Some notes about whether English can reveal itself to its future people

In literature, as in life, affectation, passionately adopted and loyally persevered in, is one of
the chief forms of self-discipline by which mankind has raised itself by its own bootstraps.
(Auden, ‘Writing’)

Sansom, Ian. September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem (p. 29). HarperCollins Publishers.
Kindle Edition.

An interest was only an interest if it corresponded to a set of magazines I could purchase. Particular
magazines capture very well certain phases of my teens and early twenties: Fishing World, Byte,
Compute, Fishing News, Muscle and Fitness, Australasian Fighting Arts and Guitar World. These to
me were primarily invitations to imagine different versions of myself and my future, situated
somewhere between Emma Bovary’s collection of pulp romances, self-help literature, technical
instruction manuals and the chivalric tales that galvanised Don Quixote. In my early teens I was a
computer nerd. I was one of the first students in my school to get a Commodore 64, 5¼” floppy disk
drive, cassette drive, dot matrix printer and RGB monitor. Later on, it was bodybuilding and martial
arts. All of these interests were extraordinarily well catered for by magazines. One of the hardest
things about going to university, and falling into a kind of romantic relation to the intellectual life,
was that there didn’t seem to be any good magazines to go along with it.

Fleming, Chris. On Drugs . Giramondo Publishing. Kindle Edition.

But perhaps most significant is the way in which privileged parents imprint in early childhood a
propensity for what Bourdieu called ‘symbolic mastery’. This includes a certain mode of using
language, including an elaborate vocabulary and ‘correct’ grammar, a general familiarity with
abstraction and theoretical ideas, and also a particular detached, knowing aesthetic orientation to
culture and taste.

Friedman, Privilege (2019), 14

‘As regards originality, it [On Liberty] has of course no other than that which every thoughtful mind gives to its
own mode of conceiving and expressing truths which are common property’ J S Mill quoted in Humboldt,
Limits of the State, viii.

Generated the following sometime in 2018

English Pedagogy and the democratic Socratic

- Away, if possible, from the tutor as ring-master, using questions as a whip, to shape
the [direction] of the conversation (and where is the thematic, evidential or logical
form of that discourse, in whose head?)

- Everyone is producing questions, so that you can use what you do not know, rather
than everyone being under pressure to produce answers (e.g. start with private
exchanges about what your reading experience, and questions that arise from it)

English is reading widely AND reading slowly, and it is about formulating questions [e.g.
from first year to dissertation].

These questions – generated by readers – will range from ‘what happens next?’ to ‘how do
people us literature to make sense of their lives?’, really big questions which you could spend
a lifetime being interested in. [Geology has the same pedagogy – ‘what do you think it is?’,
how do you think it got here?’]

Thinking about the questions we ask, and about the questions which characterize our
discipline, is a metacognitive activity which contributes to entry into a community of
practice.

Movements between observation [highlighting], assertion [commenting] and posing

questions – spontaneous (each proclivity is productive under certain conditions – e.g. looking
at text, having read text and confident enough to speak, reflective)

Conditions for generating questions

Environment – sub-group? (is the circle of English too exposing? Do students need an
intermediary environment in which to build working relationships TASK ANXIETY,
TEACHER SURVEILLANCE)

Prompts – think about your experience of reading X. (Difference Engine = Babbage). What
questions do you have? [these take the form of uncertainties, I don’t understand, I’m not sure
why? – who would you ask to help address your uncertainty?]

[asking someone a question, posing a question to yourself, testing someone else with a
question]

________
I am convinced that literature is not a subject that should ever be taken entirely seriously. It
is, at the end of the day, a form of conversation that takes place between two monkeys, not an
attempt to measure gravitational waves.

Paterson, Don. The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre (Kindle Locations 123-124). Faber & Faber.
Kindle Edition.

The group divides itself into the “knows” and the “know-nots,” much as they might divide
themselves into “haves” and “have-nots” with regard to their possessions. However, a child
that knows will share that knowledge in return for friendship and reciprocity of information,
unlike with the ownership of physical things, where they can use force to get what they do
not have. When you “take” information, the donor doesn’t “lose” it!

Mitra, Sugata. Beyond the Hole in the Wall: Discover the Power of Self-Organized Learning
(Kindle Single) (TED Books) (Kindle Locations 327-330). TED Books. Kindle Edition.
 Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 11

OED Source n.
4. e. A work, etc., supplying information or evidence (esp. of an original or
primary character) as to some fact, event, or series of these. Also, a person
supplying information, an informant, a spokesman.
1788 W. ROBERTSON Hist. Amer. Pref. The sources from which I have derived such intelligence.

1828 R. BURNS Dissert. in Wodrow's Hist. Suff. I. p. ix The testimony of historians.., and other
published sources of evidence.

Resource n.

3. In plural.
a. Stocks or reserves of money, materials, people, or some other asset, which can be
drawn on when necessary.In modern use frequently the second element in compounds. human, learning resources:
see the first element.

2000 Today's Parent Oct. 26/1 I found a site..with excellent activities and resources, including a grade-two
lesson on birdsong with images and clickable recordings.

E M W Tillyard, 1926, on new Tripos paper ‘Critical Comment’ “making them use their own
resources entirely’

The above is a way of distinguishing primary/secondary ‘sources’ in relation to the tacit

distinction between the knowledge English people are expected to produce in the form of
their own opinions, and the knowledge they are expected to derive from the body of
scholarship.

The discipline of 'English', as Ian Hunter demonstrates in his study of

the emergence of English Studies, Culture and Government, can be shown to
arise from structural transformations of the teaching relation which began
in the mid-nineteenth century.5 The shift from pedagogic models which
demanded the passive absorption or repetition of information, towards
voluntaristic contexts, in which the student is required to take an active role
in producing the educational content of the lesson, is the first consideration
here. Subjective response, in the philosophies and practices of both I. A.
Richards and F. R. Leavis, will be a pivotal element in the teaching of
literature, although the rationale will differ in each instance. For Richards,
we could say that gaining access to the student's personal response bears
the same relation to mental health that obtaining a blood sample has to its
physical equivalent. The sample can then be analysed for evidence of
interpretative pathology.6 For Leavis, on the other hand, personal response
is elevated to the status of an absolute value; there is no higher arbiter on
which literary criticism can ground its judgements. But in the very act of
raising subjectivity to this level the 'subjective' is itself turned inside-out,
becoming the tautologous objectivity of a subject which asserts its own
authority in a rhetoric of aggressive self-reference

To talk of 'misdirection' here is to recognise that the question 'Well, what

do you .. .' necessarily conceals its own motivation. Teachers do not explain
to students that they wish them to offer opinions because the process of
correction is predicated on the negative analysis of response. In this they do
no more than to act in the pragmatic traditions of the dental profession,
where the introduction of the drill is ritually preceded by the assurance,
'this won't hurt a bit'. In both cases, duplicity may be necessary as the most
effective way of getting the subject to open its mouth

Alan Brown, ‘On the Subject of Practical Criticism’ Cambridge Quarterly 28.4 (1999), 296

Tony Davics.'Common Sense and Critical Practice', in Peter Widdowson (ed.),

Re-Reading English (London 1982) p. 34 (Quoted in Brown CQ 28.4)

a large percentage of male academics would rather that no one understood their conference
papers than that these be subject to criticism.

Leader, Darian. Why do women write more letters than they post? . Faber & Faber. Kindle
Edition.
‘their was always something desultory about their hours passing, not because they didn’t al
work reasonably hard, but because in the end all their work was in the service of reading,
which was absorbed and private.’
Tessa Hadley, The London Train 203

‘he [the school child] must be trained to discriminate and resist’ Culture and Environment , 5

Griswold and others on sociology of reading (who reads, what?):

‘Poetry puts us into contact, to a degree not possible in other forms of literature, with a
sensitive personality exploring, and trying to put in order, its own experience.’ (9)

For ‘people with no special literary training, but with an interest in the quality of our lives
today, and a readiness to examine whether the reading of poetry has an important relation to
that interest.’

‘in the end we discover our literature for ourselves’

Richard Hoggart, Auden: An Introductory Essay (1951), 10.

Richard Hoggart, A Sort of Clowning: Life and Times 1940-1959 (1990), 136

….cope adequately with an urbanized culture which is above all confusing and deceptive. On
the one hand it demands quite a high level of literacy and numeracy for survival, on the other
hand it flatters people into thinking about their low level of command is all that is needed to
live the good life.

In spite of all the new technological aids to communication, the process of learning is still
inherently slow…

94 The Tutorial Class, two hours per week, 24 each winter for three years – continuous study,
steady background reading, the writing of regular essays

I.A.Richards quoted in FRL Mass Culture ‘The critic…is as much concerned with the health
of the mind as any doctor with the health of the body.’
 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (1965), 20

Reading for a degree

8. a. trans. In early use: to study (a subject), esp. at a university or similar institution.

Now (chiefly Brit.): to study (an academic subject) for a university degree; to study for (a
degree). Cf. sense 6d.
c1405 (▸c1395) CHAUCER Franklin's Tale (Hengwrt) (2003) l. 412 Yonge clerkes that been lykerous
To reden [v.rr. rendyn; lerne] Artz that been curious Seken in euery halke and euery herne Particuler
sciences for to lerne.
c1450 (▸?a1400) Wars Alexander (Ashm.) 4360 (MED) Ne rede we [ Hist. de preliis non discimus] neuire na
retorik ne rial to speke.
1531 J. BELLENDEN tr. H. Boece Chron. Scotl. (1938) I. VII. iii. 271 He had nocht xx ȝeris of aige quhen
he red rethorik in Cartage.
1602 L. LLOYD Stratagems of Ierusalem II. vii. 178 Arete,..after her fathers death..read philosophie in Athens.
a1679 R. WILD Benefice (1689) IV. 42 We read Philosophy, Logick, Divinity.—We learn the Tongues—Hebrew,
Greek, and Latin, to fit us for the Church.
1706 J. VANBRUGH Mistake IV. i. 39 I have been Servitor in a Colledge at Salamancho, and read Philosophy with
the Doctors.
1782 E. HASTED Hist. Kent II. 716/2 Stephen de Faversham, in 1324, was a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury,
and the first of the sort who read divinity in that monastery.
1884 G. ALLEN Strange Stories 175 Since I have begun reading philosophy for my Greats.
1900 C. C. MUNN Uncle Terry 55 I tutored some, read law, and was admitted to the bar.
1966 Rep. Comm. Inq. (Univ. of Oxf.) II. 49 Graduates reading first degrees.
1977 Professional Careers Bull. Autumn 1/1 Partially it has been due to an ever increasing demand from sixth
formers to read law.
2003 Church Times 14 Feb. 27/2 He..won a state scholarship to read history at Lincoln College, Oxford.
What’s the use of literary criticism?

In the words of Martin Amis, the study of literature has always possessed a ‘historical
vulnerability’, in that ‘it has never seemed difficult enough [. . .] Interacting with literature is
easy. Anyone can join in.’ (3)

Professional anxieties thus provoke developments which exclude would-be English People –
making English difficult enough is, as Feslki attests below, part of the mood of the seminar.

Modern commentators on the discipline of English Literature in schools are discussing

exactly the same issues as their nineteenth-century counterparts: whether the study of
literature is ‘academic’ enough to compete with disciplines such as history and the sciences;
how this study can be made more objective and ‘examinable’; and whether attempts to make
it more objective risk jeopardising the pleasure to be gained from reading.

Carol Atherton, Defining Literary Criticism: Scholarship, Authority and the Possession of
Literary Knowledge, 1880-2002 (2006)

The aim of pedagogic criticism is to bring into focus the transactions between the study and
interpretation of texts and the social forms and rituals of pedagogy. It is a way of articulating
a process through which an educational subject (in more than one sense) is talked into being.
In this light, literary studies is a form of cultural production, a collaborative process of
making, carried out through a specialised form of dialogue.

Ben Knights, Pedagogic Criticism (2017), 1

the idea of mood gives us a helpful handle for the low-key tone of academic argument. Mood,
as discussed by Heidegger and others, refers to an overall atmosphere or climate that causes
the world to come into view in a certain way. Moods are often ambient, diffuse, and hazy,
part of the background rather than the foreground of thought. In contrast to the suddenness
and intensity of the passions, they are characterized by a degree of stability: a mood can be
pervasive, lingering, slow to change. It “sets the tone” for our engagement with the world,
causing it to appear before us in a given light. Mood, in this sense, is a prerequisite for any
form of interaction or engagement

Critique inhabits us, and we become habituated to critique. (21)

The prevailing mood of a discipline accents and inflects our endeavors: the questions we ask, the texts we
puzzle over, the styles of argument we are drawn to. Education is not just about acquiring knowledge and
skills but about being initiated into a certain sensibility. (23)

Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (2015), 20

‘writing can only ever be as good as its readers make it’

Phillips, Adam. In Writing (p. xii). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.