The Pequod

Universities Without Edges? Virtual Learning and Research in the News

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:05:00 +0000

Two contrasting stories about the use of virtual technologies for research and teaching have been hitting the headlines in the United Kingdom this week.

At Durham University, Dr. Patricia Easteal, a law lecturer at the University of Canberra in Australia, has accepted a "virtual sabbatical" in what is believed to be the first sort of fellowship of its kind. Dr. Easteal will conduct her five months of research and teaching with staff and students at Durham, using online tools such as Skype, YouTube, blogs and wikis. She plans to teach her students via Second Life. Unfortunately, for all the freedom of cyberspace, there is no overcoming one feature of real-life geography: the 11 hour time difference between Australia and the UK means that some of her lectures and contributions will have to be pre-recorded.

One acerbic commentator on the Times Higher Education is less than impressed, though, complaining that this may just be a "grandiloquent claim" about a "virtual fellow," when academics have long been used to exchanging knowledge internationally. At Durham, Dr. Westmarland, the lecturer in criminal justice who devised the project, has acknowledged that there may be technical hitches, and that this is a test case for how effective virtual tools are for collaboration at this level.

However, Demos, the UK government think-tank, might well have applauded their efforts. In a recent report entitled The Edgeless University: Why Higher Education Must Embrace Technology, the authors find that whilst social networking and the mobile internet are commonplace among students, such tools have not yet made many inroads into the university classroom. The report argues that with their expertise universities ought to be well placed to filter "the noise of information and knowledge" that envelops students, and so should be eager "to capitalise on the connections and relationships made possible by the new information technologies." Whilst acknowledging that individual academics (such as, perhaps, those mentioned earlier) have been trying to break new ground, investment in online learning and research technologies now needs to be more strategic and sustained.

A new task force set up by the British Government, chaired by Dame Lynne Brindley, the chief executive of the British Library, aims to help with this. Backed by a new Open Learning Innovation Fund of up to £10 million from the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the group aims to enable universities "to develop greater expertise in online teaching and create centres of excellence for the delivery of online learning."

What do readers here think? Have universities been a bit slow off the mark in making use of the internet for networking? Or should we be a bit sceptical about the effectiveness of things like the "virtual sabbatical"?

[Note: This is a cross-post from the Graduate Junction Blog]

Environmental Rant: Hand Driers

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:26:00 +0000

One of life's pleasures as a schoolchild was to come in dripping and chill from a winter's rugby or football game, and to win the squabble for the hand driers in the changing rooms. I would clamp the collar of my rugby shirt over the blower, and blast hot air down the top, turning the wet mud on my torso to a cracked, brown glaze, which could then be picked off and flicked at my peers. Like the hot showers that would follow, though, that warmth would last only for thirty seconds, and one had to build up a resistance against pushing the button just three times, two times, just once more.

As an adult, though, and an environmentally conscious one at that, I have a bit of a problem with hand driers. Just consider the huge energies and infrastructures required simply to deliver that brief spurt of air from the hand drier. In a huge concrete furnace, coal burns and smoke churns, whilst a dash of power runs down miles of cable, passes through substations, filters through a transformer box, so that a stream of electrons will get jammed in a small coil of resistant wire, which will warm a stream of air - and all simply to dry your hands. The hand drier is a metaphor for the egocentrism of our lives, as we exploit power and fabricate devices to do jobs that are essentially unnecessary. For there is a way of drying hands that has been used for centuries, and that involves nothing more than a shake of the excess water, and a little patience in the air. Of course, in the modern day, we grumble that we simply do not have the time.

If the hand drier has a benefit that maybe, just maybe, outweighs its energy-sucking pointlessness, it is its social one. Mirroring the pleasure of hand driers as a child, the hand drier offers a way of cutting oneself off from the human world. As an adult, stuck in one of those dreaded conversations facing the wall of the urinal - stare straight ahead; don't dare to look sideways at your pissing conversationalist! - there is no better way of signalling an end to chat that hitting the blast of the hand drier, its hot air drowning out that of the unwanted interlocutor.

Scruton's Aesthetics and the Need for Historicism

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:12:00 +0000

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.

Review of Gale E. Christianson, Greenhouse: The 200-Year Story of Global Warming

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 10:53:00 +0000

I've just posted a new review of a book that has been around for a few years, but that was recommended to me recently by a friend. My acquaintance heralded his writing style as being a beautiful example of scientific popularisation. Sadly, I disagree, as the book makes some howlers in its attempt to make history accessible. The full review is available here: Greenhouse: The 200-Year Story of Global Warming, by Gale E. Christianson

An Examiner's Perspective

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:13:00 +0000

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.

End of Year Report

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Sat, 23 May 2009 17:48:00 +0000

Now I do not consider myself a vain person - he says, vainly - but indulge me just for a while in this post. After all, personal blogs are inherently narcissistic, so if I cannot talk about myself here, where can I?

The occasion for my smugness was my final day of teaching this year. Rather than running a tutorial on a single topic, I was holding an open office morning just before the exams, for students from any of my modules to drop in and to air their concerns.

I had begun by talking with one student about his view of post-Renaissance literature, and his argument that Robinson Crusoe exemplifies the collapse of metaphysics. I suggested that this was something of an over-simplification, and that a better view would be that during the Enlightenment science and religion coexisted, albeit somewhat uneasily, and in fact that the rise of capitalism, scientific method and mass literature in the seventeenth century perhaps took on a sort of metaphysical character, a belief in the power of rational thought to pull man up the ladder of faith.

Next up, I talked with another student about Puritanism in Nathanial Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. We chatted about the way in which, in this novel of the 1850s which looks back to the 1650s, Hawthorne tried to expose the historical fact that the old, singular, strident morality of Puritanism on which the New World was originally founded had been shown to be problematic as America become more multicultural. Recalling my MA dissertation, I suggested that he go an read one or two of Hawthorne's other, moralising short stories, such as "Egotism, or, The Bosom Serpent."

My third student was concerned about Literary Theory, and was wondering whether Ian McEwan might be a good author to approach from a feminist angle. We chatted about the Thatcherite figure in The Child in Time, and the emasculated male characters in later works like Saturday or On Chesil Beach. We then puzzled on how gender issues might inform McEwan's next "climate change" novel.

As the student left, and I drew breath, it was at this point that the whiff of my satisfaction hung in the office. In the space of an hour, I had gone from the seventeenth century to a novel (McEwan's next) that has not yet been published; I had discussed the history of science, then the history of feminism; from the putative Great American Novel of Fitzgerald, to the desert islands of Daniel Defoe. Even though, as these students evidenced, I would have been covering a similar range as an undergraduate, suddenly, and for the first time in my educational history, I felt at ease and confident in my subject. Like a well-fitted suit, literature and literary criticism seems to have slipped on me so that here I was, taking my mind for a wander, not noticing all the different areas of learning I was carrying with me.

As I commented on this blog, towards the start of my PhD four years ago I felt highly self-conscious, even nervous, at conferences and seminars, because other academics' questions always seemed much more informed and well-formed than my own. Following a seminar, my supervisor, for instance, who ostensibly works in postmodern theory and contemporary literature, would happily drop in references to Jonathan Swift, or James Boswell, or Plato. I had always wondered where that sort of breadth of knowledge could possibly come from. In my tutorial room, though, I realised that it is teaching that plays no small part in it. As I wrote earlier this year, teaching across multiple modules gives you a range and allows you to perceive interconnections between material that you can rarely perceive when doing a prosaic research project. And students like those I saw for the final time this year, who are engaged and interested and who bring their own ideas, demands and questions, force tutors to be light of their step through literary history. If I opened this post in a self-indulgent manner, I have to close by acknowledging that if I feel myself to have learnt a lot this year, and to have acquired a new confidence in my subject, it is only because my students have forced me to do so by their own abilities and searching questions. My students this year have, oddly, been among my best teachers in the whole of my university career.

Climate Change Optimism

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Thu, 14 May 2009 14:36:00 +0000

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. With a President even more visionary than Roosevelt now through his first 100 days in the White House, a new optimism seems to be glimmering through the gloom of failed foreign policy and the credit crunch, reaching even that most pessimistic of fields: climate change. Talk from both Barack Obama and Gordon Brown of "greening the economy" has been primarily a rhetorical flourish intended to give bankers, politicians and economists a way of clawing back some new credibility in the public's eye.

Nevertheless, these green shoots point to a more deeply rooted belief that science and technology now at least offer the feasible tools which, if wielded by a coalition of the Western willing, can stem or even reverse the looming climate crisis. Arguably now, our greatest threat is not ignorance, but the belief that it is too late or not possible to do anything to halt climate change, whether as individuals or internationally. With that in mind, here are several good news stories that I have picked up on over the last week:

New molten salt technology offers a way to store the sun's heat for use at night or during poor weather, overcoming the key obstacle with solar power.

Household appliances that listen out for troughs in national energy use will mean fewer power stations need to be left on tickover just in case millions of kettles are turned on at once.

Investors in the Thames London Array, which will be the world's largest offshore wind farm, have agreed £2 billion of funding. When complete, the project could power a quarter of the homes in Greater London.

The cost of solar energy is expected to match that of conventional fuels within the next five years, a decade earlier than previously expected.

In the last three years, the number of plastic bags used annually in Britain fell from 13.4bn in 2006 to 9.9bn. If the trend continues through the actions of the big retailers, a further 5 billion bags could be saved, equivalent to taking 41 000 cars off the road each year.

Barack Obama's key climate change bill will not quite meet the European target for a 20% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020, but is at least a positive move to some sort of global consensus at Copenhagen, and reverses Bush's policy of ignorance.

Blog-Based Peer Review

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:33:00 +0000

Over at Grand Text Auto, Noah Wardrip-Fruin has reported that his book, Expressive Processing is almost ready for print publication. However, many people will already have read early versions of this book, because it was posted in sections on the website about a year ago. As well as submitting it to traditional, academic peer review via the publisher, Fruin had posted it online as a way of enabling blog-based peer review. Readers could comment on individual paragraphs, sections, chapters or the whole book.

Often, this led them to pick Fruin up on trivial points - and I myself did this, pointing out that the Eliza psychotherapist program had been produced only a year before the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, not "years before," as Fruin had it. More sophisticated commentators than myself, though, interrogated more fundamentally Fruin's interpretation of computer games and programs as new sorts of text.

Fruin has just posted a summary of how blog-based peer review has affected his work. Fruin has pioneered the use of the collaborative web for traditional academic scholarship, and so his comments are well worth a read. They appear in the same week as the Guardian Education discusses David Melville's recent report on "The Changing Learner Experience." Taking a more conservative line than Fruin's optimism, the Guardian notes that "There is a still a question over whether a well-respected blog is the same as having peer-reviewed research articles, for instance, and using new technologies is still 'bottom up' rather than forced on academics by their managers."

Get Your Cards Right

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Wed, 13 May 2009 08:22:00 +0000

Arrogant it may be, but I suspect that when deep in the tunnel of research, a lot of PhD students look to a glimmer at the end of it that is about the size and shape of a playing card, and shines in the sun. I am talking about a credit or debit card, and that glorious day when you envisage walking into a bank, slapping it onto the counter, and being greeted with, "Good morning, Doctor."

As I blogged when I passed my viva, the process of completing is somewhat subdued. Because there are so many stages to go through, you are never actually sure when you have cleared the final hurdle into doctorship. But the moment that new bank card lands on your doormat, and you start using it in everyday life, is the moment you know you have finally done with the thing.

Which is why I have been frustrated about how hard it actually is to get a card with this new epithet on. When I applied to the Youth Hostel Association, I used the tag, but got back a card simply with my name on it. Likewise, I thought Waterstones ought to be impressed by having a doctor (of English literature, don't they know!) amongst their customers. But you would not have known it from the plain card which arrived after I had applied, which had nothing on save for a string of numbers. My bank, Smile, similarly did not have any easy way of changing my card, though having spoken to a somewhat bemused man on the phone, I am waiting for a new card to flutter onto the doormat any day now.

However, my vanity may well have got the better of me. In this new tax year, I applied for a new ISA, using my new tag (for, surely, they will invest my money more carefully, won't they?). A couple of days later, though, an unexpected letter arrives on the mat. "Dear Dr." it reads, "We have been unable to verify your identity through the usual records checks. Please supply three items of identification showing clearly your name and address." Naturally, my recent utility bills and passports have not been updated, so I am left to worry: will they trust there's a doctor in the house?

The Value of an English PhD

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 08:54:00 +0000

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.

Literature and Science: A Disciplinary Fracture?

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 09:13:00 +0000

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).

Postgraduate Diary: The Viva

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 07:42:00 +0000

When I started this Postgraduate Diary back in 2005, my work load was somewhat lighter than it has been over the past year. This has meant that over the past few months in the run up to submission and then preparing for the viva, when one would have thought I would have most to say about the unique experience that is doing a PhD, I have had least time to blog about it. As a consequence (and further cutting the cover of my pseudonym and coming closer to revealing my real identity), I joined the Twittering masses.

If you follow me on Twitter, or look at the most recent updates in the sidebar on the right on The Pequod, you will see that my thoughts in the run-up to the viva, which took place yesterday, went something like this.

Oh shit

Achooo!

Oh shit

What was all the fuss about?

To explain a bit less succinctly, after the end of term, and having spent the first week of the vacation sending out overdue book chapters and a couple of reviews and preparing a paper for the British Society for Literature and Science conference, I managed to go down with flu, which meant that the week I had allocated to preparing for the viva was spent mostly in bed, with the thesis on my knee and me asleep or buried in tissues.

Eventually, I did plough through the thing, at which point my anxiety kicked in - hence the second expletive. Apart from noticing several typos and clumsy sentences, which I always resignedly knew (and knew my examiners understood) would creep through, my opinions on my thesis became utterly distorted. The problem was that at no point did any of my ideas make me sit up and say, "Oh, how interesting." This is because by now my interpretations of the literary works, or the arguments I strung together, were so familiar as to seem self-evident. I simply could not place myself in the position of a naive reader who would be attending to what was there afresh.

As I have commented previously, the art of learning to write well is, in a sense, the art of learning to read naively, understanding what new readers are going to take from a work, rather than what you as the writer believe yourself to have put in. But whilst this may be an art I have more or less mastered at the level of the essay, obviously writing a book-length study was entirely new to me. A book entails a different dynamic, because by virtue of its length a reader's concentration ebbs and wanes, and one often reads with less attention to style and structure (and hence to problems in that style) and responds more to broad ideas as they emerge from the fog of the whole. However, as a writer I am not experienced enough to conceptualise my ideal book reader. Consequently, in my own re-reading of my thesis, I focused intently on the elisions, the errors, the bits of structure that I felt could be improved; in a way my experience of reading my thesis was the experience of reading the thesis I did not write. So many times I wondered why I had not added another critic, or why I had not covered a particular angle of potential argument. I knew the answer - lack of time - would not really wash in the viva, but I convinced myself that these absences were all that the examiners, my first proper readers, would notice, rather than them attending to the things I had written.

When I finally emerged from the fug of flu, then, I ended up wandering around our local countryside doing rather perverse versions of some silent movie mannequin. There I would find myself, walking through the woods, waving my arms about and muttering to myself. What I was doing inside my head was holding mock vivas, imagining all the questions that might be put to me, and constructing idealised answers. If I was a cartoon, I would be Homer Simpson, with his monkey homunculi inside his skull, only in my case two of the monkey-examiners would be wearing figurative grey beards and I would be a small child chattering in the corner.

So in the run up to my viva, I went around in something of a nervous state, not quite a wreck but certainly more anxious than I had expected I would be. I think part of the issue with a viva is that in a technical sense it matters little. Unless a supervisor has been utterly useless, there is no way any student could submit a thesis that was going to fail outright. So the viva really only determines whether one will pass with a few typo corrections, or provisionally pass with the need for substantial rewriting over the coming months, a prospect no PhD student relishes, being no doubt sick of the sight of their thesis by this point. So instead of being like an exam result, with the mark passively waiting on a piece of paper, the viva is a sustained, active confrontation with two academics who are going to either look down on you, or treat you as (more or less) their equal. Especially for someone considering an academic career, like myself, this sets a tone, rather than being a final determinant of the future. Am I an academic, or am I a person who just happens to have a PhD?

So, then, to the thing itself. At which point my examiners broke all the rules by strongly implying that there was not much risk of me doing anything over the course of the exam that could see me fail, or having to go back to the drawing board. This immediately set me at ease, and meant that all the questions to follow took place within a framework in which the issues were less deconstructions and more in the same spirit of academic enquiry that follows any reading of any published book. After all, very few of us have ever read an academic monograph, no matter how good, without thinking certain aspects were weaker than others, or certain things merit further study, without this devaluing the nature of the work as a whole. Like science, studies in the humanities only chip away at the understanding of the universe. When it comes to the human world, there is no theory of everything.

And so the viva was more like a broad ranging conversation than the detailed picking apart that it had been during my internal monologues in the previous week. We talked about things in wider cultural studies beyond the scope of my thesis - including, bizarrely, a discussion of the Nintendo Wii. There were a few technical points which my examiners picked up on, including my use of the term "the viewer" in my discussions of films, as if film goers are all idealised Platonic entities who respond in the same way, rather than a diverse crowd, some of whom fidget, and some of whom pay the attention the director desires. This was quite awkward, as it was an entirely legitimate point which I myself had already spotted as a flaw, but I had to find some way to justify my use of it (in this case, it was a handy shortcut). As it was, I sort of wriggled my way around and then - because I knew that I had already passed - admitted that it needed changing. We chatted a bit about how to rework certain aspects for publication, and which publishers to aim for. And then it was all over. They stayed behind closed doors to draft their final report, and I drifted off for a celebratory lunch with my supervisor.

The whole event seemed, in the end, a bit anti-climactic. Did three years of hard slog really come down to this two hours of fairly gentle academic chatter? Rather than the elation I felt when I finally submitted "the thing" before Christmas, I now just feel a gentle kind of relief. One of the odd things is that there is not really a definitive moment when you pass a PhD. Unlike other exams, there always seems to be one more hurdle to go through before graduation. I have a few corrections to do, then have to get it hard bound, then have to fill in some more forms. And, in a peculiar way, with hindsight I had already passed the moment I submitted, and those words irrevocably printed on the page were just waiting to be read by the examiners who would confirm it. Then again, had I actually passed the moment about eighteen months ago when the chapter structure finally became clear and coherent? Or did I pass the moment when I came up with the original concept for my thesis, an originality which thrilled the examiners? Was it really always going to happen, and all those troubles of writing just going through a necessary motion?

Alternatively, looking ahead, if I want an academic career, the epithet "Dr" really means very little. I have little hope of an academic job without one published book, and a few more journal articles. The thesis is just one necessary, but ultimately minor, step on the road. Neither of my two examiners, nor my supervisor, had ever got their theses published, as it was just the launchpad to something else.

In a peculiar kind of way, this blog mirrors this effect. Over the last year or so, my Postgraduate Diary has got less and less regular, and I have started instead thinking and talking about other things, like the historical novel, or Renaissance science. So I suppose it is appropriate that this will be my final post in the Postgraduate Diary - though that only frees up opportunity for more diverse thoughts in the future.

Postgraduate Diary: Thesis? What Thesis?

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 18:23:00 +0000

I recently posted about the way I feel a loss of identity having submitted my thesis but prior to my viva. One other thing that has disturbed me is this:

As I have moaned on numerous occasions, you do not so much do a PhD as live it, lugging its intellectual baggage around with you inside your head. Every radio programmme, casual conversation, conference, news bulletin, magazine, lecture, book, article, student essay, web page becomes potential material, sparking off a synaptic connection between the thing you are watching, reading or discussing and your research. Furthermore, a new thought or setence or way of restructuring a chapter can sneak up on you just as easily at 3.00 one sleepless morning, or in the shower, or whilst out for a walk as when you are sat in front of the computer ostensibly "working."

So knowing the way I have not so much lived a postgraduate life, as had the PhD inhabit me, I expected that I would not be able simply to let go of the thesis I had nurtured into the world. The surprise has been that since I submitted just before Christmas, my thesis has lain quietly on my pile of papers, gradually sinking to the bottom beneath sheafs of other material, like some archaeological relic. I have, quite remarkably, simply discarded the thing from my mind. I have no desire to go an just check over that chapter one last time, in the hopes of catching some errant full stop wandering off the page. No sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night with some fresh idea which yes, dear, I simply must jot down before it goes. Zip. Blank.

Partly, I guess, I benefited from handing it in, and then going off for two week's break at my parent's over Christmas, slouching in front of a fire with a glass in my hand. Partly, too, I have been so busy teaching this term that I have not had time to consider researching anything (which makes me wonder how on earth that other person, who only hazily seems to have been me, managed simultaneously to do teaching, writing up, and a new job at a library last term). But even so that obsessive compulsion to write, read and (to quote E.M. Forster) "only connect," seems to have vanished as if by some magic therapy.

Until now, that is, when the repressed returns, as at last I have the date set for my viva (early April). Now that term has finished I must switch - or flicker - back into research mode. I will pick up the thing one more time and, no doubt, spot a million mistakes and things I wish I had changed. That's just the nature of the beast, but the question is whether, in a fortnight's time, I will be Doctored or set back by several months. I will keep you posted.

London Review of Books

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 13:08:00 +0000

When I graduated from my first degree in 2003, to take a year out working and travelling before returning for a Master's, 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 pitched 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. 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 my PhD reading was going to be determined less by considered reading and more by the random contents 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 I am straining under a teaching load at the moment, 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, other 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 miss Jenny Diski, whom I imagine to be cuddly and know to be cutely afraid of spiders, quite terribly. I am sure one day she, if not all the other writers on the paper, may one day be able to tempt me back within its sheets.

Should we Teach "Bad" Literature?

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:08:00 +0000

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.

The Problem of Didacticism in the Historical Novel

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:10:00 +0000

Because I am now freed from the shackles of reading for research, I have just started an historical thriller that has been receiving rave reviews: C.J. Sansom's Dissolution. However, because the disease of literary criticism has by now infected me deep into my bones, I cannot approach this novel in the light-hearted, entertaining way I am supposed to, and cannot help but think about questions of technique.

Dissolution has sparked off a few thoughts about the problems of historical novels in particular, and also of first person narration in general.

Issues in the former begin on the first page, and can be summarised by a single word: didacticism. This novel is set in the Tudor period, in the wake of the Henretian Reformation. But lest we miss the connection, within the first few paragraphs we are informed that our hero is working for Lord Cromwell; that he had "once believed with Erasmus that faith and charity would be enough to settle religious differences between men"; that he spots poles on London Bridge upon which stand the heads of those executed for treason; and that he is mourning the death of Queen Jane (Seymour). The historical details are packed in here, but the effect is like touring a museum recreation of a Tudor scene.

There is nothing natural in either the novel or such a museum, as every person has been placed there not for their own purposes, but to illustrate with waxy rigidity some dimension of the period. The blacksmith never simply happens to be working, but must present a "blacksmith working," hammering the anvil with the utmost concrentation; the shepherd is never simply shivering in a field wondering how long it will be before he gets home to his mutton stew, but is a "shepherd herding," crook in hand, posed as if looking too-strenuously for a lost sheep; a lady never empties a chamber pot whilst yelling at her kids, but is trapped forever in time as "woman emptying chamberpot." In an educational museum, of course, such caricatures serve a legitimate purpose. But in a novel seeking to recreate a thriving London scene, the mentions of the names of Cromwell, Erasmus, Seymour, Henry VIII all just seem to coincidental to be true to life. They have the quality of mannequins, lacking individual character and there simply for a purpose of the events which they illustrate. The historical novel must cling to the world's realism more than other genres, since history has actually happened, and the fiction inhabits that genuine - if now lost - world, rather than emerging from a timeless authorial imagination. Oddly, though, the more the historical novel strives for realistic detail the more it over-reaches its remit as a novel, a work of fiction.

If the opening of the novel is overloaded with pop-history, a different but related problem arises when the writer cannot assume his reader's general knowledge. Consider this exchange between the detective-hero, Shardlake, and his assistant, Mark, as they ride past a church:

All the windows of the church were filled with candles, a rich glow filtering through the stained glass. The bell tolled, on and on.
"The All Souls' service," Mark observed.
"Yes, the whole village will be in church praying for the relief of their dead in purgatory."

Now can we really imagine that the Mark who knows instinctively what date the bells are tolling on really needs to be told the significance of this particular service by Shardlake? Of course not. But then, the information is not really directed to him, even though conveyed in dialogue, but to the secular, modern reader. When even dialogue, the most vernacular of representative modes, is turned to the demands of history rather than simply inhabiting it, the whole artifice of the novel is exposed. The problem is that it is trying to perform two incompatible aims: to render a period realistically, whilst providing an entertaining and plausible work of fiction.

So this leads me to my first, general question: are good historical novels impossible to produce in a modern era when a reading public lacks a general grounding in social and religious history? As Andrew Motion observed recently, it is becoming increasingly difficult to teach English Literature because students do not know the Bible or classical mythology on which much of the canon is based. Even fifty years ago, one can imagine that the final sentence quoted above would not have needed to be written, because the author could expect a reader instinctively to know the meaning of All Soul's Day. The historical novel has been perhaps the most popular genre of recent times; one can bring immediately to mind Ellis Peters' Cadfael novels, Umberto Eco's The_Name_of_the_Rose, Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, Conn Iggulden's Emperor series, Bernard Cornwall's Sharp books, Allan Mallinson's Matthew Hervey series. Do these fictions suffer by being unable to stand as independent narratives in their own right, instead needing to convey history as information, rather than as the coincidental backdrop to the narrative, like the weather?

Not being an expert in this field, perhaps I am being unfair, which is why I present it as an open question. To look more specifically at this particular novel, though, another question springs to mind which is more specific, and can be illustrated by the following passage:

We made our way down Scarnsea's cobbled main street, where the top storeys of ancient houses overhung the road, keeping to one side to avoid the emptying of pisspots.

What is wrong here is the corollary to the didactic edge I have been complaining about. Again, we have the historical detailing. But that this is a problem may have something to do with this novel's narrative technique: first person narration. Keeping to one side of the street to avoid chamber pots is the sort of instinctive action that, in a character of its time, would have been entirely unconscious, and therefore not worth commenting upon. As with the dialogue quoted earlier, this moment exposes the didactic intention of historical fiction. But it is something we might object to less strongly if this information was relayed by an objective, omniscient, third-person narrator.

Such narrators act as discriminating eyes. They select what information we need to be told, and exclude other possibilities or unnecessary details. This is what John Fowles recognised in his postmodern reworking of the Victorian romance, The French Lieutenant's Woman. This historical novel is thick with metafiction, self-reflection on its own status and mechanisms as a novel (Linda Hutcheon would categorise this as a "historiographic metafiction.") In particular, Fowles presents himself as a character in the work, and likens himself to a puppeteer, pulling the strings of the love plot, presenting characters in certain beneficial or negative lights, and introducing modern paradigms of knowledge anachronistically into the Victorian period. Fowles seems to be saying that we cannot ever recapture history objectively, and any aspect or character of a period that is recollected is placed there, like props in a set, because the author requires it. History is made, not discovered, by the process of story.

Sansom's novel fails to realise this. By seeing events as if through the eyes of a character, it seems to be suggesting that such things could actually have happened, that these particular thoughts (avoiding chamberpots, acknowledging why the bells tolled) occured at the level of consciousness, and can therefore be written explicitly. Now I do not want to suggest the novel is not entertaining - I am certainly caught up by its tale of monastic murder. But it is compromised as a novel, a work of fiction, by clinging through the first person to the belief that a period can be seen now as it was seen then. I argue, however, that this is not the case, because between past and present the didactic intervenes, when to be successful any idea of a double-intention ought to be dissolved.

On the Road

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:42:00 +0000

Jack Kerouac's On the Road is not a great formal work of literature. Its narrative line is repetitive, with little discernible development across the four books and separate road trips. Characters - including the narrator - are flat, popping up out of the background as we meet them, hitching a brief ride in its plot, before departing as specks in the rear view mirror of the book's incessant forward momentum.

But what it lacks in aesthetic sophistication, it makes up for with its wild-horse power, a fund of energy tapped from the collision between intense, young hearts - yearning, adventurous, sexually potent - and an American land and cityscape capable of satisfying their desires, but in a too-brief flare of passion.

Europeans are used to seeing America from a distance, down the telescopes of the space age, music, Disney, Sky News and, today, the internet. From this angle, America is perceived whole, with a glossy narrative of a unified republic of peoples. On the Road presents America from the other end, giving us unique individuals who seem full of character, but whose stories remain incoherent, hidden and untold behind the drive of the prose. It looks out onto America through a moving lens, which has the effect of distorting space and time, compressing and focusing America's landmass into a few miles of tarmac and a few pages of print which nevertheless contain multitudes:

"Whooee!" yelled Dean. "Here we go!" And he hunched over the wheel and gunned her; he was back in his element, everybody could see that. We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move And we moved!

The distortion of space and time is echoed in the print by the use of commas to splice together what should be separate sentences, as if even language cannot sit still on its own full stops. For all its aesthetic flaws and rough edges, then, there is undoubtedly a poetry of sorts here.In a passage like the following, it is easy to understand why the dust jacket of my edition (the 2000 Penguin Classics edited by Ann Charters) likens Kerouac to Walt Whitman:

There was the Pacific, a few more foothills away, blue and vast and with a great wall of white advancing from the legendary potato patch where Frisco fogs are born. Another hour and it would come streaming through the Golden Gate to shroud the romantic city in white, and a young man would hold his girl by the hand and climb slowly up a long white sidewalk with a bottle of Tokay in his pocket. That was Frisco; and beautiful women standing in white doorways, waiting for their men; and Coit Tower, and the Embarcadero, and Market Street, and the elevel teeming hills.

The movement here from local geography (the bay) into a spectra of the mind (the unknown young man), which then roams from the local (the place names) to the mythical (the eleven teeming hills) is not unlike the psychological transcendence of Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

With authorial connections like this, coupled with a style which is at once flawed and its great achievement, it is difficult to place On the Road in the Western or American canon. Perhaps Old Bull Lee is the character who might represent the uneasy status of the book as a whole. Lee experiments with boiling down bird seed to smoke as dope, sits with Shakespeare on his lap whilst reading Mayan codices, has tried narcoanalysis and discovered his seven different personalities, from an English Lord to a raving idiot who must be restrained by chains. Like the novel, Lee is a confused but bold experiment, trying to find which of many possible identities might be best placed to study America as it rushes past in a blur of history:

He had studied medicine in Vienna; had studied anthropology, read everything; and now he was settling down to his life's work, which was the study of things themselves in the streets of life and the night.

Wallace Stevens meets Don DeLillo, the plain sense of things hidden deep beneath the belly of a glossy American life and letters.

Postgraduate Diary: Where Am I?

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 18:07:00 +0000

Any decent Graduate School training programme includes workshops to help a student along every step of the road to a doctorate. There are programmes on how to use Microsoft Word, workshops on time management, guides to dealing with a supervisor, advice on preparing for a viva and, finally, guidance on finding jobs when that doctorate is in hand. But pause and backtrack. Between these final stages there is a step missing, one you do not even think about when you are writing and researching, and which I encountered only on my return from the Christmas break.

Having submitted a few days before Santa geared up his reindeer, when I came back after the festivities were over, and sat down at my desk to catch up on the emails that had built up, I went to compose a reply and realised my signature was wrong. Previously, my signature line included my name followed by an unambiguous statement of my position: "PhD Research Student." I also included the address of my department, and a link to my research profile.

But what should my signature line say now? I am not really a PhD student any more, as I have not gone into continuation and have paid no fees, and I am not actively researching. But neither am I a post-doc, since I have no doctorate yet. Using the departmental address, too, seems a bit odd, since although I am teaching a considerable amount in my department, the bulk of my salary comes from a job at one of the university libraries. Then again, putting "Library Dogsbody" after my name would confuse my students. So I went for the minimal approach, just my plain old name and email address. Not even any of the letters I have accumulated: BA, MA, AHEA. As I have come to realise, the period after submitting but before viva-ing (is that a verb? it sounds like some Latin dance) has no name, which perhaps explains why it is overlooked on training programmes.

Since Christmas, I have been caught in a peculiar routine. Following the advice of friends who have graduated, I am not going to look at or work on my thesis until closer to my viva in Easter. Instead, I have spent the last month or so getting on with my teaching preparation, reading Paradise Lost and Midnight's Children, and mugging up on Freud and deconstruction. I have also had a lot of marking to do. However, my days are by not bursting at the seams of time as they were in the run up to submission last term.

I do have a few research thoughts bubbling in the back of my mind - something on mobile phone fictions, something on complexity, a paper on Frederic Jameson and computer games - but to be honest I simply cannot be bothered to get going on any one of these; when I do, no doubt I'll post thoughts in progress on this blog.

I think I was so burnt out before Christmas that I cannot bear the thought of starting from scratch on a new project. Indeed, I am not sure I can even remember how to begin in principle, because it is so long since I actually researched anything original, took down notes, and wrote down ideas. Although I have never worked harder than the previous six months, that period of finishing my thesis consisted mostly of re-writing and editing, with very little original thought, and certainly no writing 1000 words on a page that had been blank at the start of the day. This was the Polyfiller phase of PhD, when I filled in the gaps and smoothed the cracks of my existing writing and research. Those days three long years ago when I used to sit reading all morning, go for a walk after lunch, and dash out some brilliant (or so they seemed at the time) paragraphs on my computer are distant memories.

This phase, then, can best be described as a limbo. I am not in the heavenly phase of discovering new and interesting ideas, but neither am I experiencing the hell of getting these ideas coherently written during excessively busy days. I am something more than a PhD student, for in the last six months I finally became confident as a researcher, but I am not yet wearing the badge of "Dr" that makes my skills official. And, of course, there is the distinct possibility that I will not be awarded the PhD straight away, but will have to do substantial corrections.

I am still kicking around my department, nattering easily with staff and other postgraduates as I photocopy teaching handouts, but I am conscious that my eyes should really be set on other jobs, in a different university. I am financially comfortable, what with my library and teaching jobs and Mrs. Ishmael's salary also, and could happily drift along like this for the next few years; however, I know that this is not a long-term, secure career.

Perhaps I would feel happier if I at least had a label to attach to this short phase of my life. Pre-post-doc is a bit clumsy. Post-Phd-student is a bit contradictory. Any better ideas?

How Will the Recession Affect Students?

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 11:43:00 +0000

In the credit crunch era, the financial plans of everyone - from large corporations to public amenities to individuals - have to be reassessed. But there seems to have been relatively little in the press about how the recession will impact upon students or recent graduates, other than the obvious issue that jobs will be hard to come by when students leave university. Partly, perhaps, this is due to the fact that the recent Research Assessment Exercise has captured the attention of universities wondering how much they will receive for research, and so universities and press have been less focused on the other side of the research-teaching coin.

So, with the substantial disclaimer that I am by no means an expert on this subject, here are some of my own thoughts on how the recession might affect higher education. Most of these points are particular for England or the United Kingdom, but may apply elsewhere also.

The first, and most empirically certain thing to note, is that student loans have their interest rates for each year tied to the Retail Price Index as it stands in March. Over recent years, this has hovered around 3 percent. However, as of December 2008, this fell below 1 percent, with the downward trend set to continue. It is likely that come March, interest rates on student loans will be minimal, allowing those students who are in well-paid jobs to repay their loans at a faster rate. However, if RPI falls below zero, so that we have deflation in March, does this mean that the Student Loans Company will start actually paying students loans off? The terms and conditions of the loans state only that "the Government has to keep the value of what is owed in line with the general rate of inflation. They do this by working out the rate of inflation each year as defined by the Retail Prices Index (RPI) and fixing the interest charged to that rate...The new interest rate is based on the Retail Price Index for the previous March." There is no indication of what happens when the RPI falls below zero - something probably not imagined in the heady days of the economic boom when loans were introduced - and there are probably some worried faces running around the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills trying to find a loophole to ensure students repay loans at some positive rate of interest.

In a recession, one might expect students to hold off from incurring large debts, and favour finding immediate jobs ahead of further study. However, the reverse appears to be the case. With lower-skilled jobs on the decline in a recession (jobs in manufacturing or retail, for example), it is best for students leaving school to head to university in the hopes that economic prospects will have improved in three years, and knowing that at least the student loans offer a guaranteed (if minimal!) level of financial support. The Times Higher Education reports today that the government's restriction on university numbers is limiting the number of places available for increasing numbers of applicants.

The flip side to this is fewer foreign students will apply to universities abroad. The Higher Education Policy Institute recently warned that if China were to fall into recession, the effect on this vital funding stream would be "cataclysmic." Though the drying up of foreign students will affect universities globally, Britain may oddly see the recession work in its favour to offset the losses, because of the plummet in the value of the pound. However, HEPI suggested that this might mean students opt for one year courses and choose to pay up front, rather than facing the the full three years at uncertain exchange rates.

More difficult to predict is the effect the recession will have on any plans to lift the cap on top-up fees (set at £3000 plus inflation), and move to a system of full fees. The review on lifting the tution fee cap was due in 2009, but this has now been put off until 2010, after a likely general election. Universities would like the bar to be set at between £6000 to £7000. MP Ian Gibson, former chair of the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee, has argued against lifting the cap, saying that this would be incompatible with the Prime Minister's plan to ride out the recession by investing in green science research and skills. It would also surely be contradictory for the government to condemn excessive borrowing whilst allowing a new generation of students to start life owing £20 000 for tuition, plus any additional loans they need to support themselves. Furthermore, assuming the system stays the same with the government paying for students up-front, with students then repaying the loans once in work, the government would be required to put a large amount of capital into higher education, without guarantees that it would be paid back quickly, if the economy continues to run slowly. The stalling of tuition fee rises by the recession is, however, only a short term effect; longer term it is quite clear that UK higher education is moving towards the privatised, full-fee model of the United States, and will eventually do so under a Labour or Conservative government.

So there we have it. The layman's thoughts on how the credit crunch will affect current and future students. Clearly, the sector - like all others - faces a rocky and uncertain time, though if the government does see investment in research and technology as the light at the end of the tunnel of recession, universities might ultimately come out well on the research side of things. The people one has to be most worried about are new graduates. Vacancies for graduates have dropped 17 percent in the six months since summer 2008, particularly (and not surprisingly) in the financial sector. As if it were not already competitive as a result of the expansion of higher education, new graduates can expect to struggle for survival in the harshest economic environment in two decades.

Update 13th February 2008

Following the above post, The Guardian Education has just reported a big rise in undergraduate applications. Applications are up 7.8%, with

signs that the recession is affecting people's choice of degree, breeding a new generation of economists and mathematicians. The number of applications for economics degrees increased by 15.7% to a total of 44,750. Applications for maths rose 10.4% and for politics 16.7%.

There has also been an increase in public sector training degrees, hardly surprising since the public sector offers greater job security and, given the present need for investment from the public purse, probably increasing numbers of jobs also:

Applications for nursing rose by 16.7%, education degrees by 10.7% and teacher training by 3.7%. It is thought that people are opting for "safer" jobs outside business and commerce.

Not surprisingly:

There was a 7.6% decline in applications for building degrees as the construction industry slows, though there were modest rises in business degree applicants.

Bad Science in the Renaissance: Ambroise Pare and the Quacks

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:15:00 +0000

The annual post-Christmas guilt about our excessive consumption has, as usual, been accompanied by advertisements promising miraculous diet plans and detox solutions. But this period been made more interesting this year because the scientists (spoilsports that they are) have been fighting back. The Sense About Science organisation recently launched a Detox Dossier exposing the fraudulent claims of Detox quacks. Appearing on the Today programme to discuss detox plans, Ben Goldacre of Bad Science launched a highly effective condemnation of the claims of one organisation, Detoxinabox. He showed that they could not even spell that nasty chemical "cadminum" (i.e. cadmium) correctly, and that the managing director did not even know the contents of the spurious claims made on her own website when she responded to these allegations in interview.

This miniature tussle was symptomatic of a far wider battle going on between science and alternative therapies. At one level, this battle is purely commercial. There is a quick buck to be made by selling detox products to a public desperate for some easy way to fix their Christmas excesses. It does not matter that scientists have shown the ludicrous evidence base behind their clever sounding jargon, since by the time the products are exposed, they will have sold in sufficient quantities and can hibernate from view until the next festive period. At another level, though, detox products are part of a broader milieu in which evidence-based medicine is (at best) not well-understood, and (at worst) perceived to be no better way of dealing with pathological problems than any other.

Now as a literary academic I am not well-placed to deconstruct the claims made for detox or other quack products. However, what I can do is to offer some relief to the pain of those scientists who are fed up by the way in whichthey must go to great lengths to get a new drug to market (double-blind clinical trials etc.), whilst the public is prepared to swallow made-up advertising hokum of detox products. How can I help the suffering scientists? Well, by at least pointing out that such a struggle between authentic practitioners and pseudo-scientists has a long heritage.

Let us go back to the sixteenth century, and the French royal court. Here we find the physician, Ambroise Paré, chief surgeon to Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III, and arguably the most prominent and well-known medical man of his era (a sort of Renaissance Robert Winston). Paré published on medical instruments, military injuries, childbirth and physiognomy. However, his most enduring and quirky work is On Monsters and Marvels, dating from around 1573. Here, Paré offers a compilation of his own and second-hand accounts of birth defects, sea and land monsters, and grotesque injuries.

Now Paré is by no means a modern clinician. Although his use of detailed anatomical drawings is forward-looking, for the most part he relies on the two age-old authorities - Aristotle and Hippocrates - to explain how foetuses are created and may develop abnormally, and how abherrations come about. However, what is interesting about Paré is that he nevertheless feels his science is grounded on something more than superstitious belief. He invokes Augustine to argue that nothing in God's universe is intrinsically monstrous or the work of demons, it is just that we have not looked closely enough and understood what those monsters are intended by God to signify. When reading Paré, it is important to understand that - in his own time - the best scientific practices as then defined were not incompatible with believing that ultimately science (or, if you prefer, "science") would show the brilliance of God's creation.

In the modern period, in an age of wars between science and religion, we tend to place people in the camps of either empiricism, or of supersitition. If one believes in God, for example, why does one not believe in ghosts, angels, or demons? There seems to be no logical explanation for why some one who believes in God should think ghosts cannot possibly exist. Conversely, if one pursues the empirical method, it should be quite clear that miracles breach the laws of science. Anyone who holds religious and scientific values concurrently is either self-deluded or forced to fudge two fundamentally contradictory positions, as indicated most prominently in the Intelligent Design movement which reconciles God with evolution.

As a child of the sixteenth century, however, Paré thinks differently. It is taken for granted that God exists, but that is not to say that every possible superstitious belief should be entertained, regardless of evidence to the contrary. The most prominent evidence of this in On Monsters is that Paré argues that demons or the Devil do not actually possess real power to create monsters. If they did, this would imply that God was not omnipotent (all-powerful). Rather, Paré argues that demons operate by illusion. They only seem to create monsters or hideous forms by implanting false ideas in the minds of the witnesses; they can never actually make monsters, contrary to God's perfect wishes.

In the history of science, it is ironic that Paré stakes a claim for science out of this religious conviction. Rather than religion and science being antithetical, as they seem to be today, religion lends the scientist his authority to explain the world better than a different, untrained person. Paré puts himself up as the best, most scientifically rigorous of medical practitioners, so far as "science" was construed at the time. He argues against quack practitioners, who are in league with the devil:

Now just exactly as the Devil, chief and sworn enemy of man, often (yet through God's permission) afflicts us with great and diverse maladies, so do sorcerers, tricksters, and wicked men - through ruses and diabolical tricks - torture and abuse countless men; some invoke and adjure heaven knows what spirits, through whispers, exorcisms, imprecations, enchantments, and bewitchments; others tie around the neck - or else carry on them in some other way - certain writings, certain characters, certain rings, certain pictures, and other such claptrap; others use certain harmonious chants and dances. Sometimes they use certain potions, or, rather, poisons, suffimigations, perfumes, charms, and enchantments. Some are found who, having contrived the image and likeness of some absent party, pierce it with certain instruments, and boast of afflicting - with any such illness as pleases them - the one whose likeness they are piercing, even though he may be far away from them; and they say that this is done by virtue of the stars and of certain words that they hum while piercing such an image or likeness made of wax. There are, in addition, an infinity of such villainies which have been invented by these rascals to afflict and torment men, but it would weary me to say any more about it.

Irreligiousity (in the form of doing the Devil's work) and quackery are one and the same thing. Paré continues in defence of his profession:

I would never have been finished if I'd wanted to amuse myself by stringing together thousands upon thousands of [examples of] such superstitious gibberish and I would not have gone on about it so long, except in order to give warning to a lot [of persons], who are mistaken about it, not to believe in it any longer, and to beg them to reject all such foolishness, and to stop at what is assured, and [this] by so many skillful and worthy gentlemen [who are] confirmed and certified in Medicine; which doing, an infinite good will be brought about for the public; all the more because next to the honour of God, there is nothing that should be more precious to man than his health.

Any medical scientist reading this should feel a fellow hand reaching across the centuries in sympathy at the pressure they were placed under by fraudulent peddlers of quick pannaceas. True, Paré's own scientific discoveries and methods have been superseded today; but one can well-imagine that, had he been born four-hundred years later, Paré would have been happily stalking the corridors of the École Polytechnique. On the other hand, many modern scientists would like to pretend that the Enlightenment world has seen science and religion kept totally apart. However, Paré shows that the roots of the scientific revolution run earlier than the seventeenth century and the foundation of the Royal Society, and that the heritage of scientific authority is invested within a religious framework, not apart from it. Science emerged not against, but out of, religiously focused enquiries into the nature of the world, in this case Paré's desire to show that monsters are not intrinsically nasty but part of God's fecundly wondrous creation.

Indeed, the ultimate detox solution of all time has to have been the Catholic indulgences which promised absolution for all your sins (moral, as well as dietary). As part of this commercial conspiracy, Catholic priests might travel from town to town performing exorcisms, expunging the devil from a daemoniac, whose tortured body and troubled mind offered onlookers a foretaste of the purgatory to come - unless, of course, they were to buy an indulgence out of it.

Ambroise Paré, however, rebels against quackery like this, by denying that the Devil actually does physical work. It was, in part, only once demons were understood as illusions that the world became open to empirical testing. After all, if the Devil was at large in the world, how could one know that the world being tested was not the result of some diabolical hoax?

BBC and Gaza Appeal

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:59:00 +0000

Since my previous post on Gaza, an almighty row has erupted about the BBC's refusal to air an appeal from the Disaster's Emergency Committee for humanitarian aid for Gaza. I can quite understand that some see this issue as the BBC putting its airy idealism ahead of the suffering of innocent civilians. But (though clearly I have huge sympathy for the Gazan cause, and will certainly be sending a donation) I have to agree entirely with their decision. I do appreciate Director General Mark Thompson's argument that the BBC "could not broadcast a free-standing appeal, no matter how carefully constructed, without running the risk of reducing public confidence in the BBC's impartiality in its wider coverage of the story."

The attack on the BBC seems to me to misread the balance of arguments on either side. On the one hand, it is not as if by failing to show the advert the amount raised by the appeal is going to be significantly reduced (and, ironically, the row has perhaps led to greater publicity than one advert could ever have gained). In the wider context, not much would be gained by showing the advert on the BBC, given that it will already receive extensive coverage on other television channels. On the other hand, the BBC would have much to lose if the BBC was felt to be becoming impartial in its reporting. As it stands, the BBC has been exceptionally effective at reporting from the conflict zone, given the logistical difficulties placed in its way by Israel, and it is this reporting - as much as the actual facts on the ground - that has massaged public sympathies for the greater humanitarian good.

Finally, Members of Parliament such as Nick Clegg have argued that "It's an insult to the viewing public to suggest they can't distinguish between the humanitarian needs of thousands of children and families in Gaza and the political sensitivities of the Middle East." Taking a look at the BBC message boards during the original conflict, though, and it's quite clear that a large number of viewers were already attacking the BBC for being too pro-Palestinian - and it is not at all clear that these viewers would have been able to distinguish between the universal humanitarian objective served by airing the appeal, and the political inference that the BBC was nudging its way ever more to the liberal extreme by doing so. What level of discrimination and nuance is there in a comment like this one:

No amount of spin by BBC and its allies will make terrorism anything other than pure and simple murder of innocents. Calling them "freedom fighters" or anything
else is simply disgusting. Shame on you, BBC.

I could not find where on the BBC website the word "freedom fighters" was used directly to describe Hamas, but clearly the "viewing public" patronised by Clegg are better readers than I am. How about this other commentator? Do you think he or she would distinguish between the BBC's humanitarian sensitivity and its political bias:

I find it difficult to understand why the BBC and other news channels broadcast this non-stop, but don't even pay lip service to the number of rockets which have been persistently fired at Israel.

Quite clearly the BBC stated the number of rockets being fired, and the number of Israeli casualties. But if even absolute details like this can be ignored by such a vehement public, do we really think that the more subtle issue of the appeal will be responded to thoughtfully? On the basis of this commentator, who is unable to avoid stereotyping in broad brush strokes, we ought not to be hopeful:

The European left wing can't stand Jews defending themselves.They love the pacifist Jews who quietly walked into the showers - but can't stand it when Jews fight back.I just hope Israeli politicians realise that the protests from Europe are mainly by the large Muslim population and awful left wing groups.People of sound mind are standing with you Israel. We are aware of the biased media in Europe. We are aware of the BBC's pro-Palestinian bias.

I culled these comments in just a five minute survey of the boards. In that time, I did not find one comment that praised the BBC for its balanced coverage. So the BBC is right to stick to its principles and not show the DEC appeal. If it shows it, this will only bolster the case for those who condemn its alleged pro-Palestinian bias, but conversely no one will celebrate the showing of the appeal as evidence of the BBC's objectivity. The BBC has too much to lose, and not much to be gained.

On Gaza

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:58:00 +0000

I listened to the radio this morning, and heard a BBC correspondent interviewing a Gazan mother who lost nine of her family, four of them her children, in an Israeli air strike. It appears that the munition used was white phosphorous, the use of which is legal on the open battlefield as a smokescreen, but which is not permitted for use as an assault weapon in areas where civilians are likely to be.

The woman, remarkably calm, recounts how each of her children died. I saw him decapitated, she explains of her eldest. Her second died of smoke inhalation. Her youngest, she says, "melted in my arms."

What brutal poetry this phrase conceals. Echoes of Hamlet thinking of death here - "Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve into a due." But, as Adorno said, after the Holocaust poetry becomes impossible. And to perceive any poetry in this phrase seems equally inappropriate. For one is left to imagine - or to try to imagine - what it must be like to be a mother looking at your child in your arms as they simply melt away, vanish, cease to exist, life slipping out as easily as water down a drain.

Of course, these metaphors too are not appropriate. For they do not capture the other sensations that must have surrounded this moment that the woman's phrase eloquently conceals: the smell of charred flesh, the smashing of glass and the crumbling of rubble, white smoke, a chemical agent sticking to the skin and burning white hot and, around, little bits of felt silently fluttering down from the sky, each one a packet containing more lethal fire.

It is hard to know what to say about the Israeli action that has not already been expressed by the media, at least in European newspapers and television (the recent London Review of Books carries elequoent disavowals of the Israeli action, by scores of academics). Whilst news organisations have striven to be impartial, beyond a certain point objectivity has to tip into compassion and anger on the Palestinian and Israeli sides of the border. When 1200 Palestinians (about a third of them children) die in response to a dozen Israeli deaths, the dynamics of the war as one of retaliation - as Israel sees it - simply does not work. Israel, the world's fourth largest military power, has lost the moral conflict.

The use of white phosphorous, the shells of which bear the stamps of the American factories in which they were produced, has become iconic of this new mood. Given that the Gaza strip is one of the most densely populated regions on Earth, it is pretty clear that it should not have been used. Now that Israel has admitted use of the munition, there will, of course, be an investigation by the army, who will no doubt find some middle-ranking officer to use as a scapegoat, whilst keeping Olmert and his generals free from blame for planning to use such a weapon. There will, of course, be more impartial investigations by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and the United Nations, the findings of which will be breezily dismissed, whilst the shells still make their way from Lockheed and Boeing factories in the States to land in the homes of civilian women melting children (future terrorists!) out of existence.

Cynicism aside, one is left with just one hope. This is that another, balance has tipped, one which has its long end half a century ago, and which has ensured that no matter how Israel levered its military might, the balance of international opinion would never tip into condemnation. Previous Israeli actions, from the 1967 war to the recent Lebanon conflict have, been conducted under the cloud of the Holocaust. For every Hamas rocket attack on Israel, the rest of the world could not attack Israeli policies because it was still assailed by the guilt of World War Two. Now, however, opinion seems, perhaps, to have shifted. The repressed has returned for the last time, so perhaps now for the first time, it is possible to be anti-Israeli without this having the faint whiff of anti-Semitism. We must now be willing to stand defiant and say of Israel that, whilst terrorism is something to which they have the right to respond, we have the right to say: "enough."

Reading in the Bath

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 07:53:00 +0000

I have just caught the end of a piece on the radio about the popularity of the new e-book readers over Christmas. One of the commentators suggested that the key problem with them is that you cannot read with them in the bath. This reiterates a complaint I first heard from Margaret Atwood, and have heard a couple of other times since. So it seems like the Luddites are singing to a common tune in their wash rooms: if you cannot scrub your back in the bathtub whilst reading War and Peace, one of life's little pleasures has been lost.

But, I ask you, have you ever taken a book to the bath with you? The thought of all those bubbles mixing with the pages of a paperback to give a soap-stained Oliver Twist, or of adding to Anna Karina's miseries by sopping her in dirty water, puts me off. Get too absorbed by Gissing, and you too might join grubby street by forgetting to scrub your armpits. And who has baths in these environmentally conscious and time-pressed days anyway? Perhaps the tune should change: e-book readers will never catch on unless you can take them paragliding over the dusty Sahara without them breaking if you drop them in the sand.

Christmas Sets

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 09:03:00 +0000

Walk into any department store at this time of year - and here in the United Kingdom I am thinking of the likes of Boots, Marks and Spencer, and Debenhams - and you will see something that has become as ubiquitous at Christmas as tinsel and fairy lights. There, stacked on feature tables near the high street windows, you will encounter the "sets." Sets for alcoholics of all kinds, from wine to whisky drinkers; sets for fans of football, golf, tennis or any other sport; make-up sets for younger girls, and sets of royal jelly bath soaps for the older lady. There are shaving sets for men, photography sets, tea lovers' sets, coffee lovers' sets, sets for wannabe magicians and sets for soap opera gurus.

Though coming in all these different species, each set typically shares a common shape. A body of excessive (and environmentally unaware) plastic packaging, tied neatly with some ribbon, with bold and colourful type announcing its inner nature. The word "Lover" features often here, as in "Tea Lovers' Set." Cosmetics are often highlighted as "Experiences," as in "Relaxation Experience" or "Bath Time Experience." Each set will contain around four different items relating to its category. In the tea set, you will find a mug, some tea-bags, and a tea strainer; the wine drinker finds a glass, bottle stopper, and small bottle of cheap wine; the sports afficianado will find a keyring, DVD ("Wonder Goals!" "F1's Greatest Races!") and short book about his topic.

What accounts for the popularity of these sets? Clearly it is not the quality of their contents, for the individual components are invariably inferior to those that could be bought separately, and often for the same overall price. For the ten to fifteen pounds that these sets typically cost, you could easily buy a nice bottle stopper, a good (and full-sized) bottle of wine and cheap wine glass. Likewise, why spend £10 on a mug (for everyone has enough mugs) when the same amount would buy a great deal of unusual tea or coffee?

On the other hand, the psychological value of buying a "set" makes them more than the material sum of its parts. For what could be a better gift than something that proclaims how well you know the recipient? Look, I know you like tea, says the "Tea Lovers' Set." See how I accept your passion for football, says the wife to the husband, his fanaticism now legitimated by the set. For the recipient, there is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy in opening one of these. For I may drink a lot of tea to get me through the stresses of the day, but what could be better than to be confirmed not as a mere addict, but as a "lover," afficianado, expert. Breaking that ribbon and using the items of the set, I am engaging in an experience, whereas normally I am simply pouring myself a cuppa into any old chipped mug using the tea which happened to be on offer in the supermarket. I have a different relationship to the object because it now stands as a sign of someone's thoughtful categorisation of me, rather than simply marking one of my addictions.

Postgraduate Diary: Ends

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:43:00 +0000

And so it began, and so it has been, and so it ends. Not with a bang, but with the mechanical clunking of a printer, sending out three hundred pages of prose, the only matter that - at this point in time - matters in my life. For it has been my life, for the last three years. It has been the first thing I thought about when I woke. Every item of reading, every shred of prose, every lecture, every television programme and every film has, potentially, had something to say about my research. No matter how hard I tried, I could not switch off from an incessant dialogue.

Sometimes I felt like a medieval scribe, the passive medium of the voice of some divine wisom. There was a world out there, to be understood, and a page on which to mark that understanding, and me, caught in the middle, mediating a ceaseless flow of information from the world into words on the page. And the suspicion I have had - and the thing I still fear - is that even now, I do not quite understand what I have done. My agency has not been all there. Those words and ideas somehow always floated away from me, just beyond the clutch of my comprehension and the grasp of my articulation. Do I really know the postmodern condition I have described? Have I really appreciated all those films and fictions I have looked at in my research? Did I really write that paragraph? Can this thread of detection really be concluded? It will be, of course, concluded of sorts, by those academic Poirots I will confront, not in some cosy lounge but in an anonymous seminar room, where I will undergo my viva.

For now, though, as my words are burnt onto pages through the precise heat of lasers and a fine cloud of toner, I wonder about the things I have done (or did not), arguments I have written (or have not), the books I have read (and those I did not). And I think about what might have been, three years ago, when I started off researching medical narratives, and I wonder how it is that it has ended - right here, right now - with a thesis on the demonic metaphors of postmodern cyberfiction. If only I could recreate the strange permutations, the happenstances of books I just found, the ideas that happened to be floating in academia at the time, and the quirky firing of a few neurons in my own grey matter, that somehow led me here. Does all knowledge have to be produced this way, beyond the control and predictive abilities of those who actually make it?

Even as I end, I think of new beginnings, forking trajectories that point out of my thesis like a web of possibilities. These alternative research directions, I know, I will pursue differently. I now how a body of knowledge in my head, whereas before it was waiting, concealed behind dusty covers, on the library shelves. I feel I could write from the off on any number of new topics, and do it with more acumen, more insight and - most importantly of all - I would actually be conscious of what I was doing, rather than simply allowing the thesis to lead me down numerous dead end alleys, as well as exciting, interesting paths. I look at those two inches of paper, lying like a dead weight beside me on the desk as I type this, and I think - I have done something. Three years ago, this thing, this possessive thing, was not in the world. These ideas, did not exist or, if they did, they were hazy, drifting in the air of academia between different people, but now honed and compressed by me into a single, coherent argument. In spite of my feeling that I was never quite in control of my own work, my ego has to come into play now. It is my thesis I am about to trot across and land on someone's desk. I made this. I am become...a writer.