English Literature

Fold it over, secrete it, into words That spread ink upon ink, crisp pages Taught strung along this hardbound spine, Years and years at the back of the shelf Decades of unreading, stuck with bookdust. I write books about books like that.

Take it down, father, hold it in your hands, Open it, tell me what it says about you. Your peasant queens and kings before you, Fables of walnut pearls and inland seas, The Russian tanks on cobbled Köszeg streets, Stones that hit your head in the Austrian camp. Open the book, dad, lift the headstone, Let the horrors come haunt us again. You remember when I headbutted you And as we fell on the floor like dogs Mum tried to separate us and by chance I swung at you and punched her belly. You taught me to punch, dad, to hit hard, dad. To go for the throat, dad, to cheat at exams, dad. Remember the argument about the teapot When you punched my mother in the face.

Stories.

Put them in your fucking book, dad. Bury it in your ink-black Magyar soil, Along with your wine-sodden father. Wash it down with Bull’s Blood. Wash it down Kálvária utca, Watch black blood flood the generations.

I read a lot of books, dad, but I need No book to know about you, dad. What you did, dad. Put that old book in the bin, dad.

No one will read this for you. And I will not write it.

Notes

My father was born and raised in the ancient town of Köszeg in Hungary, right on the Austrian border in the far West. It claims to be the only Magyar town not to be taken by the Ottoman empire. I don’t care if that’s true - it speaks to the character of the place, somehow. 

My dad grew up on  Kálvária utca - Calvary street - and if you walk all the way up it, you ascend a steep forested hill into Austria, threaded through peasants’ vineyards, where soon you see the stations of the cross picked out in alabaster sculptures in wee alcoves, and at the top of this inaccessible, precipitous path is a burnt-out Catholic church, Jézus Szíve templom - The Church of Jesus' Heart. 

Bikavér, Bull’s Blood, is thick, blended red Hungarian wine - in the 1970s as cheap as water, in the UK at least. 

My response to this general theme of the “defence of the humanities” is to ask lots of questions in a self-important fashion. I apologise for the style to come here – it is not a style I write in, usually. But this is not a subject I turn to, much. My response is born of a sense that has been growing for a while now, that some of what we do to argue for the humanities is, in effect, self-harming. Self-declaring polemics that “defend the humanities” penned by those who are ostensibly most secure in their profession – and I include myself in that bracket – might even be damaging to those principles we in the humanities think we live and work by (though I hold those principles to be anything but homogenous).

So my blog post is not a “defence” of the humanities. I don’t want to mount a “defence of the humanities” because I do not wish to imply that my humanities-based critical practice is an inviolate pristine militarised citadel, all classic lines and Doric columns, and barbed wire atop the inward-facing college wall – or else some kind of stolid form that is beyond critique. A “defence” might imply that. It might also suggest that I have a secure idea of what it is I would be defending. Regardless of the opposing forces rumoured to be “attacking” the humanities, regardless of the professional responsibility you might demand, I still cannot grasp a secure idea of what the humanities is, or what it is for; not because I don’t think it is anything, or for nothing, but because I think it encompasses everything. Probably, I want you to think I resist definition so that I appear more radical than a secure foundation in the shape of knowledge would allow me to be. Though in reality like most of my humanities colleagues, I am probably not so radical – reliant, comforted and paid, as I am, by what the humanities mean institutionally, hierarchically and economically.

I know the humanities are being undermined on many fronts – many of them informed by capitalising versions of value in an entirely economic and monetary sense. Like most of my colleagues, I remain deeply concerned about the monetisation and commercialisation of higher education, the functionalism of education in general, and about what debt and crass vocation-seeking do to the valuation of the humanities in higher education. It would be weird if I wasn’t concerned about all of that. But there have been so many defensive and brittle articles about these aspects of the “attack” on the humanities, that I want to use this opportunity to push in a different direction: to look at the humanities and wonder what it – or they – might enable.

Writing this blog essay makes me less sure of what the humanities is, not more secure that I know it to be something worth “defending”. The very word “humanities” pushes into the light the irritating fact that as a word, indicating the broad categorisation of a sweeping set of disciplines, “humanities” does not mean as much to me as “art” or the even narrower habits of “literature”. And literary criticism, which is what my narrow slice of activity is called, is neither art, nor meaningfully does it require the label “humanities” in anything other than in its institutional organisation (universities, libraries, funding bodies). I hope I am not deliberately seeking to cause trouble for the sake of it, nor resisting categorisation because – in puerile self-regard – I don’t want my work to be defined (you cannot box me in, I won’t be tied down – that sort of thing). But still the words that categorise our work have to mean something particularising to our cause, to mean much. And if we are to defend them, if we are to cluster underneath the words on a banner of continual protest, these categories have to mean everything.

I want my discipline category to include rubble, to own detritus. I want it to be grounded, sub-cultural, insecure, furtive, subterranean, adult, dangerous. The critical humanities as a threat, not a duvet. The self-immolating speaker of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, not a cock-sure hero of a pap genre thriller. Though we can talk about both, we must tend towards complexity, towards paradox, towards the anti-hero, towards the marginalised and the minoritarian. I want to attack the disciplines myself. I want my words to be variations of attack, not defence. I want my words to be attacked. I want the “process” of the humanities to be varied and discomfiting and awkward and immeasurable and playful and irresponsible and celebratory and unsustainable and explosive and unsettling and wasteful. Critical indiscipline, rather than academic discipline.

I want this, because so many other academic areas have given up the ghost – or (to be kinder) have to live by actual products, tangible outputs beyond the book or the article – bridges and roads, new drugs, treatments, buildings, software, environment, maps, policy. In the humanities, we claim to be free: and we claim to be agents of freedom, yet we are the greatest critics of freedom’s assumptions and implications and distortions. Language is metaphor. We know that claims to freedom are rhetorical device. We are aware of how little freedom anyone has in organised societies. Yet we ourselves write the word “freedom” on university branded paper. We ask – what does freedom mean? So we criticise ideological prisons as well as those built by the stones of law in which our fellow humans dwell. We irritate. We claim to be radical and edgy from within the safe havens of elite institutions. And we argue because the argument is there to be had. We might not storm the Bastille, but we talk a lot, restlessly, about doing so. Constant agreement threatens supine complacency. Do we argue for a living? Someone has to ask questions, or else society is reduced to machinic processes of acquiescence. We seek truth, yet we revel in fiction. Humanities has no territory, because we are liberated in our critical practice, and we write beyond the walls of ownership, from behind the safe walls of university life, if we’re lucky. We occupy an irresolvable and paradoxical situation as humanities scholars and the resultant discomfort must be a necessary constituent of our work. We worry away at the “crisis” in the humanities: but are worry and crisis driving forces of humanities scholarship?

I want argument. Because to my mind, literary criticism – after investigation, balance and proof – is argument. Argument in process; sifting and moving; lifting and probing; destroying, reassessing, renewing, modernising and antiquating. I like old stuff, I like new stuff, but I like mixed up old-and-new stuff best, because it is troubling, and provokes questions. Because it is not pure. Purity is a myth of the totalitarian, of the scientist, of the ideologue. Poetry is dirty. The literary-critical end of the humanities spectrum is sustained not by declaration of fact or by assertions of fixed value, nor by normalisations, but by sceptical questions that seek to prod, probe, find evidence for and against, quiz and yes – sometimes – demolish. Variation, fluctuation, imagination, qualification, daydreaming, procrastination, deferral. A book delivered too late and with a different objective than that planned. No discernible ends in sight. No end.

I am not an architect. No one needs to live inside any of my ideas, and no one looks to them for food or cure, and they would be foolish to do so. If I contribute at all, I contribute questions. I join an ongoing argument. I don’t want that argument to close down or close off unless it is boring or stale or becoming accepted, and if so, I should leave it behind. If we humanities people see a wall, we dig underneath it, or we push through it, or we walk along it, or we jump over it – all by asking: what is a wall? What is the history of walls? What is the power that built the wall? What territories does it assert and deny? Yet I am not building anything; I am free to not build, to not assert ownership, to quiz definitions and not to make them. I can criticise a system without suggesting another system to replace it – because in my job as a critic I am free of responsibility, free of care, free of determined outcomes – though the risk is that the subjects are free only to diminishing extents. I know humanities to be important, but I resist defining its social function, resist turning it into a project, or policy. I have morality through the humanities precisely because I question ethical practices, question authority, question rhetoric – lift up the ideological stone to see what lurks beneath. And then realise that stone and insects beneath form a metaphorical mess that obscures and manipulates. So I question myself and my motives, and the styles I adopt. Everything has an agenda.

Although it seems in reality I do not – I like to think that I resist doing anything designed to be measurable by those who maintain that economic or social or educational value are the end points of all academic and intellectual endeavour. Who gave such people – such ideologies, such mindsets – control? We did – and we do every day we write or answer an email along those lines. These people are us. And these are the ideologies and mindsets we work and think by. What impact do you have? What is your economic value? Fill in this spreadsheet and enumerate the precise number of four-star research outputs in your unit of assessment. What do I have to measure and offer for my tenure portfolio? My ideas have so far amounted to 78cm of silver rod and I have filled 2.6 golden bowls with the love in my books. Can wisdom be put in a silver rod, or love in a golden bowl?

Well, yes William Blake, it seems we have allowed it to be so. And we are ashamed when we teach radical art or radical politics; but shame is awareness, is insight, is opportunity. Systems and tools govern us, that we sought to drive, when we first saw them in the car showroom of academic ambition. Even if there is no palpable humanities castle to defend, still we make the case for the humanities’ significance every time we argue, every time we expose our words. And we wreck the purpose of the humanities every time we rest on our laurels, every time we measure it or count it or convert it into money, or every time we feel superior. So let’s argue. Opposition for opposition’s sake. Planes of being not hierarchies of deference. Sentences without verbs.

Are the humanities free? Does study of and through the humanities free people? Does it unshackle in practice and on purpose? Does it actually hold the powerful to account (and are we brave enough to want it to do so)? Who are the powerful in the humanities? Is the profession all about earning potential, about paying off debt, about providing articulacy and succour to powerful orthodoxies of money and hierarchy, about feeding the machine – the hospital, the university, the career, the livestock pen, the abattoir – of capital?

Why do we constantly need to “defend the humanities”? It is so dull: we step out into a battle none cares for except us, and we look behind us to see what legions we can draw on, and all we see are our colleagues suddenly dissipate into careerist clerks, recede into risk-averse bureaucracy. The ghost of Akaky Akakievich searching for his overcoat, in the frozen mist of a Gogol farce.

I can see myself better, for having read Gogol: my snobbery, my jealousy, my greed, my insignificance in the face of bureaucracy, and my desire to be legitimised by that same bureaucracy. I can see the pomposity of my role within its arcane labyrinth. As academics we have to question the humanities, not defend it. It only flourishes for us when we start chewing on it, squeezing the juice from it – to see what it really tastes like. We have allowed systems of value and processes of codification that are entirely alien to – and which run counter to – our own liberating sceptical purposes, to invade our classrooms, and to colonise our own value systems, in practice, on paper, in meetings, on spreadsheets – in the words and modalities we pass on to our students. We have allowed our ideas to be measured in silver rods. Learning outcomes are golden bowls. What is the precise outcome that any student will get from studying this sonnet in this session, for these two hours? What is the measurable socio-economic impact of your research into ancient origins of the Finno-Ugric languages? What star-rating will I give this journal article on the sexual metaphors of Fanny Burney? How will the economy be boosted by a study of an early nineteenth-century archaeologist in the village of Castor, Cambridgeshire? How does society benefit from yet another book on a parochial peasant poet who died in an asylum in 1864?

These are questions. But just answering such questions, direct, is to risk submission to their logic – to grant them a moral authority over us – an authority that we ourselves have voted in, that we ourselves have had a hand in, that we ourselves have thought through and written down and passed on and overseen. Such questions of value we all feel a guilty urgency to express, before our managers come knocking, or so that we can fill in that grant application, or tick that box in the CV. I have done so myself, innumerable times, and have supervised – even compelled – others in doing the same. I am that foul hydra – an academic and a manager. If not on our chartered corridors, then at least in our subject areas – surely, desperately? – we must allow ideals: in the literary-critical arts we can read them, we can make them up, we can fabricate idealised spaces and utopias of no-space, allow the accident and chance of passion and intrigue and reading in libraries and fickle association to construct possible idea-worlds. Do we do that when we “defend” the humanities? Or are such public defences from the elect essentially admissions of our supine state, and mere echoes of a sad defeat that happened many moons ago?

Want to see a bracing debate about the future of the humanities? £20 please.

Dare we in the sceptical humanities attack the ideologies, the assumptions, the rhetoric and the discourse – that generate the moral logic of the questions themselves – and the questioners? Do we need to dig beneath such questions, or else knock them down, or else leap right over them, to prove the value of what we do, to prove our real “contribution”? We should do so not as a mob, not all in the same “professionalised” direction – but all over the place, from all manner of provocative modes and lifestyles. I don’t want to be in a club of mutual justification, all of us defending the humanities from behind the same crenellations. It is important that we all disagree.

We need to do the business of humanities not by acquiescence to and concurrence with polite professionalised practices, but through dissent and disagreement and disagreeableness. If we feel we have made a “contribution”, we then need to question the nature and purpose of contribution, the system that values it, and our ethics within it. I now must question why it is I need to express it all like this, from my position of arch privilege and socio-economic comfort, sitting here in the secure warmth of the Bodleian library (see – they let me in – and I mention it to impress you!), surrounded by the products of “people like us” (that is, book-writers like me, I want that to be true, I do so want to be in this book club, want my name on one of those hard-wearing spines – but why?).

Why do I have to care? Liberal arts? Codified. Humanities? Roboticised. Your brain? Just a computer. So keen were we academic humanities scholars for the establishment (and its finance gods) to accept our seriousness that we forgot to make up our own rules, or to offer our own metaphors for the way the brain works.

N.B.: all page refs are to the Norton Critical Edition of Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Reiman and Fraistat

What does tradition say of Prometheus?

P was the son of Titans (the first race) Iapetus and Clymene. P means ‘forethought’, and he is sometimes regarded as a Titan himself. P ridiculed the gods, and surpassed them all in cunning (and fraud). When Zeus (or Jupiter) offered P Pandora as a wife, he refused, suspecting Jupiter of trickery. P stole fire from heaven, and for this crime, Jupiter gets Hermes (Mercury) to chain P to a rock on Mount Causcasus where a vulture fed daily on his liver. The liver grew back daily, only to be fed upon the following day – for between 30 and 30,000 years. Heracles (often known as Hercules) frees P. P is credited with all sorts of ‘primary’ acts which benefitted mankind at the outset of human life – including the use of fire to create the first man and woman out of clay; or the giving of fire to man; or teaching mankind how to use plants for medicine and cultivation; or teaching mankind how to tame horses. (Unsure of your Greek gods and their Roman counterparts? Answers here.)

How does Prometheus Unbound respond to Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound?

Aeschylus was a classical Greek playwright who lived c. 525-456 BC. Of the c. 90 plays he wrote, only 7 survive. His Prometheus Bound tells the story of P’s theft of fire from the gods, and the subsequent punishment and torture of P. Aeschylus is supposed to have written two sequel plays – both long lost. The second play was called Prometheus Unbound and is said to have seen the release of P by Heracles, and the reconciliation of P with Jupiter. Shelley’s play Prometheus Unbound clearly resists what was known of Aeschylus’s lost original, in that although P does regret his condemnation of Jupiter (especially in Act I), there is no reconciliation of P with the tyrannical powers. Instead, P is freed himself only to go on to imagine a new world order, with no tyrannical gods at all. In Shelley’s play, the drive and the hope is for revolution, not reconciliation. As Shelley says in his preface, ‘I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind’ (p. 206); Shelley’s P is ‘the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends’ (p. 207). Also, in the preface, Shelley invokes Milton’s Satan, and his rebellion against God, as being parallel to Prometheus’s rebellion against Jupiter; yet Shelley’s Prometheus excels, and achieves freedom, not through violence, but through pity (even for Jupiter), communion and love. This is very much Shelley’s own take on the Promethean myth.

Notes on the plot of Prometheus Unbound

Act I

P is chained to the Caucasus mountains – he revokes his hatred of Jupiter, and will not be persuaded to abandon his hope that the world can change. Remember, Shelley says that the imagery he uses ‘will be found in many instances to have been drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed’ – so when P talks to the elemental voices of the mountain, springs, air, whirlwinds and then the Earth, he is doing so to explore his own mind, and his own actions. The Earth seems to help him recollect what he has done, and the context in which he did it. The Phantasm of Jupiter is a reflection of Jupiter, but also possibly the way P recalls Jupiter – and the curse (punishment) P has endured (see p. 218, around l. 286). Mercury (Hermes) is the son of Jupiter who Jupiter instructed to tie P to the rock. It is through conversation with Mercury and the Furies, Ione and Panthea – who between them present a history both of himself and of the war-torn, immiserated, catastrophic state of humanity – that P comes to the realisation that he cannot submit to Jupiter’s tyranny (‘Yet am I king over myself…’, p. 225, l. 492) but that he should ‘pity’ mankind (p. 229, l. 633). The moment he discovers the opportunity of ‘pity’, the furies – with their histories of distressing violence – disappear. Tempted by their stories to despair, P resists and realises that his own feelings of ‘revenge’ are in themselves a ‘defeat’ (p. 229, ll. 640-1). P sees that the promise of the French revolution in the end unleashed ‘confusion’, and was then exploited by ‘tyrants’ (p. 230, ll. 650-5). The six spirits of ‘the dim caves of human thought’ as Earth describes them (p. 230, l. 659) describe a more hopeful human world, but also portray the fragility of Love in a desolate world (see p. 233, ll. 763-788). This reminds P of his own lost love, Asia (p. 234, l. 809), who we will meet in the next Act (Panthea tells P where Asia is and what she is up to, pp. 234-5, ll. 825-33). P is now resolute to become ‘what it is my destiny to be, / The saviour and the strength of suffering man’ (p. 234, l. 817). His closing speech of Act I secures his resistance to Heaven, and his consolation in the Earth (p. 234, l. 820).

Act II

Daughter of Ocean, Panthea, attending Prometheus, goes to find his long lost love Asia. Panthea dreams – and this is followed by their visit to Demogorgon. They persuade him (or rather, it!) to act for Prometheus and for the betterment of humankind. In Act 2, scene 1 (A2S1), Asia welcomes Panthea as spring – with the promise of new life – ‘Like genius, or like joy which riseth up / As from the Earth’ (p. 235, l. 10-11). There is a sense from both that they have been miserable for a long time and are only now remembering what life was like ‘[b]efore the Titan’s fall’ (p. 236, l. 40). Panthea communicates two dreams to Asia (p. 236, l. 60) and the promise of hope in and through Prometheus lifts Asia. The scene ends with them both being enjoined to follow their dreams, and echoes of possibility, of futurity – the ‘world unknown’ (p. 240, l. 190).

               A2S2 sees Asia and Panthea in a forest ‘with Rocks and Caverns’, and listening to ‘semichorus’ of spirits, and then fauns. In this scene, luscious natural processes of song, sound and movement are described. Demogorgon is mentioned for the first time – as the overseer of all these natural processes (think here, back to that ‘power’ of ‘Mont Blanc’ – and the ‘everlasting universe of things’ that moves like a river through nature, and through the mind of man):

There those enchanted eddies play

     Of echoes, music-tongued, which draw,

     By Demogorgon’s mighty law

     With melting rapture or sweet awe,

All spirits on that secret way,

     As inland boats are driven to Ocean

Down streams made strong with mountain-thaw… (p. 242, l. 41-7)

 The end of this scene sees the first prediction of the release of Prometheus, and what it will allow mankind: ‘how he shall be loosed, and make the Earth / One brotherhood…’ (p. 243, ll. 94-5). A2S3 sees Panthea and Asia arrive at ‘the mighty portal’ marking the ‘realm / Of Demogorgon’ (p. 243, ll. 2 and 2-3). Asia is awe-struck, and both express a dynamic, electrifying sense of the sublime – the atmosphere full of threat yet it is intoxicating also: ‘my brain / Grows dizzy’ says Asia (p. 245, ll. 49-50). The ‘Song of Spirits’ guides them ‘Down, Down’ to the ‘snake-like Doom’ of Demogorgon. A2S4 sees Asia ask questions – of creation, origin – and Demogorgon is pretty inexpressive in his replies. Asia’s succession of questions as a speech (pp. 248-9, ll. 33-109), is her version of the creation and history of the world and civilisation – and ends with asking about the relationship between Prometheus and Jove (another name for Jupiter). The impassive Demogorgon doesn’t offer much (‘I spoke but as ye speak’ he says, (l. 113) but he does seem to offer the promise that ‘eternal Love’ reigns supreme in the universe (p. 250, l. 120). Asia asks when P will be free – and Demogorgon introduces ‘the immortal Hours’ (p. 251, l. 140) – one of which will signal it is time for P to be released. In A4S5, Panthea and Asia travel with a spirit, awaiting a delayed dawn (p. 252, l. 10). Panthea observes changes in Asia – ‘I scarce endure / the radiance of thy beauty’ (p. 252, ll. 17-18); Panthea says that ‘the whole world seeks thy sympathy (p. 253, l. 34), placing Asia at the centre of creation. The voice in the air seems to celebrate Asia’s position, and Asia’s response (pp. 254-5, ll. 72-110) which draws so much on imagery of water and river, is very similar to the sense of dynamic, coherent and mutual relations between natural processes and spiritual connections that Shelley espouses in ‘Mont Blanc’ – the end here seeming to be in ‘Harmonizing this Earth with what we feel above’ (p. 255, l. 97) – and all of it pointing to a ‘diviner day’ (p. 255, l. 103).

Act III

Demogorgon usurps Jupiter. Asia and Prometheus, Earth and Moon, are unified and a new age dawns. For the first time, we meet Jupiter, ‘on his Throne’. ‘I am omnipotent’ he declares (p. 255, l. 3): only mankind is offering any kind of resistance to his power. He talks proudly about his power over the despairing of mankind, and of his lust and the rape of Thetis. Demogorgon then appears, and challenges Jupiter’s power. By the end of this scene, Demogorgon has defeated Jupiter, and Jupiter acknowledges that P is ‘monarch of the world’ (p. 257, l. 69).

In A3S2, the sun-god Apollo and the Ocean are in conversation, in the mythical setting of Atlantis, and discuss the fall of Jupiter in detail. Both offer a sense of the new-found freedoms that open to them now Jupiter is gone – ‘unstain’d with blood’ (p. 258, l. 19) – troubled ‘no more by blood and groans’ (l. 29), and not ruled by ‘slavery and command’ (l. 31). A3S3 takes us back to the Caucasus mountains, where Hercules welcomes the releasing of P from his tortures. Ione, Asia and Panthea, the Earth, and the spirit of the Hour are there too. P looks forward to loving peace with Asia, in a cave, surrounded by the other gods and spirits (pp. 260-1, ll. 10-63) – ‘unexhausted spirits’ – ‘harmonies divine’ – ‘all / that tempers or improves man’s life, now free’. Talking to P., the Earth looks to a new world where ‘men and beasts in happy dreams shall gather / Strength for the coming day and all its joy’ (p. 262, l. 103-4). The Earth bemoans ‘faithless faith’ (l. 130) – for which there is now no need, Jupiter having gone. The Earth tasks her torch-bearer with taking light (and the company) back to the cave near a temple in which P used to be worshipped.

A3S4 sees P, Asia, Panthea, Ione and the Spirit of the Earth (not the Earth itself), at the cave. Ione and Panthea marvel at this spirit that ‘guides the Earth through Heaven’ (p. 264, l. 6). There is an over-riding sense here of relationships being re-established between elemental forces, now the divisive tyranny has gone. Spirit of Earth also relates the transformation of humanity – (p. 265, ll. 40-77) – much of it in the visual terms of human ugliness  – ‘All things had put their evil nature off’ (l. 77) – a story of ‘happy changes’ (l. 84). The Spirit of the Hour also describes transformations: ‘thrones were kingless… None fawned, none trampled… None frowned, none trembled…’ (p. 267, ll. 133-137). People are more honest when there is no tyrant to please – and no one pretends to false thoughts or emotions (p. 268, ll. 142-52). Women are free from ‘custom’s evil taint’ too (l. 156). In key lines, the Spirit goes on to describe a world without prisons, judges, thrones or altars: all those embodiments of false consciousness and tyranny, for Shelley. And along with those, goes ‘dark yet mighty faith’ (l. 174) that people had to ‘Kings and Priests’ (l. 173). Humanity is ‘Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed’ (p. 269, l. 194) – ‘free from guilt or pain’ (l. 198).

Act IV

This is the dancing, music, and singing scene (for the whole Act) – with its parade of increasingly celebratory songs about freedoms, unions, enchantments and harmonies, from spirits and choruses of all kinds around the cave of P and Asia (et al). The world has woken up. Ione and Panthea share a colourful, psychedelic vision of abundant life in exultation and extreme, dancing happiness, which is in many ways key to this psychodrama (pp. 276-278, ll. 194-318), and which the Earth explains is ‘the animation of delight’ (p. 278, l. 322). Pushing the poem even further into abstraction, Shelley envisions a play of sound, sight, materiality and spirituality – emotion and thought – which all combine energetically into one ‘Orb’ of excited loving joy. Building even further on this orgasmic sense of ‘intertranspicuous’(p. 277, l. 246) unifications of elements and feelings, the Earth and even the cold Moon then revel at length in their new-found liveliness and expansions of Love – with the defeat of Jupiter (p. 279-80, ll. 325-503); they celebrate connectivity – and the restoration of the human spirit: in a key passage, the Earth celebrates ‘Man, one harmonious Soul of many a soul / Whose nature is its own divine control / Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea…’ (p. 280, ll. 400-3). Divinity is restored to its rightful place in all mankind – ‘a chain of linked thought / Of love and might to be divided not’ (p. 280, ll. 394-5).

               Demogorgon reappears (p. 284, l. 519), and calmly describes (and communes with) a world freely organised around principles of ‘beauty, love, calm, harmony’ (p. 284, l. 527) – it is a ‘great Republic’ (l. 533) replies a ‘voice from above’. Demogorgon then establishes what humanity has now become, in the closing lines of the play, and makes all elements of the universe listen to his declarations about the state man was in, but what he is now. The closing, assertive purpose for us all to take on, that Shelley has Demogorgon voice, is to ‘defy Power which seems Omnipotent… till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates… Life, Joy, Empire and Victory’ (p. 286, ll. 572 ff.).

[This ranting unresearched and mostly unplanned polemic was written as part of a ‘performance’ of responses to four texts our contemporary literature students were set for a session on manifestos. The texts they had to read were extracts from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,  Declaration; Jaron Lanier, You Are Not A Gadget; David Shields, Reality Hunger; The Global May Manifesto of the International Occupy Assembly.

I started by showing them this film first – of a monkey with an iPad ‘magician’.]

We are all monkeys – we are all enticed and tricked by devices into thinking we are being rewarded fairly, and nutritiously. We are all infantilized by the shallow promises of technology, made into gurning monkeys. We fool ourselves into thinking we are interacting with real monkey nuts, but in reality (whatever that is) we are toying with the simulacra of a con-artist’s computer-coded mental flatulence. We laugh at one another’s inability to see the difference between a picture of a nut, and a real nut. We are incredulous about one another’s credulity. We will believe anything like this dumb monkey. Ooh clever magician: you tricked a monkey with an iPad. You are a boy wizard, can you fly on a broom – or are you just the sort of magician who gets his kicks from humiliating animals? This film reveals the idiocy of what we still call ‘magic’, the equally infantilizing misapplication of technology, and the impenetrable and unalterable cruelty in our relationship to animals.

Here’s two actual things that I have been witness to:

First. If you have travelled on the London underground recently, you might have seen what is to my eyes still a stunningly new phenomenon. Men roughly my age, with some sort of electronic device, with big fat headphones plugged in, playing what is evidently some sort of space or driving game. Moving around as if they are driving a super-fast electronic car, the sort that would get them into a party with Jeremy Clarkson. Now these are grown up adults; actual men. In their thirties or forties. And there they are, on a train, pretending to drive a car to nowhere. They are not covering that raw fact up. They seem to be saying to the world LOOK AT ME, I AM PLAYING A KIDS’ GAME – or – well – utterly nothing. Because anyone doing that, at the moment of doing it, is a monkey chasing pictures of peanuts, and probably doesn’t have much to say for themselves.

Second. Another public-transport phenomenon. About 8 years or so ago, adults started reading children’s books. Publishers caught on to the fact that there might – reasonably – be some vestige of shame if adults were seen reading children’s books about magic children in a magic children’s public school – so the canny publishers designed these books with supposedly adult-looking covers. But the strangest thing was, at the time on any given train to anywhere – you could still see the brazen printed letters on the cover spelling a title such as Harry Potter and the Paucity of his own Derivative Plotlines, or Harry Potter and the Chamber Pot of Repetitive Despair (I stole this “joke” from Stewart Lee). The adult versions of these children’s books – books for and about young children at school mind, and not for that nebulous market now called ‘young adults’ – were not I think really designed to disguise the fact that a grown-up was intently reading a children’s book. Rather, they were designed to claim a kids’ cultural item for the grown up persons. Again, there seemed to be no public shame in an adult reading these books – and worst of all – in actually talking about it to other adults.

The reason I mention the world of portable gaming computers and that of children’s literary culture together, is that both seem to me to indicate a infantilizing stage in our culture: our culture seems to be happy with adults doing kids’ things. A lot of manifest cultural concern is that these days kids grow up too fast: girls wear lipstick when they are 3, boys smoke fags when they are 6, kids become parents when they are still in nursery, and all of them run their own blue-chip companies before they’ve got pubic hair. To my mind, all of that parental Mumsnet-style worry is actually pointed at entirely the wrong end of the spectrum. It is adults adopting childish pursuits – designed by adults to entirely consumerist and capitalistic ends of course – that we need to worry about. That great manager of habit – public shame – is just not working the way it used to. Both the mechanisms I have mentioned so far are highly mediated technologies – devices for consumption of cultural stuff for sure: the first technology the book is 566 years old this year – and apart from basics like chairs and spoons is pretty much as old a piece of technology as still circulates in contemporary life; the gaming computer handheld thing is just a baby – about 25 to 30 years old. And we could talk about the different styles of interaction, the nature of distinct ways in which the imagination is stimulated in entirely separate ways by each of these devices, and probably as literary types, we’d rather talk to a grown-up who had read Harry Potter than someone who had invested hours and hours of dead commuting time in excitedly accruing electronic points in an electronic race to an electronic nowhere. Probably, we’d think the book is the superior phenomenon – and needs more from the reader – is less passive, is more intellectual as an adventure.

But then I say no. Look at what those adult-covered boy git wizard books have unleashed now. Books, yes. These books

These are books. For adults. For adults to colour in. Digest that fact if you will.

I am always saying to students, if you don’t like a book, ask what that means about you. So – I have to do it for myself. 

I don’t like this cultural phenomenon – this new and commercialized habit of adults doing things – enjoying things – talking about things – that seem to originate from the world of kids’ stuff (though all of it made by adults, of course, for money). What does it say about me and my subject position? Does it mean I am just a cultural snob? Or – if I want things designed for kids to stay with kids, and for adults to do what I regard as adult things, does this mean I am an ageist cultural conservative – that I don’t like the rebellion of these adults against expectations and normative consumption? Do I think the infantilization of cultural habits – as I read this process – is a marker of a decadent capitalism that doesn’t even demand effort on the adult’s part?

Or is this phenomenon for me a harbinger of something far more apocalyptic: that consumerism has offered us so much choice (a thrust of the Zengotita critique) – or that modernity is so horrifically complicated and threatening – that we as adults, all want to retreat into the womb of childish habits, of infantile cosiness? What does it say about our responses to reality, if we adopt child-like hobbies and cultural consumption? As Jaron Lanier says boldly at the end of the chapter from You Are Not a Gadget, resisting the idea that reality sucks and computer worlds offer endless creative possibilities – ‘Humans are free’ – we are free to not infantilize ourselves – to not be as boring as a child – to face up to adult art, adult levels of complexity and fear. 

The Occupy Assembly assert right at the end of their manifesto – ‘We will not stop being people. We are not numbers. We are free women and men.’ And yet it seems that with all that freedom, when faced with all the possibilities of western liberal democracies and consumerist decadence, we don’t want grown-up stuff. We want dummies – or in that fabulous American word – pacifiers.

It might be that – as Jaron Lanier describes it – the “one big information system” that web technology promises is so massive and so threatening, that we are beating a path to safer, simpler hobbies and habits, that seem redolent of our own pasts; or maybe it’s our sheer redundancy in the indebted global financial system (that Occupy seems to blame for all social ills) that infantilizes us, and our passivity, and that the concomitant disempowerment of our position pushes us into infantilizing cultural hobbies – cod-magical spaces where we are free from care, free from adult thought. 

Perhaps this trend has something to do with the same point David Shields makes in Reality Hunger when discussing Douglas Coupland’s Generation X – that reality is mediated for us by “mall culture and mass media” to the point that we feel we have “McLives” rather than real lives: mediated, processed, mass produced, corporatized, sweetened. And so as a route of simulated escape (and of course not real escape, whatever that could mean were it actually available) we are not simply returning to our own past childhoods (the kind that Peter Kay and James May fetishize for a living): in addition we are sucking away the cultures of our own children into our adult lives - accessing the experience of new childish pursuits as willful nappy-wearing adults. 

Today I was struck by that perennial old chestnut, thinking my way hard - frown to the fore - through paper presentations really only written for slow in-print reading, not fast oral hearing. This is not a problem exclusive to the ingenue by any means: old hands seem even more keen to show off their multi-clausal never ending conceptually hyper-stretched sentences, forgetting merrily that they have an audience’s intellect to cater for, which by now even coffee cannot seem to energise, on what feels like day 28 in the big MLA house.

It is such a relief to witness a panel where the speakers actually talk to each other, and to their punters, where they loosen from their finely-crafted abstruse monologue, and enjoy the messiness of immediate thinking. And I was lucky in that the two sessions I attended with a far broader remit - one on Critical University Studies, and the other on Working Class academia - were both nimble, accessible, conversational, and richly fit for auditory consumption. Not coincidentally, they were both engaged with immediate, pressing concerns.

The more scholarly sessions I’ve been to, were not accessible, or at least, nowhere near as much. They consisted mostly of papers to be read and re-read - not read aloud. I think my paper was also rather like that though I did try to make it fun, rhetorical, provocative, angry bits, jokey bits, coloured handout, all that. Made no difference though - audience seemed pretty nonplussed. 

I heard a good story today about a US academic who forgot her passport because she forgot Vancouver is in a different country. 

Also - saw the Queen’s face on Canadian coins and it made me feel sick and ashamed and generally freaked out. What will we feel when Prince Charles adorns the cash? 

I made it to 3 panels today. The first introduced me to the concept of a new discipline called “Critical University Studies” - essentially an attempt to resist the neo-liberal corporatisation, capitalisation, homogenisation, of universities, by making them the object of academy study. The second was, er, let’s say, in an area way beyond my skill set. The third was, for me, as moving and therapeutic as an academic conference session can get: a discussion of the working-class in academia - students and faculty. Felt like I was with friends, immediately. Class does that, somehow. Brilliant.

The MLA seems friendlier, yet more argumentative, more bolshy, than I remember it. Far fewer suits and ties (does that matter? It seems to, to me), and a greater and/or more vocalised sense, via Twitter mostly, that too many people are not here because the MLA is too darned pricey. Even so, it is certainly less hierarchical than I recall it being - and that’s great and a relief.

There is widening anger about such things as the MLA elections supposedly being covered up & misreported; about the huge pay of the senior exec of the MLA (a shock to me, that one); about the failure of the U.S. academy to prevent the exploitation of temporary and poorly paid “adjunct” teaching staff; about the precarious state of the humanities in HE; but also, from Chris Newfield especially, a sense that contemporary culture needs English, writing, and literary and language expertise, more than ever - and that this could very well be a fabulous time for our subject areas to take centre stage of a wider boom to cultural endeavour. Stirring stuff.

Travelling to the MLA annual convention for the third time today, I thought I’d try to blog daily for the first time. Here goes. I’m typing this onto a twatpad in half-light, somewhere near Greenland, on a plane dropping through the cold gloop of a maritime night, on the way to Vancouver.

Before he fell asleep, the young Swiss fella next to me told me he studies English language in Vancouver. Why English? I asked. Because he wants to be a police officer, and in Geneva you have to have English to do well in that job. Why Vancouver to study it? Because when he was younger, he fell in love with Eminem and just thought English was so cool. Why not go to the USA to study it then? Because he’s heard that Americans are not trustworthy, whereas Canadians are more friendly. Plus, Vancouver is an awesome party town.

Sleep well my new Swiss friend.

The Modern Language Association is the behemoth academic organisation of literature and languages in U.S. higher education. So big is it, so dominant, and so deep its reach, that it is nigh-on impossible to get a foot-hold on the academic job ladder in the States, without being a member of the MLA, and going through the annual convention’s first-round job interviews for academic posts. When I first went to the MLA, in December 1998, in San Francisco, as we entered the vast conference centre reception area for the first time, my colleague and dear friend (who looked after me so generously for the whole event) said “Smell the fear”.

Conferences always threaten to be disjointed and isolating affairs; you might be excited to hear someone speak who you’ve been reading for years, but mostly, the stars don’t want to talk to the younglings. The worst conference thing that happened to me, the summer I finished my PhD, occurred when a senior, brilliant academic, asked me - in front of his friends who were even more senior, more powerful academics - “You’re that John Clare cunt, aren’t you?”.

That was in the UK. And anyway, I was. Hierarchies abound at conferences everywhere, I’d imagine, but the MLA turns that judgemental dial up to 11, albeit through steely be-suited assessments of name badges rather than blunt language. Yet the main reason my companion was sniffing out the particular waft of the fearful MLA brew, is that a huge and damaging proportion of the approximately 7,000 to 10,000 delegates, would be having many, many interviews across the three and a half days of the conference. While a similar number would be doing the interviews. The highest number I have heard of, for a candidate’s number of interviews, is nine, but I am sure some plucky academic aspirants have many more than that. Poor sods.

Stories abound of interviews in hotel rooms - with the candidate on a suitcase prop, and the sole interviewer in a loose-fitting, testicle-airing dressing gown, lying on the bed, sipping hotel whisky from a minibar plastic bottle. Tenure can do all manner of things to an academic.

On my rough estimate, about 2,500 people actually present their research, in sessions which are timed so strictly, it is often hard to intellectually breathe. But then the organisers are hosting 700-800 separate sessions: if you run over time, you’re like a marble under a woolly mammoth’s foot. The whole thing could collapse into mayhem with just one extra paragraph read out.

The relationship between the interview rounds and the style and content of research presentation has to be interesting. It would be easy to walk away with the impression that the presented work of the candidates is stymied, cautious, anodyne, in case an interviewer they are about to see, is sitting cross-armed, head-shakingly, in the audience. The US job market is so perennially tough (and is the real subject of many of the MLA sessions) that anybody would be right to mitigate career-risk by steering a safe and critically inoffensive and genuflecting course in their paper. I’ve seen some awful, nervously-pompous, sycophantic papers, of course, but I am not sure the parallel interviewing process does that. It’s just part of critical discourse in general, and the “professional” desire to avoid direct confrontation at all costs. That’s the bigger shame of academia, I think. It should be a far more argumentative world than more corporate cultures beyond the academy, allow for. Academia must not copy corporatising notions of individual’s institutional alignment without deep and sustained critique - many have said this - but increasingly professionalised conferences don’t really show how we differ as a culture. All I can do is refuse to wear a suit, keep my jeans and my DMs on, and be rude, confrontational and cheeky in my own 20 minutes. But this is my third MLA and I don’t think I’m winning… Vancouver might prove me wrong, and less alone.

Back to the MLA woolly mammoth of a monster. The sheer size of the event means that no individual can come away with anything but a narrowly partial impression. In the next 3 days, at the most I’ll get to 21 sessions - but only if I do nothing else - & Vancouver must be worth a bit of a shufty? There are (I think - my program is in the locker above my Swiss friend’s snoring face) about 700 separate sessions. Each lasts 75 mins. Each usually has 3 speakers. So when we talk about the potential alienation, isolation, and fragmented experience academic gigs often seem to threaten, nothing in my own English Lit world at least, comes close to the MLA. It is unique in my profession. And perhaps against much of what I’ve said above, I kind of love it.

What country do you go to to get big restaurant portions, big cars, big movies, big rockets, big armies, Humvees, tall cities, huge corporations? The MLA is the literary academic’s equivalent of a Big Mac. My belly tells me I’ve always been partial to those squishy buggers; the MLA is like gorging myself on academic sat fats.

This last incisive point is somewhat spoiled by the fact that this year the convention is in Vancouver, Canadadada. But I hear they have some pretty big stuff too.

[I wrote this in September 2007, 3 months after our house got flooded with three feet of water, and the same month my Dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the gullet.]

If the rains came, they would wash my hapless home,

This skin and mortar taughtening structure

This web of cryptic trip wires and plaster dust,

They’d slap against the lime licked bricks and soak

The walls to porridge.

                                    If the rains came, if

One sodden afternoon you happened upon me

Scraping sand into a plastic bag, stuffing

A dead pigeon’s torso with earth, squashing

Its giblets through its throat, watching the tumour

Of its gizzards shiver in the pelting rain,

Smelling the pity of it through its feathered breast,

If against my crumbling walls you chose to lean

And by some poor mistaken route had walked

Upon this scarecrow life.

                                    If the rains came

And you came too, would you wheelbarrow me

Past the lakes, past run offs and banks and dykes?

Past and fast past tarmacked soups, on and up

You’d barrow me to higher ground above,

Beyond this pond like life, your green claws

[I wrote this polemic for an Oxford Brookes debate, for which I was asked to defend the lecture. I am not sure I buy all of it, quite... Much is based on a Twitter conversation I had about 10 days ago - thanks one and all for those contributions - and much based on the experience of the very best lectures I have been witness to. It is unashamedly idealistic.] 

The novel did not replace poetry. Cinema did not wipe out the novel. Cinema theatres did not make a ghost of the dramatic stage. Radio did not usurp cinema. TV did not make radio redundant. Recorded video and DVDs did not stem a desire for broadcast TV. And while voraciously hoovering up all of these cultural progenitors, the internet has not, so far, terminated any of them. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the internet without the content provided by poetry, drama, novels, authors, actors, TV, cinema and so on – just as it is hard, and depressing, to imagine our culture without the foundational cultural forms I have listed, all of which stem essentially from the basic, perennial human desire to tell, and to hear, a story.

So, no matter what current, modish fads we might be indulging for electronic devices offering mobile, instant, on-demand information, no matter our addiction to the twitter-chatter of pseudo-social gratification on electronic networks, it still remains impossible to imagine our culture without the poem, the stage, the novel. Some cultural forms just endure. They adapt, they refine, they reshape, they decline and resurge, and overall they endure. Similarly, the lecture – that most ancient of educational forms – survives. It is still nigh-on impossible to imagine a university without the very special focal point that is the lecture and its theatre.

All of our new educational and presentational technologies – which have grown exponentially of late – have helped the development, and have reaffirmed the centrality – of the lecture. Indeed, so central is it, that it might be that a university without a lecture theatre is not really a university at all.

The lecture is our oldest mass-communication tool, pre-dating print, but surely pre-dating the written word as well. Because they are oral forms – knowledge stories requiring just a speaker and an audience – lectures will have been heard before humanity started writing, before it started taking notes. But later, in the days when books were not printed but still copied out by the skilled hands of monastic scribes, the lecture was a cheap way of accessing the wide reading and intellectual reach of a scholar by hoards of neophytes all in one go. As many have suggested, the oral delivery of the lecture and the partner skill of lecture-note making, might have developed formally because written knowledge was hard to come by, hard to disseminate, before printed books, in the run up to 1450 and Gutenberg’s printing press.

But, if the absence of print was the reason lectures became the central platform of university education, what kept them going after portable printed text became available? Why does the lecture persist some 563 years after the technology of the book became available, which provided accessible “information delivery”? It cannot be, that the lecture maintains centrality to university life just because it is about efficient “information delivery”: there are far better modes of dissemination for that job. So why is it that the beating heart of our glorious new multi-million pound building on Gipsy Lane, is a glass and wood-ribbed lecture theatre which floats on air? Why is the lecture theatre the constructed, dramatic space we are architecturally driven to aspire to in that new building? The lecture is not just a remnant of the deep past of ancient university tradition, but is our focal point in the long future of our own new building.

Lectures are a sort of architectural technology in themselves: a social formation, a group convention, that require a suitable venue, a seating plan and a building appropriate to channel and support a group’s focus on a singular speaker. At its heart, the lecture is simple and efficient to deliver. It has always been the driving platform for the massification of higher education. The one speaks to – and responds to – the many. It is a socially enhancing dramatic event, a performance demanding intellectual risk. The lecture has the community-building role of the town crier, the politician’s hustings, the soapbox in the park. And it is structured around an idea that someone in the room has something to talk through which the rest of the group do not know or understand; the lecture in subjects like mine – English Literature – is not about information delivery much at all. The lecture can go in pursuit of critical interrogatives, not definite affirmatives; a critical inquiry opening up problems and questions, not lists of answers. The lecture is an inherently adaptable and nimble tool, useful, variously, across all disciplines, in a wide array of guises.

The lecture works best as the centre of a mixed economy of educational experiences, of course. It should not be the sole platform for learning – not at all. Under that sort of pressure, it certainly shows its limitations. But the foremost authority on the subject of the lecture – Donald A. Bligh – finally determines through various axioms of comparative assessment, that the lecture is no worse than any other form of pedagogical tool available to us as academic teachers, in his classic study What’s the Use of Lectures?

Beyond the manuscript and the printed book, the lecture has been complemented by blackboards; whiteboards; hand-out photocopies; transparencies and OHPs; PowerPoints; all sorts of technologies for enhancing audience focus and interaction, from controllable lighting, to amplified sound and electronic multi-choice voting devices; we might even mention those horrible laser pens which were deployed to enhance the phallic power of our more controlling lecturing colleagues. And to extend access to the contents of the lecture, we’ve got Moodle, and PDFs, and online films; and we can record and adapt and extend the artefacts and impact of the lecture in an increasingly rich variety of ways; we have, in sum, all manner of cheeky gizmos and techno wizardry to hand. But still the lecture endures.

We all know what it is like to suffer an interminable, inept and irrelevant lecture and we all recall that lecturer who couldn’t hold the attention of his own parents, let alone a room of 150 twitchy, twittering students. But getting rid of the lecture because of the worst lecturers, would be like shutting down Radio 4 because of The Archers and ‘Thought for the Day’; or closing all theatres and banning music, because of Andrew Lloyd Webber. So we should not question the value of an educational practice because of its lowest common denominator. We should aspire to raise it up to be in line with the best.

We all know the techniques to keep an audience engaged; we know when their attention drops off about 20 minutes in; so we use dramatic interventions, we change tack via a shift of focus, or use of a different medium, or we set the audience a quick task, or reach out to it in some other way to prod its attention back to the subject at hand. While the lecture is still conventionally a monologue, and legitimately so, most of the best lectures are interactive in some way. So keen have we been since 1968 and all that, to level the power dynamics of the educational experience, that it seems that the simple procedure of a student actually listening to a qualified, validated academic who has read more books than the students – who is in other words an expert in the subject – is now cast in doubt and regarded with suspicion.

Students join university to read; to research; to discover; to socially interact; to write, to talk; and, yes, to row and drink and dance too – but also to listen. To be silent, and to actively listen to an expert at the very top end of their subject. Good listening is not passive. A good student will actively make notes, will actively ruminate over the materials and knowledge presented by someone who knows the topic at hand better than they do; and will be actively awoken by the social cohesion of communal reading, the communal sounding out of ideas.

As academics, we should not be ashamed of that. We do know more than the students, about our subjects, and about their learning too, oftentimes. Indeed, that’s what being an academic is all about – and it is at the heart of leading a room – of holding an audience with your words, while you think them through something new for the first time. The magic of that experience of the elevating – the flowering – of understanding, the uncovering of knowledge, must not be left only to the individual at the lonely, flat computer screen, or to the unstructured, untutored chat of open group learning. It is vital and humane, that some high quality educational experiences still happen face-to-face, in a safe, planned, situation where the risks are intellectual, and where all the social attention is on one point, one voicing of thought, knowledge, analysis and understanding.

You all know that there is something profoundly uplifting in experiencing that kind of hushed educational magic in a large group; you can all recall instances of it, as I can. You cannot get that on Moodle, or Google, and we debilitate and cheapen ourselves and our disciplines, and further isolate the already lonely student, if we lazily assume that all of this vital communal stuff of being at university is genuinely reproducible online, is available via a MOOC or a TWERK or whatever the next technological educational fad is to be called. The lecture can be recorded, it can be captured like a fly in amber, like a butterfly in aspic, mounted on YouTube like a stuffed bird in a cage, but nothing properly can reproduce the sheer presence – the liveliness – the life – of being in a room with the very best lecturer who is personally invested in taking a risk for you: in taking the intellectual and social risk of live performance, in front of – in face-to-face contact with – a group of people who are essentially at university to be in that room – to be challenged – to have pre-conceptions turned on their heads – to enjoy and to be liberated by the cut and thrust of the singularity, the educational story, the unique moment in time and space, of the spoken, live, edgy drama, that is the university lecture. 

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Here are some recent articles on the same subject, all of which I stole from or was enraged by:

Adam Kotsko, A Defense of the Lecture

Graham Gibbs, Twenty Terrible Reasons for Lecturing and Lectures don't work, but we keep using them

David Thornburg [in conversation], Lectures Didn't Work in 1350—and They Still Don't Work Today

Abigail Walthausen, Don't Give Up on the Lecture

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My fight for English started at home. I did English A-level, was predicted to fail it, so was encouraged by my father to follow one of my other subjects – Chemistry – into a career. “There’s always jobs in chemicals – money too.” But in 1988, when I was thinking of applying, there was money in studying at university too. My parents did not have to help me financially at all; and they could not. So I could trounce my father’s working-class, immigrant nervousness about financial security, driven by a hard, Hungarian communist-built work ethic, with my flouncing “Dad, it’s all free, so I should do what I want to”. I could ignore his questions such as “What job will cultural studies at Birmingham get you anyway?”. These prodding doubts felt like the piercing rationality of Apollonius’s philosophical stare threatening to destroy my Lamia-like paradisical world of ideals. But unlike Lycius, who snuffs it at the end of Keats’s poem, I could chase my own Apollonius away with the cocky teen’s response of “I don’t care – I’m doing what I want and you cannot stop me because you don’t have to pay or worry”. Lots of fights ensued. Behind it all was the fact that he didn’t really want me to leave home, and didn’t trust university to do right for me in terms of eventual jobs. My mum was supportive of anything I wanted to do. Ordinary family life, then.

A working-class boy with a directionless grammar school arrogance, I flounced into Birmingham’s cultural studies department not knowing what cultural studies was or, more crucially, how to cook. I flounced right out again, after one term, and went back home to my mum’s cooking – and both she and my dad were pleased at my drop-out status. The cost? Depression and home-bound humiliation: but – get this – no debt and no financial penalty. Eighteen months later, after clubbing, taking risks, working in London (well, sort of), and growing up (well, sort of), I flounced further north this time, to Glasgow, to do English. And yet again, no financial dependency on my parents, whatsoever. Full grant, supplemented as student loans were introduced. Four more years of free study, one of them on exchange in North Carolina. A bit of paid work, shops and offices, and across holidays, here and there, and I finished with a few grand’s worth of debt.

Now – imagine this perfectly ordinary story in 2013. Again, I have no idea what to study. My school offers me no help other than saying ‘media studies at Stirling? That’s a bit far from Sidcup.’ And I look at the fees, the definite accrual of tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt at the end of it all. I talk to my friends, many of whom have middle class economic confidence, but are doing accountancy, law, business, surveying (what does that even mean?). I talk to my parents – and we do not, in our family, have any economic confidence. We’re OK, upper working class probably. But there is absolutely no way I even want to argue with them that I should do cultural studies, or English, or anything else that’s not vocational. My heart is deflated by money before it even begins to swell with love for poetry. Actually, it is less painful than that. It is a world I cannot know, so I shut it down at 17, as I do so many things, without pain, just because they are not there, are not possible, so do not bother me. Keats’s world will never exist for me, beyond not understanding the point of him at A-level. Indeed, at 16, do I even choose English? Do I even pick up the fight? At 16, am I already thinking that my third A-level subject, alongside Chemistry and Geography, should be Physics, because it would mean a possible career “in chemicals”? I do well in Physics at GCSE (though I hate it, and its evil twin Maths) – so maybe that’s to be my path? And – well – what a manly subject to impress my Engineer of a father. Everybody’s happy. Though I do not go to university, at all.

Back to now. There’s another set of issues which, increasingly, might be inhibiting boys from considering doing English at university. If you’re working-class and male, doing English seems set against a lot of what your identity means, is against being male, against being part of that group, that culture, that rooted set of spaces and behavioural expectations, that muscular, directed, brutally productive purpose. Ridiculous though it seems to me now, the reality is that there can be an array of seemingly insurmountable obstacles directing working-class boys away from English.

I’d vouch that for many 17 year old working-class boys, masculinity - like the current discourse around higher education since tuition fees - is instrumentalist, utilitarian, and not freely idealistic. The same therefore goes for all pensive intellectual subjects which chart expression, emotion, psychology, relationship. So if you do sense an attraction to something like English, the fight starts within – you have to find a self-determination to make it right for yourself, before you then take it to others. First, often, to your father. And as that doesn’t work out, you have to find new friends who are pensive and introverted like you (or like you aspire to be).

It was probably important to me that Keats was a lower middle-class Londoner, and that he pulled away from his version of “chemicals” – medicine. His aesthetic idealism, his poetic lust, was not rooted in decadence, but in insecurity, in the threat of disappointment, in a revulsion at blood and medicinal physicality – ‘the weariness, the fever and the fret’. Literary freedom charted routes away from that corporeal misery, on the wings of the Nightingale’s song. At the same time that I was under Keats’s spell for the first time, my Chemistry teacher Martyn Berry recommended Primo Levi, and the similar patterns could be said to be true of Levi, in extremis: a stable, literary, cultured self, battling a world constructed of every deprivation and suffering man has invented for his fellow man, yet Levi maintains a productive relation with the physical universe he loves as only a chemist can. What does he grasp hold of to keep himself sane in Auschwitz? Dante – specifically lines about Ulysses from the Inferno. Poetry, literature, can form a survival mechanism – can map the possibility of future freedoms – can help you push against and beyond whatever moulds of identity are laid out for you – whether it be through class, or status, or sex, or money, or family. It is no exaggeration to me – it does not embarrass me – to say that in a very real sense – literature is freedom. In Virginia Woolf’s words, ‘literature is common ground’. It offers freedom of association, freedom to desire, freedom to play with possible worlds. Freedom to not be what everyone else expects you to be.

But with clouds of debt sagging over all prospects for a putative student, even while full funding is available via the expanded student loan mechanisms and university bursaries, how on earth can the possibilities of literary enchantment and enlightenment get through to a working-class boy of 17 now? I am sure there are parallel problems and restraints on working-class girls at the same stage, forcing them in certain directions, preventing them from taking others. But the depletion of the number of males studying at university is quite distinct. This increasing imbalance of the sexes is now combined with a national collapse in September 2012 of the number of students taking English, which nobody is talking about. English Literature can only survive as a diverse and inclusive subject - but is its future narrowing? Is it to be an early victim of tuition fees? These are worrying times.