How education works

My colleague @MsEmentor found this on @SeanFail's Twitter page - apparently it's English Lit GCSE day, and the peons are rebelling against close reading:

Obviously there are occasions on which even I find myself exclaiming 'FFS' or worse, when faced with a particularly adventurous interpretation, but on the whole, this amusing graphic is utterly wrong. It's like this:

It doesn't matter what the author thinks. 

He or she may be dead, and is certainly not present at your reading. You have a complicated and rich cultural context which isn't the same as the author's, and so you'll interpret things differently. Good authors know this, and are fine with it. Bad ones work extra hard to make sure you see things his or her way. It doesn't work, because bullied readers rebel or give up. 

A decent teacher wouldn't talk about what the author meant - they'd talk about the possible interpretations of the words on the page. 

I hope I've successfully ruined the joke now. Further reading: 'The Death of the Author' (Roland Barthes) and Susan Suleiman's Authoritarian Fictions. 

Collateral damage

I'm slowly unpacking. Very little is damaged, but I have lost some of my favourite CDs - several Nick Drake and all but one of my Damon and Naomi albums, which is very strange. If you don't know them, they make a darker version of dreampop. They used to be in Galaxie 500: the other bloke, Dean Wareham, founded Luna subsequently. Highly recommended for the wee hours. Gotta love bands with songs like 'The New Historicism', which is funny because I'm currently reading that movement's founding text, Greenblatt's Learning to Curse.

Talking of books…

After the most expensive week of my life, I planned to turn to thriftiness for a couple of months, until my bank account has been replenished.

Planned to. Failed to. I went to the bookshop for a standalone copy of Henry V (which they didn't have), and ended up buying - at full price - books on literature and history, Derrida, Lacan, literary theory and a second complete Shakespeare. Then, not looking like a man who had all he could read, I went online and bought the latest three Library of Wales books, Jack Jones's Black Parade, Alun Richards' polemical Dai Country and yet another edition in my collection of Glyn Jones's stunning, complex, ambiguous The Valley, The City, The Village.

This really must stop.

Genius

I'm rapidly becoming addicted to xkcd.com. This one is brilliant. (Click on it for larger version).

On Deconstruction… and Anne of Green Gables

This week, I'm reading two books, Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction and L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. 

Now, one might think that an interest in both texts is mutually exclusive, you snobs. But hold: Anne and Jonathan have a lot in common. They both reject the restriction and even the possibility of fixed meanings, both value the complexity and richness of words, and both are poor lost orphans. 

Anne wandered from family to family before ending up in the Hopeton orphanage, misunderstood and silenced, before mistakenly being sent to the Cuthberts' in Avonlea, where her gently anti-Protestant Romanticism and devotion to Imagination both shocks and thrills the buttoned-up community. Poor Jonathan had a glittering career at Cambridge, then Oxford, until the disapproving old conservatives decided that he was a just little too French for their New Critical tastes, with his interests in deconstruction and structuralism/post-structuralism, so they didn't give him a full professorship. 

So he wandered the cold world outside the dreaming spires, refusing to simplify his message for the slower minds of academe but earning their respect. In this, he's of one mind with Anne, who tells Matthew '…people laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven't you?' (p. 15).