ESC Newsletter - Issue 9 by English Subject Centre

English Subject Centre

Newsletter Issue 9 November 2005

Metaphor Mongering Daniel Cordle

Integrating Creativity into the Curriculum Peter Howarth

Creativity: A One-Day Symposium Sean Matthews

‘Writing in the Dark’

Jonathan Worley & Matthew Martin

Reader, I Triumphed Simon Dentith

Transliteracy – Reading in the Digital Age Sue Thomas

This newsletter is published by the English Subject Centre, part of the Subject Network of the Higher Education Academy (previously the Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN)). The Subject Centre provides many different kinds of help to English lecturers – more details are available in this newsletter and on our website (http://www.english. (http://www.english. heacademy.ac.uk/). heacademy.ac.uk/ ). At the heart of all our work is the view that the HE teaching of English is best supported from within the discipline itself. As well as updates on the Centre’s activities and on important developments (both within the discipline and across HE), you will find articles here on a wide range of English-related topics. If you would like to submit an article (of between 300 and 3,000 words), propose a book or software review (perhaps a textbook review by one of your students) or respond in a letter to someone else’s article, please contact the editor, Jonathan Gibson (jonathan.gibson@rhul.ac.uk jonathan.gibson@rhul.ac.uk). ). The next issue of the newsletter will appear in Spring 2005. In the meantime, you can keep in touch with our activities by subscribing to our email list at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/english–heacademy.html http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/english–heacademy.html.. The newsletter is distributed to English departments throughout the UK and is available online at http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/ publications/index.php along with previous issues. If you would like extra copies, please email us at esc@rhul.ac.uk.

Contents Director’s foreword – Ben Knights

Events Calendar

Articles Daniel Cordle – Metaphor Mongering: Science, Writing and Science Writing

Peter Howarth – Integrating Creativity into the Curriculum

Sean Matthews – Creativity: A One–Day Symposium

Jonathan Worley and Matthew Martin – ‘Writing in the Dark’: Bringing Students’ Writing into the Light Through Peer Tutoring

Simon Dentith – Reader, I Triumphed: Complicating the Appeal of Jane Eyre

Sue Thomas – Transliteracy: Reading in the Digital Age

Susan Bassnett – Retrospective on DUET

Book Review Heather Beck – Pedagogical Research in English Studies: A Case Study in Creative Writing

News & Reports Designing a Subject Centre Event

Supporting New Lecturers

Networking Day for Heads of Department

Teaching on the Language – Literature Border

English at School and University: The Case of Chaucer

Pedagogic Research in English

UCAS Figures for English, Media Studies and History

IT Works!

Director’s Foreword Ben Knights, Director, English Subject Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London

here are many ways of assessing the health of a subject, even more so where that subject is a loose federation of related disciplines. The TQI and Student Satisfaction Survey wear fairly prominent health warnings for anyone uneasy about the steady marketisation of Higher Education. Yet, while acknowledging that ‘student satisfaction’ needs to be triangulated with other kinds of evidence, the English community can afford some satisfaction over the results. With an average score of 4.18, English–based subjects come high on the discipline tables – joint fifth with Biological Sciences. Eleven English courses – more than any other subject – feature in the Guardian’s composite list of 50 top scoring courses (1). While clearly there is a near–universal need to tackle the issues of assessment and feedback, this is a result that goes some way to support the contention that ‘English’ is a subject where the vigour of scholarship and the practice of teaching are mutually reinforcing. It is unreservedly good news for the subject community. The English Subject Centre is delighted, and (given the quirks of surveys) relieved. The survey results achieve public recognition for the fertility of the human and cultural materials we have to work with. In this context we can afford the return to the question aired in earlier Newsletters: what kind of knowledge do Subject Centres represent and seek to foster? Several considerations feed into a provisional answer. These include the current Funding Council / Universities UK / Higher Education Academy consultation on Accreditation and Professional Standards; a lively debate among the Subject Centres over the nature of pedagogic research and its (in)visibility in the RAE; and observations drawn from the diverse materials crossing the Subject Centre’s radar. Perverse as it may seem to remark just now, we are still struck by the difficulty of writing or talking about teaching. With some notable exceptions, English people, challenged to write about teaching, talk about curriculum choices (which authors or texts) or about resources (which editions, anthologies, readers).

Does this – as an older linguistic fundamentalism might suggest – imply a difficulty in thinking about teaching? Evidently there is much good, even inventive teaching around, but in what forms, through what discourses and genres do we make our tacit teaching knowledge available to others or even to ourselves for scrutiny? This is a question which The Cambridge Quarterly addresses in its 40th anniversary issue (2). There are many potent forces which push us back towards default assumptions (the primacy of the essay, the self–evident process of the seminar, the value of lectures, the uselessness of generic staff training) – default assumptions held in place by forces as various as the RAE and the construction of students as consumers. To return then to the question. The knowledge that the English Subject Centre seeks to promote is working knowledge about our group of subjects as read through a pedagogic lens. There are many reasons for doing this, not least of them the growing gap between students’ experience of English in school and at A–level and their experience of university. (Another reason might be sought in the probable results of failing to reconcile and build on the differing strengths of language, literature and creative writing.) Even in sharing the community’s unease over the idea of dissemination (‘you can’t bottle it’ as one colleague remarked), we can seek to bring about a conversation about teaching and learning. A community that is so good at analysing and using language and cultural forms, a community that prides itself on linguistic and conceptual inventiveness, need not be inhibited about developing a vocabulary and a syntax in which to address teaching. Or in which to evaluate our own subject knowledge in relation to pedagogy or to the learning styles and prior cultural knowledge of our students. If, as we like to think, we are good at reading, why not also read the fine grain of the seminar encounter? And, having read it, share our interpretations? Let us seek to articulate together how in Felicity Rosslyn’s words, we have ‘made English real

. Guardian Survey at http://education.guardian.co.uk/students/ta-

. Cambridge Quarterly, Fortieth Anniversary Special Issue: English Now, 34.3 (2005).

‘Building a distinctive knowledge about teaching does not require teachers of English to abandon our own idioms’

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Direcctor’s Foreword

as a discipline’ in the fragile space of the seminar (3). Developing a pedagogic language in which to talk to each other would mean at the same time developing our ability to take part in and mediate those cross-cultural encounters with students in the hybrid environment of the classroom. Building a distinctive knowledge about teaching does not require teachers of English to undergo Mowbray’s sentence of banishment, to abandon our own idioms for a foreign tongue. Humanities disciplines, their material all the time overlapping with the stuff of everyday life and language, are evidently subject to what Gerald Graff has referred to as ‘the problem problem’ (4): the apparently counter–intuitive nature of what we do. In finding a sharable language for ‘the problem problem’, we might even discover fresh pedagogic valencies to familiar organising concepts: concepts such as gender, the other, desire, dystopia, the gothic, the postcolonial. Or from other registers, imagination, embarrassment, shame, hospitality.

Twenty–five years ago this September, John Broadbent and a group of colleagues held at the University of East Anglia the first of many Development of University English Teaching workshops (see Susan Bassnett’s article in this issue, p. 3 ).Their object was to unlock collaborative creativity in teaching. Preparing for one of the next workshops John Broadbent remarked on ‘the difficulty of talking about serious matters in professional terms. Even though we work in interpretative communities, we may find ourselves being “swamped by the machine” … the professional group turning into a deadly threat, excess of structure producing apathy or anarchy’. Many histories have flooded and ebbed since then. But the task DUET set itself now seems if anything more rather than less necessary.

3. Felicity Rosslyn, ‘Literature for the Masses: The English Literature Degree in 2004’, Cambridge Quarterly 33 (2004), 1 - 10. 4. ‘The Problem Problem and Other Oddties of Academic Discourse’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 1.1 (2002), 27 – 42.

Websites Wanted The Subject Centre is collaborating with the Humbul Humanities Hub to update the popular free guide Internet Resources for English. The new guide will be published in the RDN’s ‘Best of the Web’ series that recommends websites in different disciplines. We are keen to include websites that members of the English studies community recommend, so if there is anything that you think is a particularly good or useful, or just offers an interesting example of how the web can be exploited for English, please send the URL to jane.gawthrope@ rhul.ac.uk .

Events Calendar 2005–2006 Brief details of each of the English Subject Centre’s forthcoming events are given below. If you would like to attend any of these events (with the exception of ‘Teaching the Reading of Texts’), please register on our website at http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/events or email esc@rhul.ac.uk. All events are free of charge.

Teaching Victorian Poetry

The Training of Postgraduates in English Studies

25 November 2005: Woburn House, 20 Tavistock

27 January 2006: University of Bristol

Square, London

A workshop hosted jointly by the University of Bristol English Department and the English Subject Centre. The object of this one–day event is to explore pedagogic issues arising from the training of postgraduate students within and beyond MA research training modules. This event will take as its starting place the idea that the training of postgraduate students is a matter of pedagogy, that postgraduate curriculum, assessment and teaching methods are as worthy of developmental and critical attention as are those experienced by undergraduates, and that ‘transition’ and ‘retention’ are equally pressing concerns. Since research training is also the gateway to the profession, the experience of postgraduate students has an intimate bearing on the future shape of the subject.

This event will take stock of some of the ways in which university teachers now teach Victorian poetry, with subjects ranging from the dramatic monologues of Browning and Tennyson to the fin de siècle works of Oscar Wilde, Amy Levy and Michael Field.

New Lecturers’ Workshop 2–3 December 2005: University of Birmingham

A two day residential event intended for recently appointed HE Lecturers and tutors of English. The conference will be highly participative in nature and will offer ample opportunity for the formal and informal exchange of views and models of practice. A report on last year’s new lecturers’ workshop appears on p. 40 of this newsletter. Fee £45.

Teaching the Reading of Texts: Interdisciplinary Perspectives 7 December 2005: University of Glasgow

Texts, short and long, in their original language and in translation, play a central part in our academic practice – and in our teaching practice. How can students best become proficient in the interpretation and understanding of these demanding materials? Three Subject Centres, those for English, for History, Classics and Archaeology, and for Philosophical and Religious Studies, are organizing a meeting to discuss these issues.You do not need to register on the English Subject Centre website to attend this event. Instead, you are asked to confirm your attendance with Marion Cochrane (m.cochrane@arts.gla. ac.uk) by Friday December 2nd.

Teaching Romanticism 17–18 March: Central London This event will explore the ways in which Romanticism is taught in Higher Education Institutions in the UK. It will assess how far changes in research methodologies have filtered down to the teaching of Romanticism in Universities. Key questions will be addressed both in papers given at the event and through an analysis of the results of an electronic questionnaire sent to convenors of Romanticism modules throughout the country. Details about the questionnaire are on p.9 of this newsletter. An analysis of its results will be sent to event participants at the beginning of March.

Teaching Medieval Romance 13 May 2006: University of Wales, Bangor Courses on English medieval romance are often very popular with students and the genre itself enjoys a high profile – at least, in its chivalric, Arthurian manifestations – outside academia. How best, then, can teachers of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on romance build on these advantages? This day conference will provide an opportunity to exchange ideas and develop new teaching strategies.

Articles Metaphor Mongering: Science, Writing and Science Writing In the latest of an occasional series of articles on the links between English and other disciplines, Daniel Cordle, Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts, Communication and Culture at Nottingham Trent University, revisits an old battleground. Some of this material was presented in February 2003 as a paper, ‘Cunning Metaphors: Science In and Science as Culture’, at the ‘Literature/Science: Between the Disciplines’ conference at Warwick University. ‘Metaphor: mongering’ Index entry in Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (1998). In 1994, in a vituperative attack, Paul Gross and Norman Levitt complained that humanities scholars were indulging in ‘metaphor mongering’ in their approach to the Sciences (1). It was, perhaps, the first significant shot in what later, with a touch of grandiloquence, became known as the ‘Science Wars.’ Although the controversy swiftly polarised, particularly after the physicist Alan Sokal placed a hoax article with the journal Social Text (claiming, on publication, that the editors’ failure to spot that it was a tissue of meaningless and self–contradictory statements revealed shoddy standards of scholarship in the humanities), the terms of the debate (or of the abuse) are instructive. Gross and Levitt’s complaint is that a perception of knowledge as, essentially, textual was being transferred onto disciplines where it did not apply. For all that their attack on the humanities, and particularly on what has become known as ‘Science Studies,’ reveals a lack of understanding of what we do, it does raise an important question for a subject like English, where we frequently seek to contextualise our object of study by reference to phenomena exterior to it: how do we make meaningful connections with the other disciplines with which we come into contact? In a recent article in this newsletter, Philip Martin investigated usefully the role history can play in both opening up and closing down the meanings of literary

. Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (1994; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), p. 116, p. 121.

texts, arguing that a text’s historicity is an issue we must broach, as an open one, with students (2). History provides a good starting point, because there is a temptation, when we deal with Science, to treat its contextual value to us as versions of the less interesting kind of History. Although we know that History is an essentially interpretative discipline, and that it is subject to the shapeshifting nuances of variant textual readings, the tempting short-cut, at least in teaching, may be to use it as a solid background context against which to play out the more complex discussions of literary texts we allow to take place. This temptation is all the more alluring when we encounter subjects, like Science, further removed from the normal spheres of expertise in which we practise. The easy way to use it is as a subset of historical knowledge, a steadily accumulating body of facts and insights, fixed at any given moment: evolution in 1859, relativity in 1905 and so on. In this perspective, Science is solid and uncontroversial, not a living group of disciplines with their own peculiar controversies, forms of discourse and communities of practitioners in debate with one another. Certainly, in older debates about the Arts and the Sciences, there was a tendency to assume their absolute difference from one another, without really engaging with the interesting questions of subjects’ identities that arise with true cross–disciplinary engagement. For instance, when Matthew Arnold and T.H. Huxley debated the relative merits of different forms of education (classical or scientific), there was a strong sense that these were alternate modes of knowing, with few areas of intriguing overlap. Although Arnold claimed that ‘[a]ll knowledge . Philip Martin, ‘With or Without? Is there any History in this class?’, English Subject Newsletter 7 (November, 2004), pp. 18–21.

Metaphor Mongering: Science, Writing and Science Writing

that reaches us through books is literature,’ he did not effectively contest the distinction he ascribed to Huxley that a scientific education confers a ‘knowledge of things,’ while humanist enquiry produces a ‘knowledge of words’ (3). Eighty years later, the most famous spat about English and Science, the ‘two cultures’ debate, principally between F.R. Leavis and C.P. Snow, did little to advance our understanding of how these ‘cultures’ might interrelate. Snow’s famous claim that not knowing the Second Law of Thermodynamics is equivalent to ignorance of the works of Shakespeare, and Leavis’s petulant assertion that a strong English School is at the heart of the modern university, are revealing of institutional power struggles to control loaded terms like ‘education’ and ‘culture,’ but fail to interrogate what such terms, or even ‘English’ or ‘Science’ themselves, might mean. There is little interest in the complex ways in which the different languages of literature and Science might be related to one another, except in asides by, for instance, Aldous Huxley (4). In the run up to the Science Wars, though, debates about English and Science took on a markedly different character. A key moment is, surely, Gillian Beer’s insistence in Darwin’s Plots (1983) that ‘not only ideas but metaphors, myths, and narrative patterns could move rapidly freely to and fro between scientists and non–scientists’ (5). This is a new form of interdisciplinarity entirely. It does not just see Science as part of a history of ideas that might be necessary to contextualise literature. Instead, it treats it as a form of literature. Although Professor Beer qualifies her claim by noting that in the nineteenth century primary scientific texts were, in general, accessible to the educated lay reader, a large number of literary and cultural critics have since followed her example, many transferring the ‘Science as discourse’ perspective to more recent developments. Science Studies is, in fact, driven by this insistence on the textual life of Science: Lisa Jordanova introduces essays collected under the title Languages of Nature with the

claim that they focus on the ‘discourses common to literature and Science,’ Robert Scholnick claims that historians of Science have learned to approach it as ‘only one among other social constructs,’ and James Bono speaks of understanding ‘the textuality of scientific discourse and the metaphoricity of the languages of Science’ (6). This is, from the perspective of English, a comforting approach to take. It implies that the specific skills we value (close textual analysis; imaginative analogy) are sufficient to the task of making cultural sense of Science. It is also an approach which has drawn complaints from some in the Sciences. To Gross and Levitt’s dislike of metaphor mongering, we might add Sokal’s claim, in a book, Intellectual Impostures, co-authored with Jean Bricmont, that ‘the natural Sciences are not a mere reservoir of metaphors (7). For one side in the Science Wars, Science (note the singular form) is caricatured as monolithic, enchained in an empirical doctrine and rooted to the belief that it speaks the Truth. For the other side, the Humanities, and in particular Literary Studies, are lampooned as riddled with seditious semioticians, speaking of a subject, Science, about which they have little understanding, and to which they naively apply an extreme relativist philosophy. The cartoon is completed by the suggestion that some of these people are (‘the horror, the horror’) postmodernists. The first group sees Science and writing as separate activities; the other sees them as one and the same. Even in these caricatures, though, there is a way out of the impasse between those seeking to understand Science as a dynamic force within the culture, and those who argue that Science should be left alone. Sokal’s position that the natural Sciences are not a ‘mere reservoir’ of metaphors is a reasonable one, but does not mean that Science does not (whatever else it might do, and whatever else it might be) also function as a reservoir of metaphors and narratives on which the culture draws, and to which it might even contribute.

. T.H. Huxley, Collected Essays, vol. 3 (London: Macmillan, 1905), pp. 645–46. . Huxley, for instance, acknowledges the complexity of the relationship between language and the world: ‘That the purified language of Science, or even the purified language of literature should ever be adequate to the givenness of the world and of our experience is, in the very nature of things, impossible.’ Aldous Huxley, Literature and Science (London: Chatto and Windus, 1963), p. 99.

. L.J. Jordanova, ‘Introduction’, in Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature, ed. Jordanova (London: Free Association Books, 1986), p. 17; Robert J. Scholnick, ‘Permeable Boundaries: Literature and Science in America,’ in American Literature and Science, ed. Scholnick (University of Kentucky Press, 1992), pp. 1–2; James J. Bono, ‘Science, Discourse, and Literature: The Role/Rule of Metaphor in Science,’ Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeasern UP, 1990), p. 60.

. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth–Century Fiction (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 7.

. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science (1997; London: Profile, 1998), p. 177.

Metaphor Mongering: Science, Writing and Science Writing

Perhaps there is a way of being serious about culture, and about Science in the culture, without having to broach the issue of Science’s truthfulness at all; about whether, for instance, in debates about evolution, Stephen Jay Gould is right that the primary unit of selection is the individual or Richard Dawkins is correct in saying that it is the gene. When we deal with culture we deal with representations, the turning of experience into narrative, and Science is a powerful force within our culture because it is a source of potent narratives about who we are, where we come from and the world we live in. Those narratives are for many of us, as non–scientists, translations from a language we do not fully understand, and the most we can hope to do is to talk in an informed way about the translations, rather than the raw Science, if there is such a thing. But this is not necessarily the death knell for our understanding of Science as culture. It is, after all, only as translations into popular Science books, technological spin–offs, and general understandings of the world, that Science exists within culture. The accuracy of those translations – the sense in which they are mistranslations – while undoubtedly a crucial issue in one sense, is, in another – for our role as cultural critics – more peripheral. Here, a little linguistic sleight of hand can help us immensely. If we distinguish between professional Science (descriptions of the world as formulated by, and within, communities of scientists) and cultural Science (the manifestations of Science within our culture, which may or may not be accurate reflections of professional Science, and are certainly likely to be only loosely tied to whatever peculiar modes of thought, experiment and logic we use to define Science), we can put in parentheses the issues of Science and truth, and concentrate on the more culturally vital phenomena of Science and representation. To give an example, from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s there was a penchant for getting terribly excited by chaos theory. This was partly to do with the word, ‘chaos,’ which is culturally resonant, but also to do with the way in which popular narratives about chaos were constructed, in particular James Gleick’s big-selling, and influential, piece of Science writing, Chaos: Making a New Science (1987). Gleick sells chaos in rhetorically appealing ways as a new and, moreover, paradigm-changing, Science. He constructs a narrative, combining archetypes of the Romantic hero and the American West, in which

sole, male adventurers, working alone, and quite often pictured in frontier landscapes, make new discoveries. Other representations of chaos theory, in books and newspaper articles, drew on similar rhetorical constructions. There was a very strong sense that chaos was important, revealing, as The New Scientist Guide to Chaos Theory put it, ‘fundamental limits to human knowledge in an uncomfortable way’ (8). There was even a brief fad for posters and t-shirts with fractal images, chaos’s most dominant visual motif. Within Literary Studies, articles and books, like Katherine Hayles’s Chaos Bound and Harriet Hawkins’s Strange Attractors, found exciting analogies between the features associated popularly with chaos theory (a strange and exciting new world somewhere between chaos and order; the sense of a paradigm-shift in thinking) and cultural developments which might loosely be described as postmodernist (9). This fashion drew the ire of Sokal and Bricmont, and Gross and Levitt: it is the only scientific topic to have its own chapter in Intellectual Impostures, and fifteen pages are devoted to it in Higher Superstition. The claim is that the importance of chaos theory, and even central tenets of it, are grossly misinterpreted by Humanities scholars. This is, of course, an important issue: whether chaos theory is, or is not, a watershed in the history of Science, really matters. It is, though, one that can only be solved, in the short term, by an appeal to authority and, when scientists are themselves split over its significance, the authorities we choose are liable to be dictated by our own agendas. However, important though the status of chaos in professional Science is, from our point of view as literary and cultural critics it is the wrong issue. Our concern cannot be what chaos theory is, but how it is represented. Representation, rather than essence, is the root of our professional interest in Science. Culturally, for the very reasons Sokal and Levitt identify – the unscientific and rhetorical appeal of words like ‘chaos,’ and the analogies between popularisations of chaos theory and other cultural developments – chaos theory is, or at least was,

. Nina Hall, Introduction, The New Scientist Guide to Chaos, ed. Hall (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 10. . N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991); Harriet Hawkins, Strange Attractors: Literature and Chaos Theory (New York: Prentice– Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995).

Metaphor Mongering: Science, Writing and Science Writing

significant. It may only have been of passing significance, and perhaps it was not the enduring, revolutionary development it was hailed to be, but the fact that it was presented in such a way is of importance. It is chaos as narrative, as a story which intersects with other tales within our culture, which makes turning to it important. So the antagonists in the Science Wars debates talk about Science in two very different senses. For one group of contributors, it has specialised, technical meanings that might be to do with a mode of thought, a system of experimentation, or a body (or rather bodies) of knowledge, and for another group it is a system of discourses within the culture. This is not to say that the differences between the polarised positions produced by the Science Wars are purely semantic. While common ground is often obscured by different styles of discourse, there are also some very real differences in relation to issues of truth, culture and education. Even here, though, there is very often a blurring of the opposing arguments. For example, amongst those of us on the, let’s call it, ‘Science is culture’ side of the debate, there can be a tendency, on the one hand, to reduce Science to discourse, and on the other, simultaneously, to invoke Science as though it lends authority to the reading of literary texts. This is not a new phenomenon. When I.A. Richards sought to formalise the case for, and the practice of, university study of English in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), Science and Poetry (1926) and Practical Criticism (1929), it was at once both an attempt to resist the growing institutional and cultural power of Science, and to emulate and reproduce, methodologically, scientific rigour in the study of literature (10). A similar blurring of opposing positions can also occur amongst those on the, let’s call it, ‘leave Science alone’ side of the debate. In this case, the very process of engaging in extended discussions of the misuses of Science cannot help but demonstrate the powerful function of Science within cultural discourses. Norman Levitt, for instance, bemoans the prejudicial and uninformed way in which Science is treated within contemporary culture in his book Prometheus Bedeviled, but in order to do 10. I. A. Richards, Poetries and Sciences: A Reissue of ‘Science and Poetry’ (1926, 1935) with Commentary (London: Routledge, 1970); Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (London: Routledge, 1964); Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1989).

this he has to engage in what is, essentially, an extended work of Science Studies, analysing the cultural potency of terms like ‘Science’ and ‘nature.’ He certainly does not have the same views as his Science Studies antagonists, but he does have to acknowledge the cultural power of Science and the way in which the term and its meaning are moulded by other discourses. He even adopts a rhetoric – as when he declares his aim to ‘consider the peculiar authority of the term ‘natural’ in the discourse of our culture’ – which is indistinguishable from the ways of speaking (use of the term ‘discourse’) and the project (deconstruction of cultural authority) within Science Studies (11). My purpose here is not to suggest that the debates and differences that followed the publication of Sokal’s hoax article in Social Text were not based on very different world views and ideas about knowledge. However, they certainly were not entirely at odds with each other, even when the rhetoric employed might have implied that they were. On the most fundamental level, then, even though the rhetoric of the Science Wars implied absolute difference, there were areas of overlap and agreement, primarily in the understanding that Science is culturally powerful. Why it is powerful, and how that power is exercised, is of course a different matter. Nevertheless, given this power, what questions and issues do we need to address if we are to embrace the Sciences as living disciplines in our practice as teachers and scholars of English? First, what do we mean by the term ‘Science’? Do we define it as a specific body of knowledge? (and, if so, is it a knowledge that simply accumulates, or is it a knowledge that is constantly being overturned, and refashioned, as new understandings come along?). If we see it in this way, do particular sorts of Science, or particular disciplines, come, in our minds, to stand for all Science? (as, for instance, in Gleick’s presentation of chaos theory, in which all contemporary Science is, by implication, subsumed under the umbrella of this particular development). If Science is not a specific body of knowledge, can we define it as a mode of experimentation or thought? Or is it a word that has meaning only in relation to the institutional and social contexts in which it is invoked? 11. Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1999), p. 66.

Metaphor Mongering: Science, Writing and Science Writing

Second, how do we see this thing called Science, discipline? (Literary Studies rather than literature). This however we are defining it, engaging with the rest of is important because much of the discourse in the Scithe culture? Is it something that sits in a discrete zone, ence Wars has been about discourse. Talking about texts its development powered by internal disciplinary drives, – novels, popular Science books, or whatever – that inand feeding material into the culture, but not impacted terweave with scientific discourses, is different from talkupon by cultural developments? If it is shaped by cultural ing about the sorts of dialogue that may or may not take developments, is this in a weak form, whereby, say, politi- place between ways of doing literary study and ways of cal, financial and social contexts determine what sort of doing Science. research can take place, but do not shape the eventual Finally, while the interest in Science as writing has given findings of that research? Alternatively, is it in a stronger us a means of engaging with the cultural presence of Sciform in which culturally specific perceptions, biases and ence, might scientific developments give us new means of ways of thinking have a shaping effect on scientific en- engaging with literature? Recent scientific research into quiry and the narratives produced by Science? consciousness and language must, surely, at some point, Third, why so often is it that we talk specifically of ‘lit- impact upon Literary Studies. erature’ and ‘Science’? The terms seem incommensurate. We can carry on doing what we have been doing in the In a university context, one is a faculty–level concept, past, without broaching these questions, approaching Sciwhile the other is only the label for a single discipline, ence, where we must, only to provide a context for literaor the activities that might take place within a limited ture. However, if we can find a way to engage with Science number of disciplines. Is this mode of speech a product writing, by which I mean the inscription of cultural Science of the way in which debates between the disciplines into every aspect of our world view, it may open us to a have been fashioned by institutional political battles over dialogue that takes us beyond a vaguely defined sense of terms like ‘education,’ ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation,’ not to Science as absolutely other to what we do in English. mention the scramble for limited public funds? Might we run the risk of homogenizing a diversity of disciplines and methodologies under the single term ‘Science,’ because it makes it more containable? Also, by pitching ‘literaTeaching ture’ or, before that, the even more politically loaded Romanticism term ‘English’ into battle against Science, do we Convenors of Romanticism modules reproduce, without even realising it, the sense currently running in UK HE institutions are invited to that Arnold, and later, Leavis, had, that Literfi ll in a questionnaire that will be used to provide informaary Studies is somehow at the centre of tion for an English Subject Centre supported event, ‘Teaching the university? In other words, is one of Romanticism’, to be held in the Friends’ Meeting House on Euston our starting assumptions the belief that Road, London, 17–18 March 2006. For the purposes of the quesour basic activity – dealing with words tionnaire, a Romanticism module is defined as one that covers literary and language – is the foundation upon texts created or published roughly between 1770 and 1830. For furwhich all other Humanities disciplines, ther information, or to register for the event, please see: http://www. and increasingly Science disciplines too, english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/events/future/event/event_detail. are reliant? Is there a sense, in other php?eveventId=76 or contact the organiser of the conference, Dr Shawords, in which we feel our ‘metaphor ron Ruston, English Department, University of Wales, Bangor, Gwynmongering’ qualifies us to reach out in edd, UK LL57 2DG (s.ruston@bangor.ac.uk). Questionnaires must our intellectual adventures into other acabe completed by 15 December 2005. The results will be posted demic departments and Faculties? on the websites of the British Association for Romanticism Fourth, what do we mean by ‘literature’ (http://www.bars.ac.uk/) and of the English Subject when we put it next to the term ‘Science’? Are Centre (http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk). we talking about literature as ‘object’ – bodies of written work – or are we talking about an academic

Integrating Creativity into the Curriculum This article is an expanded version of a talk given by Peter Howarth, Lecturer in 20th-century Literature in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham, at the 2005 Higher Education Academy conference, held at Heriot-Watt University in June. To begin the session, participants were asked to write a three-line poem, swap with another participant, write a second verse to poem, then swap back to see how different the addition made their original poem feel. Many writers speak about the experience of creativity as bringing into being something they didn’t know was there when they started (1). Many creative writing teachers, on the other hand, have to spend a lot of time uncoupling creativity from such ideas of inspiration or genius, because they imply to the novice writer that creativity is a special faculty or originating moment out of which the work arrives fully-formed, complete in itself, freely obedient to its own laws of construction, and thus cannot be improved by some decent editing. However, I hope the experience of seeing your original poem transformed by somebody else may suggest a different aspect to creative surprise. In reading what the other person has done to your poem, you’ve seen what the other person does and doesn’t understand of your intentions in writing it, and also seen that your three lines may have something in them which you weren’t aware of. Some of your little poem’s creativity has become evident through its transmission, rather than simply in relation to the special experience of its beginning in your intentions and authorship. My suggestion is that thinking of creativity as something which can operate through the processes of response, rather than merely pre-existing it, may help us to think about a difficult question for English in Higher Education, namely, how do we integrate creative writing into the general critical aims of an undergraduate curriculum? For wonderful as creative writing is, several critics have noted that its pedagogy often operates on tacitly formalist, art-for-art’s sake principles which are at odds with the way the rest of the discipline works. I agree with them, but I also think there are also some good reasons why creative writing is the way it is, and I’m interested in how we might bridge the creative–critical gap without simply collapsing one side into the other.

Creative Writing classes across the country have mushroomed over the last 20 years, and the battle against the notion that creative writing cannot be evaluated in any justifiable way is mostly over. But as a result of having to fight for its corner, my sense is that creative writing is too often still in that corner, not really integrated into the rest of the average English curriculum on an intellectual level. Any critic trying to publish an article simply discussing Bleak House in terms of character interaction or analysing the placing of the line-breaks in The Cantos for aesthetic effect would get stern readerly questions, because the critical consensus is that a text’s meaning has to have some reference to its social status and historical circumstance. But on a curriculum level, this is how we often teach creative writing. The questions asked at workshops, as Paul Dawson’s Creative Writing and the New Humanities forcefully remarks, tend to be about the new poem’s rhyme and metre or a novel’s development of character, and they ask how the work may develop, find its inner logic, truly become itself (2). They do not tend to be about an awareness of the social networks of power and history which the new work’s words are performing. By teaching as if the rules for ‘good’ writing were ahistorical and universal, creative writing is at methodological odds with approaches practised in the rest of the curriculum, and we are encouraging double-think in our students. If you tend to be suspicious about the cultural politics of the creative workshop, your suspicions will only be deepened by talking to the students themselves.The overwhelming reason to choose creative writing, according to Greg Light’s recent study of British student attitudes, is that it offers a chance to ‘be myself’ or ‘do my own work’

‘By teaching as if the rules for ‘good’ writing were ahistorical and universal, creative writing is at methodological odds with approaches practised in the rest of the curriculum, and we are encouraging double-think in our students.’

. Brilliantly discussed in Tim Clark, The Theory of Inspiration (Manchester University Press, 1997). 10

. Creative Writing and the New Humanities (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 116ff; cf. Morton and Zavardaseh’s older polemic, ‘The Cultural Politics of the Fiction Workshop’, Cultural Critique 11 (1988–9), 155–73.

Integrating Creativity into the Curriculum

in a way that ordinary literature classes do not (3). Students are attracted to creative writing because it offers ‘freedom from the non–personal, external demands of facts and other people’s ideas, comments and forms’ (4). Of course, much of the creative writing teacher’s time is spent getting new writers to abandon such self-flattery and to concentrate on the work itself, with its requirements of readership and genre, and Light suggests that the marking of creative writing rightly rewards them for doing so. And yet if the students’ assumptions show only too clearly the persistence of Romantic notions of genius, they may unwittingly point up a little more clearly just why it is genuinely difficult to bring creative writing criteria smoothly into line with the English or Humanities mainstream, or indeed, the aims of any university curriculum. As is well-known, the word ‘genius’ changes its meaning over the course of the 18th century, from being the spirit of a particular place to a quasi-transcendental creative person, a shift which comes to a head in Kant’s identification of the creative artist with a uniquely free kind of activity in the modern world. ‘By right we should not call anything art except a production through freedom’ begins section 43 of the Critique of Judgement, and Kant goes on to stress the difference between the ordinary craftsman who creates through following predetermined rules and the creative genius who creates his own rules (5). True creativity, in the sense that Kant bequeathes to modern aesthetics, does not simply fulfil some pre-arranged criteria, but freely creates its own standard, a standard which will then be a beacon for other lesser artists. Now even if most creative writing teachers would want to deny that anything can be perfectly original and pour scorn on the myth of the lonely genius, there is still an important sense that aesthetic creativity means changing the rules of the game. If a work is really creative, it is not simply going to fulfil

the criteria we already know about: it cannot be wholly predictable, nor necessarily useful, fitting or productive, because this would imply that we already knew before the work existed what it would be about. This principle, though, bedevils easy attempts to make creative writing produce the kind of writing that literary criticism wants. Creative writing workshops which aim to cross the creative-critical divide by producing writing that is an attack on the bourgeois centrality of the author, say, or demonstrates the hybridity of post-colonial identity, will always smack of being an example: an embodiment of a truth about the nature of writing or racial identity which the author knew elsewhere in other circumstances, and which they are performing now. Like poor Little Chandler in Joyce’s Dubliners, dreaming of the praise his as–yet–unwritten poetry will receive for sounding the true Celtic note, such creative writing is trying to live up to its own criticism. And any attempt to escape by inventing a would-be Derridean creative writing whose aim is to produce something ‘other’ to all embedded critical or conceptual mastery simply twists the problem round still further, for it is still operating on the territory of the theory. Literary theorists are the ones who get excited by the way writing troubles conceptuality, and so the creative text which expressly knows this is by definition creating itself as such theory’s other, which promptly makes itself not ‘other’ at all. This resistance to academic instrumentalism is an important aspect of Kant’s insistence that the creative work must not be subsumed under a concept. For the students in Light’s survey, it translates into the feeling that creativity must have a chance to determine its own aims, and so cannot be criticised according to an wholly alien, inflexible and impersonal standard of judgement. However problematically, creative writing offers the possibility of their work being recognised, as opposed to merely evaluated, in a way which cannot happen in other subjects. So while it may be worthwhile to criticise the workshops which prop up the more egoistic versions of such recognition – creative writing as an exercise in self-indulgence or cheap therapy – to subsume creative writing wholly to external criteria is to forget the original dream

‘to subsume creative writing wholly to external criteria is to forget the original dream of anti-instrumentalist freedom behind it.’

. Gregory Light, ‘From the Personal to the Public: Conceptions of Creative Writing in Higher Education’, Higher Education, 43:2 (2002), 257–276. . Ibid., p. 265. . Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 170.

Integrating Creativity into the Curriculum

of anti-instrumentalist freedom behind it. For students almost perpetually pigeonholed by a fateful combination of competitive exams, young people’s tribalism and demographics-based marketing, these attractions are understandable. If creative writing is taught with formalist criteria, it may be less because we are unreconstructed anti–theorists or anti–historicists, and more because we want to do some kind of justice to creativity, even as the creative-writing session in the university promptly institutionalises that freedom. This dilemma between creative freedom and social conditions reappears in Paul Dawson’s thought–provoking account of the problem and his solution. Dawson rejects D. G. Myers’s idea that the original and best aim of creative writing is to be part of general humanities education, since this makes creativity merely ‘an adjunct or pedagogical tool’ to literary studies, and worse, a New Critical version of literary studies (6). Arguing instead that ‘aesthetic or craft–based decisions of a writer are always the result (consciously or otherwise) of ideological or political choice’, Dawson believes we need to think of creative texts as ‘directly active components in the organisation of social relations themselves’ and run creative workshops which examine how a new work participates in those social relations (7).This means challenging the story which is beautifully-written sexist claptrap, for example, or working on confessional poetry which is less about self-declaration and more an interrogation of the genre and its links with Romantic genius, insanity or women’s writing. Exciting as this sounds, it is still a bit unclear why his programme is not keeping creative writing as ‘an adjunct or pedagogical tool’, only with Cultural Studies replacing New Criticism. The problem is the phrase, ‘directly active’, which leaves no room to consider why a text’s indirection or inactivity might be important for its social relations. The problem is not simply

to show that aesthetic choices are really disguised social relations, but also how the particular cultural construction of realms of ‘fiction’ or ‘art’ or ‘poetry’ or ‘creative workshops’ produces distinctive kinds of social relation, in which certain things may be said and felt which are impossible elsewhere. And a quick look at the history of creative writing suggests that this has always been an aim. Dawson makes his indictment of formalist teaching by tracing several key phrases of workshop lore – ‘show, don’t tell’, ‘reading as a writer’ – back to the principles of New Criticism, and behind them, T. S. Eliot and his impersonal poetics. Creative Writing is shown to stand in a tradition of aesthetics which makes art deny the writer’s social identity or its political resonance. But as Mark Jancovich and others have shown, it was politics which made the New Critics and Eliot celebrate the autonomy of art, because they thought it a way to resist the dominance of industrialised rationality and capitalist homogenisation (8). In fact, I think the politics of creative autonomy go back much further to one of most important and unacknowledged sources for Eliot and modern aesthetics generally, Schiller’s 1795 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.There, Schiller argues that the ‘aesthetic’ means a special kind of experience of non–domination. In true art, there is no division of means and ends, no separation between the sensual and rational understanding, the concrete particular of content and the abstract universal of form. Instead, art’s specific way of relating tale and teller or form and content means that as spectators or readers, we think and feel as united beings in a way that the specialisation of modern economies or rationalist philosophy disallows:

. Dawson, Creative Writing, p. 164.

. Mark Jancovich, The Cultural Programme of New Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 20–30.

‘if art’s true creative freedom comes to be visible not at a single moment of origin, but through varying historical conditions of judgement, then a work’s creativity is not separable from its re-interpretions’

. Dawson, ibid., p. 211. ‘Directly active’, p. 208 (quoting Tony Bennett).

Taste alone brings harmony into society, because it fosters harmony in the individual. All other forms of perception divide man, because they are based exclusively either upon

Integrating Creativity into the Curriculum

the sensuous or in the spiritual part of his being; only the aesthetic mode of perception makes him a whole (9). But in a fragmented society, art can only do this by being itself autonomous, a realm of ‘play’ in which all the oppositions which organise practical life or moral duty are suspended. Far from being unconcerned with politics, the ‘play’ of powers involved in aesthetic experience becomes the only way to imagine a politics without hierarchy. As Jacques Rancière notes in an extended and brilliant commentary on this passage, Schiller’s idea of the ‘aesthetic’ appears ‘in a specific experience which suspends the ordinary connections not only between appearance and reality, but also between form and matter, active and passive, understanding and sensibility’, and it is this suspension which ‘promises, then, a community which will be free in the measure that it will no longer know these divisions’ (10). But Schiller also confesses in his letters that we never can experience this perfect unity and freedom in a work of art. Instead, we can imagine aesthetic freedom ideally because we only experience it partially, over time and by making comparison between artworks of different types and times. Now this admission of failure has confirmed many suspicions that Schiller cannot make the aesthetic as wondrously free an experience as he claims. But I think Schiller’s failure could also be an important way of imagining how the freedom of creative writing might be related to historical criticism. For if art’s true creative freedom comes to be visible not at a single moment of origin, but through varying historical conditions of judgement, then a work’s creativity is not separable from its re-interpretations, and may come to reveal more of itself through them.As readers, we always read new works with a particular awareness of what situations those words have already been used in; we are historically and theoretically-situated in our judgements and have to see the work within our multiple and overlapping social frame-

works. But the more we understand the situatedness of those judgements, then the more we may become aware of how those judgements and the structures to which they belong may require recalibration in our encounter with the work’s creativity.That is, the freedom of creative work may come to happen in its repeated exceeding of any particular scene of reading. Derek Attridge’s wonderful book The Singularity of Literature puts it like this: If the work of art can retain or renew its alterity and inventiveness across temporal gaps – if, indeed, this power is what constitutes it as a work of art – … works of art… depend on their resistance to accommodation across time; and it is through this resistance that they make further artistic invention possible (11). But such resistance to complete judgement can only be known through understanding what criteria of judgement are operating, and this might help us make links between creative writing and the rest of the curriculum. Rather than saying that the work can only be judged here and now on its own terms – and hence back to ideas of formalist autonomy – we might say that it establishes those terms as its creativity comes to be visible through a series of situated readings, but that its freedom is always established through its re-readability. What might this mean in practice? Let’s imagine a creative writing workshop where students are reading each other’s work, and are fairly comfy doing so. Then imagine a parallel series of seminars in which their creative reading of each other’s work is guided into a discussion of the cultural categories they found themselves using in encountering it, and how the new work fits or resists them. For example, what were their expectations of the piece, its cues of genre or form or marketplace niche? Were those expectations fulfilled; were the readers up-

‘the freedom of creative work may come to happen in its repeated exceeding of any particular scene of reading’

. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed and trans. by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), p. 215 (Letter XXVII). 10. Jacques Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthetique (Paris: Galilée, 2004), p. 45, 52 (my translation).

11. Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 49. This passage, I suspect, will mark a crucial difference with Rob Pope’s Deleuzian Creativity (London: Routledge, 2005): Pope identifies creativity with autonomous otherness, a self–organising pluralism construed as evolutionary diversity or infinite game, whereas Attridge’s focus is on the way that the otherness of the singular work is always constituted in relation to situated categories of judgement. Cf. Sean Matthews’ article in this Newsletter (p. 15). 13

Integrating Creativity into the Curriculum

set, or moved, or bored, and why? This then opens the question of the cultural conditions of audience expectations and how our ‘aesthetic’ emotions may be tied up with something like Raymond Williams’s socially-derived structures of feeling – while at the same time keeping visible how the work challenges those structures. Noting how the value of self-expression (‘being who you truly are’) tends to be a catch-all Good Thing for the modern West, for instance, might lead into an interesting history of how historically-variable this value is, and the kinds of work and genres it promotes or erases, and thence to questions of canon-formation and re-formation. Or to take a real example, a student once remarked to me that the creative piece in question was all about cars and had effectively naturalised their existence, but felt that in the light of environmental pressures we’d look back in 2050 on casual references to the internal combustion engine with same degree of distaste now reserved for casual racism. This then unfolded into a discussion about Kipling, how much a work belongs to its era and whether it can be more than some of the values of its time, and also into some ironical awareness about the bias of our age’s own critical questions. Or alternatively, such a seminar might pick up on the feeling many new writers have that their text is apparently gaining a life of its own as it is being read and queried by others. Hearing one’s own words in someone else’s mouth seems to bring out connotations and perceptions the author did not ostensibly intend. This might lead to the issue of self–fictionalisation and how different the ‘I’ on the page is from the ‘I’ sitting at the table, and which will last longer. Equally, it might lead to the question of what such public circulation does to iden-

tity-based criticism of the author. Did the new author think she wrote as a woman, say, or was being read as a woman, and did her text say more than its author’s gender, race, or class? In my limited experience, students do often feel this, and it leads to questions as to why we feel uncomfortable applying the same kinds of critical categories to ourselves as we do to Toni Morrison or Geoffrey Chaucer. Asking the author about what they felt of people’s reading of their work, too, opens up the question to what extent aesthetic content is extractable or paraphraseable in critical summary, and what we think we are doing when we say, ‘This passage means…’ What does a passage’s particular form do to our experience of the text, and how might the letter of the work resist the ideal critical evaluations we make of it, as an event being read rather than just an object to be dissected? Even if you wouldn’t want to teach like this at all, thinking of creativity as something which takes place over time is often very helpful for nervous students to realise that the judgements given by creative writing classes can’t be the final arbiter of their value, since the work may always come to matter to more people than are currently reading it. Still, I know many of us are asking these sorts of critical questions in our literary teaching. My hope is that rethinking the way that a work’s creativity comes to happen might help us relate what happens in the workshop to those seminars in a way which improves them both.

Enhancing Careers Many Careers Services have been encouraged to develop services specifically for English students through Subject Centre funding. Short reports on their work are available from http://www.english. heacademy.ac.uk/explore/projects/archive/careers/ careers6.php so if you would like some ideas to propose to your Careers Service then have a look. A further round of project funding will be announced shortly. Contact jane.gawthrope@ rhul.ac.uk for further information.

Creativity: A One Day Symposium What is the place of ‘creativity’ in English Studies? Sean Matthews, Director of the D.H. Lawrence Research Centre and Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Nottingham, reports on an event held on 21 May 2005. The extent to which a newly emergent discourse of ‘Creativity’ is serving to focus and drive debates at the intersection of literary, linguistic and cultural studies was made powerfully apparent at a recent symposium held at Nottingham University. Organized by Peter Stockwell, Professor of Literary Linguistics, and Mark Robson, Lecturer in Renaissance Literature and Literary Theory, the event was co–sponsored by the Poetics and Linguistics Association and Praxis, the Centre for the Study of Literary Discourse at Nottingham University. The occasion marked the publication of Stockwell and Robson’s anthology, Language in Theory, a timely work bringing together an important collection of texts exploring the interdependence of literary and linguistic theory. It was during their collaboration on this volume that they realized the intriguing connections across recent books by Derek Attridge, Ron Carter and Rob Pope (1), and decided to make something more of their launch party than the usual wine, canapés and academic small–talk. The three authors accepted invitations to speak, and the result, ‘Creativity: A One Day Symposium’, provided the capacity audience, a diverse collection of discourse analysts, stylisticians, legal and health professionals, educationalists, literary and cultural critics, and linguisticians, with a valuable opportunity to participate in a productive and provocative debate. The variety of questions and challenges which were articulated during the day suggest that the ramifications of ‘Creativity’ provide a welcome escape from the intellectual, disciplinary and institutional limits which would usually prevent such a group even from gathering, much less collaborating. However, with discussion ranging from practical questions about how to integrate creativity into conventional pedagogy, and then necessarily how to assess it (in a class or and RAE panel), to complex theoretical and philosophical conundra concerned with definition and precision, or/and with the contradictions of creativity’s rich semantic heritage, the symposium was in some ways as exasperating as it was exciting as participants occasionally struggled to sustain several very different strands of argument at the same time. It is clear that the topic will bear much further scrutiny, and one imagines it . Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004); Ronald Carter, Language and Creativity: The Art of Common Talk (Routledge, 2004); Rob Pope, Creativity: Theory, History and Practice (Routledge, 2005).

will be central to the discursive agenda in the Humanities for some time to come. The event opened with presentations from each speaker, outlining core ideas from their books and situating these ideas in relation to each other’s work. Attridge refined his account of creativity in order to give particular emphasis to his argument emphasising the singularity of the ‘act/event’ of creation. For him, creativity (or what he calls ‘inventiveness’) takes place for both author and reader in their shared experience of a literary text, and is defined by a distinctive, unique and yet crucially iterative quality. Indeed, it is in part the potential for repetition of the act-event of reading which constitutes its singular quality, as the tensions within existing cultural conventions become apparent not only to the author in the act of creative writing, but also to the reader in creative interpretation.This repeated confrontation with the ‘other’ embodied by the text endows creativity with a necessary moral element, obliging author and reader to recognise and evaluate their relation to the ‘other’ of the text. Although Attridge acknowledged that inventiveness/creativity takes place in the full range of human experience, he was thus primarily concerned to define and defend the specific value of the literary text, more properly the unique creative experience, or process, of writing and reading a literary text, and in so doing, he returned fruitfully once more to the notion of literariness itself. In contrast, Ron Carter argued forcefully against such exclusive delimitation of the realm of creative activity, making the case for new forms and methodologies to assess the range of new materials, new evidences, made available through advances in recording technology and computational linguistics – specifically corpus linguistics, which permits access to substantial, searchable digital archives of recorded speech. Carter drew on examples from the CANCODE corpus to demonstrate the extraordinary creativity inherent in ordinary talk. In doing so, he rejects the conventional critical priority given to the literary artefact and to written language (with purported grammatical norms), over the ephemera of everyday conversation. He argues that these new materials and methods begin to open up analysis of the variability and mobility inherent in the spoken idiom. They thereby require not only that we reassess the grounds of our understanding of orality, but also of the criteria by which we define creativity. These are traditionally drawn from the 15

Creativity: A One Day Symposium

study of poetic or written forms (and invested with evaluative force, most problematically from association with post-Romantic ideologies of authorship and originality), which may ultimately be exposed as inadequate given the range of invention and innovation revealed through the corpora of spoken discourse. Rob Pope offered a further, overarching perspective, situating our contemporary notions of creativity (and arguments), in the wider pattern of historical and cultural variation, teasing out the contradictions suggested by the term’s shifting semantic field. Pope’s stress lay on the unpredictability of creative process, and also – echoing Carter – on its collaborative and evolving nature: creativity is never ex nihilo. It was, more than anything, the form of Pope’s intervention which was most startling. Using an overhead projector to combine in a visual field otherwise unrelated texts and objects, he challenged the audience to play with their sense of meaning and form, examining how a further text emerges through intervention and collaboration. He also circulated various objects –a flower, a rock and a nest –asking how these constituted forms of ‘natural’ creativity distinct from human creativity. More generally, Pope typically challenged the conventions of keynote presentations with a provocative, interactive, unsettling performance which enacted his demand that we all embrace a revised relation to creativity. In the open debate which flowed from these initial interventions, a number of predominant themes emerged. First, it was clear that there is much support for the ‘democratic’ impulse of Carter and Pope’s work, which attends to the ordinary and everyday, extending the long, polemical tradition of Raymond Williams’s seminal essay of the 1950s, ‘Culture is Ordinary’ (Williams is a recurrent figure in Pope’s work). However, there was also concern that there is a risk of evacuating necessary distinctions between great literature and linguistic playfulness – between, for example, Hamlet and a conversation in the pub – though Pope and Carter were evidently far more sanguine about the dangers of such relativism than Attridge, or at least they were more ambivalent in their reactions. Second, the ethical aspect of Attridge’s defence of the literary act–event opened up more broadly the question of the moral freight of the term, whether it should be taken as a morally neutral category. Is there such a thing as a creative crime? Or to offer a more recent and controversial example, is 9/11 a creative act?

Third, a more nuanced account of the opposition between spoken and written forms, which had perhaps been mapped too easily onto an oral/literary binary, was necessary to accommodate, for instance, theatre and other performance art forms. Fourth, as Carter made clear, much more needs to be done in terms of refining, even inventing, methodologies with which to address the corpora – it is an open question whether literary studies might properly engage with the opportunities this provides to reimagine the discipline. Fifth, there was intriguing discussion of practical and pragmatic issues, which included the question of how Pope’s radical pedagogy, or commitment to the playful and collaborative versions of collective creativity, dovetails with institutional assessment imperatives. This bordered onto larger questions about the implications of work in this area, in terms of its relation to the professional and disciplinary constraints of contemporary HE. The questions which seem ultimately to haunt this emergent, interdisciplinary discourse of creativity seem to me concerned above all with value. Creativity and creative are terms which involve both description and evaluation, and provoke serious questions about the value, context and direction of our work – questions which these books and this symposium have brought to the fore. Pope and Carter share a polemical, democratic interest in demonstrating the creative qualities inherent in the most common and ordinary areas of life. They are fighting a necessary battle against the ‘mass civilization/minority culture’ dichotomy, with its tendency to compound educational and aesthetic hierarchies with class privilege and presumption (or consumption). Likewise, they reject institutional and academic inertia, that conservatism of subject boundaries and disciplinary hermeneutics which prevents the articulation of new questions, the emergence of new forms of knowledge. The field of ‘creative writing’, the work of ‘creative–critical intervention’, the attention Carter proposes to ‘The Art of Common Talk’ (with the potential for a revival of studies of rhetoric and oratory through the lens of modern stylistics), and Attridge’s insistence on the significance of the act–event of literature offer important challenges to conventional literary criticism, to the separation (or at best uneasy bed–sharing) of literary and linguistic studies, and by extension to the instrumentalist and managerialist logic of the twenty–first century university machine.

‘Writing in the Dark’: Bringing Students’ Writing into the Light Through Peer Tutoring Jonathan Worley and Matthew Martin, St. Mary’s University College Belfast The authors of this article are co–directors of the ‘Centre for Learning and Teaching (Northern Ireland): Critical Thinking and Analytical Writing’ at St. Mary’s University College Belfast. They were formerly beneficiaries of a grant from the English Subject Centre (2002–2004) for their Peer Tutor Project, described in this article. Jonathan (j.worley@smucb.ac.uk) and Matthew (matthew.martin@smucb.ac.uk) would welcome inquiries from other institutions seeking to expand their written communications support. For writing to achieve critical sophistication, it needs to ‘see the light of day’; however, in the case of many university students, their writing is never read more widely than by themselves and their markers.Their writing often occurs in an intensely private world where work is written hastily, in seclusion (perhaps late at night when it is dark outside) and then submitted with a prayer that it won’t be found wanting. Depending on the course and the lecturer, these students may receive little more than a number describing their work. Some students are more than content with this conclusion to the process, as further discussion would only increase their level of exposure to critique and interrogation – or so they fear. However, we believe that good analytical writing is fruitfully nurtured in a more social environment. In other words, we view writing itself as a fundamentally social act, as opposed to the act of a solitary mind. We began our Writing Centre and its associated Peer Tutoring CETL(NI) project in 2001, convinced that the more students were willing and able to look at each other’s writing, the more that writing would improve. The question for us at St. Mary’s was how to bring students together and how to break down the barriers – both institutional and psychological –– that traditionally have prevented students from engaging with each other’s writing. We reviewed a range of practices in use in the UK and abroad for bringing students together to critique each other’s work. Strategies for exposing students to each other’s writing have been practised for many years, particularly at American universities where writing classrooms are now familiar with such strategies as in–class writing, peer review and full–class discussions of samples of student writing. Most American universities now also have writing centres where students can bring their writing for

review, and such centres are beginning to appear with greater frequency in the UK. Most interesting from our perspective was the practice in American universities of students tutoring other students, after having been trained in some basic principles of peer review. We decided that student or ‘peer’ tutoring offered the most exciting opportunity for breaking down the barriers that kept our students ‘writing in the dark’. We decided this in part because we knew that when we were developing a piece of our own writing, we naturally turned to our friends and colleagues for help, seeking a friendly and receptive environment for initial feedback. We also sensed that the institutional hierarchy traditionally determining the intellectual relationship between students and tutors was not always conducive to good writing. We wanted to invite a group of students to become our peers in the quest for improving the writing of students generally, and to work collaboratively with them in developing our sense of how best to help students. In turn, we wanted them to learn to collaborate with their fellow students. Students coming to the Writing Centre are now met by just that – peer collaborators rather than evaluators. In the spring of 2002, with the assistance of a grant from the English Subject Centre, St. Mary’s launched an initiative to train students how to talk to other students about improving their writing. Informally dubbed the ‘Peer Tutoring Project’, we asked for students of all abilities to declare their interest in joining us. In our first year, twelve students of differing abilities applied and were accepted. We believed that all of our students had enough linguistic sophistication to tutor other students if properly trained. They were not going to be expert writing commentators but rather expert facilitators, enabling students to re-examine their own writing with a renewed and refreshed critical perspective.

‘Writing in the Dark’: Bringing Students’ Writing into the Light Through Peer Tutoring

We offered six hours of initial training to our prospective tutors in four areas: (1) models for possible tutorial sessions (2) models for understanding the writing process (3) an examination of common grammatical errors, and, most importantly, (4) the review of a wide range of student essays. The model that we developed for a student to conduct a one–on–one tutoring session allowed our tutors plenty of time to prepare for meeting with another student. Their students, or ‘tutees’, were required to submit essays in advance: these could be either essays on which the students were working or essays which had already received a mark but upon which a student wanted greater elaboration. Tutors would then privately read the work and prepare for the tutorial session. The tutors were asked to read for ‘content’, ‘focus’, ‘order’ and ‘development’ and then to perform a check for six very common grammatical errors. Armed with this information, they would then proceed to a tutorial session. Tutors were asked to begin a session by asking the student what concerns they had about their writing and then to respond in one of two ways: (1) to agree that they had discovered similar concerns and then to go over the student’s essay in light of them, or (2) to politely disagree and to demonstrate to the student where they thought attention might be more fruitfully paid during the revision process.The tutor was asked to cover any additional points about the essay that they thought were relevant, including an analysis of any pattern of grammatical errors. Lastly, students were encouraged to summarise with both a positive comment about what the student was doing well and concise suggestions for improvement. In those initial training sessions, we were impressed by the quality of student responses to written work, and when they exchanged work with each other, the tutors,

too, saw the value of the peer review process. Their satisfaction levels with their own writing increased, as did their enthusiasm for discussing writing challenges with other students. In subsequent years, when we increased the period of training from two to ten hours, we concentrated less extensively upon lecture sessions and more intensively upon the practical work of reviewing student essays. The process of introducing peer tutoring has not been without difficulties. First, there was the initial reluctance of lecturers and student tutees to trust the quality of student tutoring. These difficulties were gradually overcome as lecturers saw their students improving, and as students discovered the process was more helpful than painful. Secondly, not all of our peer tutors developed the good judgement we thought necessary to provide good tutoring. We carefully nurtured the weaker ones by asking them to meet with us before going out upon tutorial sessions, and, over the years, we have become more selective in our choice of peer tutors. In particular, we now rely heavily upon the recommendations of our fellow lecturers for the provision of good peer tutors. Central to our work is the recognition that we, as lecturers, are always learning to become better readers of students’ work while we simultaneously encourage our peer tutors to do the same. We have recently diversified our training to make peer tutors more expert in particular subject areas. This latest development is at the heart of our new CETL–funded project, which allows us to integrate the writing demands of individual disciplines more accurately into our work, as well to engage in a more active and fruitful dialogue with staff members of every department and discipline. We are thus working toward greater ‘decentralisation’ of the writing centre.

Reader, I Triumphed: Complicating the Appeal of Jane Eyre Simon Dentith, Professor in Literary Studies at the University of Gloucestershire, unpicks the assumptions behind a common student approach to 19th-century fiction. I take it to be uncontroversially true that the 19th-century novel (indeed, more narrowly, the mid–century novel in English), dramatises or brings alive a range of culturally-rich subject–positions. Given this variety, it is surely striking that so many contemporary readers (I am most conscious of them as students) should read the 19thcentury novel as repeatedly telling a triumphant liberal narrative of the individual overcoming constricting social circumstances. Consider the following peroration, which concludes a student essay recently submitted for a course that I teach on 19th-century literature:

in the tones of sensible, plain-speaking youth pointing out the error of her ways to a maiden aunt – Harriet Frean, in the novel of that name, written by May Sinclair in 1922. Harriet speaks first:

Jane Eyre proved to the world of the 1800s that the idea of a woman beating the odds to become independent and successful on her own was not as far-fetched as it may have seemed. Jane goes against the expected type by ‘refusing subservience, disagreeing with her superiors, standing up for her rights, and venturing creative thought.’ With such determination, she is able to emerge victorious over all that has threatened to stand in her way. She is not only successful in terms of wealth and position, but more importantly, in terms of family and love. These two needs which have evaded Jane for so long are finally hers; adding to her victory is her ability to enjoy both without losing her hard-won independence. As Jane was a role model for women in the nineteenth century, she is also a role model for women today. Her legacy lives on in the belief that as long as there are hopes and dreams, nothing is impossible.

‘Then she was a fool. A silly fool. Didn’t she think of him?’

The student has taken her quotation from a ‘Critical Evaluation’ in the Masterplots series, and with it possibly some of her other formulations. Nevertheless, I am sure many readers of this newsletter will recognise the attitude represented in this quotation, and not only in essays about Jane Eyre. It also finds widespread formulation in the blurbs on the back of editions of the 19th-century classics (1). What follows is the voice of Bloomsbury in a slightly unfamiliar guise, . Raymond Williams, ‘The Blomsbury Fraction’, in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), pp. 148-69.

‘I knew a girl once who might have done what you’re doing, only she wouldn’t. She gave the man up rather than hurt her friend. She couldn’t do anything else.’ ‘How much was he in love with her?’ ‘I don’t know how much. He was never in love with any other woman.’

‘Didn’t she think?’ ‘No. She didn’t. She thought of herself. Of her own moral beauty. She was a selfish fool.’ ‘She asked the best and wisest man she knew, and he told her she couldn’t do anything else.’ ‘The best and wisest man – oh, Lord!’ ‘That was my own father, Mona, Hilton Frean.’ ‘Then it was you. You and Uncle Robin and Aunt Prissie.’ Harriet’s face smiled its straight, thin–lipped smile, the worn, grooved chin arrogantly lifted. ‘How could you?’ ‘I could because I was brought up not to think of myself before other people.’ (2) May Sinclair’s impatience with the notion of the ‘moral beauty’ of self–denial is evident here; in her brisk, even utilitarian, analysis it is a mask for vanity, and is anyway self–defeating in terms of the calculus of benefits that accrue to the parties involved. We can note also the . May Sinclair, The Life and Death of Harriet Frean (London: Virago, 1980 [1922]), pp. 144-5. 19

Reader, I Triumphed: Complicating the Appeal of Jane Eyre

role of the father in this: Harriet Frean’s reference to the ‘best and wisest man she knew’ provokes only a snort of derision. Another eminent Victorian gets suitably short shrift. I use The Life and Death of Harriet Frean, then, as a brief indicator of one phase of our cultural history which has predisposed Bloomsbury’s inheritors to find insupportable the notions of self–sacrifice and self–denial that animate much 19th-century writing – most obviously in the novels of George Eliot, for May Sinclair’s text can readily be understood as a revision of aspects of The Mill on the Floss. The snorting dismissal of Harriet’s father in turn indicates another phase of social and cultural history which has predisposed contemporary readers to wish to insist on the triumphant liberal narrative: popular feminism, in a common-sense, equal-rights version of it. Jane Eyre, it will be recalled, tells the story of ‘a woman beating the odds to become independent and successful on her own’. Harriet Frean’s father stands in for patrriarchy just as powerfully as the Reverend Brocklehurst, though he couches his moral blandishments in a very different idiom. The extraordinary success of second-wave feminism since the 1970s, and its popular simplification as narratives of heroic women ‘beating the odds’, is undoubtedly the overwhelming social fact which makes that triumphant liberal narrative so plausible and so attractive for contemporary readers. In this apparently feminist version, the heroine of the story is pitched against Victorian patriarchy, in a move which combines Bloomsbury’s rejection of 19th-century moral constrictions with feminist analysis of the gender imbalances that characterise those impositions. It was, after all, women especially who had to do the self-sacrificing, in the light of what, in this account, appears as an ideology of female self-denial and restraint. Feminism, in short, has added to the Bloomsbury caricature of Victorianism (a necessary and progressive misreading in its own time) further specifically masculine identifying brush-strokes. One disadvantage of this plausible story for the reading of 19th-century literature is that it proposes a reading model which, for all its crudeness, can be made to fit all the texts it confronts: hero/heroine of novel x does/

does not challenge the constrictions of Victorian society; his/her success or failure in doing so provides the only measure for the novel in question. Built into this model are not only unsustainable simplifications of 19th-century literature; it also presupposes a fairly straightforward notion of reader identification, in which the heroine of the novel is seized upon as a role model. This latter aspect of the story points me to the third factor which seems to me to have produced the reading habit which I am trying to specify here: the predominant moral individualism of the contemporary social order, hard to characterise without my own resort to caricature but summed up by the banner slogan of a supermarket chain: ‘Go for it!’ A whole complex social history needs to be sketched in here: the triumph of consumerism, the relative failure of socialism and other projects of the collective life, privatisation – all specific social trends operating with more or less force in differing class, regional and national contexts. Nevertheless, this seems to me to suggest the ground out of which that triumphant liberal narrative has emerged, and it encourages readings which focus on the central individual in a story and make her the focus for special identification. As I have suggested, I do not think it is appropriate simply to dismiss this narrative, if only because it is certainly possible to find some grounds for it in 19th-century writing itself. I propose instead to seek to complicate it, and then to point to some other models of personal growth and development which are also present in the literature. We can begin by considering the classic statement of 19th-century liberalism, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and then see how far that is supported by Jane Eyre at one of the defining moments of its heroine’s life. In Mill’s chapter ‘Of Individuality’ in his 1859 text, he is keen to give an elevated, not to say strenuous, version of what individuality means, making acknowledgement to von Humboldt, and invoking the whole tradition of bildung in which the growth of the person involves the exercise of all their powers in the most harmonious but also morally testing way possible to them.This entails the personal testing of customary precepts and wisdom: all of human history, in effect, is only to be trusted insofar

‘Bloomsbury’s inheritors... find insupportable the notions of self-sacrifice and self-denial that animate much 19thcentury writing’

Reader, I Triumphed: Complicating the Appeal of Jane Eyre

as it can be proved to be personally valid. This gives the concept of choice in the following passage a particular moral depth and rigour:

do so. He has put the case to her that since she is effectively without family, nobody would be hurt by her living with him outside marriage:

The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing only because others believe it. If the grounds of an opinion are not conclusive to the person’s own reason, his reason cannot be strengthened, but is likely to be weakened, by his adopting it: and if the inducements to an act are not such as are consentaneous to his own feelings and character (where affection, or the rights of others, are not concerned), it is so much done towards rendering his feelings and character inert and torpid, instead of active and energetic (3).

This was true: and while he spoke my very conscience and reason turned traitors against me, and charged me with crime in resisting him. They spoke almost as loud as Feeling: and that clamoured wildly. ‘Oh, comply!’ it said. Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?’

In this passage ‘choice’, the shibboleth of contemporary (21st-century) moral and political sloganising, takes on a rich and demanding resonance. Custom, opinion and received wisdom are possible guides to action, but one can only discover as much in the activity of choosing: this energetic exercise of the faculties is the condition for moral and intellectual growth. While this is a far cry from the inert exercise of ‘choice’ demanded by contemporary consumerism, one can nevertheless see a family resemblance (across several generations) between Mill’s high–minded conception and the liberal paradigm I have been seeking to elucidate. It is all the more interesting, therefore, that it is exactly this distrust of customary opinion that Jane Eyre (published some ten years before On Liberty), repudiates at one of the crucial moments of choice that she encounters, when she decides not to elope with Rochester though her whole self is crying out for her to . John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in Utilitarianism, Liberty, Representative Government (London: Dent, 1968, pp. 116-7.

Still indomitable was the reply: ‘I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad – as I am now. Laws and principles are not for times when there is no temptation: they are for moments such as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth – so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane – quite insane, with my veins running fire and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations are all I have at this hour to stand by; there I plant my foot’ (4). This is a moment of renunciation then, framed in an idiom that sounds morally conservative, and which certainly approaches the same set of notions as Mill but to almost exactly opposite effect. Where for Mill received principles are always subject to fundamental challenge, here for Jane they offer the only security when ‘individual convenience’ and the power of desire threaten to radically destabilise her. This is not to say that the novel is wholly inhospitable to an individualist reading; rather, that its self–understanding is rather more complex than the triumphalist version allows. . Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (London: Penguin, 1982 [1847]), p. 344.

Reader, I Triumphed: Complicating the Appeal of Jane Eyre

One way of describing this complexity would be to recognise the differing historical roots that underlie the novel, and which can be glimpsed even within a passage of such short compass as this one. When Jane utters the ‘indomitable’ reply that ‘I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself’, we are surely hearing a secular version of Protestant moral identity that goes back to Bunyan – a kind of individualism with a very different history than Mill’s restatement of Humboldtian bildung, though every bit as strenuous in conception and application. I am not sure that the various emphases and rhetorical climaxes are fully under Charlotte Brontë’s control – that is, I am not arguing that the complexity of the novel is to be resolved in the same way that one would seek to resolve a complex argument advanced in a philosophical treatise such as On Liberty. But it is certainly the case that the genuine assertion of individual self–worth that a passage like this contains, and which the whole book also represents, has to be understood, contra contemporary caricature, as likely to issue in an act of renunciation as of simple personal claiming. Furthermore, one of the most striking aspects of the novel is that even at its most vehement it includes contrary voices which contradict the simple pleasures of gratified identification that it undoubtedly offers to the reader. After Jane as a child gets her revenge for her humiliation, we are offered Helen Burns to provide a powerful example of humility and self–discipline. So altogether there is plenty in the book to productively complicate the triumphant liberal reading of it with which I began. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly to Jane Eyre that one would turn for the novel which most lends itself to that interpretation. This is partly a matter of the romance at the heart of its narrative – that central story of frustrated and then ultimately gratified desire which doubtless makes the mechanisms of readerly identification so powerful. In this respect, it contrasts strongly with The Mill on the Floss, which has a similar commitment to personal fulfilment for its heroine, but finds it impossible to imagine a means by which it can be realised. There is plenty in this novel also which allows it to be read in terms of the liberal paradigm – this time as a story of the defeat of the heroine by narrow social circumstances, patriarchy, etc. But George Eliot is at great pains to articulate a moral position which would supersede the attraction of

that liberal romance. In the following passage, for example, she is explaining to Stephen Guest why she cannot renew her relationship with him. It is another moment of renunciation, and invites comparison with the comparable moment in Jane Eyre: ‘O it is difficult – life is very difficult. It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling; – but then, such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us – the ties that have made others dependent on us – and would cut them in two. If life were quite easy and simple, as it might have been in paradise, and we could always see that one being first towards whom. . . I mean, if life did not make duties for us before love comes – love would be a sign that two people ought to belong to each other. But I see – I feel it is not so now: there are things we must renounce in life – some of us must resign love. Many things are difficult and dark to me – but I see one thing quite clearly – that I must not, cannot seek my own happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natural – but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too. And they would live in me still, and punish me if I didn’t obey them. I should be haunted by the suffering I had caused. Our love would be poisoned. Don’t urge me; help me – help me, because I love you.’ (5) Oddly enough, Maggie’s reasoning here is more Millian than the comparable passage from Jane Eyre – at least insofar as one should take seriously the parenthesis in Mill’s argument where he acknowledges the ‘rights of others’. That is to say, it is certainly possible to argue in the strictest liberal or utilitarian way that any moral dilemma of the kind faced by Maggie Tulliver should be resolved by considering the balance of advantage to all the parties involved. But in fact this is not how the passage reads; instead we can see an anguished movement of feeling as a young woman struggles towards renunciation and towards finding the resources that would aid in that action. . George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (London: Penguin, 1982 [1860]), pp. 570-1.

Reader, I Triumphed: Complicating the Appeal of Jane Eyre

It is possible to see in Maggie’s initial sentiment – ‘it seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling’ – a concession to moral individualism that the whole movement of her statement strains to overcome. This indeed would repeat the pattern of the wider book; in her earlier contentions with Stephen Guest, he puts to her some very plausible Bloomsbury– style arguments for why they should continue with their elopement, which she concedes to be plausible but finally rejects. Here the grounds of the rejection are ultimately not utilitarian; that is, she does not ‘resign love’ because of the damage that it would do to others but because of the intolerable burden such damage would do to other feelings and loyalties which are just as real as desire. In this perspective, there can be no objective calculus of benefit, but a continuous struggle to subordinate one legitimate feeling to another. To imagine that the world might be otherwise is utopian, to pretend that we might be now as Adam and Eve were in paradise and have the first ‘being’ on whom the desiring eye alighted. This conflict is one that George Eliot cannot resolve in The Mill on the Floss; this is why the novel ends with Maggie’s death. The way that George Eliot conceives her heroine’s progress, then, is profoundly antipathetic to the triumphant liberal narrative of personal assertion, and it is powerful because we are asked to recognise a complexity of feeling in relation to moral choice, and not to simplify matters by awarding desire the power to trump all other feelings. This is to make her position sound too straightforwardly conservative, however; there is no question here but that Maggie’s feeling towards Stephen are legitimate, modest, attractive and sexual. The novel thus provides a point of entry for any reader who seeks the gratifications of romance – but repeatedly prevents their realisation. Like Jane Eyre, then, The Mill on the Floss is a complex book, whose rhetorical economy leads the reader in different directions. Its ultimate resolutions, however, both at moments like the one I have dwelt on, and in the novel’s ending, challenge the liberal individualism already present in mid-19th-century culture, and now one of the predominant notes in our own. In fact, it is partly because George Eliot was engaging with something that was current when she was writing, and which has some continuity with our contemporary cultural dispositions, that her novels have the capacity to challenge and provoke in the way that they do.

It is not difficult, of course, for anyone with even a passing knowledge of nineteenth–century literature to show that there is more to it than stories of men and women, but especially women, emerging triumphant over difficulties. The point, however, is not to knock down a straw man, but to ask what continuities and discontinuities there are between mid-19th-century culture and our own which make this reading at once so plausible and so inadequate. Furthermore, starting from that basis, we can ask what happens when, in actually reading novels and other cultural statements from the ‘Victorian’ past, we find it necessary to complicate or altogether contradict contemporary simplifications. What value does it have, to put the matter crudely, to make this a point of entry for reading the 19th-century novel? Initially there is an undoubted value in productively complicating contemporary versions of individualism. In attending closely to the actual vocabularies in which Charlotte Brontë and John Stuart Mill articulate their sense of personal growth and self-worth, one can hear powerful and deeply-rooted traditions – of moral individualism and bildung – which I alluded to in a shorthand way by the names of Bunyan and Humboldt. If reading Jane Eyre, together with On Liberty or on its own, can be made to tell another ‘indomitable’ story beyond that triumphant romance, then some gain has certainly been made. This is the task of making more complex what I assume contemporary readers already find sympathetic or gratifying in the novels that they read. Its matching task is to bring readers to an engagement with moral positions with which we do not assume them to be initially in agreement. A novel like The Mill on the Floss, clearly enough, can provide an emotionally resonant alternative to liberalism. Paradoxically, this ambition for the novel – indeed, this ambition for the literature of the past, that it should provide powerful articulations of historically– specific subjectivities radically different from the present – is itself a liberal one. The main point, one could say, of reading the literature of the past is that it provides powerful alternatives to the tyranny of the present; it reminds us that things might be otherwise. Where for Mill one engaged strenuously with received opinion in order to exercise one’s moral faculties, perhaps one could say that one of the resources upon which one could draw in that battle is ‘received opinion’ in another guise: the literature

Reader, I Triumphed: Complicating the Appeal of Jane Eyre

of a now relatively distant past with which, nevertheless, there are still powerful connections. Both of these conclusions are founded on a belief in the possibility of sympathetic and attentive readings of novels like the ones I have briefly discussed. Such readings are, in my experience, more common for the 9thcentury novel than perhaps for any other form of literature now recognised as historically distant, precisely because the form provides a point of entry for that simplifying narrative with which I began. I take it that this is

a condition of our understanding: we can only recognise the specificity of the historically alien by virtue of some underlying connection to it. Hence my conclusion is not simply to deprecate the triumphant liberal narrative, but to see it as one starting point for a productive engagement with the 9th-century novel â&#x20AC;&#x201C; whose end-point, perhaps, would be a return of the form as one of the resources for a critique of the present and its stories with their ambivalent politcal and cultural charge.

Making the Most of Your Library â&#x20AC;&#x201C; A Guide for English Lecturers The role of university libraries is changing. As well as books, libraries now offer a huge and sometimes bewildering range of ICT services. Subject librarians, meanwhile, can help lecturers exploit to the full all that their library offers, but are all too often under-used by departments. With this in mind, the Subject Centre has produced a set of web pages (http:// www.english.heacademy.ac.uk /explore/resources/ library/index.php) answering commonly asked questions about the relationship between university libraries and English departments.

Renewals:

Refiguring University English in the 21st Century Royal Holloway, University of London, July 5–7, 2007 English (across the spectrum of Literature, Language, and Creative Writing) is a dynamic and everchanging subject. One axis of change is made up of the interactions between ‘English’ and adjacent subjects – drama, philosophy, history, media studies, and so on. Another is composed by the shifting relations between teacher scholars and their students. In few subjects do the cultures of teaching and of scholarship have such a potentially transformative reciprocal influence.The object of this Conference is to understand the realisation in Higher Education of English, its scholarship and communicative habits, through the lens of teaching. The Conference seeks to address the matter of the discipline through attention to performance, writing, rehearsal, technologies, pedagogy – all the ways in which students and scholars ‘do’ their subject. It will permit detailed and fruitful engagement with traditional and new subject matters as they are immersed in the medium of learning. Given this orientation, the emphasis will be upon structured reflective activity. There will of course be a place for plenary presentations, but within the overall design we aim to create a dialogue between presentation and practical ‘hands on’ exploration in smaller groups. Throughout, we hope to create a space within which varieties of experience and expertise can enter into dialogue.The Conference will be made up of a number of concurrent and complementary strands, interspersed with plenary presentations.There will also be evening readings and performances to complement the daytime programme. Our broad idea of the strands is as follows: • Pedagogy • Performance • Creative – critical crossover • New writing / e–writing • Reading and making: publishing and the history of the book • Postgraduate training These suggestions are simply indicative. We would welcome approaches at this stage from colleagues who might be interested in convening or refining any of these strands: please email the Subject Centre (esc@rhul.ac.uk). The conference website is at http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/renewals/ .

Transliteracy – Reading in the Digital Age Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media in the Faculty of Humanities at De Montfort University, reports on the ‘Transliteracies’ Conference held at the University of California at Santa Barbara on June 17–18, 2005. Anxiety or opportunity? The Transliteracies conference, held in June 2005 at the birthplace of the Voice of the Shuttle Humanities web-resource (1), dared to stare directly into the future of reading in the digital age and, to its credit, did not blink once. In this article I will describe the issues impacting on reading today, summarise the conference’s deliberations, and outline some ideas for how we might address these opportunities in the UK. My recommendations are also informed by the AHRC’s seminar on E–Publishing in the Arts and Humanities, held in London in May 2005 (2). The Transliteracies Conference was convened by Alan Liu (3), Professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) and founder of the Voice of the Shuttle in late 1994 at a time when his research into the potential of the internet ‘spilled over into the creation of courses, a Web–authoring collective, and a how–to manual titled The Ultrabasic Guide to the Internet for Humanities Users at UCSB (4). Well, he is certainly not lonely now. According to Nielsen//NetRatings’ July 2005 estimate (5), the digital media universe stands at 457,605,522 people. Since the web is still primarily a textual medium it would be reasonable to assume that most of these users can read their own language and many of them can probably read English as well. Far from the web reducing the number of readers, it is giving text the biggest boost since Gutenberg. Unfortunately for some, however, this new literacy is not about reading fixed type, but about reading on fluid and varied platforms – blogs, email, hypertext and, soon,

digital paper and all kinds of mobile media in buildings, vehicles, and supermarket aisles. Although text still dominates at the moment, it is possible that it might come to be superseded by image, audio, or even ideogram as the medium of choice. Hence ‘transliteracy’ – literacy across media. Consider, for example, the challenges faced by web developers working in China: Chinese uses thousands of ideograms. On a computer, they usually are written by typing words phonetically in Roman letters, then using special software to convert them to characters. Making things even more complex, the mainland’s communist leaders simplified many characters after the 1949 revolution, while Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and other societies use the old system. So a search engine must sift through twice as many characters. And Chinese is written without spaces between words, making it hard for a machine to figure out where one ends and the next begins. Then there are the quirks of a writing system with a vast literary history, 1 billion modern users and pressure to keep up with technology and international commerce. Baidu.com’s advertising notes that Chinese has 38 ways to say ‘I’ (6).

‘Although text still dominates at the moment, it is possible that it might come to be superseded by image, audio, or even ideogram as the medium of choice.’

. http://vos.ucsb.edu/. . http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/news/events/previousevents/e–publishing_research_strategy_seminar_on_e–publishing_in_the_arts_humanities.asp. . Liu is also the author of The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (University of Chicago Press, 2004), an insightful study of the role of new technologies in connecting the humanities with the business world. . Excerpt from Alan Liu, ‘Globalizing the Humanities – Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research, Humanities Collections 1, no. 1 (1998): 41–56 (http://vos.ucsb.edu/excerpt.asp). . http://www.nielsen–netratings.com/news.jsp?section=dat_gi. 26

Western worries about the impact of txt msgs seem petty compared with that. However it is not just a question of format.Thanks to the widespread adoption of virtual learning environments in academia, many colleagues have mastered the art of creating online content, but the real challenge is what you do with it. Much of the discussion at Transliteracies was about exactly this – the growth of social software and its impact on interactivity and collaboration. This issue has not really hit the UK yet but it is on its way, so just as we get used to writing online modules, along come blogs, wikis, Flickr and del. . China Search Engine Baidu.com Set For IPO’ 10e20 (http:// www.10e20webdesign.com/news/news_center_latest_technology_internet_news_01_august_05_China_Search_Engine_Baidu_ com_Set_for_IPO.htm).

Transliteracy – Reading in the Digital Age

icio.us, all woven together by RSS. What are these exotica? The following notes are adapted from Wikipedia (7), whose anarchic liberalism itself creates yet another challenge: Wikipedia: A web-based, multi-language, free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers and sponsored by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. In recent years its philosophy of openness has attracted insults and devotion in equal parts. http://www.wikipedia.org Blog: A web–based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order). May be individual or collaborative. Example: Romantic Circles http://www.rc.umd.edu/blog/ See also vlogs (video blogs) Wiki: A web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content. Example: WikiNews http://en.wikinews.org/ Flickr: A digital photo sharing website widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. http://www.flickr.com del.icio.us: A social software web service for storing and sharing web bookmarks via a method of tagging them with keywords. The result is an organic and ever-growing lacework of shared and interconnected tags. http://del.icio.us/ aggregator: An easy-to-read webpage or application which subscribes to sites which have RSS (8) feeds such as blogs, some websites and mailing lists, and other services, and provides alerts when they are updated. Instead of using bookmarks and mailing lists individually, the user can collect them all in one page for ease of use. Especially good for news and blogs. Example: http://www.bloglines.com/

All of the above combine to create an evolving knowledge network of unprecedented reach. As Dan Gillmor wrote recently in The Financial Times, the networks supported by wikis and blogs are now ‘a key part of a growing, complex global conversation’ (9). They are also increasingly part of the academic conversation because they fit very well into pedagogical traditions of information-sharing. The Transliteracies project has set out to understand this evolving process from the point of view of the reader.

The conference Transliteracies (10) is a collaborative research project involving several campuses of the University of California which was recently awarded a five year grant to conduct research into the technological, social, and cultural practices of online reading. It arose out of UCSB’s earlier Digital Cultures project, which sponsored the June event (11), the first in a series. The conference set out to examine how people today are reading in digital, networked environments. Speakers included a number of researchers who have worked both in literature and in new media – Alan Liu, Jerome McGann, J.Hillis Miller, Leah Price, Bill Warner and others – plus key West Coast computing innovators including Curtis Wong, Group Manager of Microsoft Next Media Research Group, John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist of the Xerox Corporation, and Anne Balsamo, Director of the Institute of Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California. The structure of the conference was experimental and reflected the familiar tension of the digital – a tight skeleton of pre-designed elements encircled by the less predictable wrapper of human interaction. A blog was set up before the event where participants could read the documentation and begin the discussion, and the conference itself comprised a series of keynote speeches interspersed with three roundtables. These were presented with a series of pre-designed questions, but all returned to the same one: ‘How can reading online be improved? And what do we have to do to get there?’ (12). There is no space here to list all the topics discussed, but as an indication, Roundtable 1 looked at ‘Reading, . ‘Web 2.0? Try 3.0’, Financial Times, 20 April, 2005. 10. http://transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu/archives/. 11. http://transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu/category/conference–2005/.

. http://www.wikipedia.org/. . RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication

12. http://transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu/post/conference–2005/ seed–questions/. 27

Transliteracy – Reading in the Digital Age

Past and Present’, including ‘What is the difference between reading and searching, or browsing?’ and, the burning question, ‘How to take a good online text to bed?’ Roundtable 2 considered ‘Reading and Media’, asking ‘In what terms can we discuss the cultural significance, value, and function of reading in the age of new media and multimedia, a moment when multi–sensory immersive experience seems to be privileged?’ Roundtable 3, ‘Reading as a Social Practice’ asked ‘How do reading practices create or define community? Does this work better or worse online than off?’ and ‘Is reading becoming more (or less) social, collective, or collaborative than in the past?’ The final panel featured an experiment whereby members of the audience with wireless laptops were encouraged to blog together parallel to the live discussion. I participated in this and we made a brave attempt but the multitasking proved rather too much for even this tech–literate audience to cope with! The transcript is online along with a dynamic visualisation of the conversation (13). Despite the focus on new technologies, the keynote speech which discussants constantly referred back to focussed not on digital media but upon Galileo, Newton, and the Cambridge Maths Tripos examination. The first speaker, Adrian Johns, of the University of Chicago, used such examples to illustrate that reading does not happen in isolation. He emphasised that whatever the era or technology, texts are presented within a context, to and by individuals who influence their reception for good or bad, and they very often need intermediaries to make them comprehensible. We took these notions as the foundation for our deliberations, and they helped us over the first hurdle of ‘traditional reading’ by making it very clear that reading in any medium has never been simple or transparent. Now a Research Professor at UC Irvine after retiring there from full–time teaching and research, J. Hillis Miller confirmed this, remarking that after a lifetime of teaching he still could never be sure that his students’ experience of the text matched his own, no matter which media were used.

In the medieval period ‘good reading’ was collective and public, and silent reading often provoked suspicion, but as reading became more professionalized certain practices which once were common came to be frowned upon – pointing at the page as one reads, reading aloud, annotating margins, or permitting one’s lips to move during reading. Nevertheless, as Leah Price noted, reading has always disrupted the linear via ‘mining’ practices of tables of contents, indexes, and concordances. And in relation to search engines, Alan Liu reminded us that Walter Ong had asked what would happen if we could never look anything up, but what happens now, he asked, when you can look everything up? Anne Balsamo pointed out that reading has traditionally been part of community life, whereby certain texts are read by all, religious texts being the most obvious example, and Bill Warner offered the notion of the commonplace book as an illustration of ways in which families collected and passed on practical knowledge and techniques. These examples draw clear parallels with contemporary social softwares which also aggregate information without the mediation of a formal editing process. According to Jerome McGann, the traditional university model of semi–private reading within restricted peer groups is bound to be affected by new public models which depend on openness, and this issue is already causing a crisis in the academy and beyond. The Los Angeles Times, for example, recently experimented with a wiki page and quickly closed it down due to ‘abuse’ (14). Unsurprisingly, we kept returning to the problem of editing. As Walter Bender, Director of MIT Media Lab, emphasised, the more texts we produce the more vital is the role of the editor, and to that end, the Media Lab has recently appointed its first Editor-in-Residence. There was also a great deal of interest in annotations – people wanted to be able to annotate documents but they also wanted access to others’ annotations. UCLA Professor of English and Design/Media Arts, N.Katherine Hayles, expressed optimism about ways in which the Humanities tradition of close reading and paying deep attention to texts could be fruitfully applied to media–specific texts

‘Do academics have to accept that they can no longer control knowledge?

13. http://hybrid.ucsc.edu/Agonistics/Transliteracies/Interface/agon1. html (needs to be left to run for a while to see how the conversation builds up). 28

14. LA Times closes wiki’, US Politics About.Com, 19 June 2005 (http:// uspolitics.about.com/b/a/178945.htm).

Transliteracy – Reading in the Digital Age

where the materiality of the reading environment is an essential element. Editing and annotation lead naturally to peer–reviewing, which takes on new dimensions in a world where texts become available in multiple and ever-changing drafts. Although the prospect of so many versions is daunting, there was also a fascination with such complexity and much enthusiasm for developing ways to record and make visible the evolving histories of documents.

The way forward So, do these developments provoke anxiety or opportunity? How can academics approach the issue of students using collaborative and contributory resources like wikis and blogs? Do they have to accept that they can no longer control knowledge? That soon their books may no longer be read? That semi–private reading in small peer groups will give way to more public community/ open source reading, subject to constant revision and annotation? How can we make use of interactive reading in the seminar room and lecture theatre? Some academics now allow their students to blog live during lectures, with the resulting conversation displayed simultaneously on screen. Will such practice contribute to learning or diute it? How can we manage online documentation which is added to and edited by many, often unaccredited, authors? How can we track the provenance of such materials? Add our own annotations and read those contributed by others? Develop new processes of editing and peer review? So many questions and as yet few answers. In May 2005 I attended an AHRC Research Strategy Seminar on E–Publishing in the Arts and Humanities where I was delighted to find a strong commitment from the AHRC

to support and encourage experimentation in this area. The following recommendations are drawn from both the Transliteracies conference and the AHRC seminar:

Awareness The Transliteracies participants identified a gap between what is actually happening with online reading, and the ability of academics to comprehend it. Rather than trying to control and dictate the direction reading is taking, scholars should study what is actually happening right now. This echoed the opinion of AHRC seminar speaker Martin Richardson, Managing Director, Journals Division, OUP, who stressed that ‘we should learn from the ways in which scholars are already using e–resources, rather than try to push them in other directions’. This includes a recognition of the fact that digital culture is now rubbing against the boundaries between academia and the wider community, and the tools and approaches of transliteracy can both help the public engage with academic research and also assist external scholars to contribute to it.

Laboratories We need transdisciplinary laboratories where we can study new social practices of reading, synthesise established histories with newer developments, and produce appropriate taxonomies for these new kinds of reading. The Humanities must invest in this process whilst also learning from the expertise of the science community. And, crucially, implementation of transdisciplinarity means working within our own universities to make boundaries more porous not just metaphysically but practically, in financial and management terms too, because transliteracy operates best in a flexible environment.

Transliteracy – Reading in the Digital Age

Blogging Academic blogging by both staff and students should be encouraged because it reflects the reality of how knowledge constantly grows, shifts and develops. Fixed type has never been able to keep up with the naturally fluid and organic ways in which we learn, teach and research.At the AHRC seminar, Michael Jubb, Director of the Research Libraries Network, asked ‘why shouldn’t we encourage academic blogging – especially in areas currently covered by academic journals?’ and enquired whether short–run print monographs ‘are really a sensible way to communicate with a relatively small group of peers?’

Publishing Experiments in e-publishing are vital and must be undertaken as widely as possible. Failures should be studied as closely as successes. This is an embryonic field and every faltering step adds to our knowledge. At the AHRC seminar, Paul Ayris, Director of Library Services at UCL, and chair of SHERPA (15) said that monographs are not sustainable, and e-books are unpopular across any discipline. He advocated a combination of web format with Print on Demand ‘for those needing paper’. We certainly must continue to insist that academics who become fixated on PDFs are missing the point. There are important opportunities for combining e-publishing with the kinds of interactivity described above, and in such situations PoD will quickly become obsolete. (Although it might be replaced by ‘Burn on Demand’ for DVD formats, or similar.)

Peer review David Robey, Director of the AHRC’s ICT in Arts and Humanities Research Programme, insisted that ‘there is no contradiction between peer–reviewing and open access’. There are, however, many questions about how peer reviewing might operate in a transliterate environment, especially with regard to quality. The level of anxiety around this issue means that there is little motivation to experiment with peer review, especially in relation to creating a scholarly structure for the creative and performing arts and new media. But like Adrian Johns we must transit time as well as media, exploring historical 15. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/index.html

as well as future perspectives, and experiment with practices from scientific disciplines, such as the circulation of pre-prints for feedback, and perhaps the revival of early types of perusal.

Connection between e–learning and e–publishing This issue arose at both events, but in each case as something of an afterthought. And yet there are so many overlaps between the two. I would guess that the people who engage with e-learning are the same people who have an enthusiasm for e-publishing, and of course anyone who creates e-learning materials is ‘e-publishing’ in some sense. Any divide comes not only from the teaching/research split, of whose iniquities we are all aware, but also from the apartheid which occurs in many institutions between the technicians and programmers who build and support the systems and increasingly find themselves labelled as ‘e-learning support’, and the academic researchers who may be perceived to operate on a somewhat more exalted level. It is our responsibility to change this destructive anomaly. At De Montfort University, transdisciplinarity is at the core of a number of new ventures. The Centre for Creative Technologies, founded by Professor of Music Technology, Andrew Hugill, is due to open in 2006 and will form the heart of collaborative digital research across the university. In the Faculty of Humanities I am working with Kate Pullinger, Simon Mills, and other colleagues to develop courses which are deeply informed by transliteracy, including a PG Dip in Publishing and New Media and an online MA in Creative Writing and Technology (http://writing.typepad.com/cwt/). My own research is moving forward with a focus on narratives in digital contexts, most recently with the new Writing and the Digital Life collaborative blog and email list (http://writing.typepad.com) plus other projects in the pipeline. Transliteracy is about openness – across disciplines, communities, cultures and countries. There are great opportunities for those with the courage to descend from the safety of the (offline and somewhat crumbling) ivory tower.

Retrospective on DUET Susan Bassnett, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick, remembers the work of the DUET (Developing University English Teaching) project, which, as Ben Knights notes elsewhere in this newsletter (p. 3), began 25 years ago. The ways in which human beings learn are complex. We can be trained, like animals, by brutality, programmed and brainwashed into obedience, learning in effect through fear. We can learn by following examples, by being mentored and coached, by having things that are difficult explained to us. Remembering how we were taught, some of us recall inspirational teachers, some recall a passion for a particular subject, others shudder at the memory of joy in learning cut off by tyranny or negativity. Our memories often go back a very long way, to our first encounters with formal education. By the time students reach university, their patterns of learning are firmly fixed, for better or worse. My earliest memory is of being dragged into a circle of small children, all mocking me and singing, with an earnest teacher anxious for the strange foreign child ‘to join in the fun’. That sense of being an outsider has never left me, though fifty years have passed. I was able to start remembering my own learning journey when I first joined the DUET team on a workshop in Norwich many years ago. After that there were other workshops, including one in Poland and another, not so long ago, at Emory in Atlanta. What made DUET special was its unique combination of the scholarly and the personal: alongside rigorously prepared academic sessions, all participants were assigned to a creative writing group and, most controversially, to a group run on Tavistock principles, close to the old idea of encounter groups that had come into prominence in the 1970s and early 1980s. This combination led to a three–layered journey: all of us were able to explore new ideas in literary studies and to engage with new pedagogical methods, we were all compelled to face up to the centrality of writing in the discipline and we were able, in a group setting, to engage with difficult areas within ourselves. I remember tears, arguments, confrontations, extraordinary moments of revelation, and a resulting shift of perception that has never left me. Through DUET I began to do what I have done ever since- to combine the scholarly with the personal, and not to be afraid to do so.The child who was dragged into the circle learned to understand both why she had been

so frightened and humiliated, and how to avoid inflicting similar pain on her own students. Trawling through memory, certain moments from DUET meetings stand out: a story–telling exercise, whereby working in pairs, we told one another a version of a myth and then each told the other’s tale back, like an echo. As a revelation of the gap between what is said and what is heard, this exercise is marvellous. You tell someone something, then you hear what they heard from you, so that the process of inner translation is made manifest. I remember inventing an exercise once, based on the Star Trek idea of going to a planet where no man has gone before. In this exercise, one person leaves the room, the others stay inside and have 5 minutes to work out a communication system, to decide how, if at all, they can be killed, and what their intentions are towards the incomer. The person outside similarly has to decide what his or her intentions are going to be: to enter the room as a coloniser, or as a potential friend. The first person to arrive on the planet, I remember, killed everyone by embracing them. When I walked in, I was filled with dread because everyone was so kind and yet so sinister – they had decided I was food and I could not quite decode the signs. As a way of making people think about insiders and outsiders, about what it means to join a society when you come from a completely different culture, this simple and highly entertaining exercise works brilliantly. And my third great DUET memory is of dancing up and down corridors in a shabby student residence in Katowice, at our last night party, where music was provided by all of us opening our doors and turning on our radios. My colleague these days at Warwick, Piotr Kuhiwczak, was one of the dancers on the Polish side. Friendships were made at DUETs, working relationships formed, lives changed. The historical moment when DUET came into being is important. DUET was born at the height of the Great Theory Wars, the crisis point in literary studies, before the advent of post-colonial thinking, when we were trying to come to terms with wave after wave of new ideas – feminism, post-structuralism, deconstruction,

‘I remember tears, arguments, confrontations, extraordinary moments of revelation, and a resulting shift of perception that has never left me.’

Retrospective on DUET

post-modernism, to name but four. Those of us trained in the Leavisite mode, or like myself in the more philological methods of close reading deriving from Empson and the Russian Formalists were literally at the epicentre of the critical revolution. We were teaching courses that belonged to one era, reading late into the night books and essays that were changing our view of the subject and of the world. Moreover, we were part of a university system that was changing rapidly, as numbers expanded, as student groups internationalised, as new subjects like film and television and theatre studies took off. DUET provided a space for exploring change and for enabling those of us keen to move forward to become less afraid of change.

Was DUET important? I believe it was enormously significant. Even those who remained hostile to the experience – and there were some – did not deny that the time spent in the workshops was unique. I believe the workshops transformed the thinking and the practice of a lot of people, and over the years, as I have met former DUET participants, now often elevated to professorial and even Vice-Chancellorial rank, I am struck by the significance that many scholars and writers attach to those DUET meetings. At the present time, perhaps we need more DUETs to help us move on to another stage.

E-learning Projects The English Subject Centre has embarked on a series of e-learning projects using funding provided through the JISC elearning framework. An investigation into how ‘online learning designs’ could be used in the teaching of English using the ‘LAMS’ authoring environment (http://www.lamsinternational.com/index.html) is being carried out in three universities headed by the Oxford University Learning Technologies group. A detailed study of the use of, and attitudes towards, e-learning in English studies across the UK is the subject of the second project. The third project is investigating possible pedagogical models for teaching using digital archives such as Early English Books Online (EEBO), Literature Online (LION) and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). The fourth project is a longitudinal study of the use of online discussion forums in undergraduate programmes and focuses in particular on assessment. More details about all these projects will appear in future issues of this newsletter and on the Subject Centre website.

Book Review Pedagogical Research in English Studies: A Case Study in Creative Writing Heather Beck, The Writing School, Department of English, Manchester Metropolitan University. Review of Rebecca O’Rourke, Creative Writing: Education, Culture and Community. Published by NIACE (National Institute of Adult Continuing Education), 21 De Montfort Street, Leicester, UK, LE1 7GE. 263 pages. ISBN: 1 86201 1613. £18.95 In a recent English Subject Centre newsletter, Ben Knights issues an invitation for colleagues ‘to engage in a range of related activities which may be described as variously Pedagogical Research, Scholarship of Teaching, and Reflective Practice’ saying that ‘writing and research about pedagogy can be as important and valuable as subject research traditionally conceived.’ (1) As such, Rebecca O’Rourke’s case study is definitely worthwhile reading, not just for creative writing specialists but for anyone interested in pedagogical research in English Studies. My own teaching experience is limited to undergraduates and postgraduates in higher education, while O’Rourke’s book focuses on the adult education sector, so if like me, you’re largely unfamiliar with pedagogy outside higher education, this may well be a further reason to investigate her book. Indeed, midway through the study, O’Rourke warns: There is also a danger that creative writing in higher education will monopolise both the knowledge production and pedagogy of creative writing, assuming that in both instances higher education practitioners are more sophisticated than those working in schools or adult education (p. 140). Like it or not, I suppose there is a sort of hierarchy implied by the ‘higher’ in the term ‘higher education’.To this end, O’Rourke also criticises some histories of Creative Writing for focusing only on higher education, arguing that pedagogy in higher education, adult education and schools shares much in common and that practitioners working in different areas can learn much from each other, and this is also a position maintained by NAWE (Na . Issue 8, June 2005, p.13.

tional Association of Writers in Education). To return to Ben Knight’s invitation, O’Rourke’s work is, quite simply, exemplary as Pedagogical Research. Her study is motivated by an important and clearly defined question: Had late-20th-century campaigns for a more democratic and inclusive approach to writing and literature in British cultural policy and education been successful? (p. 230) To investigate this, O’Rourke engages in a five year long ethnographic study exploring the dynamic that exists between policy and practice in Creative Writing courses and free-standing groups in the adult education sector in Cleveland, Teesside. The methods she uses include participative observation and a comprehensive range of qualitative investigation techniques, such as structured interviews. In keeping with good practice, she anonymizes students, tutors and names of all courses and free-standing writing groups. The book is structured as follows: O’Rourke sets up the context of her study by considering literature in relation to changes in cultural policy with its focus on becoming more inclusive and participative. She discusses new managerialism and market reasoning with its attack on dependency in this context and states that this is tempered by educational values and purposes. (I plead ignorance on management theory and market reasoning, but I do have a minor quibble here insofar as I do wish O’Rourke spent more time unpacking this aspect of her argument. However, other readers will no doubt disagree.) Next O’Rourke gives a critical account of the rise of Creative Writing in education and argues how different educational locations and contexts result in different ide33

Pedagogical Research in English Studies: A Case Study in Creative Writing

as about Creative Writing’s value and purpose and hence entail different pedagogies. She then sets out details of her extensive ethnographic study of social writing. This theorises cultural policy’s shift from conceptualising writing as a singular to a socialised activity, e.g., of the sort found on courses and in writing groups. To explore this, she develops the concept of a ‘local culture of writing’ for the following reason: I developed the concept of the local culture of writing to represent and analyse the complex ground of lived relations between writers and their writing. This holds cultural and educational policy on one hand, and their social practice on the other, as important terms but it enables a more complex account of the interaction between them. Local cultures of writing not only mediate policy towards creative writing but also generate their own form of regulation.This is not always directed towards the same ends as that of cultural policy, whether it is driven by an older set of values and ideology, to do with elites and individual genius, or more contemporary values of diversity, inclusion and socialised activities. (p. 231) The argument she then develops is particularly strong insofar as it shows the complexity of forms of organisation and support for writers across the study. Next, she considers ‘peopling local cultures of writing,’ giving profiles of participants, including how they started and continued writing, reasons for joining courses and writing groups, and their initial expectations of such activities. Her participants’ profiles conformed to national profiles for participation in adult education, being ‘predominantly female, over 50 and white’ (p.94). Decisive catalysts for joining groups and courses were often due to externally imposed changes such as motherhood, divorce, bereavement, ill-health, redundancy and retirement. O’Rourke argues that writing came into focus for participants at times when personal identity, direction and values were in crisis. She finds that getting into writing was as much down to chance as it was to inclination and considers how many potential participants knew little if anything about what goes on in socialised Creative Writing activities, arguing that this represents a major barrier to participation. 34

Initially O’Rourke distinguished between free–standing groups and tutored courses as she anticipated differences of experience, writing ambitions and types of activities. However, there was not much differentiation between them, with participants moving between groups and courses and likewise attending both simultaneously. She finds that participants talked about courses as if they were groups and that tutors as well as students played down the educational dimension of their activities: ‘I’m not the teacher and I don’t think of them as my students’ (Tutor, Crowden and Stanage, p.119). O’Rourke considers how this seemed to challenge the power relations of compulsory education systems with both tutors and students conceptualising Creative Writing as exploratory and tending to construe education in terms of regulation and control that ‘precluded developing active and transformative pedagogies.’ (p.119) She describes the following standard format of activities across most groups and courses: People in turn read their work. The tutor or chair of the group comments first and then other people add their questions and comments.The only variation is whether a time or word allocation operates. It is assumed that everyone will read something each week, and that this will be new work, usually a response to a group task. Work was rarely revised and brought back to the group. (p.120) This contrasts with creative writing pedagogy in higher education insofar as re-drafting is often a key activity (2). Also, unlike many higher education courses with their learning outcomes and activities clearly specified and linked to assessment and assessment criteria, O’Rourke finds in her study that there was little if any discussion of why or how work should be discussed, and she concludes that, ‘where rationale for workshops remains tacit its potential for learning and teaching is curtailed.’ (p.120) In both free-standing writing groups and courses led by tutors O’Rourke finds several contradictions embedded in pedagogical practice. For example, she finds that although creative writing has a rhetoric of empowerment, quite often in practice it entails group and tutor dependency. Students often depended on tutors to generate topics, rather than thinking them up on their own. They . See, for example, Peter Howarth’s article above (p. 10).

Pedagogical Research in English Studies: A Case Study in Creative Writing

also expected tutors to give formulae and rules for writing and had difficulty making the transition to independent writing that giving feedback on each other’s work in progress is supposed to engender. Similarly, students often wrote for the course or group and what they felt others such as potential publishers expected rather than following their own agendas. As such, there were tensions between individual development, group considerations and commercial imperatives. There are also a host of other issues discussed and I urge readers to explore this area as it is fertile ground for learning as well as for the making of comparisons between pedagogy in adult education and in higher education settings. O’Rourke moves on to discuss the experience of creative writing tutors, including the tutor’s standing as a writer, locating a creative practice in an educational setting, managing feedback and criticism, and diversity of purpose and experience in student groups. She explains that her findings confirm Linda Anderson’s (1993) view that becoming a writing tutor can distort a writer’s identity; rather than working primarily to gain status as a writer, tutors gain status and identity by being teachers. This results in a contradiction: tutors are employed for their work as writers but rewarded by their ability to improve other’s writing, while in the process their own writing is often adversely affected. (Note: It may be my mistake, but I couldn’t find a full reference to Anderson in the bibliography.) O’Rourke also discusses how many tutors seemed to shy away from the role of tutoring, and she sets out some implications of this. For example, when tutors are reluctant to specify aims and objectives a ‘fuzziness’ develops around courses and this may result in barriers to participation insofar as students don’t know what they’re asked to participate in and how to do so effectively. As such, tutors’ reluctance to take directive, interventionalist roles paradoxically emphasises the dependency relation between them and their students. She also finds that many tutors act as if power is centred outside the classroom, with agents, publishers and editors, rather than considering and confronting the power they have as both published writers and tutors. To return to her research question, O’Rourke argues how this rhetoric obscures the extent to which participation needs to be consciously brought about rather than merely assumed. (Readers interested in this strand of argument concern-

ing power and identity, should also refer to Anna Leahy’s forthcoming edited book: Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project, (Multilingual Matters, November 2005). The argument then considers three myths of the common writer: Firstly, that their work simply gushes out, sloppy and unworked; secondly, that they are obsessed with publication; and finally that they seek and depend upon each other’s critical admiration. (p. 172) O’Rourke likewise explores questions of progress and value, considering three aspects of progress reported by participants: Firstly, they related areas of personal development, such as increased confidence, a wider social circle and general intellectual stimulus to their involvement in creative writing activities. Secondly, they sometimes saw progress in terms of the wider educational opportunities creative writing introduced. Finally, as might be expected, they measured progress by changes in the writing itself. (p. 190) She critiques the myth of mutual admiration, but also considers tensions between feedback and criticism, including participants’ feelings that they are not skilled enough to give valuable criticism and that friendships sometimes ‘muffled their response’ to work. O’Rourke also addresses the issue of internal / external guidance, with many participants discussing how feedback carries more weight when it comes from an authority like the tutor. As such, she finds that neither groups nor courses took full control of the process of giving and receiving feedback and that therefore these skills often remained underdeveloped. Valuable aspects of their experience included the chance to be heard and read by an audience and appreciation of the diversity within groups. Interestingly, O’Rourke finds that the providers and organisers of the many elements ‘saw the range of interests and abilities as a factor that limited the potential achievement of those writers involved’ and argued that a narrower focus ‘would enable individuals to progress further with their writing’ (p.226). Overall, O’Rourke finds that socialised writing was valuable insofar as it eased participants into the ‘ebbs 35

Pedagogical Research in English Studies: A Case Study in Creative Writing

and flows of the writing process,’ modelling how writing is ‘a combination of inspiration and technique and as much about discipline and habit as one-off flashes of inspired, driven writing’ (p. 226). The final chapter returns to O’Rourke’s question concerning the success of policy campaigns for a more democratic and inclusive approach to writing and literature.

I won’t spoil anyone’s experience of reading this remarkable book by dwelling on details from the final chapter, but as O’Rourke says, a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ does not quite answer the question she initially poses. I hope it’s clear that this book covers a lot of ground in interesting and original ways: please put it on your ‘must read’ list.

T3 (Teaching Topics and Texts) Uncertain about what to do in the 9.00am seminar tomorrow? T3, our new interactive resource (www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/resources/t3/), could provide a little gentle inspiration. Organised by text and topic,T3 is a collection of pithy teaching ideas especially designed for hard–pressed English lecturers.T3 is interactive, so we invite (and eagerly await) your contributions – on whatever texts and topics you prefer.

News & Reports Designing a Subject Centre Event Thinking of collaborating with us on an event? Ben Knights, Subject Centre Director offers some thoughts. Many of the events and workshops to be found in the English Subject Centre programme are jointly sponsored. We welcome and always take very seriously suggestions from colleagues for such joint events. Practical information about setting up one or two day events can be found on our website at http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/events/propose.php# (click on ‘How we can help’). But the Subject Centre team thinks it might also be helpful to spell out some of the thinking that underlies planning an event.We are prepared to take this risk of sounding patronising because we strongly believe that any event with which a subject centre is associated (be it conference, workshop, symposium, round table, or departmental development seminar) should in itself model sound pedagogic principles. In other words, those designing an event should deliberately think about how they expect participants to learn as well as what they hope they will learn. We have learnt from experience that under pressure academics sometimes fall into a default position – to put out a call (or ask their friends) for papers. There is a place for giving papers, though one might note that the relentless barrage of wall-to-wall 15 / 20 minute papers in the contemporary research conference has become something of an ordeal for presenter and audience alike. As a ritual, it probably has more to do with the sociology of the profession than with generating Deep Thought about the subject matter.At all events,‘giving papers’ should not be the first choice of the organiser of an event on learning and teaching. Participants in workshops are themselves to some temporary degree in the same position as students on modules. Part of the value of a development event is to enable them to reflect upon that experience of ‘being on the receiving end’. Even in the best–organised event they may sometimes feel cross, frustrated, or bored. Equally, they may feel excited or even elated. Obviously what you are trying to do is minimise the former and stimulate the latter.To this end you need to think about the shape, flow and rhythm of the occasion. Some kind of input (short presentations, brief case studies) is generally though not

universally a good idea. But input should be focused and contribute to the overall design. It is there to stimulate rather than to impart information. Partly of course presentations vary the pace and nature of activities. A crisp and focused presentation makes participants feel as though they have been given something (see below). But people need time to absorb and think through what they’ve been presented with, and one of the besetting sins of conference and event organisers – it may actually be the besetting sin – is trying to cram too much into their event. Yes to richness and density: all for that. Realistically though, in a one day event you have got from say 10.30 till 4.30 at the most. A blow-by-blow day a) risks leaving participants bored and frustrated; b) almost invariably leads to the breakdown of time boundaries. An overrun of 15 minutes by 11.30 will probably be an overrun of 30 minutes by 12.45, leading you to have to take an ad hoc decision to cut down the lunch break, or even cancel the final session. Structure can be deadening, obsessive, mechanical. (Group chorus of ‘Bring out number, weight and measure in a year of dearth.’) But implicit in the previous paragraph is a belief that a well-designed structure is actually enabling. As well as varying the elements, organisers need to think realistically about how much time to allot to each element of the day. Presentations and discussion almost always take longer than you think, and it’s unsatisfactory for everyone to end up with off cuts of time too short for any sensible use. Allow adequate time for breaks – there will be a queue for the coffee urn, the coffee is hot, people get talking (it’s what they’ve come for). If you are using small groups, think about how they report back to each other or to the plenary – that too takes time. As it is also potentially repetitive, you might want to think about other methods (e.g. posters, OH slides) than serial report backs. Above all, think about what you or your co-convenors can manage on the day. Occasional participants may thrive on chaos, but generally speaking people like to know where they are, and that the organisers know what they are doing. They don’t want to be 37

wondering whether the lunch break (promised for 2.45 and it’s already . 0 and climbing, and no one seems to be able to stop that voluble man over there) will ever come. If you have done as the Subject Centre advises and circulated a plan for the day, stick to it unless there are very good reasons to change.

• Put yourself in the shoes of those who are going to attend. What are likely to be their material or mental needs during the event? Academia has its share of heroic bladders, but most people need to go the loo from time to time, and also look forward to breaks where they can talk to colleagues – preferably with some simple treat in terms of drink or food.

To summarise briefly:

• This is among other things a social occasion. How are you going to effect introductions? Just by letting people mingle? By a round of names and ‘why I am here’? No prescriptions: just an appeal for ‘fitness for purpose’ in the matter of introductions.

• Think carefully about who and what your proposed event is for.A clear – though not prescriptive – view of objectives is a good starting place for thinking through how you want to do it. • Vary activities. Participants can get as irritated by being incessantly divided into small groups as they can by being incessantly talked at. • Plan enough digestion and making up time into the day. As host you don’t want to spend the day looking at your watch and making impromptu decisions to cut down or cancel sessions. • Participants are going to give up time and make an effort to come to this event. What will vindicate their decision to attend? What will they take away? Sometimes organisers need to ‘give presents’: some special input, some useful materials or handouts. The opportunity to network and talk to colleagues within an enabling structure is often gift enough – but as organiser you need to weigh up whether to include some ‘special’ elements. (For example presentations by colleagues who are known experts in a particular area, or who have a particular expertise to show off.) • You’ll never pre–empt all the unpredictables that happen on the day, but do as much preparation as possible first. For example, capture and brief those who are going to chair sessions or lead small groups. Or if you are using rooms which you are not used to, visit them first. Is it up to you to move furniture, or can you arrange for caretakers to do it? (Getting sweaty and miserable dragging tables while greeting early arrivals is a bad start to your day.) If presenters are expecting to be able to use Powerpoint, are laptop and data projector available? Is the room networked? Better to find out the truth before the day itself.

• A lot of factoids about attention span travel around the middle earth of L&T. But that doesn’t mean you should not think seriously about how long you can reasonably expect people to concentrate. • Don’t turn it into a marathon: it isn’t the best way of ending to have people tensely checking their watches, fumbling with train timetables, or trying to tiptoe out without being seen. If your topic is very rich and complex, perhaps you should consider an event over two days.

Guide to Departmental Websites This new area of the Subject Centre website (www. english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/resources/students/ index.php) is aimed at prospective English students and their parents and carers. The variations between different departments’ websites means that it is not always easy for the uninitiated to work out precisely how one course differs from another. This set of web pages provides guidance about such things as the structure of English degrees as well as more general advice on how to ‘read’ departmental websites.

Supporting New Lecturers Gillian Wright, Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham, reports on a Subject Centre event held in December 2004. The Subject Centre will be running another New Lecturers’ Event in December 2005. See the Events Calendar on p. 4 for details. This event was designed by the English Subject Centre as a means of providing subject-specific training to complement the more generalised training in university teaching methods now routinely provided by many institutions. The programme got under way at tea-time on the Friday, with a general introduction and getting-to-know-eachother session, followed by dinner, a talk by Elisabeth Jay of Oxford Brookes University, and drinks in the bar. On the Saturday, there were four sessions: topics covered in the morning were seminar planning, marking, and e-learning, whilst the afternoon was given over to paired discussions of problems we had each encountered in our teaching experience to date. I doubt if many of the 2 or so participants who turned up at the University of Birmingham conference centre on a cold Friday afternoon in December did so with an excess of enthusiasm for the task. Many had probably been bullied or cajoled by their Departments into going. Some may have taken comfort in the hope that attendance at the event would look good on their CVs. Most had firm if unspecified views on how they would have preferred to spend their Friday night and Saturday morning. It is greatly to the credit of the organisers that by the end of the event, there was widespread agreement that it had been an important and useful exercise. ‘New lecturers’ had been interpreted broadly. Among the participants were postdocs and temporary teaching fellows, some who had started permanent lectureships the previous September, and others who had been in lectureships for 2–3 years. I was about to start my first permanent teaching position – coincidentally, at the University of Birmingham – in January 2005. Among us were both language and literature specialists, modernists and early modernists – scholars of areas as diverse as Elizabethan prose fiction, recipe books, cyber theory and chick lit. It was instructive to find out about the experiences of people from different academic backgrounds, and especially about the widely diverse working conditions experienced in different institutions. The need for good practice in inducting new staff – explaining the rules and, more nebulously, the habits of departments – was unanimously agreed on. Most new lecturers know better than to expect an office of their own in today’s overstretched departments, but a desk, email address and telephone number would appear to be essential, in terms both of 40

self-organisation and of maintaining one’s credit with students. Alas, such simple marks of status cannot always be taken for granted. Stories were told of deskless staff, while one especially unfortunate victim of university bureaucracy had had to wait four months for a departmental email address. It can take less time than that for students to decide that you’re not a proper member of staff and don’t count. One session in which the ‘group therapy’ aspect of the event came to the fore was the marking workshop. We had been supplied in advance with an undergraduate essay on Restoration comedy – an area in which none of us was expert – and a notably rigorous set of marking criteria. It will be news to no one that there is an element of subjectivity in grading literary essays, but I think we were all nonetheless quite surprised by the wide range of marks (47–64%) suggested by members of the group. After arguing the merits of the case among ourselves, we later learnt that the essay, when originally submitted, had earned a mark in the low sixties. The workshop was a useful means of exploring a vitally important issue. Also very valuable was the session on e-learning, which was extremely informative and could usefully have been twice as long. It is probably a comment on the usual habits both of conferences and of academics that the organisers’ precise time-keeping through both the Friday and Saturday sessions evoked considerable surprise and admiration. Another lesson for us all; it can be done! Overall, then, this was a helpful, reassuring and informative event.

Want the Latest? Announcements about new Subject Centre events, project funding and commissioned work are made on our email list English-heacademy@jiscmail.ac.uk. To join the list just go to http://www.jiscmail. ac.uk/lists/english-heacademy.html.

Networking Day for Heads of Department Ben Knights, Subject Centre Director, reports on a meeting held in Oxford on 21 April 2005.

This, the second of what the Subject Centre intends as annual events, was attended by 18 heads of department drawn from all types of institution. The object of the day was to give heads of English departments the opportunity to talk to one another in a focused way about matters of common concern. Much of the discussion took place in small informal groups about which it is impossible to generalise. Nevertheless, it was clear that one of the things valued by participants was the opportunity to share experiences in a way that the role very often precludes. The form adopted was that successfully trialled last year: that is to say, there were no papers or keynote addresses. Instead there was a sequence of plenary and small group sessions facilitated by nominated colleagues or by members of the Subject Centre staff. A prior trawl of participants resulted in the decision to set up groups on four specific topics. What follows is a very bald summary of rich and energetic discussions. 1. The impact of the Research Assessment Exercise on learning and teaching (led by Morag Shiach, Queen Mary, University of London) A strong case was made that the RAE was resourced from time rather than from money: we were, argued one participant, doing the research cheaply or even for free. We were experiencing management panic in a climate of continuous low–level anxiety. Admittedly, the RAE was used to legitimise all sorts of management strategy. But bid writing and strategy groups used up unaccounted amounts of time. The discussion dwelt on the impacts on staffing, the pressures to manage or even get rid of ‘nonproductive’ colleagues, the desperation of those on short contracts, the pool of hourly-paid postgrads and postdocs: a system that relied on cheap labour. From another direction a question arose whether research-led teaching (of which in principle most English people approve) in fact led to a quirky and unbalanced curriculum. 2. The changing curriculum (led by Peter Kitson, Dundee) There was some sense that ‘theory’ was receding, but what was it being replaced with? Drivers for curriculum change included the limited time most students could

or would give to reading, and a canon that was shifting in response to market forces – the rise of creative writing and contemporary fiction were both cited – and increased levels of staff specialisation. Newly appointed staff increasingly expected to teach to their specialisms. Those present were strongly in favour of maintaining a spread, at least across the literature curriculum. 3. Funding and financial management (led by Scott Fraser, University of the West of England) While most felt they had been inadequately trained for their fiscal and legal roles, the feeling was not universal, and examples of good institutional practice were cited. There was an animated discussion of the rising legal pressures on heads of departments (for example in the domain of Health and Safety and of Disability), and the general lack of institutional training and support for this increasingly onerous aspect of the HoD role. Heads of departments needed more legal training and support. Student complaints, disability issues, harassment cases all led to a fraught and increasingly isolating workload. One tried to avoid crisis, but often it was only in a crisis that one got institutional backing. All the while, subject colleagues were apt to regard you as the ‘bad cop’. There was a widely-shared feeling that generic models of management did not fit, that heads of department experienced tension between different forms of leadership, and that they were not rewarded as executives. At times ‘creative failure’ might be the only narrative response to the expectation that you would be good at simultaneously managing staff, students, and finance, while also doing marketing and strategic planning. Delegation was

Networking Day for Heads of Department

4. The impact of variable fees (led by John Joughin, University of Central Lancashire).

a perpetual problem, and the temptation was always to give tasks only to those who had proved themselves willing. Three years was widely seen as not long enough: you needed five years to really get into the job, though the cost to families could be ‘penitential’. Levels of student complaints and appeals were rising all the time, and here too HoD responsibility faced both inwards and outwards.

Most of the questions were still unanswered or unanswerable. Most institutions were already seeing increased localisation of their student body. We were seeing an implicit politicisation of students as a new kind of educational ‘subject’. Yet pressure from students and their parents might actually lead to improved facilities. We needed to activate learning contracts as a motivator for attendance and commitment. There was some optimism on the grounds that English had always been an adaptable subject that was agile in developing its own practices. One closing suggestion was that the Subject Centre should facilitate a cross-institutional ‘buddying’ system for new heads of department, though it was recognised that it could be quite difficult identifying new appointments. At the end Subject Centre staff were left with a renewed sense both of the enormous commitment of heads of department to their students, their colleagues and their subject, but simultaneously of an unsustainable workload and level of stress. These dual perceptions lead to a third. That is that the professionalism and commitment of those who are willing to take on these arduous roles is exploited by a system which relies on people being conditioned to make their jobs their lives. This does not seem a sustainable way of bringing on the HoDs of the future or of supporting those already in post.

£ 50 for Case Studies The Subject Centre is issuing a call for case studies – 1,500 word descriptions of innovative work in English departments. If you’ve recently tried an experiment in teaching or pastoral work that you feel other lecturers could benefit from hearing about, email Jonathan Gibson at the Subject Centre (jonathan.gibson@rhul.ac.uk) to submit a case study proposal. Further details about this initiative can be found on the Subject Centre website, at http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/publications/case_studies.php.

Teaching on the Language – Literature Border Ben Knights reports on a Subject Centre event held in Sheffield on 27 May 2005.

As Nigel Fabb has shown in a recent Newsletter article (1), the relationship between English Language and English Literature in HE institutions is not a straightforward one. Many of the complexities that inevitably characterize transactions across the border between these two ‘sub–disciplines’ were unpicked in an event held earlier this year, co-convened by Ben Knights and Richard Steadman-Jones (University of Sheffield). Participants circulated to each other samples of module descriptors and other papers as preparation for the workshop.Those present represented institutions where there were modules or strands of modules in which literature teaching was inflected with terms and practices drawn from linguistics. Language was a core component of a degree programme at two of the institutions represented. Most of those present worked in larger staff groups, though three were in effect the only language teachers within literature–oriented units. Strengths and weaknesses were identified in both situations: thus ‘benign neglect’ could be experienced as both in some ways liberating (freedom to invent modules that interest you; ‘literary stylistics are what I say they are’) but also as intellectually isolating. There was nevertheless a clear implication that it is entirely possible to run successful linguistic–inflected modules without having a whole language team. To define some parameters for discussion, Richard Steadman-Jones took as a case study the development of the combined Language – Literature BA at Sheffield. This experience and straw polls of students led to a number of questions and observations: • What is the most effective way to teach basic skills? • How does institutional environment shape what you do? For example, how receptive are literature colleagues when students employ approaches taken from stylistics? • How might pedagogy relate to our own research interests? How can teaching be made more researchled? . ‘Linguistics in an English Department’, English Subject Centre Newsletter 8 (June 2005), pp. 5–9, available online at http://www.english. heacademy.ac.uk/explore/publications/newsletters/newsissue8/fabb. htm.

• Should we be open to the idea of teaching-led research? • What mix of A and AS levels have students experienced?

Teaching the Basics The issue of basic skills has important connections with the history of academic linguistics.As soon as the new linguistics started to impact on literary studies in the 1970s it was evident that this was a field with marked pedagogic implications. The systematic structure of linguistics enabled teachers to put tools in student hands, and to employ simple building blocks, which could cumulatively become more sophisticated intellectual structures. Here was a conceptual lexicon and set of taxonomies that required to be tackled in a structured way. There was a set of hard-edged technical skills which were ‘very teachable’, and very satisfying for students to learn. Even before the days of ‘learning outcomes’, you could specify clearly what might be learned in a particular session, and such skills exhibited a kind of transparency lacking in the vocabulary of literary criticism. The whole domain also gave considerable and so far under-exploited scope for students to undertake research themselves. In a subject area with a low degree of consensus about the core, conceptions of what the basics actually were would tend to reflect the research allegiances of staff. In a real sense it was impossible not to teach your research, even within programmes where there was little scope for teaching specialist options. Lecturers could fortify student confidence by building on and making explicit knowledge that had up till then been implicit. Effectively we could say to students ‘you are linguists already’, and provide them with the tools for articulating what they in some sense already knew or could already hear. A parallel was noted with the reflection on skills embedded in systems of PDP, and indeed language study was felt to lend itself especially well to being able to explain what you had learned. From week one, language study also enabled devolution to students, giving them tools and a sequence of activities. Again, there was strong convergence with the potential of VLEs.

Teaching on the Language – Literature Border

Institutional and Intellectual Allegiances One recurrent theme of the day concerned the borders and territories which shaped allegiance and practice. Following a presentation by Cris Yelland (University of Teesside) on teaching language within a literature environment, a number of territories and boundary crossings were identified. These included intellectual allegiances (schools, traditions, conceptual vocabularies), and the archaeology of individual institutions (the actual geographical relations and degree of polarisation of ‘School of English Language’ / ‘School of English Literature’). The linguistic source field had changed with the rise of pragmatics and as ‘critical discourse analysis’ had separated out from ‘literary linguistics’, and ‘linguistic criticism’. It was noted that much of the High Theory of the 1980s had been as hostile to linguistics as had Literary Criticism previously. Other fraught borders were those between diachrony and synchrony (while there were stylisticians who were historicists, most literature people were highly suspicious of the tendency of linguistic analysis to de– contextualise), between description and evaluation (despite the canon wars a strong aura of ‘great bookishness’ was felt to hang over literary study), between aesthetics and science. These tensions worked themselves out at the level of curriculum and pedagogy. More recently, the explosion of creative writing, growing enthusiasm for the new Cognitivism, and the awesome power of Corpus Linguistics had all impacted on the field and created new alliances and even fields of study. All of them had direct and tangible pedagogic implications. While what Cris Yelland identified as the ‘Gramscian moment’ was probably past, there was a clear consensus that blends of literary and linguistic studies possessed enormous pedagogic and intellectual power.

Transition and Assessment Participants agreed that the rise of English Language and Language and Literature at AS and A2 had had a major effect on the knowledge and understanding of many students (2). The effects of there being more students who had already studied language were however not unambiguous.At the best, there were students within any given

cohort who possessed a working knowledge of terms and methods of analysis, but you could not make too much of what you assumed students would have learned. (Film Studies or Sociology A-levels were, it was felt, quite often a better preparation.) A-level English Language was seen as being mainly oriented towards Sociolinguistics. There was also the phenomenon one colleague described as ‘Boring! We did words at A-level!’ It was widely felt that HE teachers needed to instruct themselves in more detail about what is actually taught at A-level, and the syllabuses of the different examination boards (3). Much of the discussion of student transition and expectations gravitated towards wider concerns over standards of academic writing and preparedness, and here it was noted that linguistics – having licensed non–standard varieties in declaring itself non–prescriptive – needed to explain itself very carefully when laying down forms of academic English. Ways in which we could harness the synergy of Language and Literature in being hospitable towards the new generation of students might include: • Use of forms of transformative writing and re-writing (exploit ‘creative language awareness’) • Emphasis on drafting as a formative and pedagogic mode (cf. the ‘Speak-Write’ project at APU) • Generally, a focus on acts of production • More attention to rhetoric, persuasion, and language in use It was felt that the subject matter lent itself to variety in assessment as much as it led to blended forms of teaching. Participants discussed: • Imaginative use of a wider variety of forms of assessment to include learning logs, and portfolios (NB they take ‘forever’ to mark!). The subject domain lends itself to quizzes and multiple choice questions presented through VLEs, and to tightly–focused exercises and worksheets as well as more traditional discursive forms of analysis • Making use of the web to get students building hypertexts of a poem or passage • Making posters as a simpler form of hypertext

. See Adrian Barlow’s appendix to Four Perspectives on Transition (English Subject Centre report Series No. 10, 2005), available online at http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/resources/transition/guide.php. 44

. For the specifications (now rebranded as ‘criteria’) for English A–levels see the website of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority: http://www.qca.org.uk/3061_2396.html.

Teaching on the Language – Literature Border

• Exploiting the enormous scope for students to gather and select materials and examples (though it was noted that literature students frequently preferred set essay questions) Given rival varieties of terminology and approach, it was feared that we might sometimes be in the position of Father Christmas taking away presents given earlier. The inverse of this situation was a potential metacognitive gain, as students came to understand the provisional, heuristic, nature of terms and taxonomies and to comprehend the way in which knowledge is made.

Conclusions The final discussion of outcomes turned to the resources and support needed by colleagues working in this area. It was recognised that (as always with events of this kind) many of the outcomes of the day could not be captured in simple lists: they would grow out of the dialogues of the day and feed back into individual practice, or into shaping participants’ sense of belonging to a larger com-

munity. There was a feeling that there was no call for a commissioned report on the topic at this stage. But some specific outcomes might be summarised: • Various specific suggestions and websites to be circulated • Some asked for suggestions for an accessible glossary of terms • This was pre–eminently an area for collaboration between Subject Centres: the English Subject Centre should actively collaborate with the Subject Centre for Area Studies on another workshop with a more specific theme, e.g. teaching grammar • A taxonomy of teaching practices (perhaps as part of the Subject Centre’s proposed teaching web area) – illustrative examples of integrating linguistic practice into literary teaching • Explore feasibility of a JISC list for colleagues teaching on Language / Literature border.

Why Study English? The Subject Centre has revamped and reprinted its popular free leaflet encouraging young people to study English at degree level. The leaflet highlights the excellent employment prospects, personal satisfaction, quality of teaching and range of learning opportunities available and many departments have distributed it at open days. We are also sending copies to secondary schools across the UK. You can view the leaflet at http://www.english. heacademy.ac.uk/explore/resources/access/why_ english.php. To order copies, please email esc@ rhul.ac.uk stating how many you require.

English at School and University: The Case of Chaucer Jonathan Gibson, English Subject Centre, reports on ‘Teaching Chaucer Today’, an event held at the University of Birmingham on 8 June 2005. Initiating and building on conversations between schools and universities – between academics and A-level teachers-is currently one of the most important areas in the Subject Centre’s remit. Clearly there are, in Ben Knights’s words, ‘pressing reasons for urging more intellectual and pedagogic commerce across the sectors’ ( ).We have recently published Andrew Green’s report Four Perspectives on Transition: English Literature from Sixth Form to University (2) and are currently in the process of commissioning a guide to English AS/A2 level qualifications. Meanwhile, the Subject Centre is playing an increasingly significant role in the continuing debates about the future of secondary school qualifications. The Subject Centre Director, for example, is convening a QCA group to investigate the feasibility of a secondary school qualification in creative writing. At a more immediate, short–term level, the exceptionally positive feedback to a Subject Centre Chaucer day hosted earlier this year by Steve Ellis at the University of Birmingham highlights the value of face-to-face contact – of events that enable teachers from both sides of the secondary/higher ‘divide’ to meet and talk together about literature. ‘Teaching Chaucer Today’ was attended both by university lecturers and by A-level teachers, with more than twenty schools being represented. The range of topics discussed and the liveliness of the debate forcefully demonstrated the vitality of Chaucer teaching at both HE and secondary level, in the face of all institutional obstacles. 1. In the introduction to a set of pages on ‘English Across the Sectors’ on the Subject Centre website (http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/ explore/resources/transition/index.php). 2. URL: http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/resources/transition/guide.php

Proceedings began with a stimulating tour d’horizon from Steve Ellis on ‘Recent Developments in Chaucer Studies’. Later in the day, two valuable presentations were given on digital resources. In the afternoon session, David Wallace (University of Pennsylvania), President of the New Chaucer Society, not only gave an excellent talk – flagging up the current shift in Chaucer criticism towards ethical and oral approaches – but also issued an open invitation to school-teachers to attend the New Chaucer Society’s 2006 conference in New York. The bulk of the day’s business, however, came in two sets of parallel Canterbury Tales workshops, the first focused on critical approaches to set texts, the second on pedagogical strategies. These highly enjoyable sessions gave teachers and lecturers an exciting opportunity to discuss Chaucer with each other on equal terms. The day ended, after a plenary session exploring possible ways to build on the obvious success of the event, in a glow of satisfaction – with many people hoping that ‘Teaching Chaucer Today’ might run again, perhaps on a biennial basis. For one participant, the day had been ‘the best possible use of my time’. The Subject Centre is keen to build on the success of the Chaucer day and would like to support more events of this type: please contact me (jonathan.gibson@rhul.ac.uk) if you would like to collaborate with us.

Work in Progress This section of the Subject Centre website (http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/ progress/index.php) gives a brief overview of activities currently under way which have not yet taken the form of a specific event or publication. The page will, we hope, both give you a clearer view of the range of our activities and help you identify ways in which you might like to work with us.

Pedagogic Research in English Jonathan Gibson, reports on a Subject Centre event held at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Elsewhere in this Newsletter, Ben Knights emphasizes the valuable role that thinking about and analysing teaching can – and perhaps should – play in the lives of English lecturers (above, p. 2). Currently, much writing about English HE teaching either chooses not to be analytical at all (offering up pragmatic sets of teaching ‘tips’), or else deploys frameworks taken not from English but from the social science discipline of educational research. The question this event posed was a simple one: is there a ‘third way’? Can we, as English lecturers, evolve, on our own terms, within the discipline of English Studies, an intellectually rigorous tradition (or traditions) of writing about teaching? Isn’t this an area that is too important to be neglected by us and left to researchers from other disciplines? The event was jointly convened by Ben Knights, Director of the English Subject Centre, and Shân Wareing, Director of the Educational Development Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London. As background reading, participants had been sent copies of three essays, each highlighting different possible ways forward for pedagogical research: a section from Ben Knights’s book From Reader to Reader (Harvester, 1992) exploring similarities in the ways that both literary texts and the seminar groups that discuss them construct meaning, an essay by Shân Wareing putting the case for ‘generic’ pedagogic research, and ‘Investigating the Production of University English’ by Ken Jones, Monica McLean, David Amigoni and Margaret Kinsman (Arts and Humanities in Higher Education (October 2005)), the description of a pilot project videoing and analysing university English seminars. After a scene-setting discussion based around a series of short presentations, the group selected three topics for further discussion in the afternoon: ‘transition’ from school to university, the ‘identity’ of English lecturers and students, and the implicit theory behind English lecturers’ pedagogical practice. Each of these topics was allocated to a different sub-group, and, in each case, a rich crop of questions resulted. The ‘transition’ group concluded that topics for research might include both the peer cultures of students and the nature of any clash between the values of students, lecturers and managers. The ‘identity’ group discussed both possible ways of finding out about ‘disciplinary identity’ – blogs, ‘Big Brother’ diary rooms, learning journals, surveys of joint honours students – as

well as the relationship between pedagogic practice and curriculum topic – the extent to which literary theory can be applied to and inform teaching, the ‘reading’ of teaching encounters in terms of genre theory, and so on. The group looking at pedagogical assumptions flagged up the importance of gender and ethnicity and also proposed a number of different methodological approaches: inter alia, a survey listing possible pedagogical assumptions to which lecturers would be invited to respond, teaching observations and the analysis of taped conversations with lecturers with the lecturers themselves. The day concluded with a wide-ranging plenary session on future directions and outcomes. Many important topics were raised, including the false dichotomy between ‘teaching’ and ‘research’ (together with its baleful child, the unequal status of pedagogy and publication) and the key question of audience (to whom should an English–specific scholarship of teaching be addressed?). The group compiled a long list of desiderata, viz. • more networking via the Subject Centre • more departmental publications and projects • the submission of more articles on HE English pedagogy both to traditional ‘research’ journals as well as to specialist journals such as Arts & Humanities in Higher Education (http://www.sage pub. co.uk/journal.aspx?pid=105475), Changing English (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/ 1358684X.asp), Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/ professional/publishers/smart.html) and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (http:// www.unr.edu/cla/engl/isle/). • more colloquia and conferences • the incorporation of discipline-specific research in new lecturers’ programmes • the forging of links with CETLs • more sessions on pedagogy in ‘research’ conferences (something the Subject Centre would be keen to help fund (http://www.english.heacademy. ac.uk/explore/events/index.php#)) • events on this topic bringing together university and secondary school teachers

Pedagogic Research in English

This exploratory day clearly succeeded in its primary aim: to support and spur on lecturers ready to think in creative ways about their own teaching. More events will follow. In the meantime, interested parties should bear in mind that the Subject Centre is providing English–specific pedagogical research with a number of publication outlets, including online case studies (http://www.eng-

lish.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/publications/case_ studies.php), Teaching the New English (a major new monograph series from Palgrave (http://www.english. heacademy.ac.uk/explore/publications/newenglish. php)), and, last but not least, this newsletter, which wel-

comes articles on any area of HE English teaching.

CCUE AGM 2005 The CCUE (Council for College and University English) AGM took place at St. Anne’s College, Oxford on Friday 22 and Saturday 23 April 2005. The programme provided those present with a bird’s eye view of the concerns currently shaping English Studies – not to mention unrivalled networking opportunities and excellent food. Presentations on the Friday balanced the demands of teaching and research. In the opening session, the chair and deputy chair of the English RAE sub-panel, Rick Rylance (Exeter) and Susan Manning (Edinburgh), together with RAE manager Ed Hughes, took questions from the floor. After lunch, Ben Knights (English Subject Centre) chaired a panel of new CETL (Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning) directors. The CCUE business meeting was followed by a stimulating lecture by David Trotter (Cambridge) which subtly re-examined the relationship between early film and literary modernism. Proceedings continued on Saturday, with a penetrating analysis by Mary Stuart (Sussex) of the ‘widening participation’ agenda and, bringing the AGM to a rousing conclusion, the Kate Fulbrook lecture, delivered by Patricia Duncker (UEA) – a blistering exploration of the possibilities of feminist literature and the shortcomings of chick lit.The next CCUE OGM will be on Saturday 0 December in Stewart House, Bedford Square, London. Contact Greg Walker (gmw4@leicester.ac.uk)) for further information.

UCAS Figures for English, Media Studies & History Jane Gawthrope, English Subject Centre.

We are aware that interrogating the UCAS website for statistics is not the easiest or most enjoyable of tasks, so here are some highlights relevant to English, using Media and History as comparators. A few notes of caution however: • UCAS figures do not include postgraduates or part–timers • The figures presented here do not include those on joint or combined programmes • The basis for the subject categories was amended in 2002, so caution must be exercised in comparing figures with 2001 and earlier. For these reasons, there are likely to be differences between figures presented in the UCAS data and those presented by HESA.

All Applicants and all Accepts by Subject and Gender 2001–2004

English 2004 2003 2002 2001 Media studies 2004 2003 2002 2001 History 2004 2003 2002 2001

Men Applicants Accepts

Women Applicants Accepts

Total Applicants Accepts

2809 2690 2583 2382

2433 2325 2291 2168

7247 6919 6730 6493

6214 6228 6252 5932

10056 9609 9313 8875

8647 8553 8543 8100

2070 1918 1669 1471

2299 2386 1979 1738

2113 2225 2177 1781

2106 2349 2185 1729

4183 4143 3846 3252

4405 4735 4155 3467

4780 4465 4223 3624

4232 4131 4086 3261

4484 4329 4440 3217

4349 4271 4413 2997

9264 8794 8663 6841

8581 8402 8499 6258

Commentary • Trends – The total number of accepts for English in 2004 was about 100 up on 2003 (as was History). The rise in numbers in Media Studies appears to have halted however, with accepts in 2004 being 330 down on 2003. • Gender – Women represent almost 72% of accepts for English in 2004. (48% for Media and 51% for History) • Age – Figures not shown here demonstrate that 87% of English accepts are aged 20 and under; 6% aged 21 to 24; 5% aged 25 to 39 and 2% aged 40 plus. • Domicile – Figures not shown here indicate that 96% of English students are home students, 2% are from the EU and 2% from other overseas.

UCAS Figures for English, Media Studies & History

History Media 15

English

% 10

0 000-000

001-079

080-119

120-179

180-239

240-299

300-359

360-419

420-479

480-539

540+

Tariff

Total Number of Accepts by Tariff and Subject (UK applicants, 2004) Commentary • UCAS tariffs are explained more fully at: http://www.ucas.ac.uk/candq/tariff/index.html. As a rough guide, three GCE ‘A Levels’ at grade A amount to 360 points • The profile of English is almost identical to that of History; there are more Media accepts in lower tariff bands than English or History Stop Press – provisional data released by UCAS on 19 October shows that 9,234 applicants have been accepted onto degree courses in English, an increase of 6.90% on 2004. (The average increase across all subjects was 7.76%.)

IT Works! Brett Lucas, (brett.lucas@rhul.ac.uk), Learning Technology Officer and Website Developer at the English Subject Centre, gives his regular roundup of teaching-related developments in IT. For this issue, I have divided the information in ‘IT Works!’ into three areas

Publications JISC have just published a great new e–learning guide, Innovative Practice with e–Learning. The glossy front is a disguise for some interesting video case studies on a CD–ROM, handy planning tools and lots of tips and advice. The focus is on all things wireless. URL: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/eli_practice.html TechDis have produced an excellent series of staff development packs containing training materials for aspects of accessibility including Dyslexia, the use of assistive technologies, and an introduction to web accessibility. URL: http://www.techdis.ac.uk/resources/sites/staffpacks/index.xml If you are dabbling in electronic assessment (particularly online quizzes) there is an interesting paper written by a law lecturer at Oxford Brookes: ‘One Lecturer’s Experience of Blending Elearning with Traditional Teaching or How to Improve Retention and Progression by Engaging Students’ by Paul Catley. Read it online at: http://www.brookes.ac.uk/publications/ bejlt/volume1issue2/academic/catley05_1.html !

eLearning tools ATLAS.ti – Is a textual analysis manipulation tool that has a growing following. You can download a fully functional trial version of the software.: http://www.atlasti.com/index.php There are more and more interesting ‘extensions’ for the Firefox browser. Extensions are small software programs that add new functionality inside the Firefox browser.Two very useful ones are ‘Scrapbook’ for saving webpages and/ or managing collections, and ‘Colorzilla’ for getting color readings from any point in your browser – quite handy if you are building learning materials for online viewing.There are hundreds more! https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/ ?application=firefox Internet explorer has also released the beta of its new ‘developer toolbar’ (as an extension). This toolbar is very useful for highlighting tables and divs on webpages and has great CSS features too. Great for analysing your own work or browsing for design tips. A must for anyone designing / editing webpages. Search from the Microsoft site: http://www.microsoft. com/downloads/search.aspx?displaylang=en

Contemplating giving your students a sound recording of your own lecture, pointing them to a sound file on the internet of a programme you heard on the radio last night or linking your online course bibliography into a downloadable sound archive? Read the beginner’s guide to Podcast creation: http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/beginners–guide–to–podcast–creation/

Web Resources The Humbul humanities hub have developed a useful online tutorial in ‘Internet Information skills’ for English students: http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/tutorial/english Edina – The Education Image Gallery – has recently added 7000 new images, free for use in educational settings, to its collection. First check if your institution subscribes, then browse to: http://edina.ac.uk/eig

News Macromedia have announced version 8 of their popular website development tools: Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash. Information, online demonstrations and beginners – to advanced tutorials are available at: http://www.macromedia.com

Bits & Bytes Read the hilarious personal blog of Rob Spence, a UK English lecturer: http://spencro.blogspot.com/ . Interested in the real potential of ePortfolios and PDPs (Personal Development Plans) – There is a lot of useful information and a great community you can join on this project site where all aspects of this mode of learning are considered: http://www.eportfolios.ac.uk/ Does it take you ages to login to your email account when you are out and about? If you need to send files (up to 1Gb) quickly try browsing to this nifty site: http://yousendit.com Wallenburg Hall is a 21st-century teaching space at Stanford University. The kit on offer to the curious lecturer gives one reason to drool longingly. Definitely a must for those in control of the ‘IT equipment budget’: http://wallenberg.stanford. edu/teaching/technology.html#ispace • Where possible I try to recommend software that is open– source, free-of-charge, copyright cleared, shareware or freeware • All URLs on this page were last accessed in October 2005 • You can access all the links on this page directly in the online version of this newsletter. URL: http://www.english. heacademy.ac.uk/explore/publications/index.php

The English Subject Centre Report Series Our Report Series is now well-established. Copies of all reports are available on our website at www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/general/publications/reports and most are circulated in paper form to English Departments in the UK. Further copies are available on request, subject to availability. Send your request to: esc@rhul.ac.uk.

Published Reports: Report no. 1, Admission Trends in Undergraduate English: Statistics and Attitudes, Sadie Williams, April 2002, ISBN 0 90219 443 7 Report no. 2, The English Degree and Graduate Careers, John Brennan and Ruth Williams, January 2003, ISBN 0 90219 463 1 Report no. 3, Postgraduate Training in Research Methods: Current Practice and Future Needs in English, Sadie Williams, February 2003, ISBN 0 90219 4 68 2 Report no. 4, Good Practice Guide: Access and Widening Participation, Siobhรกn Holland, February 2003, ISBN 0 90219 473 9

Report no. 5, English and IT, Michael Hanrahan, December 2002

Report no. 6, Good Practice Guide: Creative Writing, Siobhรกn Holland, February 2003, ISBN 0 902 19478 X

Report no. 7, External Examining, Philip Martin, March 2003, ISBN 0 902 194933

Report no. 8, Survey of the English Curriculum and Teaching in UK Higher Education, the Halcrow Group, Jane Gawthrope and Philip Martin, October 2003, ISBN 0 902 194291 Report no. 9, Good Practice Guide: Part-time Teaching, Siobhรกn Holland, August 2004, ISBN 0 902 194291 Report no. 10, Four Perspectives on Transition: English Literature from Sixth Form to University, Andrew Green, February 2005, ISBN 0 902 19498 4 Report no. 11, Good Practice Guide: Living Writers in the Curriculum, Vicki Bertram and Andrew Maunder, March 2005, ISBN 0902 19414 3

English Subject Centre Administrator: Jackie Fernandes Manager: Jane Gawthrope Academic Co-ordinator: Dr Jonathan Gibson Director: Professor Ben Knights Website Developer & Learning Technologist: Brett Lucas Academic Co-ordinator: Dr Andrew Maunder Administrative Assistant: Rebecca Price The English Subject Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham TW20 0EX Tâ&#x20AC;˘ 01784 443221 Fâ&#x20AC;˘ 01784 470684 esc@rhul.ac.uk www.english.heacademy.ac.uk

The English Subject Centre Newsletter is produced twice a year and distributed widely through all institutions teaching English in Higher Education. The newsletter’s aims are: • to provide information about resources, developments and innovations in teaching • to provide a discursive or reflective forum for teaching and learning issues • to evaluate existing and new teaching materials, textbooks and IT packages We welcome contributions. Articles range from 300–3000 words in length. Editor: Jonathan Gibson Jonathan.Gibson@rhul.ac.uk

The English Subject Centre Royal Holloway, University of London Egham TW20 0EX T• 01784 443221 F• 01784 470684 esc@rhul.ac.uk www.english.heacademy.ac.uk