it is possible to see how each year's exams compare to previous ones and, finally, individual students can request copies of their exam papers and examiner's comments under the Data Protection Act. These controls too ensure that, when the best-willed examiner gets a mark an entire band out, it should be an isolated incident.

However, this last control - allowing students to see and hence to interrogate their own papers - is also controversial. My own university does not exactly make public the fact that students have a legal right to see their scripts after they have been marked. Personally, I think this right should become an expectation among students, who are still often fearful of approaching departments with what seem like trivial requests. The National Union of Students has a policy that feedback should be provided on exams, and have issued stickers for students to put on exam papers stating that "Exam Feedback Helps Me Learn." From an examiner's perspective, although in many cases it is not possible to indicate specific places where students might improve (again, partly because time pressure makes it impossible to write detailed comments), there are many papers about which I do note specific stylistic issues that could be quite easily addressed. Making these comments, though, seems like shouting into the wind, if students are never going to get the opportunity to see them. Having gone to the effort to mark a script as an examiner, why not at least allow students to get as much from your work as possible?

Besides the adminstrative burden, the reason universities are reluctant to provide exam feedback is, I suspect, from a fear of litigation or of students picking examiners up on every point to gain even more marks. Even if the fear of litigation is a little hyperbolic, the idea of student's challenging their papers may affect the exam process unduly. Those students prepared to go through the technical process of questioning their results may end up with better marks than those who are mostly concerned with studying their subject for the pleasure of it, and who are not so end-focused, and who simply accept the results given to them and look to the following year. In a system where exams are always open to challenge, results might become partly determined by a student's ability to work the system, rather than their ability in any given subject. On the other hand, is this issue not precisely the problem with exams overall, that not only are they testing knowledge but they are also testing one's ability to sit exams and to have good "exam technique" in the first place? Allowing students to interrogate and receive feedback on their own marks at the end of the process only mirrors the effect that happens in that artificial period called "exam season" at the start of it. At this time of year students who may have done less work all year sit down to cram and prepare model answers just to pass the three essay questions on an exam, whilst students who have conscientiously studied broadly throughout the year continue in their model approach to their subject in a way that does not always help them to focus on the specialised nature of an exam. As an examiner, I usually have a pretty good hunch which students have prepared to pass a few questions on the exam, and which have enjoyed studying their course as a whole, but it is a very difficult thing to prove, and it is not possible to adjust marks based on a hunch.

From my examiner's perspective, then, encouraging students to seek the written feedback from their exams would be a positive step, because it would add a qualitative report to the process, allowing those students who have worked well throughout the year even if not reflected in the pure exam percentage to seek guidance on how to improve. These sorts of students are more likely to incorporate these comments into their more holistic approach to the subject (such as their desire to write well), than those who simply aim to pass the exam as a technical challenge, and so hopefully some sort of levelling might be achieved.

If you are a student reading this post, then, I hope you feel some sense of schadenfreude. If you have been sat there feeling fed up about the fact that you have to work through exams which seem a disproportionate measure compared to the way you have worked throughout the year, it is worth knowing that this examiner at least feels the same way about marking the exams. It may be slightly disturbing that I have drawn attention to the human frailties of the marking process, but on the other hand I hope too students appreciate firstly that it is bands, not single percentages, that are the most important indicator of ability, and secondly appreciate the lengths institutions go to in order to mitigate against any widespread effect marks can be consistently misjudged, even though probably every examiner misplaces a percentage point here or there, and even occasionally gets a band wrong.

The trouble is, exams remain the most efficient system we have for testing even qualitative subjects like English. The good news is that even though there may be candidates who can work the exam system to their unrepresentative benefit, and even though examiners of essay-based subjects may be unable, as ordinary human beings, to mark every essay to its perfectly deserved percentage, on the whole, the system, tumultuous though it is during the early days of Summer, does work.

Labels: essay marking, exams, Literature, University Life

A couple of days ago, somebody forwarded me a link to a new career's website for Arts and Humanities PhD graduates, called Beyond the PhD. The site seems quite useful, offering advice and experiences from recent graduates, who have gone on to careers inside and beyond academia. Unlike many other careers websites, this is actually targeted at, and relevant to, this particular audience.

Seeing the website reminded me of my own experiences a couple of years ago, back when I was in the middle of my PhD research. I am a socialist and utilitarian at heart, which means I find it necessary to justify taking public money by explaining what benefit the society which distributes those funds gets out of it. Given that I was lucky enough to be fully funded throughout my studies, I was always conscious of the need to put something back into the public domain, as I explained in a series of posts labelled "The Idea of a University."

It was out of one of these posts that the issue of the "value" of an English PhD arose. Picking up facts and figures from various reports circulating at the time, I worked this post into an essay, which I presented as a seminar paper in my department. However, since I am now at the end of my PhD studies, I thought it appropriate to revisit this piece and put it up on The Pequod. Since some of the employment figures may be slightly out of date (especially given the current recession) it is not an authoritative case study, but will hopefully be of interest to some readers, particularly those currently undertaking PhDs in the Arts and Humanities, and wondering for themselves whether and why their studies are worthwhile.

The essay can be found here: The Value of an English PhD.

Labels: Literature, PhD, the idea of a university

Last week, I attended the annual British Society for Literature and Science conference in Reading. As in the previous two BSLS conferences I've been to, this was a fabulous event, an opportunity to renew old acquaintances, chat about common interests, enjoy sumptuous breakfasts...oh, and to hear some excellent panels and plenaries.

However, thinking broadly about the weekend's papers, there seems to me - and I stress that this is my general sense, or thought-in-progress, and may well turn out to be misguided or making a false accusation - to be something of a crack emerging in the interdisciplinary approach to the field of literature and science.

On the one hand, there are those who treat literature and science in an essentially conventional historicist vein. Often focusing on Romantic poets and Victorian novelists, they explore the ways in which particular writers were influenced by scientific ideas in circulation at the time. Which scientists was George Eliot reading when she wrote Middlemarch? How was Wordsworth influenced by Humphrey Davy? Often drawing on archives or letters, scholars in this vein connect ideas or metaphors at work in the creative text with scientific enquiries. This is very interesting and worthy work, but it uses an essentially conventional model of English literary studies, showing the influences upon a writer in an attempt to make better sense of their oeuvre. In this case, scholars look at science, but they might just as easily refer to an author's tour of Venice, or their reading of Milton.

On the other hand, others in the field see the confluence of science and literature as an opportunity to rethink the models of knowledge with which literary scholars work, asking what are (to me) very interesting epistemological questions. What is "science"? Can a scientific "fact" about the world be conveyed to readers via creative works, such as science fiction, or does a fact assume a different status the moment it transfers into a genre other than the scientific journal article? To what degree does scientific writing draw on narrative modes, employing devices such as metaphor, plot, drama, rhetoric in order to produce a stable and persuasive body of knowledge? What sort of knowledge is made available by literary fiction, and can fiction itself therefore be said to be a science of sorts? How can we use recent discoveries in science, such as neuroscience or evolution, to inform our interpretations of literary texts? Without invoking that outmoded postmodern belief that science has no greater claims to reality than any other way of looking at the world, when these sorts of questions are raised they trouble the "two cultures" boundary, broadening the remit of "knowledge" as construed by the sciences and the arts.

It seemed to me that very rarely did the two approaches come together. Presenters were either theorising science and literature, or historicising, but not really making connections across the parallel approaches. This is particularly odd because the matriarch of science and literature (and President of the BSLS), Gillian Beer, stood in the shoes of both the historicist and the theorist in both of her seminal works. Darwin's Plots shows how Darwin's language and rhetoric was essential to the way his argument operates and convinces, and Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter shows how science and literature interplayed in the late Victorian period in a way which makes the "two cultures" differences of the twentieth century seem quite arbitrary. For anyone working in science and literature, these works are founding manifestos of sorts, but in a sense the fact one of the most formidable (but charming) scholars of the present moment wrote them reminds how difficult it is to do this sort of interdisciplinary work in a way that makes best use of science's introduction to literary studies to create a new paradigm for the latter.

If it is to be conducted in the fullest way, I would argue that science and literature must avoid doing two things. On the one hand, it cannot simply seize on scientific texts as just other examples of influential historical documents through which to understand a poem. On the other, it must avoid turning to science in order to claim some positivist legitimacy for literary studies, as if to say that literary criticism is a science just like physics, when in fact if there is a scientific knowledge encoded within literature and literary studies, it is a science of a different sort to that encoded in molecular mechanics. The latter is precisely what the current hot topic of the moment, evolutionary literary criticism risks doing, when at its worst it appears to say that reading Jane Austen can somehow improve your evolutionary survival in society - which is simply to give a gloss of scientific kudos to what is essentially an old Arnoldian argument that reading literature is a moral activity (see Joseph Caroll's Evolution and Literary Criticism).

Labels: British Society for Literature and Science, Literature, Science and Culture

When I graduated from my first degree in 2003, to take a year out working and travelling before returning for a Masters, I realised that I needed to keep my reading and writing skills ticking over if I was to slip back easily into the literary life. To take care of the writing side of things, I set up this website (and how different it looked back then!), whilst for my reading, alongside my bedside stash of novels, I decided to take out a subscription to the London Review of Books.

Since then, I have resubscribed without hesitation every year - until now. My lasped subsription is no reflection on its content per se, for it has remained one of the few bastions of the art of the extended literary essay (Andrew O'Hagan perhaps being its star contributor in this line). I used to look forward to its arrival every other Thursday: tearing through the thin cellophane to reveal the latest Peter Campbell cover picture; then nosying the brief biographies of all the contributors; then turning from the final diary entry to browse the infamous personal ads. For a celebrity gossip monger in denial, these were a few of its little pleasures.

In between the picture and the personals was more serious content. The LRB essay is typically written a degree below the academic but a pitch above the popular. Encountering something controversial - such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's "The Israel Lobby," or Terry Eagleton's lambasting of Richard Dawkins - was thrilling, because one knew oneself to be among the select group of subscribers who would read this first, in full and in original, before the controversy spread, distorted into sound-bites, across the web or the broadsheets. On that note, I always have to smile wryly when I see Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader promoted in bookshops - we LRB readers (for whom Bennett's New Year diaries are a special highlight) got there six months before hand, when this novella was published in full in the LRB.

But what I most valued it for was (or, I suppose, still is) its eclecticism. One could be reading Eamon Duffy on the Henretian Reformation one minute, then discovering the history of science with Simon Schaffer, or learning about legal issues with Philippe Sands the next. It was this diversity that I found most useful in relation to my research, as I continued to take the magazine in my postgraduate life. Time and again, looking for an unusual take on a well-worn subject, I would be sent in an unexpected direction by the LRB. For example, my essay on Heart of Darkness and Victorian Anthropology is a case in point, because it began when I read a review of a biography of Malinowski. University research can be a narrow-minded exercise, but the LRB continually helped me to broaden my vision (much as, a few years back, I pondered whether the content of my PhD thesis was going to be determined by the random collections of my local Oxfam).

A couple of years ago, when still a keen fan of the LRB, I was having a drink with the novelist A.S. Byatt (as you do - my supervisor happened to know her) when Byatt complained that she did not have time for the LRB. "Surely one should make time for such an institution?" I thought back then. How naive I was in those halcyon days at the start of PhD life. In the final stages of my PhD last term, or when straining under a teaching load, such acts of temporal alchemy are purely wishful thinking.

At around 30 000 words per issue (nerd that I am, I pasted every article from the past few online issues into Word to reach this figure), the LRB equates to a small paperback book. This may not seem a lot, but when one also has novels and articles to read for work, books to review, and wants a few pleasureable paperbacks on the go as well, this is quite a load. And, whereas at one time I would happily snuggle up with some of Jerry Fodor's analytical philosophy, after a hard day at the office I need a novel to keep me that little bit more alert - otherwise I'll be out within ten minutes. Having said that, I do terribly miss Jenny Diski, whom I imagine to be cuddly and know to be cutely afraid of spiders. I am sure one day that she, if not all the other writers on the paper, may one day be able to tempt me back within its sheets.

Labels: Literature, London Review of Books

My previous post about the problems of the historical novel has another dimension to it. In that post, I posed two questions, working with C.J. Sansom's popular Tudor detective novel, Dissolution: whether a good historical novel is harder to write in a period of poor general education, and whether the historical novel works less effectively when narrated in the first person. Both problems arise because the novel appears more didactic than fictional. Now whatever the answer to these questions, my point is that they were not raised out of my engagement with some great work of literature. Indeed, I suggested that the best historical literary fictions, such as John Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman, actively bring such questions to the fore through devices such as metafiction, by which they reflect on the processes by which the story is being crafted. So, in a sense, my two simple questions hardly seem worth asking about this book, because the novel has pre-empted them and is interested in deeper, more complex issues, such as the degree to which we can ever transparently and accurately represent anything through language. It is perhaps only in less carefully constructed literature that basic questions come to the fore, at least for literary critics, because the problems with the fiction stand out so clearly.

And this brings to mind something I said to my students at the start of the academic year. We were looking at Robinson Crusoe, and in my initial questions I ascertained that the majority of them had not enjoyed it. Some of them were even bold enough to call it a "bad" novel. Ever the optimist, I tried to put a positive spin on things by saying that this was a pretty unique work on their course. Most of the novels, poems and plays they study over the three years are there because they have some intrinsic aesthetic merit, at least according to the lecturers who include them on syllabi. Robinson Crusoe, however, is there by virtue of its historical significance, as one of the earliest English novels. And so it is a unique book for them to study, because it is one of those rare works that has some quite obvious deficiencies in style and structure, even if it is contextually an important work of literature. In the tutorial, we were able quite easily to discuss issues of realism, because of how sharply this is breached when Crusoe swims naked to the shipwreck and returns with biscuits in his pockets. We also pinpointed that one primary objection to the novel is that its allegorical and didactic religious intentions bubble like froth on the surface of the plot, and so we almost automatically put up barriers against its moralising. The development of the novel over the three centuries since Crusoe can be read as the development of increasingly clever ways to conceal social and political issues beneath the text, in ways which are more effective because they sneak in by the back door of the book's potential readings. As with Dissolution, this problem of didacticism in Robinson Crusoecame out because of, rather than in spite of, the developmental weaknesses of Defoe's embryonic novel.

I wonder, therefore, whether literature courses are perhaps too much built around the canon of good literature. Should courses be bolder and also look at works of questionable literary quality? This of course feeds into broader debates about the role of literature departments: should literature departments exist to maintain taste and inculcate generations of students about what a good work of art looks like (a Harold Bloom kind of view), or should departments reflect the literary predilictions of culture as a whole, studying those books that happen to be popular even if not considered good fiction by trained literary critics? My own opinions would sway towards the latter, since my research looks at popular science fiction (arguably the most academically overlooked genre of significance), including film and computer games. Over the years, I have drifted away from being a pure literature student into a cultural studies researcher.

But regardless of my personal convictions and this broader debate, I am sure that even the conservative, Bloomian school ought to acknowledge that the teaching of literature loses something if it only ever focuses on the good, without providing a counter-image of the "bad" against which fine writing defines itself. Not only would such an "anti-canon" (as one might tentatively call it) help to guide questions of taste, it also might point to significant theoretical issues, such as those to which my attention was drawn in my previous post. The risk of only ever looking at "good" literature is that we focus intently on the intricate stylistic complexities that combine to make it excellent. We talk about Austen's free indirect discourse as a way of creating psychological intimacy, or George Eliot's omniscient narrator in Middlemarch, or John Fowles' historiographic argument in The French Lieutenant's Woman. And we overlook the very basic fact that a novel (and in a different way, a poem) tells a story, and that novels that have few stylistic innovations or have significant stylistic problems can nevertheless tell "good" stories. Just look at the longevity of the Crusoe myth in popular culture, or the fact that, in spite of my critical objections, I am absorbed in Dissolution's murder mystery, turning the pages as my light burns late into the night.

Labels: C.J. Sansom, canon, didacticism, Dissolution, Literature, teaching