Teaching Contemporary English Literature: A Task-based Approach [1 ed.] 9783737005760, 9783847105763

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Hans Osterwalder

Teaching Contemporary English Literature A Task-based Approach

V& R unipress

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available online: http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISBN 978-3-7370-0576-0 You can find alternative editions of this book and additional material on our website: www.v-r.de  2017, V& R unipress GmbH, Robert-Bosch-Breite 6, 37079 Gçttingen, Germany / www.v-r.de All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Contents

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part I: Assessing literary competences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I.1 Competences and tasks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I.2 Modelling literary competences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I.3 Roman Jakobson’s contribution to defining literary competences . I.4 Reading Seamus Heaney’s “Digging”: an illustration of the different linguistic functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I.5 Descriptors for literary competences: the CEFR, the Conference of German Education Ministers’ (KMK) educational standards and their Austrian counterpart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I.6 Setting up an assessment grid for literary competences . . . . . . I.7 A comprehensive assessment grid for Reading . . . . . . . . . . . I.8 Exactly what is a task? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I.9 What is the most suitable critical approach to literature for the EFL classroom? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I.10 Making use of comics figures to rouse students’ interest: a task-based approach to Simon Armitage’s poem “Kid” . . . . .

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Part II: Hybridity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II.1 Hybridity : the most topical manifestation of Self and Other . . II.2 A first taste of hybridity : Carol Anne Duffy’s “Comprehensive” II.3 Immigrants as victims: Hanif Kureishi’s “We’re not Jews” . . . II.4 The Namesake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II.4.1 Two faces of hybridity : rejecting or accepting the host culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II.4.2 The children’s acculturation in the US . . . . . . . . . . II.4.3 Gogol’s transition back to Bengali culture . . . . . . . . II.4.4 The flipside of second-generation Indian women’s emancipation: Moushumi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Contents

II.4.5 Ashima’s emancipation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II.4.6 Nikolai Gogol, names, identity and the title of the novel . II.4.7 An assessment task to elicit the literary competences acquired by the students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II.5 Radicalised young Muslim men: Kureishi’s “My Son the Fanatic” . II.6 Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” . II.7 Bharati Mukherjee’s “Orbiting” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II.8 Self and Other on Home Ground: Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II.9 The generation gap: another manifestation of Self and Other . . . II.10 Tony Harrison’s “Them & [uz]”: Other and Self in the class system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II.10.1 Teaching the first part of “Them & [uz]”: the ‘nicely spoken’ teacher’s suppression of the young working-class lad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II.10.2 Teaching the second part of “Them& [uz]”: T.W.’s rebellion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II.10.3 Diglossia: a lower and a higher variety of the same language used in a language community . . . . . . . . . . Il.10.4 Assessment tasks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II.11 Them & [uz] within the family : Tony Harrison’s “Bookends” . . Part III: Gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III.1 Gender in language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III.2 “You’re beautiful… I’m ugly”: female and male stereotypes questioned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III.3 The male versus the female view of love: a medley of poems by male and female poets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III.3.1 Guessing the author’s gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III.3.2 A male and female view of love juxtaposed: Philip Larkin’s “High Window” and Carol Anne Duffy’s “Rapture” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III.3.3 Harking back to the sexual revolution: Philip Larkin’s “Annus Mirabilis” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III.3.4 “Love”: two poems with the same title by Duffy and Larkin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III.3.5 A Duffy poem representing the dark side of love: “Row” III.4 Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III.4.1 An assessment of the five characters in terms of emancipation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III.4.2 Creative writing tasks to explore the characters . . . . .

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Contents

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III.4.3 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part IV: Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IV.1 Appendix 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IV.2 Appendix 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

157 157 162

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

167

Preface

This book is first and foremost for teachers: it provides a host of task-based lesson plans for tackling contemporary authors in the classroom. The two main subjects which are explored are multiculturalism and gender. The former is of particular topicality nowadays, since and mass migration and fundamentalist Islam have left their mark on our time. It is noteworthy that stories written in the 1990s already explore the mind of a disenchanted Muslim youth in the process of being radicalised: Hanif Kureishi’s “My Son the Fanatic” (1997) does precisely this. In other stories, Kureishi, himself the son of a Pakistani father and an English mother, probes the less radical hybrid minds of two generations of Pakistani immigrants: the fathers born in the Indian subcontinent, the sons and daughters born in Britain, but growing up with a foreign culture at home. ‘Hybridity’, the scholarly term which has ousted multiculturalism, is a metaphor borrowed from biology, meaning the cross-breeding of two species to form a new species. It can be seen as a manifestation of the fundamental anthropological dichotomy of Self and Other. This contrast between oriental Self and western Other (or, in Kureishi’s case, the reverse), is the galvanizing force driving all postcolonial writers; however, racism and xenophobia live off this dichotomy as well, labelling all immigrants as the Other. Another prominent name in postcolonial literature is Jhumpa Lahiri (1967–): born to Bengali parents in London, but growing up in Rhode Island (US), her acclaimed novel The Namesake delves into the minds of both the parents and the younger generation, who in spite of the strong presence of Bengali culture at home feel primarily American. Here the two religions coexisting in an uneasy truce are Hinduism and Christianity. Bharati Mukherjee (1940–), is the grand old dame of postcolonial literature: she was born in Calcutta and moved to the US at the age of 22. Exploring the same themes as Lahiri, her immigrants come from countries ranging as far as Afghanistan and Italy : hybridity is the central aspect of her short stories, too. Extending the hybridity theme to social class, another chapter of this book deals with Tony Harrison’s (1937–) poetry : his landmark poem “Them& [uz]”

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Preface

tackles the duality between working class and ruling class in terms of language: the working class lad with a thick Yorkshire accent is not allowed to read poetry aloud in class by the ‘nicely spoken’ teacher. This makes students aware of the fact that Received Pronunciation, the accent of the upper classes, was, or to some extent still is, a social indicator. In more general terms this hybrid duality falls into the paradigm of ‘them and us’, or Self and Other. Following up the story of sociolinguistic change from the late 1940s, the time in which Harrison’s poem is set, to today yields insight into the changing role of accent or grammar as a social marker and induces students to reflect about the sociolinguistics of their own language. Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) presents yet another facet of Self and Other : the autistic teenage narrator inhabits a radically different world than the ‘normal’ adults. Reading this book from this perspective heightens students’ awareness of the plight of disabled people who are often unconsciously discriminated against by society. The second major theme is gender. A complex theoretical discussion of this theory-laden topic is deliberately shunned. The book presents some concrete examples of the gender-bias inherent in the English language, again stimulating reflection about the students’ own mother-tongue. Simon Armitage’s (1963–) poem “You’re Beautiful” presents an unorthodox list of male and female traits: analyzing it the students are encouraged to draw up their own contrastive list of male and female qualities. Next they are given poems on the subject of love and relationships between men and women by Carol Ann Duffy (1955–) and Philip Larkin (1922–1985). However, the names of the authors are not given, the students have to apply their criteria of male and female to guess the author’s gender. To what extent modern emancipated women can diverge from stereotypical role models is explored in Caryl Churchill’s play Top Girls (1982). It shows up the ruthlessness of a career woman when dealing with her family, even her own daughter, whom she palmed off to her working-class sister in order to pursue her career. Since all female students at upper secondary school will face the dilemma of combining a professional career and motherhood, and the male students have to grapple with being at least partial house husbands, the play is an ideal springboard for reflection about gender roles in the modern world. Another dimension is added by the First Act, where six women from different historical periods and geographic regions meet for dinner, telling each other about their fates in their societies. This adds the historical dimension to the reflection about women’s role in society. The book also breaks new ground in terms of methodology : since the 1990s the task-based approach has been dominating language teaching. By setting tasks to the students the teacher encourages them to explore new aspects of the real-world uses of language on their own. In this book task-based learning is

Preface

11

applied to reading literature: in the age of access to the internet in most classrooms students can even explore the literary and historical background of a text independently, a dimension traditionally supplied by the teacher, if they are given precise tasks. By emphasizing learner autonomy the acquisition of literary competences is facilitated. As regards literary theory, the Reader Response approach is followed, since adolescent students are largely driven by their emotional reaction to a text. This does not mean that any interpretation is deemed valid: the emotional response has to be verified by comparison with the textual evidence. After all the tasks set to understand the various aspects of the text, assessment tasks with the appropriate solutions enable the teacher to evaluate the students’ performance. How to reliably assess students’ competences is the main challenge in an age of educational standards and outcome-oriented curricula. The most common tool, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), offers detailed descriptors for language proficiency, but is sadly lacking in literary assessment criteria. This book supplements the reading competence descriptors for non-fictional texts from the CEFR (which is modified by dividing every category into ‘pass’, ‘good’ and ‘excellent’) by six literary descriptors which are also graded according to difficulty. This grid is not meant to be a tool for psychometric evaluation of students’ performance (an enterprise proposed by some researchers in the field, which to my mind disregards the fundamental ambiguity of literary texts), but it is a useful help for teachers to go beyond mere arbitrariness when assessing their students’ literary competences. As a blueprint for eliciting literary competences and how to assess them, a task-based analysis of Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging” rounds of the theoretical part of the book. All in all it can be argued that the book breaks new ground in the areas sketched out in this preface, not least by offering a great number of concrete tasked-based lesson plans to to tackle contemporary texts which update the literary canon at upper secondary schools.

Part I: Assessing literary competences

I.1

Competences and tasks

A competence-based curriculum goes hand in hand with educational standards, which define the measurable skills, i. e. competences, a student should have at certain points in the education path. They are the education authorities’ response in many countries to the discrepancies in outcome between schools, a phenomenon particularly acute in federal education systems. The discussions about this controversial concept started in the early 2000s, triggered by the landmark expert report in the German-speaking world by Klieme et al. In this comprehensive work the CEFR is cited as a model of competence-based assessment for foreign languages: The Frame of Reference aims at establishing transparency and comparability when defining , developing and assessing foreign language competences in Europe; thus a broad base for the planning of teaching, learning and, above all, evaluating foreign language competence is provided. (122, my translation)

But, as Drieschner has pointed out, the elephant in the room is “‘Teaching and Learning’ to the ‘Test’ … Teaching which is reduced to competence training is predicated on a narrow concept of learning and teaching, and results in an impoverishment of educational culture.” (565, my translation) To circumvent this impoverishment, Drieschner suggests tasks which correspond to the various levels of an assessment grid starting from a minimal standard have to be developed to give students and teachers a tool other than psychometric tests to chart students’ progress in a process of formative assessment: “The central pedagogic-methodological challenge of competenceoriented teaching lies in the transformation of competence descriptions into a task format, where the competences can be graded in appropriate competence levels.” (568, my translation) These tasks are a pivotal element of competence-based teaching, learning and assessing:

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Part I: Assessing literary competences

These tasks should be embedded in ,authentic’, ,multiple’ and use-oriented contexts, where competences are formed in a cumulative, networked manner. (568, my translation)

This is the starting point of this book: the main objective is to define literary competences and subsequently develop an assessment grid consisting of the three levels ‘pass’, ‘good’, ‘excellent’ and to operationalise this system with a syllabus of task-based readings of literary texts which, due to the very nature of literature, cannot consist of multiple choice questions with clear true/false outcomes. At this stage I give only a general definition of what a task is, a more detailed discussion is to be found below : Ellis’ basic definition runs as follows: “‘Tasks’ are activities that call for primarily meaning-focused language use.” (Ellis 2007: 3). Using the CEFR as a matrix can be problematic: in fact, a number of objections have been raised. Keller gives a survey of the major faults: it is not based on an empirical study of the language acquisition process, it pretends to be a guide for the progression of teaching from lower to higher levels, which is obvious nonsense, since in writing for instance on levels A1 and A2 there would be only isolated phrases, no sentences. (cf. Keller 38) Another fundamental objection is the fact that there are no literary competences, although this is a central element in the syllabus of upper secondary schools in many countries. (Keller 36) Klieme highlights the fact that the CEFR is a quarry rather than a completed edifice: “The Frame of Reference presents itself as a flexible branching model … whose defined competence levels are to be subdivided, or rather subdimensioned.” (122, my translation)

I.2

Modelling literary competences

In the following I am going to model literary competences and add them to a grid based on the CEFR. To begin with, the term competence must be defined. The obvious point of departure is Weinert’s often quoted definition: [Competences are]…the cognitive skills and abilities which are either disposable or learnable for individuals in order to solve certain problems, as well as the motivational, volitional and social mind-set and skills to succeed in responsibly solving problems in variable situations. (quoted in Klieme et al. 72, my translation)

A more concrete definition geared to curricula-makers is given by the German Conference of Ministers of Education (KMK) in its 2012 document: Competence is perceived as the ability to use knowledge and skills in a particular subject for problem solving. The competences defined in educational standards are concretised by descriptions and requirements. (5, my translation)

Roman Jakobson’s contribution to defining literary competences

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The capacity for independent problem-solving is the essence of a competence. To develop definitions of specific literary competences we need a model of communication which includes literary texts.

I.3

Roman Jakobson’s contribution to defining literary competences

Jakobson’s model is often used to illustrate the process of communication. In his landmark study of task-based learning and teaching, Ellis points out one of the shortcomings of task-based learning: “[it] restricts the way in which language is used, causing learners to miss out on experiences of crucial importance for successful language learning.” (328–29) He is speaking about productive competence, while I am dealing with the receptive equivalent. As a model for “a multifunctional view of language” (329) he refers to Jakobson (1960) who, “in a widely cited article, identifies six main functions of language.” (329) Jakobson gives two figures of the six functions of language which can be blended in the following manner : CONTEXT (Referential Function) (1) (referred to by the addresser, seizable by the addressee, either verbal or capable of being verbalized) ADDRESSER (2) MESSAGE (Poetic Function) (6) ADDRESSEE (3) (encoder-orientation) (decoder-orientation) CONTACT (4) (a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser or the addressee, enabling both of them to stay in contact) CODE (5) (fully or at least partially common to addresser and addressee) (Osterwalder 11) Ellis glosses these six functions and then considers their importance in taskbased learning:

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Part I: Assessing literary competences

1) 2) 3) 4)

the referential function, i. e. the use of language to convey information the emotive function, i. e. the use of language to express feelings the conative function, i. e. the use of language to influence another person the phatic function, i. e. the use of language to simply establish, discontinue or prolong communication or check whether it has taken place 5) the metalingual function, i. e. the use of language to communicate about the code itself 6) the poetic function, i. e. the use of language in such a way that attention is drawn to the form of language itself. (329)

Discussing the occurrence of these functions in tasks, Ellis enumerates various task types which cater to the first five functions. But he concedes that “the poetic function … is entirely absent.” (329) In a syllabus in which literary texts take up centre stage, as is the case in many upper secondary schools in the Germanspeaking world, this lacuna has to be filled. However, to establish a gradient of complexity in a literary syllabus I shall start with the referential function. Understanding texts in which the referential function is predominant is easiest: they describe the reality surrounding the speaker. But the referential function is by no means restricted to describing the mundane details of everyday life in an artless, purely pragmatic fashion: in literature, realism is the style in which the focus is on the context, giving detailed descriptions of the circumstances in which a character lives. This has been pointed out by Ian Watt: Formal realism, in fact, is the narrative embodiment of a premise that Defoe and Richardson accepted very literally, but which is implicit in the novel form in general: the premise … that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors, concerned, the particulars of the time and places of their action, details which are present through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms. (quoted in Osterwalder 12)

Due to the proximity between messages in everyday life and realistic fiction, realistic texts are easier to understand for learners of a language than poetry, in which the poetic function predominates. The latter is at the opposite end of the scale, since the focus is on the message for its own sake. Instead of a long chain of signifiers trying to render as close a picture of reality as possible, which is the hallmark of the referential function, the poetic function is predicated on the similarity between the signifiers on the one hand (rhyme, metre, alliteration, assonance etc.) and the signifieds on the other (metaphor, simile, symbol etc). As Jakobson puts it: The set (Einstellung) toward the MESSAGE as such, focus on the message for its own sake, is the POETIC function of language … Any attempt to reduce the poetic function

17

Reading Seamus Heaney’s “Digging”

to the sphere of poetry or to confine poetry to poetic function would be a delusive oversimplification. Poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent. (356)

In a poem the poetic function is predominant, typically metaphor, simile and symbol occur frequently, often there is rhyme and metre. But there are elements of the other five functions in a poem as well: notably there must be referential elements to define the ‘dramatic situation’, the time and place in which the speaker addresses an addressee on a specific subject: the emotive and conative function are also involved, there are likely to be some phatic and metalingual aspects as well. As Jakobson points out, the poetic function is also heavily present in advertising jingles: he quotes the slogan for Eisenhower in the 1950s, ‘I like Ike’, where there is a triple rhyme plus the repetition of the k. Election slogans from our time use the poetic function as well: in Obama’s ‘Yes we can’ an unstressed monosyllable is framed by two stressed ones, the first two syllables forming a trochee. Since it is followed by another stressed syllable the listener feels that more syllables illustrating what they can do might follow. George W. Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’ uses alliteration and two iambs in each word. Thereby hangs a pedagogic tale: to introduce learners to the poetic function, advertising is a rich field that could be explored before taking the further step of tackling poetry. In the following chapters I’m going to give a blueprint how this theoretical framework can be used to analyse literary texts and to devise literary categories for an assessment grid in the spirit of the Common European Framework of Reference.

I.4

Reading Seamus Heaney’s “Digging”: an illustration of the different linguistic functions

As a first illustration of these theoretical considerations I’m going to present a task-based reading of Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging”: the target learners are advanced students in their final year of upper secondary school who are experienced readers of literature in English. Digging Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravely ground: My father, digging. I look down

5

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Part I: Assessing literary competences

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills Where he was digging. The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

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By God, the old man could handle a spade Just like his old man.

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My grandfather cut more turf in a day Than any other man on Toner’s bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up To drink it, then fell to right away Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods Over his shoulder, going down and down For the good turf. Digging. The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it. (Heaney)

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Different tasks demand a command of different linguistic functions: the first tasks are aimed at establishing the ‘dramatic situation’, a term coined by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: This leads us back to what we have said earlier, that every poem is in one sense a little drama. A poem is an utterance. There is someone who utters. There is a provocation for utterance. There is an audience. (112–13)

The first tasks are about determining who utters in response to what ‘provocation’: this obviously highlights the referential function in the poem; Jakobson’s extended definition may be helpful: “a set … toward the referent, an orientation toward the context – briefly the so-called REFERENTIAL, ‘denotative’, ‘cognitive’ function.” (Jakobson 353)

Reading Seamus Heaney’s “Digging”

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1. Define the ‘dramatic situation’ of the poem by answering the following three questions: Who is the speaker? Where is he/she? What is he/she doing? Then aspects of the poetic function are focused on in the ensuing task: 2. Analyse the first two lines and find out which word strikes the reader as rather strange because it doesn’t fit in with the other words. Explain the implications of the first two lines. Semantic incongruity is clearly something which rarely occurs in non-fictional texts relying predominantly on the referential function. The poetic function stresses the message for its own sake, thus the use of words violating semantic congruity are in the realm of the poetic. 3. Express in your own words what shifts in time and space take place in lines 6–9. Describe the location of the events taking place in lines 7–14. Here we are back with the focus on the referential function: students are asked to sketch out the ‘plot’ of the poem, what happens where at what time. 4. Explain the different meanings of the expression “living roots” in line 27. The metaphoric level of a text obviously belongs to the realm of the poetic function. Glossing it is a combination in which the metalingual and the poetic function predominate. 5. Define the main theme of the poem. Give at least two elements making up the overall meaning. Here one could speak of the need for a mix of the poetic and the metalingual function: using language to talk about the code itself, i. e. interpreting a text which makes heavy use of the poetic function. This kind of task-based approach to a poem is meant for summative assessment. A detailed discussion of the nature of a task and the potential for formative assessment will be given in the next chapter. There is no pre-task, while-task and post-task structure here. Below the answers to the tasks focusing on the referential function are given:

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Part I: Assessing literary competences

1. Dramatic situation: a. A writer / poet / Heaney himself (son of a farmer) b. He seems to be sitting at his desk, c. looking out of the window watching his father digging. 2. ll. 6–9: As he sees his father (now old) straining to dig the flowerbeds, he remembers him in his prime, digging ‘potato drills’. We are transported 20 years back into the past, to a potato field. Tasks 3 and 4, on the other hand, direct the learner towards the discovery of the metaphoric, symbolic level of the text: 3. the gun. The pen is part of him; it is a mighty instrument in his hands; ‘snug as a gun’ means it fits his hand comfortably, he feels at ease with it and that the pen is powerful, potentially violent (‘the pen is mightier than the sword’). Realizing the symbolic potential of a word that does not fit into a literal description of the context, where the referential function predominates, is a first step on the road leading to a grasp of the poetic function of language, where the purely denotative meaning of a word is only a first dimension of the text. Task 4 asks the student to perceive the difference (and affinity) between the denotative and the connotative dimension of language: “Slicing through roots” is, on the one hand, purely referential, describing the physical activity of the speaker in the past when he was digging potatoes; on the other hand, the metaphoric family roots are also cut since the speaker has decided not to follow in his forebears’ footsteps. Task 5 is the most demanding of them all: to be able to arrive at an understanding of the overall meaning of the text both the referential and the poetic function in the text must be grasped. The wording of this gloss on the code also implies the use of the metalingual function. There is no one correct answer, since the poetic function of language is open to different readings. However, as Thaler points out, a reader who does not have a sufficient grasp of the English language, literary history and theory can misread the text. (34) The poststructuralist adage that “any reading is a misreading” is predicated on specific linguistic and philosophical assumptions which don’t apply to the L2 classroom. The gist of the poem may be summarized as follows: The poem is about our relationship to our forefathers and to work. The writer describes his relationship to his father and grandfather in terms of their digging (= work) on their plot of land. Digging, on the one hand, is the most common kind of work in a rural community, but it can also be seen as a symbol for creative literary work (digging down to your family roots) – hence the link to the speaker’s writing. While the grandfather and father dig with their spades, the

Descriptors for literary competences

21

author digs with his pen. So it is also about the change of lifestyle and worldview from one generation to the next. To some extent the speaker feels disloyal, almost ashamed that he abandoned his forebears’ way of life. A reader who hasn’t learnt to perceive and decode the poetic function of a text will say that the poem is about rural life and potato digging, the speaker is just writing down his memories about his father.

I.5

Descriptors for literary competences: the CEFR, the Conference of German Education Ministers’ (KMK) educational standards and their Austrian counterpart

The literary competences must now be defined and graded so as to fit into a general framework like the CEFR: following the lead of the Klieme study and German Abitur standards I am going to define three levels (pass, good, excellent) to enable teachers and students to assess literary competence. The first port of call to find a blueprint for descriptors of literary competences is, of course, the CEFR. It is not graded in this way and mentions literature only in passing from level B2 upwards: I can understand in a narrative or play the motives for the characters’ actions and their consequences for the development of the plot.

This descriptor comprises only the most basic understanding of the referential function of a literary text. Bearing in mind that B2 is the level reached by the average student by the time they have finished upper secondary school, where literature is the central element of the syllabus at least in the German-speaking world, this is an illustration of how stunted the CEFR is in terms of literary competences: a grid in which the latter features more prominently is therefore of paramount importance. On level C1 there are three literary descriptors in the CEFR: I can read contemporary literary texts with ease. I can go beyond the concrete plot of a narrative and grasp implicit meanings, ideas and connections. I can recognise the social, political or historical background of a literary work.

The first descriptor somewhat naively uses the umbrella term ,contemporary literary texts’. The assumption that all contemporary texts are of equal difficulty is untenable, since it includes postmodern literature. There is a chasm between Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and a Nick Hornby novel. It is the difference between heavy use of the poetic function in the former and a predom-

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Part I: Assessing literary competences

inance of the referential function in the latter. In my grid I have therefore added the key word ‘realistic’. The best students in their final year at upper secondary school reach C1; their literary competence is characterized by the two descriptors on the right in categories 8 and 9 in my grid below in chapter I.5. The third descriptor from the CEFR is taken over verbatim. For C2 there are three literary descriptors: I can understand contemporary and classical literary texts of different genres (poetry, prose, drama). I can read texts such as literary columns or satirical glosses where much is said in an indirect and ambiguous way and which contain hidden value judgements. I can recognise different stylistic means (puns, metaphors, symbols, connotations, ambiguity) and appreciate and evaluate their function within the text.

The explicit mention of ‘classical texts’, i. e. texts from earlier periods, exceeds the ability of most upper secondary students. Shakespeare is often read, but he is only manageable with substantial help from the teacher and a specially annotated edition meant for English sixth formers. Once again, one has to be more discriminating: Jane Austen and some other realistic novelists could be within the grasp of excellent students; Tristram Shandy certainly is not. The “different stylistic means” all belong to the poetic function of language; but it is fallacious to assume that metaphor and symbol are not acquired on the lower levels of literary competence: realistic literary texts like Nick Hornby’s novels use them constantly : but they are easier than postmodern novels because the basic narrative makes much heavier use of the poetic function, often disrupting the thread of the realistic narrative. Another important document where one expects a clear definition of literary competences is the educational standards for the German Abitur published in 2012. However, one’s expectations are somewhat disappointed, since they are barely mentioned in the entire document. In the reading comprehension section the word ‘literary’ does not feature at all, even for the higher level. (16) Obviously the descriptors below can apply to literary texts, but complex newspaper artic les fulfil the criteria as well: – to interpret independently (English: complex) texts of various text types and periods, including unfamiliar topics (Bildungsstandards 16, my translation) – to recognise the content structure of complex texts, analysing constitutive features in their function and effect – to analyse the impact of texts in the context of their target culture

Descriptors for literary competences

23

“Texts of various … periods” could certainly apply to the canonical Shakespeare play (according to Nünning’s research published in 1998, Macbeth leads the Top Ten drama list in the German TEFL classroom (quoted in Thaler 137), but a nonfictional historical document like the American Declaration of Independence would fit the bill as well. The only examples of multiply-coded texts are not literary : – to relate, recognise, analyse and assess multiply coded texts and text excerpts, e. g. advertisements, posters, leaflets in their particular as well as their overall meaning (Bildungstandards 16) For the higher level, some elements which might refer to literary texts are added: – to decode complex texts of various text types and from different periods even if the topics are largely unfamiliar (16) Again, the historical dimension is highlighted, but there is no explicit reference to literature. The word ,literary’ is used for the first time in the descriptors for Speaking: – to present non-literary and literary as well as medial texts linguistically appropriately and coherently (18) Then it occurs again in Writing, but never as the only compulsory option: – to write texts in response to literary and non-literary original pieces of writing (18) In the description of the compulsory writing paper the KMK guidelines merely list fictional inputs next to non-fictional inputs in written or oral form without stating any preference. (31) The description of text and media-competence can of course apply to literary texts, but once more it is not explicitly stated: Text and media competence comprises the ability to understand texts independently, in a goal-oriented manner, in their historical and social contexts; an interpretation has to be corroborated by cogent reasoning (22)

Two of the three sample exam papers contain literary texts (by Tom Wolfe and Meera Syal) but the third is based entirely on Barack Obama’s inaugural address in 2008. Given that probably the lion’s share of lesson time in the top forms of upper secondary school in the German-speaking countries is devoted to literature, it is surprising that literary competences are given such short shrift in the new educational standards. When scrutinising the questions put for the literary reading comprehension papers one is struck by their general nature: they avoid critical terms like metaphor, simile, symbol, etc. altogether. The focus on understanding figurative

24

Part I: Assessing literary competences

language in order to understand the literariness of the text is largely absent. In Meera Syal’s text, which is quite demanding, irony is the dominant trope, and yet in the questions it is never mentioned: 2) Outline the clich8s about Pakistanis and the reality as presented in the text. 3) Analyse the way in which the narrator’s language reflects her perception of Pakistani women in the text. 4) In an interview, Meera Syal, the author of the text, said about herself: “I really did have the best of both worlds – a white working-class background outside the home; and inside all my Asian aunties and uncles”. Assess to what extent Tania shares this attitude. (Bildungsstandards, 87) Questions 2 and 3 necessitate a grasp of the concept of irony as well as metaphor and simile; but the assumption on the part of the authors of the exam paper seems to be that any kind of critical terminology might be beyond the competence of the average student. I don’t believe that a firm command of literary theory can be expected at upper secondary level (a utopian demand proposed by Nünning/Nünning, quoted in Thaler 38), but an understanding of the basic literary tropes can be taught and expected in the finals. The tasks I set above in my model comprehension test on Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” is a blueprint of what this might look like In the next chapter I’m going to show a possible way of modelling literary competences including the use of basic literary terminology. In Austria a central Matura paper was introduced in 2015; the centralised education system makes this possible, in stark contrast to a country with highly federal school system like Switzerland, where educational standards for upper secondary school are still only a mirage. When scanning the competences outlined in the Austrian educational standards, one is struck by the almost complete absence of literary criteria. Only in one instance are they mentioned as a possible task to demonstrate reading competence: Students are able “to recognise independently the structure of various non-fictional and fictional texts.” (Zentralmatura 122, my translation)

Of the four texts for reading comprehension, only one could meet the criteria of a literary text. “The White Rabbit” is certainly to be located at the accessible end of literary texts, a realistic short narrative with a few fantasy elements. As for the tasks, there is only a sentence completion exercise with an absolute minimum of literary terminology : The narrator watched the film to the end because _

Setting up an assessment grid for literary competences

25

“Narrator” is used two more times, but it is the only critical term used in the exam paper. In act, it is explicitly stated that the centralized exam paper is based on the Cambridge First, which contains no literary texts whatsoever. By contrast, my approach to reading comprehension of literary texts is more ambitious: not just simple narratives are used, but also poems. When fulfilling the tasks set to deal with the text, the students can acquire more critical terminology, as shown above in the chapter on the Heaney poem. A task-based analysis of Simon Armitage’s poem “Kid” featuring at the end of Part 1 of this book, is another blueprint for the exploration of critical concepts: irony is the predominant trope in that poem, and the students are guided by a set of tasks to deepen their understanding of this crucial term. This overview of the definition of literary competences in various seminal documents has revealed the paucity of descriptors for literature. Hence the development of a more detailed assessment grid for the reading comprehension of literary texts is called for : this is the subject of my next chapter.

I.6

Setting up an assessment grid for literary competences

In this chapter I am proposing a grid geared to upper secondary school with explicitly literary descriptors designating three levels, with a gradient from texts in which the referential function predominates to text types permeated by the more demanding poetic function. On the lower level the competence described implies an understanding of the plot, the characters’ actions and their motives, whereas level three highlights the understanding of the symbolic level beneath the realistic plot line:

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Part I: Assessing literary competences

1 I can understand realistic contemporary novels, plays and short stories; I understand the plot, the motives for the characters’ actions, the overall meaning as well as the significant details.

I can perceive various levels in a literary text which are relevant for its meaning (plot, constellation of characters, imagery, authorial comment, irony)

2 I can distinguish epic (narrative), dramatic and lyric texts; I can recognise their basic stylistic devices and understand the overall meaning of these texts

I recognise the various formal devices used in a text such as the kind of narrator employed by the author in a prose text. I can distinguish the different dramatic genres as well as the different types of metre and rhyme in poetry.

I can read realistic literary texts from the 20th and 21st century with ease; I can perceive and interpret the symbolic level beneath the realistic plot of a narrative. I am familiar with narrative technique (I-narrator, third-person narrator, unreliable narrator) and can assess its impact on the meaning of a text. I can perceive a subtle use of irony ; I can recognise the stylistic devices typical of literary texts (tropes: metaphor, simile, symbol, rhetorical question; rhetorical figures: anaphora, parallelism, chiasm) as well as the social, political or historical background of a literary work.

The first descriptors of level 1 emphasise the receptive command of the referential function by referring to realistic fiction, in which the realistic context takes up centre stage. In the second descriptor of 1 this is amplified by featuring the second, figurative level of a literary text (imagery, irony), i. e. the poetic function, in addition to the predominantly referential elements of plot, character and authorial comment, in which the emotive and conative function, the focus on the addresser/addressee, feature as well. In the third descriptor of 1 the same elements as in the previous box are presented with more detail about narrative technique, with the addition of the qualifier ‘with ease’, which points to the state of flow which can be reached by readers on and advanced level. Level 2 presents a higher competence in the three categories: for a ‘pass’, a formal recognition of different literary text types is sufficient. For ‘good’ a more detailed knowledge is expected, narrative technique in prose texts as well as the formal details of poetry enable the students to tackle more complex texts in which the poetic function features prominently. ‘Excellent’ requires a command of the rhetorical devices occurring in the poetic function as well as the ability to take the history of literature into account when interpreting a literary work. Let me take a classic like The Catcher in the Rye to illustrate this: a reader on Level I of Category 1 understands the story, reads it as a diary of a loser. They realise that Holden ends up in a psychiatric clinic and needs some serious

Setting up an assessment grid for literary competences

27

reorientation. Level 8.II analyses the symbolic details like the catcher in the rye metaphor : “I have to catch everybody if they start going over the cliff.” (180) A student on level 8. II realises that the children going over the cliff is a symbolic fall from the grace of childhood, thus reflecting the protagonist’s desperate resistance to adulthood. Other symbols are Phoebe riding on the carousel, reaching for a gold ring; again Holden is afraid “she’d fall off the goddam horse” (218). Recognizing the Fall of Man and the expulsion from paradise goes beyond category 8, but this insight would be covered by 2. III. Other symbols are Holden’s fantasy of being a deaf-mute married to a deaf-mute girl living in a cabin. This spells out his unwillingness to communicate with the world of ‘phonies’, i. e. adults; another instance is his rage at the boys who have written “- you”[fuck you] (207) on the wall of the school: the children would start thinking about it and “some dirty kid would tell them.” (207) A reader on level 8.III perceives more of these ubiquitous symbolic elements and is able to define the narrative technique used in the novel: The I-narrator confesses himself that he is an inveterate liar, which makes him an unreliable narrator, which means that there is an ironic distance between the I-narrator and the implied author, which is crucial for a full understanding of the novel. Category 2 presents a higher competence on the three levels: in every case a command of the skills listed under 1 is a precondition: for a ‘pass’, a formal recognition and description of different literary text types is sufficient. For ‘good’ a more detailed knowledge is expected, narrative technique in prose texts as well as the formal details of poetry enable the students to tackle more complex texts in which the poetic function features prominently. ‘Excellent’ requires a command of the rhetorical devices occurring in the poetic function as well as the ability to take the history of literature into account when interpreting a literary work. Huxley’s Brave New World will serve as an illustration of a text making greater demands on a reader than The Catcher in the Rye. Judging the text in terms of Category 9. I, the reader realises that Huxley’s book is not a purely realistic novel. The setting is utopian, or rather dystopian, the reader must be familiar with this literary genre to grasp the meaning of the text. The fact that cloning has become a reality today has to be contrasted with the time in which the novel was written, when it was pure science fiction. Historical consciousness is a central element when reading the novel, a descriptor featuring in category 2. III. The frequent quotations from Shakespeare recited by the Savage add to the difficulty of the text. The students should be able to identify the passages with the help of the internet and then perceive why Shakespeare is quoted on these specific occasions: on p. 150 the Savage quotes part of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ speech in his dialogue with the controller, stressing that “slings and arrows” are central to his view of life, while in the Controller’s Brave New World any kind of pain is just

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Part I: Assessing literary competences

abolished. To be able to make sense of this passage the descriptors of 9. III must be activated. Illustrating the literary descriptors with a text reveals that it is impossible to read texts using only one category. As in Jakobson communication model it is a question of hierarchy : depending on the text some elements are more dominant than others. A domain not mentioned in the CEFR which features in books on literary pedagogy is literary theory. Some authors make great claims about its necessity for reading literature: according to Nünning/Nünning literary theory and literary criticism “are indispensable analytical tools which enable the student to formulate the premises and arguments of their literary analyses to describe textual phenomena in an appropriately differentiated manner”. (quoted in Thaler 2008:37) In an ideal world this is a justified demand, but pedagogic experience at upper secondary level tells us that this is the stuff that dreams are made of: there are too few lessons to cover literary theory, one has to make do with the basic literary concept suggested in my assessment grid above. Nünning/ Nünning’s goal may be achieved with Bachelor students at university, maybe it even takes MA level to have a full command. Thaler, who quotes this passage in his book Teaching English Literature reduces the remit of such demands: “Teachers, and to a certain degree, students should therefore have a preliminary overview of the most important theories, models and approaches.” (Thaler 2008:37)

I.7

A comprehensive assessment grid for Reading

In the previous chapter I presented a newly developed assessment grid for literary competences. Here it is extended to reading in general: the grid covers genres like newspaper articles, letters, popular scientific articles, complex manuals and reviews of cultural events. It is based on the reading descriptors of the CEFR, but they are arranged to represent the three levels ‘pass’, ‘good’, and ‘excellent’, just like the literary categories I presented above. The three levels correspond largely to B1, B2 and C1. This assessment grid for Reading is the product of three years of curriculum development in the Swiss canton of Aargau; it has to be seen against the backdrop of a highly federalist education system, in which each of the 26 cantons shapes its own school systems guided only by very general curricula outlines from the Swiss federal government. There are no other attempts at developing something resembling educational standards for upper secondary school. Apart from the grid, assessment tasks (featuring the Heaney poem presented above) were given to a limited number of students to calibrate the system. Unfortunately

29

A comprehensive assessment grid for Reading

there were not sufficient resources available to fully evaluate the grid and the tasks. LEVEL I Reading I

1

2

3

4

5

6

LEVEL II Reading II I can rapidly grasp the content and the significance of news and reports on topics I can understand the main connected with my points in newspaper interest or my job, and articles about current and decide if a closer reading is familiar topics. worthwhile. I can read columns or interviews in newspapers I can read and understand and magazines in which articles and reports on someone takes a stand on a current problems in which current topic or event and the writers express understand the overall specific attitudes and meaning of the text. points of view. I can guess the meaning of single unknown words I can understand in detail from the context thus texts within my field of deducing the meaning of interest or the area of my expressions if the topic is academic or professional familiar. speciality. I can read letters on topics I can read letters on topics within my area of within my areas of academic or professional academic or professional speciality if I have time to speciality or interest and re-read them several grasp the most important times. points I. I can skim short texts (for example news summaries) I can understand and find relevant facts and specialised articles outside information (for example my own field if I can who has done what and occasionally check with a where). dictionary. I can understand the main I can read reviews dealing points of reviews dealing with the content and with the content and criticism of cultural topics criticism of cultural topics (films, theatre, books, (films, theatre, books, concerts) and summarise concerts). the main points.

LEVEL III Reading III

I can understand fairly long demanding texts and summarise them orally. I can read complex reports, analyses and commentaries where opinions, viewpoints and connections are discussed. I can extract information, ideas and opinions from highly specialised texts in my own field, for example research reports. I can read any correspondence with occasional use of a dictionary. I can understand scientific articles in magazines or newspapers like Newsweek or The Guardian. I can understand the main points of a scholarly article on a literary work I have read.

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Part I: Assessing literary competences

(Continued) LEVEL I Reading I

7

8

9

LEVEL II Reading II

LEVEL III Reading III I can understand long complex instructions, for I can look through a manual (for example for a I can quickly look through example for the use of a computer programme) a manual (for example for new piece of equipment, and find and understand a computer programme) even if these are not the relevant explanations and find and understand related to my job or field of and help for specific the relevant explanations interest, provided I have problems if I have enough and help for a specific enough time to re-read time. problem. them. I can understand realistic I can perceive various contemporary novels, levels in a literary text I can read realistic literary plays and short stories. I which are relevant for its texts from the 20th and meaning (plot, 21st century with ease; I can grasp the plot, the can perceive and interpret motives for the characters’ constellation of the symbolic level beneath actions, the overall characters, imagery, the realistic plot of a meaning as well as the authorial comment, significant details. irony). narrative. I can recognise the various formal devices used in a I can perceive a subtle use narrative text (point of I can distinguish epic view, different kinds of of irony ; I can recognise (narrative), dramatic and narrator). I can the stylistic devices typical lyrical texts; I can distinguish the different of the main literary genres recognise their basic dramatic genres as well as as well as the social, the different types of political or historical stylistic devices and metre and rhyme in background of a literary understand the overall poetry. work. meaning of these texts.

Obviously, one could devise a much more detailed grid of literary competences. But in the progression from lower to upper secondary school students move slowly from mastering the domain of everyday life to literature. Two out of nine categories reflects roughly the time devoted to literature in the nine years of language learning. Since tasks are the means to activate the competences described in this chapter, the next chapter sets out to define exactly what a task is. Modelling literary competences and operationalizing them by setting tasks might be viewed as a contribution to the process of standardizing outcomes in the teaching of literature in foreign languages at upper secondary level. But the previous chapter has shown that literature cannot be itemized for psychometric tests. Yet my grid offers a frame of reference to avoid the pure arbitrariness of the teacher’s assessment of student work, which results from the absence of calibrated assessment criteria In fact, the different countries of the German-speaking world are at different stages of implementing outcome-oriented assessment based on educational

Exactly what is a task?

31

standards: Germany is more advanced in implementing educational standards for English than Switzerland: as documented above, the German ministers of education are moving in this direction in spite of the federal nature of their school system. What is striking, though, is the marginal position of literature in the competence descriptors. Austria has a centralised education system and is therefore ahead of Germany and Switzerland. The Austrian agency for education research puts it as follows: The rationale for introducing educational standards is to attain more accountability in the Austrian school system, ensuring basic competences for all pupils. The development of these standards is in line with a paradigm change in the entire Germanspeaking world, which puts sustainability and outcome orientation at the centre of teaching development. (my translation) (Bildungsstandards Oesterreich)

Accountability and guaranteed outcomes are the main goals of this change: the first batch of standardized Matura exams took place in 2014/15. What is striking is the fact that in English there were no literary texts at all, the whole test is modelled on the Cambridge First. Even to a greater extent than in the German Abitur the reliability of the tested outcomes is the primary focus, to the exclusion of reading comprehension tests on literary texts, since there is an inherent ambiguity in interpretation. By contrast, this book endeavours to equip students with literary competences by presenting a wide range of texts by contemporary authors to be analysed by students in a task-based manner. Since reading literary texts is the centre piece of teaching English at upper secondary level, an attempt at exposing students to all kinds of contemporary texts going beyond the usual canon and tools for assessing students’ literary competence must be made.

I.8

Exactly what is a task?

There exists a great deal of literature about how to use tasks in language learning, but nothing on applying this approach to literature. Ellis gives a comprehensive survey of task-based teaching. Although he deals exclusively with language pedagogy, his general definition of a task can be applied to a task-based approach to literature as well: “‘Tasks’ are activities that call for primarily meaning-focused language use.” (3). As opposed to tasks, activities are focused on language learning (cf.10) He lists nine different, more detailed descriptions of a task by various authors, weighing their pros and cons. The definition of Bygate, Skehan and Swain is more extensive than Ellis’ and fits the use of tasks in a literary syllabus more precisely : “A task is an activity which requires learners to use language, with emphasis on meaning, to attain an objective.” (quoted in

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Part I: Assessing literary competences

Ellis: 5) The emphasis on meaning is paramount in literary analysis, the objective is understanding a literary text, for which purpose a number of tasks dealing with the various dimensions of literature have to be solved by the students. Ellis’ extended definition of a task at the end of his discussion of the various descriptions by different authors fits the study of literature to a t: A task is a work plan that requires learners to process language pragmatically in order to achieve an outcome that can be evaluated in terms of whether the correct or appropriate propositional content has been conveyed. To this end, it requires them to give primary attention to meaning and to make use of their own linguistic resources, although the design of the task may predispose them to choose particular forms. A task is intended to result in language use that bears a resemblance, direct and indirect, to the way the language is used in the real world. Like other language activities, a task can engage productive or receptive, and oral and written skills, and also various cognitive processes. (16)

The propositional content is an appropriate reading of the literary text, the primary focus on meaning is obvious, the use of students’ own language resources is central, even if they are expected to use some literary terminology (rhyme, stanza, point of view etc) which in the case of literary tasks are the “particular forms” which the task may predispose learners to use. The potential grammar focus is replaced by literary metalangue. The language use bears resemblance to the real-world use in a discussion of literature by experts or students at English-speaking colleges. Apart from the obvious receptive reading skills, creative responses in written or oral form are part and parcel of a taskbased analysis of a literary text. In the parlance of applied linguistics, literary tasks are ‘unfocused’ because normally there is no linguistic target feature. However, designing tasks which target a specific grammatical or lexical item that is analysed after the primary focus of the task on the meaning of the text has been evaluated, is a possibility which may be desirable in upper secondary education. Equally, a formal element of literature can be focused on: in my project on Simon Armitage’s poem “Kid”, which will be presented below, I focus on the literary trope ‘irony’ by setting tasks which direct the students to explore this concept in detail, learning about the distinction between dramatic and situational irony. Learning about stylistic devices of literary texts is focus on form in the literary EFL-classroom. By applying the task-based format to the study of literature this book makes a genuinely innovative contribution to the field. To devise a syllabus it is helpful to classify tasks in terms of their type, to determine their thematic content and then to sequence them using appropriate criteria for grading their level of difficulty for the learner. (cf. Ellis: 207) While there is a cornucopia of task-based language teaching materials, books containing task-based literary syllabuses are few and far between. In the case of

Exactly what is a task?

33

literary tasks, grading the level of difficulty means first setting tasks to analyse the referential function of language, i. e. the setting in space and time. Then questions about metaphor and symbol, pertaining to the poetic function, follow. There can also be a lexical focus, for instance the academic vocabulary of immigration (hybridity) in the texts which belong to the first thematic focus of the syllabus I’m going to propose in the following chapters. Another consideration is the “scope of the outcome” (Ellis: 226). Due to the lack of studies on whether open or closed outcomes are more challenging, Ellis surmises that open outcomes are of greater complexity. Skehan puts it as follows: Some tasks require only straightforward outcomes in which a simple decision has to be made. Others require multi-faceted judgements in which the case or position a learner argues during a task can only be effective if it anticipates other possible outcomes and other learners’ contributions. (173)

Literary tasks mostly belong to the open type, where learners will disagree on the outcome: the very nature of the literary text, the emphasis on what Jakobson called the poetic function, means that there are a great many ambiguous elements in a literary text to which there is more than just one correct answer. This has implications for the implementation of educational standards: they are operationalised by summative assessment of the psychometric type. It has to be emphasised that literary competence cannot be assessed in this way. For instance the answers to question 5 of the Heaney poem above cannot be slotted into a true/false dichotomy. In an interesting essay on literary aesthetic judgement in the mother-tongue literary classroom at upper secondary level, Roick et al. point out that all psychometric tests of reading competence, such as PISA, use non-fictional texts. In the context of literature the central question is the following: How is it possible to define unambiguous statements which can be used in psychometric tests about a literary text, in spite of the fact that the latter is ambiguous? (166, my translation)

In their essay they use Eco’s model of reading a literary text in order to eschew the total indeterminacy of poststructuralist critics. Eco highlights three aspects of the process: intentio autoris, intentio lectoris und intentio operis. While the author’s and the reader’s intention may be unfathomable and subjective, the intention of the text is transparent and allows for true or false answers by checking the passages which are cited to corroborate the reading. This model was proposed for German students reading German literary texts, but it can be applied to reading literary texts in a foreign language as well. However, the extremely complex way in which Roick et al. operationalise their model in a large-scale test with over a thousand students renders it impractical for teachers.

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Part I: Assessing literary competences

Eco’s categories “idiolectal and semantic literary aesthetic judgement” (Roick: 167), which are used in the test are rather idiosyncratic and certainly not part of a teacher’s general knowledge of literary theory. Using them in a test given in the literary EFL classroom would clearly be beyond both teachers and students. What can be gleaned from the model is that a reader’s backing up of their interpretation with references to the text is the criteria for evaluating a student answer. Psychometric tests on literature are extremely complex and in a way deceptive since they pretend that an objective, statistically sound assessment of literary competences can be achieved. The task-based study of literature works mainly with open, unfocused tasks which can be low stakes (e. g. for the assessment of course work) or high stakes (e. g. finals at the end of upper secondary education in Germany, Austria and Switzerland), but defy psychometric testing. It also fosters learner autonomy : one facet of this approach is formative self-assessment, which by definition is different from high stakes summative testing. An important part of it is to promote the learner’s capacity for self-assessment, which can result in a portfolio containing all the stages of the answers to tasks (original answer, elaborated version after peer feedback, further elaboration after teacher feedback) delineating the learner’s progress. In language teaching, tasks have been given centre stage for assessment. Ellis sums up the advantages as follows: Brindley (1994) identifies a number of specific advantages of what he calls ‘task-centred assessment’, i. e. it has a favourable washback effect. It results in both teachers and learner focusing on a tool; it enables assessment to be more easily integrated into the learning process; and it enables the results of an assessment to be reported in a way that is intelligible to non-specialist. (279)

The washback effect is crucial: because task-based assessment tends to be holistic and based on real-world situations teachers don’t have to reduce their teaching to inculcating discrete grammar items which then are assessed in a system-referenced cloze or gapped text test. Transferred to the literary classroom this means students are not expected to just reel off a great many literary terms, but to apply them to a text to arrive at a reading which is corroborated by quotations from the text and displays the ability to use the critical terminology to arrive at a valid interpretation. The real-world equivalent is a literature test at a college in an English-speaking country. Because a task-cycle on literature is a dynamic process with a number of different tasks (written emotional reaction to the text, web-searches about the social, historical or literary background of the text at hand) it doesn’t provide results which can be psychometrically measured.

What is the most suitable critical approach to literature for the EFL classroom?

I.9

35

What is the most suitable critical approach to literature for the EFL classroom?

Although teachers don’t need to be familiar with the whole gamut of critical theory, they should make an informed choice of the critical approach most suited to the EFL classroom. In the following I’m going to present the theoretical approach favoured by a great many scholars working in literary pedagogy. In an excellent article Harlam Kellam gives a survey of the critical tools used by different researchers in the field of reading literature with learners of English. One of the crucial elements is getting the students on board emotionally, to tap into their feelings when confronted with a literary text in a foreign language: Martin and Laurie (1993), who surveyed participants studying French as a foreign language in Australia about their attitudes toward literature, recommend that teachers permit students to integrate and relate what they are reading to their own personal experiences. Liaw (2001) studied the effects of Reader-Response theory in an EFL course taught in a Taiwanese university. The students wrote personal responses to short stories, and they were most interested in the texts when they could personally relate and respond to the characters and themes of the stories. (13)

Carter and Long express the same opinion: “More important [than choosing the right level of language difficulty] is access on an experiential level … Students need to identify, and identify with, the experiences, thoughts and situations which are depicted in the text.” (5–6) Reader Response criticism, developed, among others, by Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser, considers readers’ personal reactions to literature as vital to interpreting the meaning of the text. As Tyson points out: Reader-response theorists share two beliefs: 1) that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and 2) that readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary text; rather they actively make the meaning they find in literature. (170).

This theoretical rationale might be seen as catering to many students’ belief that anything goes, that the teacher’s reading of a text is as subjective and potentially erroneous as any student’s. Especially if literary texts are used for summative assessments using open tasks this issue can be contentious. Wolfgang Iser’s theoretical position precludes this kind of relativism: Thus, for Iser, though the reader projects meaning onto the text, the reading activities through which we construct that meaning are prestructured by, or built into, the text. In other words, Iser believes that the text itself guides us through the processes involved in interpreting (projecting meaning onto) it. (Tyson 2006: 174)

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Transactional theorists like Louise Rosenblatt analyse how different readers come up with different acceptable interpretations because the text allows for a range of acceptable meanings, that is, a range of meanings for which textual support is available. However, because there is a real text involved in this process to which we must refer to justify or modify our responses, not all readings are acceptable and some are more so than others. (Tyson: 174)

This parallels Eco’s theoretical stance presented by Roick et al. above: a reading is only acceptable if it is backed up by passages from the literary text, which in turn is used by the Roick team to construe reliable parameters for the measuring of literary competences in psychometric tests. Although the latter enterprise seems to be somewhat doubtful, it certainly demonstrates that Reader – Response and similar theoretical approaches do not lead to a land of no holds barred. But this approach clearly is germane to the adolescent mind: there is no tyrannical, authoritarian father-figure-like text, but a malleable entity which the teenagers, within circumscribed limits, can shape themselves. After so much emphasis on the students’ emotional response it is crucial to point out that the formal properties of a literary text must not be neglected. Therefore Kellam describes what he calls a Stylistics approach and highlights the controversy among scholars: While some researchers feel that an analysis of language forms and style is paramount to the study of poetry in the EFL context, other researchers claim that it is the personal relationship with poetic themes that positively affects learning English. (14)

At higher levels such as upper secondary school, reading literature is an end in itself, improving language skills is more of a by-product. But improving language proficiency is the overall goal of English classes, so some focus on form is appropriate. Kellam calls his fusion of the formal and emotional response the “formeaning” approach: This dichotomy does not need to exist, and I am proposing to combine both approaches into one … I have coined the term formeaning (form + meaning) to represent Stylistics, the language-centered approach to teaching poetry. Form and meaning are inseparable in a stylistic analysis, because to correctly describe and understand a language form – such as a lexical item or grammatical structure – one must consider the form in a meaningful context. (14)

This makes perfect sense, but the examples which Kellam gives for his Stylistics approach are rather disappointing. The techniques cited are reminiscent of the a lower-level EFL classroom and can hardly be called a stylistic analysis in a literary sense:

What is the most suitable critical approach to literature for the EFL classroom?

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Alternative words exercise. In this multiple choice exercise, individual words within the poem are put into parenthesis. Then two or three alternatives are added to each additional one as choices. (15)

Since poetry by definition uses words in a special way, often breaking semantic rules, this activity can only yield results facilitating a deeper understanding with a small number of lexically simple poems. The time-honoured classics like Roger McGough’ “Love” and “40 Love” come to mind. They both feature in McRae and Carter and Long (33) where they are given a more sophisticated treatment than the exercise suggested by Kellam above. Still, this kind of activity may suit students on levels A2 to B1, but more as a warm-up than as the actual interpretation of a poem. The next two activities, a listening cloze and the listing of words according to grammatical categories (verbs, pronouns etc.) are equally basic: they may help the students’ language proficiency, but can hardly be considered tools to understand a poem. In fact, this smacks of the downside of what Carter and Long call “the language approach”: This is taken by some teachers to mean that literature can be an instrument for use in connection with the teaching of specific vocabulary or structures …Such an argument misunderstands the nature of language in literature (2)

Kellam does go beyond these basic level activities in his meaning-focused tasks: the Reader-Response type of activities he proposes do more justice to the poem as a work of art. Students discuss the characters in a poem, write letters to them, draw pictures representing the poem (14–15) However, in much of EFL literature activities in response to a literary, text are devised for low levels of language proficiency, at most B1. At upper secondary school in northern Europe the proficiency level at Abitur is B2, so more sophisticated tasks have to be set, not just course book type activities. One of the pitfalls of teaching literature not just as a means of improving language proficiency but in order to learn to appreciate the cultural dimension of texts is what Carter and Long call the cultural model [which] is normally associated with a more teacher-centred pedagogic mode which focuses on the text as a product about which students learn to acquire information … there is not much attention given to the individual works. (8)

However, by applying the results of the vast amount of research on task-based language teaching to the study of literary texts I can offer a cultural model which is student-centred and encourages the students to analyse the literary aspect of a text in great detail, to my mind the most suitable approach. The next chapter offers a model analysis of a contemporary poem informed by this task-based rationale.

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I.10 Making use of comics figures to rouse students’ interest: a task-based approach to Simon Armitage’s poem “Kid” Although the original version including Robin is slightly dated (the original comic series dates back to the 1960s, the most famous film version was released in the 1980s), some of the later incarnations of Batman morphed into Spiderman and Superman are still present in today’s teenagers’ minds. Due to the ubiquity of the internet also in classrooms, students can explore the narrative of Batman and his sidekick Robin on their own. This enables them to unearth the central theme of the Armitage poem, the rebellion of the slighted stooge against his master, which is redolent of archetypal family dramas like the rivalry between kid brother and elder brother, son and father. This theme makes the poem an ideal stepping stone into the realm of contemporary British poetry. What task-based approach is best to tackle them is going to be outlined in the following. Kid Batman, big shot, when you gave the order to grow up, then let me loose to wander leeward, freely through the wild blue yonder as you liked to say, or ditched me, rather, in the gutter . . . well, I turned the corner. Now I’ve scotched that ‘he was like a father to me’ rumour, sacked it, blown the cover on that ‘he was like an elder brother’ story, let the cat out on that caper with the married woman, how you took her downtown on expenses in the motor. Holy robin-redbreast-nest-egg-shocker! Holy roll-me-over-in-the-clover, I’m not playing ball boy any longer Batman, now I’ve doffed that off-the-shoulder Sherwood-Forest-green and scarlet number for a pair of jeans and crew-neck jumper; now I’m taller, harder, stronger, older. Batman, it makes a marvelous picture: you without a shadow, stewing over chicken giblets in the pressure cooker, next to nothing in the walk-in larder, punching the palm of your hand all winter, you baby, now I’m the real boy wonder. (Armitage: “Kid”)

5

10

15

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Phase 1: pre-reading activities for ‘Kid’ The main objective of this pre-task phase is to induce the students to acquire the necessary background knowledge to grasp who the speaker and the addressee of the poem are and what the main theme of the poem might be. – Task 1 Exploring the topic. Exchange with your neighbour what you know about Batman. – Task 2 Use the internet to explore the figure of Batman and the other characters around him. – Task 3 Watch some Batman video clips on youtube. Discuss what emotions the figure of Batman triggers in you. Ask yourself how the characters around Batman must feel and what their role is. The obvious first port of call is Wikipedia: a scanning of the article provides the answer to the second part of Task 2: The early, pulp-inflected portrayal of Batman started to soften in Detective Comics #38 (April 1940) with the introduction of Robin, Batman’s kid sidekick. [25] Robin was introduced… Batman needed a ‘Watson’ with whom Batman could talk.[26] Sales nearly doubled … and it sparked a proliferation of “kid sidekicks”. (“Batman”, Wikipedia)

A next step is to write a fact sheet about Batman as well as the minutes of the main points of the discussion requested in Tasks 2 and 3. – Task 4 Write a fact sheet about Batman. Write down the minutes of the discussion requested in Tasks 2 and 3. Swap your text with that of another group and compare the results. After the tasks set above it is time to give students the text of ‘Kid’ and play Armitage’s rendering of the poem on youtube:

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Phase 2 (while-reading) Before giving the students a carefully structured set of tasks fathoming their spontaneous response, a Reader Response requirement, is of great pedagogic value. It helps the teacher to adjust the tasks set out below to the needs of the specific group of students faced with the poem. – Task 5 Write down your spontaneous response to the poem. State whether it appeals to you, what you think it is all about, what its message is. Write about 150 words. This is an important first step to activate the students’ imagination, to encourage a creative response to a work of art. In the pilot class many students got the gist of the poem and pointed out its formal similarity with rap. But only after a detailed analysis of the poem is it possible for the students to give an adequate poetic response. This is called for in Task 11. – Task 6 Compare your text in groups of three. Write down the elements you can agree on. After comparing the group results in class, a more systematic approach to the text is needed to establish the basics of the poem, which enables the reader to move on to the level of literary interpretation. At this stage it is apt to introduce some critical vocabulary to provide the necessary tools for the analysis of poetry and to give the students some exposure to literary criticism. First they have to identify who is speaking, to establish what Cleanth Brooks and Robert Pen Warren called ‘the dramatic situation’ of the poem. – Task 7 Read ‘Kid’ and proceed in the following manner: some critics say that a poem is like a scene from a play with a specific setting and one character talking to another. Establish these facts first by answering the two questions below: – Who is the speaker? – Who is addressed? After the exploration of the Batman mythology on the internet identifying Robin as the speaker addressing Batman poses no great problem. Some students in the pilot were even still familiar with Batman and Robin because The Dark Knight, a new Batman movie by Christopher Nolan was released in 2008. In a next step, the tone of the monologue must be sensed. Brooks and Warren define this central component of a poem as follows:

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The tone of a poem indicates the speaker’s attitude toward his subject and toward his audience, and sometimes toward himself. The term is, strictly speaking a metaphor, a metaphor drawn from the tone of voice, speech or song … this leads us back to what we have said earlier, that every poem is in one sense a little drama. A poem is an utterance. There is someone who utters. There is a provocation for utterance. There is an audience. (112–13)

Reading just one poem the students can learn some basics about the genre in general. To promote this understanding I suggest giving the Brooks/Warren definition to the students to familiarize them with a specimen of the language of poetry criticism. – Task 8 Read this extract from a critical book on poetry and find the different components it mentions in ‘Kid’. Draw on the results of Task 5 to answer the following questions: – What is ‘the provocation’ for the speaker’s utterance? – How does the speaker feel about the addressee? – In what tone does he speak to the addressee? It is not difficult to identify the anger and spite residing in Robin’s monologue. The first five lines are enough to sense the irony and sarcasm in the address. However, irony is a term which needs closer scrutiny since as a literary trope it goes beyond the simplistic notion of everyday usage. – Task 9 Define irony. Give examples of irony in colloquial language in everyday situations To deepen the students understanding of the literary importance of this trope and to confront them with the language of literary criticism the follow-up task is to read the following definition of various types of irony and to determine which apply to the poem: – Task 10 Which of these definitions of irony can you find in the poem? Give some concrete examples. Irony : Irony comes in many forms. – Verbal irony (also called sarcasm) is a trope in which a speaker makes a statement in which its actual meaning differs sharply from the meaning that the words ostensibly express …

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– Dramatic irony (the most important type for literature) involves a situation in a narrative in which the reader knows something about present or future circumstances that the character does not know. In that situation, the character acts in a way we recognize to be grossly inappropriate to the actual circumstances, or the character expects the opposite of what the reader knows that fate holds in store … Probably the most famous example of dramatic irony is the situation facing Oedipus in the play Oedipus Rex. – Situational irony … is a trope in which accidental events occur that seem oddly appropriate, such as the poetic justice of a pickpocket getting his own pocket picked. (Literary Terms and Definitions: I) Instances of verbal irony or sarcasm abound in the monologue: ‘big shot’ turns out to be an ironic term of address to the former idol. ‘When you gave the order / to grow up’ ironically uses a possibly military term for a natural process, which then ends in the underdog ousting the top dog, which could be seen as an instance of dramatic irony, Batman being ignorant of the consequences of his command. The hyperbolic ‘wild blue yonder’ Robin is supposed to explore ironically turns out to be the gutter. The last six lines provide a fine example of situational irony, since the erstwhile all-powerful Batman is doing his own cooking, only chicken innards to boot, the oversized ‘walk-in larder’ being almost empty. The reader can’t help feeling that it serves the, in Robin’s eyes, haughty, vain-glorious Batman right to be reduced to this state. Some guidance by the teacher is needed to locate and identify these different types of irony ; this corresponds to the monitoring phase in task-based language learning. Phases of independent activity are followed by teacher feedback and intervention. The instances of verbal irony were easily spotted by the pilot group, whereas dramatic irony needed a teacher-centred revision of the basic facts of Oedipus Rex, which the class had read in their German lessons two years before. The monologue does contain some idiomatic usage which is a stumbling block for non-native readers. “Let the cat out on the caper with the married woman” combines the idiom ‘let the cat out of the bag’ with the metaphoric slang meaning of ‘caper’. Even “blow the cover on a story” is not immediately understood. The poem becomes even more challenging when Armitage gives free reign to his punning, partly neologistic strain: “Holy robin-redbreast-nest-egg shocker! Holy roll-me-over-in-the clover”. Tackling these difficult coinages with the help of a monolingual Learners’ Dictionary is a task to raise language awareness. It results in students having to be increasingly aware of the metaphoric nature of language when used in slang and puns: ‘let the cat out [of the bag]’ has an exact equivalent in German, so the metaphor underlying the idiom is plausible to German speakers; ‘caper’ (literally ‘frisky movement, leap’) is

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expanded to any sort of odd, out-of line behaviour. The punning extension of Robin’s name to “robin redbreast” can be cleared up by consulting the dictionary. Working on the vocabulary of a poem is a good method to show that mere translation of a word simply won’t do. “Nest-egg shocker” presents the biggest problem. The meaning ‘sum of money kept as reserve’, which is given in Learners’ Dictionaries doesn’t explain the image: the SOED definition ‘real or imitation egg left in nest to induce hen to go on laying there’ needs to be considered as well. Robin saw himself as an egg still in the nest before he was kicked out into the ‘wild blue yonder’ by the cuckoo-like Batman. “Holy roll-meover-in the-clover” depends on the familiarity with the folksong ‘Roll me over in the clover’, which can easily be googled. It is girls addressing a number of men to pleasure them sexually, which harps back to Batman’s clandestine seduction of the married woman in lines 9 to 11. It is irony on the part of Robin about Batman’s sexual prowess, possibly hinting at the fact that in future Robin is going to be the object of female desire. The “off-the-shoulder / Sherwood-forestgreen and scarlet number” (ll. 15–16) needs more research: in the trial class the association with Robin Hood was spotted by some students; in any case, googling ‘Sherwood Forest’ will yield the clue, an image of Batman with his cape in one of the youtube videos will elucidate the telescoped figures of Robin Hood and Batman, also making clear that “number” is used in a metaphoric sense here, Decoding this aspect of the poem is a lengthy task, which can be given either as homework or as the major activity of an entire 45-mintue lesson. – Task 11 Have a close look at lines 6–13. Use a monolingual Learners’ Dictionary or the online MerriamWebster dictionary to look up all the difficult words and expressions. If a term is not clear to you, google it. Identify the idioms and metaphors used in these lines. After this detailed analysis on a micro-level it is important to zoom out to get the overall meaning of the poem. – Task 12 Read the entire poem aloud to a partner. Discuss what fundamental human problem is dealt with in it. Use the terms introduced in the previous tasks to explain the poem’s meaning. Write down the essential elements. Can you imagine other people having a relationship which is similar to the one between Robin and Batman?

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This leads the students back to the initial question. The ironic, sarcastic tone permeating Robin’s address to Batman should be clear by now, the patronising feel of the generic title “Kid” will lead to the realization that all idols are questioned in an exemplary fashion. At this point a creative writing task is warranted in order to give the emotion stirred up in often patronised teenage souls an outlet. Here we move on to the post-task phase of the project.

Phase 3: post-reading – Task 13 Write a monologue in as similar tone to somebody who has been treating you like a kid. Use a form similar to this poem. Parents, elder siblings, teachers are obvious targets for this. Writing a monologue without rhyme and regular metre is possible in a foreign language, but comparing the student products with Armitage’s poem is a good ploy to direct the students’ attention to the form of Robin’s monologue, which otherwise might have gone unnoticed. A possible extension of this task to promote writing skills is for students to swap their texts with their neighbours to give some peer feedback. A further revision of the text asking students to use all the resources of a computer (spell- and grammar checker, Google etc.) leads to a writing portfolio process (cf. Paulson, Numes) preparing for real-life authoring of a text. In a next step the teacher can read the texts and make suggestions in what way they might be developed as well as drawing the students’ attention to grammatical or lexical shortcomings. In this multilayered revision process writing skills can be honed and progress documented in a portfolio containing the different stages. The creative response to the poem helps to draw the students’ attention to the formal aspects of the poem. The exploration of the content of ‘Kid’ is rounded off by a mini-syllabus on the form of poetry, a subject which usually meets with little enthusiasm in sixth formers. But the interest the content has generated gives some momentum to a formal analysis. If, however, the constrictions of the curriculum make it difficult to spend so much time on one poem, this last part can be left out. – Task 14 Compare the form of your poem with ‘Kid’. Is there anything striking about Armitage’s poem?

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This leads to the discovery that all lines end in -er, with a great many full and half-rhymes strewn in. In this manner students can be motivated to explore the formal aspect of a poem, a dimension which is often disparaged as tedious byrote-learning of metres and rhyme- schemes. To familiarise them with the terminology some definitions must be given; although they are supposed to have some basic knowledge of scansion from the teaching of literature in their mother-tongue, a thorough revision is clearly warranted. – Task 15 Study the definition of rhyme and inexact rhyme on the website ‘Literary Terms and Definitions: R’ and determine which type of rhyme you find in ‘Kid’? Having read the definitions of the various types of rhyme the persistent use of off-ryhme will be realized for the first time. Depending on the students’ exposure to traditional rhymed poetry in their mother-tongue a discussion about the nature of poetry, the necessity of full rhyme as a constituent part of the genre, may arise. In the pilot a number of students imitated Armitages off-rhymes in their own monolgues written for task 11. The last formal element to be considered is, of course, metre. Again, some preknowledge from mother-tongue literature may be there, but the English terminology needs to be introduced. Again, the website Literary Terms and Definitions supplies the main points in a nutshell. – Task 16 Check out the definition of metre (American spelling meter) on the internet and determine which pattern dominates in ‘Kid’. Depending on the familiarity with metrical patterns from mother-tongue lessons understanding these basics of scansion in English is more or less time-consuming. The largely trochaic metre as well as the consistent use of the feminine –er ending in all the lines is only perceived at this stage. The pilot class was totally unaware of this technical aspect, but they recognized the similarity to rap, which makes use of similar devices. Dealing with one contemporary poem can provide a syllabus increasing students’ awareness of poetic language and form in general. The emotional appeal of Armitage’s poem enables the teacher to overcome the prejudices against formal analysis of poetry. The final task of the third phase towards which tasks 4 to 16 are stepping stones is to write a short critical discussion of the poem, taking all the elements focused on in the various steps on board.

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– Task 17 Write a critical discussion of about 400 words of ‘Kid’. Comment on form and content of the poem. This kind of writing task is of a higher order of complexity. But independent student output is one of the central goals of task-based learning. This critical discussion can be written on a medium (B2) or a top level (C2) of language proficiency, but the output will differ in the degree of sophistication due to the different lexical and syntactic range at the student’s disposal. This project is a syllabus initiating students who have had little contact with poetry to the essentials of the genre. By choosing a poem broaching a subject which is of intrinsic emotional interest for teenagers by one of Britain’s foremost contemporary poets, a first step into the ‘groves of poesy’ is taken, giving the lie to the widespread prejudice that poems are old-fashioned and boring. After covering the theoretical ground of task-based learning and competencebased teaching, the ensuing chapter consists of task-based readings like the one above are used to blaze a trail through contemporary texts highly praised by academic literary critics, but largely unheard of in the classroom. This book breaks new ground and offers teachers task-based lesson plans for a host of major contemporary authors dealing with the higly topical themes of multiculturalism (in scholarly parlance ‘hybridity’) and gender.

Part II: Hybridity

II.1

Hybridity: the most topical manifestation of Self and Other

This chapter gives a theoretical outline of the seminal concept of hybridity. First, I’ll explain why hybridity is such a crucial aspect of the modern world; then I’ll give a practical introduction for teachers to this heavily theorised concept: they may partly draw on this when teaching the many texts which illustrate hybridity in the following chapters. Key elements of the theory is integrated in some of the tasks to the texts given to the students. All the readings are task-based and focus on activating the literary competences introduced in my grid above: they range from novels by Jhumpa Lahiri and Marc Haddon, which are household names in ELT, to short stories by Hanif Kureishi and poems by the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Tony Harrison, which are set texts in the study of English literature at university, bur represent pastures new in ELT. All these texts embody different aspects of hybridity. In this day and age it can be taken for granted that virtually all classes have students from ethnic backgrounds, who are in fact hybrids. In the age of globalisation, migration and the ensuing mixing of races is irrevocably taking place; so is the formation of anti-immigrant parties like UKIP in the UK or the Front National in France. Our classrooms necessitate the ability for intercultural communication, a key concept in recent years. The following description of an MA course in this field at the University of Manchester sums up this need succinctly : The global era has stimulated transnational cultural flows (of people, practices and products) and local cultural complexities that were inconceivable even a generation ago. Nowadays, individuals increasingly recognise not only their own cultural complexity but also the need to function effectively in culturally-diverse contexts ranging from the home and neighbourhood, to places of worship and recreation, to organisations and workplaces, and to societies and regions. Through face-to-face interactions at home and overseas, through the media, and through digital communications, the need to live interculturally is fast becoming the norm for more and more of us rather than the

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exception experienced by a few. As a consequence, intercultural awareness and communication skills are now a necessary part of life for most people in most aspects of their lives. (Manchester University)

The English classroom can become such a site where intercultural communication is practised, leading to the acquisition of intercultural competence. Hybridity and intercultural competence are intrinsically linked. There is a formidable body of theory on hybridity, but the objective of this book is solely to assemble material (primary or secondary) which may give the teacher some deeper insight which in a transformed manner can be used in the classroom. One of the best and most widely known definitions of hybridity is the one by Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. M8lange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change by fusion, change by conjoining. It is a love song to our mongrel selves. (Rushdie, 394)

The “absolutism of the Pure” refers to racist, potentially Fascist attitudes which want to preserve the purity of the race by keeping other races out. But in the globalized world the intermingling of races is now the norm, therefore m8lange, hotchpotch and mongrelisation dominate the planet. For Rushdie this is a reason for celebration. A more theoretical definition by Ashcroft et al., the authors of the landmark postcolonial study The Empire Writes Back, runs as follows: Hybridity: a controversial term in post-colonial studies concerning the creation of a new identity, one that results from transcultural shifts produced by decolonization. The term itself comes from the world of horticulture: the cross-breeding of two species to form a new, third species. Hybridity repudiates the idea of a pure, national identity. The Indian immigrant in London or the son of a Japanese woman and an American man may represent these hybrid selves, these offspring of Postcoloniality. (HYBRIDITY & Salman Rushdie’s Postcoloniality)

Another seminal concept is that of diaspora. European students’ encounter with the results of the globalisation triggered by the postcolonial phase of history consist of seeing the often tightly knit communities of immigrants berated by populist politicians. As Ashcroft et al. put it in The Empire Writes Back: If anything seems to characterize globalization at the turn of the century, it is the phenomenon of the extraordinary and accelerating movement of peoples throughout the world. The increasing refugee crisis in every western country is just one mani-

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festation of the long-standing circulation of peoples of what Edward Said has called “the voyage in”. (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 217)

Twenty-five years after the publication of Ashcroft’s book the circulation and the refugee crisis have even increased and are constantly in the spotlight. These islands of foreign culture, i. e. the diasporic communities, are not just geographically displaced. They face “the vexed question of identity, memory and home which such displacement produces.” (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 218) As the success of populist, partly racist parties in Europe illustrates, the underlying struggle against the acculturation of immigrants is that of Self and Other. As Edward Said, the father of the notion of Orientalism, puts it in his landmark book: [T]he traditional Orientalist … conceive[s] of the difference between cultures first as creating a battle front that separates them, and second, as inviting the West to control, contain and otherwise govern (through superior knowledge and accommodating power) the Other. (Said 47–8)

Childs/Fowler give an excellent summary of the Self/Other dichotomy in Orientalism: Said asserts that European knowledge of the East goes arm in arm with expansionism, exploration and settlement. He argues that the ’Orient’ is constructed and represented in the binary opposition against the Occident, as the ’Other’. In many respects, the Orient is seen by European values, assumptions, cultural codes and as the Occident’s Other. He criticizes the way that the Occident views the Orient by its own culturallydetermined, biased historical perspective. Said’s intervention is designed to illustrate the manner in which the representation of Europe’s ’others’ has been institutionalized since at least the eighteenth century as a feature of its cultural dominance. Orientalism describes the various disciplines, institutions, process of investigation and styles of thought by the Self and the Other, because as Said points out in his second definition of Orientalism, it makes a distinction between the Occident, i. e. Self and the Orient, i. e. the Other, since the analysis of the relationship of the ’self ’’ and the ’other’ is at the heart of Postcolonialism. (Childs & Fowler : 162–3)

Many scholars define postcolonialism in terms of the relationship of Self and Other. Orientalism, as Ashcroft notes, is a Western invention, knowledge which constructs the East as the “other”, Therefore, in Said’s formulation, it is principally a way of defining and ‘locating’ Europe’s others. (Ashcroft, 1995: 50). The outcome of Orientalism is the building on a binary opposition between Occident and Orient. Orient is imposed as everything that the West is not, exotic, alien, dangerous, unreliable, Western metaphysics is based on binary oppositions, a hierarchy in which one is privileged and the other is unprivileged. … The Self – whether it is conceived as male, white, European – is

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constructed as a positive term. Conversely, the Other – be it female, black, non-European – is constructed as its negative reflection ( Childs & Fowler :165).

Postcolonial criticism reveals the fundamental bias of the former colonisers: the Self is the colonialist and the Other is the colonized. The Other is everything that lies outside of the Self. The Self is the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”) and the Other is strange (the Orient, the east, “them”). Lois Tyson sums up the colonist’s gaze neatly : The self and the Other can be translated to the Occident/Orient, us/them, The West/ the rest, center/margin, metropolitan/colonial subjects, vocal/silent. In all these cases Western literary and cultural canon defines ”its other” in relation to himself, the other is an alien and alter ego, to and of the self, as the inferior reflection of Europe. By the process of Othering, the colonizers treat the colonized as ‘not fully human’, and as a result, it dehumanizes natives. Othering codifies and fixes the self as the true human and the other as other than human. The Colonizers consider themselves as the embodiment of “proper self” while labelling the colonized as “savages”. The “savage” is usually considered … as ‘demonic or exotic’ other. For the former, the savage is evil as well as inferior, but for the latter the “savage” is perceived as possessing a “primitive” beauty or nobility born of a closeness to nature. In either case, however, the “savage” remains other and, therefore, not fully human (Tyson: 420).

In the ensuing chapters I shall apply these theoretical concepts to a large number of texts in which Self and Other are the main theme. Direct quotations from these theorists will be used sparingly ; the teacher’s deeper knowledge of the problematic of hybridity, diaspora and ‘Othering’ will enable her/him to add some theoretical comments where appropriate. At the end of each chapter of Part II there is a paragraph indicating the literary competences which have been activated by the tasks set to the students. This is followed by a low-stakes evaluation task, generally an essay question. To emphasise the formative test format, these essays can be given to the teacher or to peers for feedback; this can result in a multiple revision process, a portfolio. Given the open format of the essay questions just a few seminal points which the essay might contain are provided as part of the solution. They are not meant to be a compulsory yardstick for assessing the students texts. Each of these projects was piloted with a class, ranging from the 11th to the 13th year of schooling (kindergarten is excluded in this count). Occasionally there are references to insights or contributions of students in the pilot in order to offer practical hints to the teachers using this book.

A first taste of hybridity: Carol Anne Duffy’s “Comprehensive”

II.2

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A first taste of hybridity: Carol Anne Duffy’s “Comprehensive”

As a first text documenting the global flow of migration Duffy’s poem “Comprehensive” offers a succinct analysis of the phenomenon. Although it was written already in 1986, 24 years before she became Poet Laureate, when she was writer in residence at a school in East London, it reflects the contemporary situation perfectly. Each stanza is spoken by a different speaker. The three English teenagers are framed by four young immigrants, which iconically represents the stranglehold in which many British people feel they are. Tutumantu is like hopscotch, Kwani-kwani is like hide-and seek When my sister came back to Africa she could only speak English. Sometimes we fought in bed because she didn’t know What I was saying. I like Africa better than England. My mother says You will like it when we get our own house We talk about the things we used to do in Africa and then we were happy. Wayne. Fourteen. Games are for kids. I support the National Front. Paki-bashing and pulling girls’ knickers down. Dad’s got his own mini-cab. We watch the video. I Spit on Your Grave. Brilliant I don’t suppose I’ll get a job. Its all them coming over here to work. Arsenal. Masjid at 6 o’clock. School at 8. There was a friendly shop selling rice. They ground it at home to make the evening nan. Families face Mecca. There was much more room to play than here in London. We played in an old village. It is empty now. We got a plane to Heathrow. People wrote to us that everything was easy here. It’s boring. Get engaged. Probably work in Safeway’s worst luck. I haven’t lost it yet because I want Respect. Marlon Frederic’s nice but he’s a bit dark. I like Madness. The lead singer’s dead good. My mum is bad with her nerves. She won’t let me do nothing. Michelle. It’s just boring. Ejaz. They put some sausages on my plate. As I was putting one in my mouth A Moslem boy jumped on me and pulled. The plate dropped on the floor and broke. He asked me in Urdu If I was a Moslem. I said Yes. You shouldn’t be eating this. It’s a pig’s meat. So we became friends.

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My sister went out with one. There was murder. I’d like to be mates. But they’re different from us. Some of them wear turbans in class. You can’t help taking the piss. I’m going in the Army. No choice, really. When I get married I might emigrate. A girl who can cook with long legs. Australia sounds all right. Some of my family are named after the Moghul emperors. Aurangzeb, Jehangier, Batur, Humayum. I was born thirteen years ago in Jhelum. This is a hard school. A man came with a milk crate. The teacher told us to drink our milk. I didn’t understand what she was saying. so I didn’t get any milk. I have hope and am ambitious. At first I felt as if I was dreaming, but I wasn’t. Everything I saw was true. (Duffy : “Comprehensive”)

It makes sense to introduce the concept of the dramatic monologue to prevent students constantly identifying the speaker of a poem with the author. In modern literature the dramatic monologue is a ubiquitous phenomenon. In Alan Sinfield’s definition it is simply “a poem in the first person spoken by … someone who is indicated not to be the poet.” (7) Duffy herself pointed out the importance of the dramatic monologue as a clandestine way of expressing her own concerns: “The dramatic monologues I’ve written … are, yes, objective; but closer to me as the writer than would appear.” (Rees-Jones 23) In “Comprehensive” the seven voices are obviously distinct from Duffy’s person. But adding up the different points of view makes it possible to fathom the poet’s own view of the hybrid nature of British society. In stanza 1 an African girls tries to relate the games English children play to the ones she used to play in her native Africa. Her mother’s assertion that she’ll like England “when we get our own home” falls on deaf ears: the girls reminisces with her sister about their past happiness in Africa. Stanza 2 presents the polar opposite to the girls in Stanza 1: 14-year-old Wayne is a National Front supporter who blames his joblessness on “all them coming over here to work”. So he passes his time watching video nasties and supporting Arsenal. The video is graphic and well-known in the 80s: …Wayne, the racist Arsenal fan who likes I Spit on Your Grave. (This was one of the infamous video-nasties of the 1980 s – films released straight to VHS, at a time, before the multiplexes arrived, when cinemas were closing; this film was often named, along with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Driller Killer, as an example of supposed cinematic degeneracy. (Poems by Duffy : Comprehensive)

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Again, thirty years on, the same racist sentiments, now in connection with the free movement of persons within the EU, make themselves heard. The National Front has been replaced by the British National Party or the English Defence league, or, politically slightly less incorrect, UKIP. In stanza 3 a devout Muslim boy misses the religious rituals punctuating the day in his native country. “Masjid” means ‘place of worship’: the mosque precedes school. Epithets like “friendly” and “more room to play” dominate his memories of his native village, together with typical Indian or Pakistani food like “nan”, a flat bread. Now the village is empty because the people followed an empty promise that “everything was easy here”. Stanza 4 features an English girl who is a low achiever at school, finds everything boring and forecasts her future as a check-out girl in a supermarket. She is still a virgin in order to be respected. The only racist sentiment uttered here is that Marlon Frederic is “a bit dark”, therefore not a possible future match. The stanza is framed by the key word “boring”; the girl’s enthusiasm for the band Madness, whose lead singer is “dead good” (emphasis mine) clearly takes on a symbolic meaning. Stanza 5 tells the curious tale of a Muslim boy who gets harassed because he is about to eat a pork sausage. Ironically the last words are: “So we became friends.” From a contemporary vantage point this can be seen as an early stage of the radicalisation of a Muslim youth by a fundamentalist friend. In stanza 6 a slightly less racist English boy talks about his future in the army and that he’d like to be “mates” with “them”, but they are too different. His sister’s experience with an immigrant ended in “murder”, probably only metaphorically. His own fantasies of emigration are centred on Australia, where he expects the culture to be the same, with a leggy girl who can cook. Male chauvinism supplements a mildly racist attitude. The final stanza presents an ambitious 13-year-old immigrant of possibly noble descent: the Moghul emperors may be a fantasy, but Jhelum, the city in Pakistani Punjab, boasts the reputation of the city of warriors and martyrs, a tradition going back to Alexander the Great whose horse is supposed too be buried there. In tune with the warrior spirit the boy accepts that “this is a hard school”. He is the prototype of the hard-working Oriental immigrant who will go far and to whom the west is a dream come true. These insights can be elicited from the students in a task-based format consisting of the usual task phases (pre-, while and post-task).

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Phase 1 (Pre-treading) – Task 1 Write down the different cultures and nationalities students in your class in secondary school came from. (3 minutes) – Task 2 Describe the way these students were treated. Some students share their experience with the class. (5 minutes)

Phase 2 (While-reading) – Task 3 Describe the different cultures the students in the poem come from. Work with your neighbour. (10 minutes) – Task 4 Form seven groups. Each group explains their stanza to the rest of the class. Use the internet to understand cultural references and difficult vocabulary. (15 minutes to prepare presentation) – Task 5 Give an example of irony. Define what exactly irony is. (5 minutes) – Task 6 Compare the way the British characters are presented to the description of the immigrants. (10 minutes) – Task 7 Find out the different meanings of ‘comprehensive’. (3 minutes)

Phase 3 (Post-reading) – Task 8 Write an extended monologue of the character you analysed in Task 2 of the while-task cycle. (homework, about 150 words)

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– Task 9 Turn your prose text into a poem of the kind Duffy’s poem is. In what way is it different from traditional poems? Which features does it lack? Find a reason why the poetess made this choice. (20 minutes) In keeping with my allegiance to Reader Response, the pre-task aims at relating the subject matter of the poem to the students’ own situation in their previous school. The current school is too delicate, students’ feeling might be hurt. The post-task creative writing stint activates the students’ own productive capacity and is a foray into the various types of poetry. With regard to the literary categories of the assessment grid, this free verse poem is fairly close to a prose text and activates 8.I. and 8.II. As this syllabus progresses more demanding texts requiring category 9 competences, which generally aim at the figurative level of a text, will have to be tackled.

II.3

Immigrants as victims: Hanif Kureishi’s “We’re not Jews”

One objective of this chapter is to explore hybridity. doubtless the seminal concept of postcolonial literature, more thoroughly With the unstoppable progress of globalisation, migration has been increasing steadily over the last decades. Even in the German-speaking world a brief look at the statistics confirms the hybrid nature of our societies: Switzerland is historically a hybrid nation boasting four official languages, which has, as a result of its economic prosperity, attracted large amounts of immigrants amounting to 24 % of the residents. Germany has an immigrant population of 8.8 %, Austria 9.8 %. The same can be said about most European countries. Ever since the days of the Empire, and especially after its demise, Britain has had a steady influx of immigrants, mainly from South Asia, which has led to a prominent breed of writers labelled British-Asian. Hanif Kureishi, the son of a Pakistani father and an English mother, is one of its most prominent exponents. The story “We’re not Jews”, published in Kureishi’s first collection of short stories Love in a Blue Time (1997), contains the concept of hybridity and the concomitant racism in a nutshell and is therefore ideal for introducing upper secondary students to this central aspect of contemporary British fiction. Before tackling the story, it makes sense to explore the theory of hybridity by quoting one of its most feasible definitions. This is phase one, or the pre-task stage, of the task-based approach. Since students are unlikely to have heard of the term hybridity, it is better to first use the term ‘multicultural’ for a brainstorming session about the importance of this concept.

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– Task 1 Work in groups of three. Produce a mind map of your associations with the term ‘multicultural’. – Task 2 Compare your mind map with that of another group and write a 50-word text about the results. Include some thoughts to what extent this applies to your school or your class. In the pilot class about a third of the students had non-Swiss parents, the bulk coming from south-eastern Europe, so they realized that multiculturalism is a theme which impacts on their daily lives. In a next step the students can be confronted with the theoretical concept of ‘hybridity’. By way of introduction a Swiss teacher can give them the list of players in the Swiss national football team. At least 70 % have foreign names, mainly of southeast European origin, but some of them speak German, others French or Italian. The German national squad will yield similar results and the same applies to most national teams. – Task 3 Look at this list of players from your national football team. Find out where their parents come from and which two languages they speak. To approach the forbidding term ‘hybridity’ the best thing is to ask them what a hybrid car is: many boys will know that it consists of two engines rather than just one. – Task 4 What is a hybrid car? What must the meaning of the term ‘hybrid’ be? Now the ground has been cleared for springing the, at first sight, rather daunting task of understanding Salman Rushdies famous definition of hybridity on them. – Task 5 Analyse the following quote from an essay by the Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie commenting on his book “The Satanic Verses”; look up the important words you don’t understand in a dictionary. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the

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absolutism of the Pure. M8lange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. (Rushdie, 394) Getting to grips with such a complex piece of prose may be quite a challenge, so the students have to distil the key concept from the proliferation of terms. – Task 6 Give a simple summary of Rushdie’s text, using those terms from the quotation which you understand best. After this preparatory phase one the students are ready to tackle the story, the while-task phase. The main protagonist is Azhar, the son of a Pakistani father and an English mother, who gets bullied at school by Little Billy, the son of Big Billy, a racist biker. The latter pair get on the same bus as Azhar and his mother and start harassing them with racist slurs, their aggression culminating in young Billy flinging a marble at Azhar. At this juncture the mother, Yvonne, utters the phrase “We’re not Jews”. Mother and son get off the bus, but instead of going home they go to a dismal public toilet where the mother weeps and then tries to regain her composure before facing the men at their home. Azhar and partly his mother are the focalisers, the thoughts flowing through their minds give the reader more insight into the child’s and the mother’s history of feeling at odds with their environment: apart from his father there are the grandfather and two uncles crammed into the small flat. They speak of going ‘home’ to Pakistan, a place Azhar has never visited and is alien to his mother. The father does a menial job as a packer but has a great love for literature, compulsively tapping away at his typewriter to become a published author. Unfortunately the rejections slips keep piling up over the years because his English is “‘Bombay variety, mish and mash’.” (Kureishi 47) When mother and son finally get back home all the males are listening to the cricket commentary, speaking in Urdu and Punjabi. The boy can barely get the gist of what they say, and the final word summing up the story is “incomprehension.” (51) Reading the story is homework; the pre-reading tasks focus the students’ minds on the central theme of hybridity. In the next lesson, it is best to split up the class into several groups to study the various characters in detail. – Task for group 1 Analyse Azhar’s character ; how does the reader learn about his background? Describe his emotions on the bus, at school and in the toilet with his mother.

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– Task for group 2 Describe Azhar’s feelings when he gets home. What is the atmosphere at his home and how does he fit in? Find out about the importance of cricket in the Englishspeaking world. – Task for group 3 Follow up Azhar’s mother’s feelings in the course of the story. How does she feel about the situation of her family in Britain and her place in the family? – Task for group 4 Characterize Azhar’s father. Where does he originally come from? Google the possible countries of origin. How does he feel about his situation in Britain? – Task for group 5 Describe Big Billy and Little Billy. Are there equivalents in your country? All five groups then have to report back to the class. Most of the elements mentioned in the following should feature in the students’ presentation of their group work. If something essential is missing, the teacher might draw the students’ attention to this element. – Answer to task for group 1: Most of the story is told from Azhar’s point of view. It opens with Azhar’s confrontation with his worst fears, the Billys. “Azhar closed his eyes and hoped it was moving too rapidly for them to get on.” (41) But they do get on and “settled directly across the aisle where they could stare at Azhar and his mother.” (41) When mother “made to rise” (41), the Billys do the same, so the mother gives up: persecution is inescapable. Azhar then gets taunted by the Billys as a “[c]ry baby” who “has to run to teacher” (41). His mother’s defensive rhetorical question “‘Are you still the best reader in the class?’” (42) does not help much. The complaint to the headmistress about Little Billy bullying Azhar only had the effect that other boys “also started to pick on Azhar.” (42) When he came home from school “[h]e looked as if he’d been flung into a hedge and rolled in a puddle – which he had.” (43) The reason for the bullying is revealed on page 43: the racial slurs “sambo, wog, little coon” (43) were hurled at him, and his own verbal defence “‘Muck, muck, muck – common as muck you!’” (43) was parried by Little Billy saying “we ain’t as common as a slut marrying a darkie!” (43). Only now is Azhar’s hybrid identity fully revealed to the reader. The name itself suggests somebody from the Indian subcontinent, but to the racist Billys being a hybrid is even worse than just being a Pakistani. Azhar realises his mother’s growing distress and is totally confused when in their defence the mother

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ejaculates “‘We’re not Jews’”, suggesting the aggro should be taken out on the traditional target racist fascism. (45) Her remark just adds to the bewilderment he experienced when his parents said they couldn’t follow his best friend’s family’s example of emigrating to South Africa because of racial discrimination. He remembers his father saying “that there had been gassing not long ago. Neighbour had slaughtered neighbour”. (45) The subsequent remark that “‘We’re in the front line!’” filled Azhar with fear. In Azhar’s world this dire prediction comes true at school: when the Billys finally give up their pursuit he knows that “tomorrow Azhar would be for it, and the next day, and the next.” (49) When he is in the public toilet his mother forces him into the stall with her while she’s defecating. He has to hold his breath and suffers a paroxysm of fear : “His teeth were clicking, ghosts whispered in his ears…dead fingers seemed to be clutching at him.” (49) – Answer to task for group 2: After the dreadful setting of the public toilet Azhar enters his home, which is “lighted and warm.” (50) The three elders of the family, father, Grandpop and Uncle Asif are listening to the cricket commentary, drinking beer and smoking pipes. “They were talking loudly in Urdu or Punjabi. Using some English words but gesticulating and slapping one another in a way English people never did.” (50) The triumphant shout referring to the cricket “‘Yes – out – out!’” symbolically stands for Azhar’s position in his family : he is “accustomed to being in his family while grasping only fragments of what they said.” (50) He has to make a great effort to get “the gist of it” but his only option is “laughing, as he always did when the men laughed, and silently moving his lips without knowing what the words meant, whirling, all the while, in incomprehension.” (51). The final word sums up the young hybrid’s position in the world: he doesn’t understand the language and culture of his family, which in turn is a hybrid result of colonialism, cricket being the coloniser’s imposed gift to the subject people. Azhar is an outsider at school and at home, but compared to the grim atmosphere of the world outside, home is still “lighted and warm”. – Answer to task for group 3: Yvonne, the mother, is the second character whose consciousness is sometimes entered by the narrator. She is the main target of the racial attacks by the Billys, culminating in the above quoted “slut who marries a darkie.” (43) She doesn’t see her husband as an “‘immigrant’…since in her eyes it applied only to illiterate tiny men with downcast eyes and mismatched clothes.” (45) When the entire extended family walked to the shops, Uncle Asif ’s wife “had, without prompting, walked several paces behind” (46) the men. Azhar’s mother “had had to position herself, with Azhar, somewhere in the middle of this curious procession.” (46)

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She physically enacts the hybrid status she has acquired by marrying a Pakistani: she is not level with the men, but not clearly behind the men like a Pakistani woman. The men’s talk of ‘home’, meaning Pakistan, makes her uneasy. “How could she go ‘home’ when she was at home already?” (46) – Answer to task for group 4: Azhar’s father is a typical victim of the throes of Indian independence and Partition: “His family had lived in China and India; but since he’d left his family had moved… to Pakistan.” (46) Here a brief overview of the period after 1948 by the teacher is warranted, if the students don’t come up with it as a result of their Google search for the father’s country of origin. The most likely ‘home’ is Kashmir, which changed hands several times. But Azhar’s father “had never been there.” So the male relatives’ talk of going home is devoid of any real base, a mere projection to relieve their sense of not feeling at home in England. The father’s main ambition is to be a writer. Whenever his menial job as a packer allows it, he writes, “the sound of his frenetic typing drummed into their heads as gunfire.” (46–7)1 But unfortunately the rejection slips keep piling up, and he “stamped on them and swore in Urdu, cursing the English who, he was convinced, were barring him.” (47) Relapsing into his first language to curse the former colonial masters who imposed English on his country of origin, but also enabled him to acquire English as a Second Language, is a detail showing up the plight of the colonized subject. A retired schoolmaster who corrects father’s spelling and grammar points out that he uses “‘the right words in the wrong place, and vice versa’” (47). The sentence “[b]ut father didn’t have a sure grasp of the English language, which was his, but not entirely” (47) can be used by the teacher to explain the concept of English as a Second Language and the new Englishes. At the same time it needs pointing out that since the early 70s, in which time the story is set (as we can see from the father’s reference to the Vietnam war), the assessment of other varieties of English has changed considerably. – Answer to task for group 5: Big Billy is a former Teddy Boy, the first British youth subculture which was involved in race riots as early as 1958. Big Billy is simply following on from where he began, turning his son into his double. There is a competition between the two in terms of physical and verbal aggression towards Azhar and his mother. When the physical aggression escalates with Little Billy hurling a marble at Azhar even 1 To explore the autobiographical parallels of the story an excerpt from an interview with Riz Khan is of interest (6’30’’) (accessed 31. 8. 2016).

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his father’s eyes “widened.” (47) But Big Billy dominates in the sphere of verbal assault. After the mother’s defensive outcry “We’re not Jews” he curtly replies “‘You no Yid, Yvonne. You us. But worse. Going with a Paki.’” (45) The minimal sentences without copula show Big Billy’s minimal education. His main charge against the mother is the sexual betrayal of the tribe. After all, they had known each other since their childhood and shared the same air raid shelter during the war. While Big Billy has taken the racist road, the mother has embraced another culture. Little Billy replenished his stock of racist abuse at home, as pointed out above. At this stage a teacher-led look at the history of right-wing racist movements in 20th century Britain would be appropriate: Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in the 1930s, the Teds in the 1950s, Enoch Powell’s National Front in the 70 s2 and finally the British National Party. A juxtaposition of British racism with far right parties in the students’ countries will enhance their awareness of the similarities and differences between the two cultures. For the final post-task phase a writing assignment is appropriate: – Post-task writing assignment: Write some entries in Azhar’s diary : focus on his feelings about his home and his reaction to the mother’s verbal defence “We’re not Jews”. Use complete sentences! This is a way of reflecting about the results of the group work. Writing skills can be improved by a portfolio-type of rewriting of the different drafts in response to peer or teacher feedback. The literary competences activated in these tasks are mainly 8.I and 8.II, as with most literary prose. An independent reader who doesn’t need the teacher’s feedback to the various tasks displays a mastery of 8.III. Most tasks for formative assessment in this book are holistic rather than s series of detailed items. With this story a 400-word essay on the following topic will show the degree of understanding. The content is to be found in the answers to the group work above. – Assessment task Describe the hybrid characters in the text. Show how their mixed origins are a problem for them in the British society presented in the story. (400 words) 2 In an interview Kureishi speaks about being discriminated against on racial grounds; at 7’30’’ there are a number of photographs of the marches of the National Front in the 70s. (accessed 31. 8. 2016).

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Some of the following seminal points ought to feature in the text: – characters: Azhar, the father – Azhar is bullied at school due to his mixed origin – Linguistically he belongs to the hostile world of the school, the neighbourhood – Culturally Azhar belongs to a split world: at home he doesn’t understand the language and physical gestures used by his Dad and uncles – The final world ‘incomprehension’ sums up his understanding of the world around him – the father doesn’t know which country he really comes from: India/China/ Pakistan – He has the ambition to be a writer in English, the language imposed on his homeland by the British colonisers – But the British judge his English to be ‘Bombay mish and mash’ barring him from fulfilling his ambitions – As a result he has a menial job as a packer, is degraded to the status of an immigrant in the sense of his wife who refers to them as ‘illiterate tiny men’ Obviously, an essay is an organic piece of writing which cannot be judged mechanically by ticking boxes. In a 400-word text it is unlikely that all the points listed above are addressed; in any case, apart from content there is organisation, vocabulary, stylistic register and mastery of grammar to be considered. The bullet point lists after the assessment tasks are generally to be seen as blueprints which may be approximated by students, rather than a compulsory roadmap. In conclusion the claim can be ventured that a short story like Kureishi’s is ideal to explore one of the central issues of our time. Using task-based learning encourages a student-centred approach while still allowing for some teacher-led phases.

II.4 The Namesake As a rule each of these chapters is an independent unit, which can be taught separately. This discussion of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake is an exception in that it refers to the concept of hybridity as introduced and the story “We’re not Jews” analysed in the previous chapter. Reading Kureishi’s story acts as a pre-task for tackling this novel, which deals with similar themes. This enables the students to carry out the tasks without any preliminary introduction. There are various ways of reading a long text in class: dividing the novel into three parts in which different themes are highlighted proved to be a fruitful procedure in the pilot. It gives the students sufficient guidance without curtailing

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their learner autonomy or restricting their emotional reader-response significantly. Jhumpa Lahiri (1967–) is one of the most prominent Indian-American writers. Born in London to Bengali parents, she was raised in the US, where she went to elementary school, High school and college where she earned a PhD. Her first collection of short stories, An Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize. The Namesake was a great success and made into a film by Mira Nair in 2006. Lahiri grew up within and without the Bengali diaspora, which is precisely the situation of the book. In the following students will be guided through the seminal aspects of the novel in four phases.

Phase 1: pp. 1–96 (chapters 1–4) II.4.1 Two faces of hybridity: rejecting or accepting the host culture I’ll be using the critical jargon of postcolonial studies rather sparingly, but in the course of reading the novel some elements of the critical terminology should be introduced to enable students to read some of the simpler exponents of this kind of literary criticism. The understanding of the concept of hybridity is predicated on the reading of Hanif Kureishi’s story “We’re not Jews” as an introduction to the world of multiculturalism – Task 1.1 Consult Salman Rushdie’s definition of hybridity from the chapter on Kureishi’s “We’re Not Jews”. What does the scene when Ashoke presents himself as a suitor to Ashima show about the hybrid nature of Indian culture? Reread the scene and then watch the film version. (pp. 7–10) Ashoke’s American shoes fascinate Ashima. She “stepped into them” (8) to vicariously feel the sensation of living in a desirable foreign culture. To prove her education she has to recite William Wordsworth’s “The Daffodils”, the subject of which is meaningless in India since there are neither spring nor daffodils, but it is considered part of the cultural heritage dating back to the Raj, the time of British colonialism. So even Indians who have never been abroad partake of a hybrid culture since the colonial power has left its indelible mark. A parallel to this can be found in Kureishi’s short story when the Pakistani men are listening to the English cricket commentary, making remarks in Urdu or Punjabi in Azhar’s Pakistani-English home.

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– Task 1.2 Analyse “The Daffodils”. Try to find out what daffodils must be without consulting a dictionary. The words in bold are glossed by the teacher at the bottom of the text in the students’ first language. I wander’d lonely as as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils, Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the Milky Way, They stretch’d in never-ending line Along the margin of the bay : Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced, but they Outdid the sparkling waves in glee: – A poet could not but be gay In such a jocund company! I gazed, and gazed, but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought. For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.

As John McRae points out “if you blanked out the word daffodils, would the poem still be about flowers? … Words like ‘Fluttering and dancing’ (line 6) ‘Tossing their heads’ (line 12) might make you think of birds.” (34) The main point is that the experience of spring by an English romantic is bound to be totally alien to an audience in the tropics. And yet it is deemed to be a hallmark of education by the cultured elite. – Task 1.3 Explain why the subject of the poem cannot mean much to an Indian. Find out who wrote it and in what period it was written. Guess why being able to recite this poem is important to Ashima’s parents.

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Romantic nature worship is very much a western construct. Spring is the resurrection of nature, based on a four-season cycle. A tropical society which only knows a dry and a rainy season develops different concepts. The expectations her parents have of Ashima are a subliminal result of cultural imperialism. – Task 1.4 Trace the different attitudes of the parents and the children to American culture. Find passages in which this is most apparent. Does Rushdie’s definition apply to either of the two generations? Does “newness enter the world” in the form of “a bit of this and a bit of that”? For such a large task I will only indicate some of the seminal passages. Students will find other passages which are appropriate answers to the task as well. – Ashima: p. 2: she feels a complete stranger in the hospital; the gown is too short for Bengali standards of decency. p. 3: American husbands say ‘I love you, sweetheart’, something a Bengali husband would never do. p. 33: Ashima clearly states her unwillingness to integrate: “I don’t want to raise Gogol alone in this country … I want to go home.” pp. 62–3: the Gangulis’ weekends are totally taken up by meeting other Bengalis: “They have met so many Bengalis that there is rarely a Saturday free.” Gogol’s childhood memories of Saturdays are “thirty-odd people in a three-bedroom suburban house … the parents .. conversing in the Bengali the children don’t speak among each other.” p. 81: “Ashoke and Ashima slip into bolder less complicated versions of themselves, their voices louder…” The upshot of these quotes is that Ashoke and Ashima don’t acculturate significantly. This is, however, an incomplete picture: in fact, there are some elements of acculturation: p. 64: “For the sake of the children they celebrate … the birth of Christ.” In spite of forcing their children to attend Saturday morning Bengali classes they “give in” (65) Ashima wears only saris, but in the supermarket they allow Gogol to fill the trolley with American food, Ashima even treats him to a Hamburger Helper once a week. (65)

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Phase 2: pp. 97–187 (chapters 5–7) II.4.2 The children’s acculturation in the US – Task 2.1 Document Gogol’s attitude towards Bengali and American culture. Does his journey end in rebellion or in going back to his roots? An emblematic scene illustrating Gogol’s cultural indeterminacy is his experience of a panel discussion about India novels which he goes to because a distant Indian cousin of his is one of the presenters, so “he feels obligated to attend.” (118) He realizes that he is an ABCD, “‘American-born confused deshi’”. (118) To his parents India is desh, home country, while he thinks of India as Americans do. While he can speak Bengali fluently, his reading/writing proficiency is not even modest. As opposed to his parents, he has no ABCD friends; he avoids them because getting in touch with them reminds him of his parents’ way of “befriending people not so much because they like them, but because of a past they happen to share.” (119) To focus the students’ attention on this seminal passage, an extra task with a mini-writing task can be formulated for this passage: – Task 2.2 Analyse the passage on p. 118 at the top “One day he attends…” to the middle of p. 119 “an errata slip were pinned perpetually to his chest.” Define Gogol’s ideas of home, mother tongue and identity; compare his notions with those of his parents. Write a 150-word mini-essay on this, dividing it into three paragraphs. The next significant experience for Gogol is his falling in love with Maxine and meeting her parents, whose lifestyle is in many ways the polar opposite of the one of his parents. A key passage is on pp. 136–37. American east-coast intellectuals display a more relaxed attitude to life and other people than Gogol’s parents: “It is a different brand of hospitality from what he is used to; for though the Ratliffs are generous, they are people who do not go out of their way to accommodate others, assured … that their life will appeal to him.” (136) This is diametrically opposed to the strained Bengali way of treating guests, which always implies total dedication on the part of the hosts, and for the women, hours of toil. Another crucial difference is the attitude to sexuality : “At night he sleeps with her in the room she grew up in.” (136) In Bengali culture sex is the ultimate taboo, especially between the generations. Gogol still bears the scars of this denial: “The first morning he’d slept over he’d been mortified to face them

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[Maxine’s parents]” (137). As a result of these experiences “he falls in love with Maxine, the house, and Gerald and Lydia’s manner of living” (137). At this stage he is at the furthest remove from his roots: he rarely visits his parents, he is totally engrossed with the new, free way of life. – Task 2.3 Compare the notion of hospitality of the Gangulis and the Ratliffs. Which appeals more to you and for what reasons? Analyse pp. 136–37. However, there is one caveat: this American way of life, so free and without sexual taboos is by no means the manner of the majority of Americans: the Bible Belt takes up a vast part of the country, so the students have to be encouraged to investigate this intra-American fault-line as well. The testimony of an atheist professor living in the Bible Belt graphically shows the face of the other America: Institutional discrimination refers to patterns of discrimination that are woven into the fabric of society. Victims are negatively labeled based on some characteristic or attitude that sets them apart from most members of the community. Such discrimination is so ingrained in the ethos of a people that the logic of their prejudice is never questioned. In the “bible belt,” atheists are victims of institutional discrimination, despite the fact that most nonbelievers in their communities tend to be good neighbors with a concern for humankind-secular humanists. These atheists do not pose a threat to Christianity or any other religion. In fact, the five percent or so who are atheists are as closeted as homosexuals were 30 years ago. Many, especially in the South, even go to church. I was not one of that group, but neither was I an outspoken critic of Christianity, fundamentalist or otherwise. A series of events that began in the fall of 1991, six years after moving to Ada, Oklahoma, where I am a university professor, has changed my attitude toward Christians, particularly fundamentalists. A local newspaper asked students, “Who is the worst professor on campus?” One girl, a member of a fundamentalist church, answered, “I don’t take Dr. Zellner’s classes because he is an atheist.” My immediate reaction was okay, don’t. I have never had a problem filling classrooms. But the student’s comment touched off a wave of hostility. Our car was vandalized to the tune of $543–Praise Jesus! I began getting damning notes from students (most left anonymously under my office door). We received threatening telephone calls at home, insisting that we get out of town. A fellow professor …

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sent me a seven page letter, accusing me of being in league with Satan. (DeepBibleBelt) The task for this subject runs as follows: – Task 2.4 Read the text. Check out what the Bible Belt is and compare the attitudes of these Americans to the way of life of the Ratliffs. Search the internet for the meaning of the term ‘liberal’ in the US. It is obvious that easy-going liberals are not the majority in the US and that Christian fundamentalism is far more crippling than the Bengali culture of Gogol’s parents. Obviously, there is also Hindu fundamentalism, which can be as tyrannical as its Christian equivalent. The main objective of this task is to contextualise the Ratliffs’ liberal attitude.

II.4.3 Gogol’s transition back to Bengali culture The cultural gap between Maxine and Gogol’s parents is indicated already when she meets them for the first time: on p. 146 she kisses the parents and calls them by their first name, which is totally against Bengali culture. On the other hand, when he is with the Ratliffs in their holiday home in Maine celebrating his 27th birthday in their company “he feels free” (158). It is his father’s sudden death which brings out the Bengali instincts in him and leads to the break with Maxine. Pages 168 to 188 describe the trajectory of Gogol’s return to his roots: he flies to Cleveland, spends the night in the flat his father lived in during his research semester against Maxine’s advice and goes home to Pemberton Road. He remembers “that it was a Bengali son’s duty to shave his head in the wake of a parent’s death.” (179) The novel doesn’t state that he actually does it, but in Nair’s film version Gogol’s bald pate stresses his distance to Maxine. Ashima, Sonia and Gogol “eat a mourner’s diet, foregoing meat and fish.” (180) Crucially, when Maxine joins a meeting of the Bengali friends of the family during which “a priest chants verses in Sanskrit”, (181) she is an outsider from the very start; when she finally gets a chance to speak to Gogol she says that she is so sorry, but adds the view common to Westerners: “You guys can’t stay with your mothers forever” (182). This western home truth is offensive to Gogol on this occasion. Maxine’s attempts to get him away from his Bengali group and identity fails, he says “I don’t want to get away.” (180) At the beginning of chapter 8 we learn that Maxine was excluded from the family’s trip to Calcutta “to scatter

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Ashoke’s ashes in the Ganges” (180) and that “a few months after his father’s death he stepped out of Maxine’s life for good.” (180) – Task 2.4 Trace the development of the relationship between Gogol and Maxine on pp. 168–88. Compare the film version of this episode with the book. Document the development of Gogol’s attitude to American and Bengali culture.

Phase 3: pp. 188–291 (Chapters 8–12) II.4.4 The flipside of second-generation Indian women’s emancipation: Moushumi Moushumi first features in the book at one of the Bengali get-togethers at Pemberton Road when she is 13. Since she recently moved from England to the US she has an English accent. The to American ears posh connotations of this are borne out by her reading Pride and Prejudice and her declaration “I hate American television” (73). Although they’re almost contemporaries, “Gogol and Moushumi have nothing to say to each other.” (73) Then they meet again about 15 years later at the behest of their mothers, since both of them are on the rebound from a failed relationship. Their meeting smacks of the beginnings of an arranged courtship; but despite their resistance to the Bengali way of matchmaking they fall in love with each other and even accept a Bengali wedding. However, Moushumi’s emancipated American view of life forces her into an escape from both Bengali and American culture into a French identity. Being together with Gogol enhances this instinct, which drives a wedge between them. When they go to Paris for a conference Moushumi is attending, Gogol feels like a tourist, the odd one out in his wife’s francophone crowd. On their return to New York Moushumi starts the affair with Dimitri, which finally breaks their marriage. Moushumi’s development starts out from an American default position, which gets slightly shaken by being ditched on the eve of the wedding by her first American fianc8. Hence she reluctantly gives in to her mother’s pleading to at least meet Gogol, a fellow Bengali, and is then swept off her feet by passion, a Western notion. She even concedes a traditional Bengali wedding, but hurls herself in a multicultural context of her own making, not the one given by her inheritance. Her francophilia and the proverbial sexual libertinism of that culture ends her marriage to Gogol. One might say that in her case emancipation and being “a bit of this and a bit of that” as Salman Rushdie puts it in his definition of hybridity. has gone into overdrive.

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– Task 3.1 Trace Moushumi’s phases of obedience to and rebellion against her parents’ wishes. What is her final position? – Task 3.2 Assess the impact Moushumi’s love of the French language and culture has on her marriage.

II.4.5 Ashima’s emancipation There is a remarkable change in Ashima just before and after her husband’s death: she is able to shake off some of the shackles of Bengali culture and move more freely in the American world: she takes a part-time job as a librarian (162) thus breaking the dictat of Bengali culture which requires women to stay at home. Some of the women working there become “the first American friends she has made in her life.” (162) After her husband’s passing she becomes a typical Bengali woman performing all the mourning ceremonies prescribed by Hinduism. But there is a striking difference between her and Moushumi’s mum, who after 32 years in the US “does not know how to drive, does not have a job … And yet she is a perfectly intelligent woman, was an honors student in philology … before she was married off at twenty-two.” (247). Ashima decides to divide her time between America and India, selling the house which had been her home for the last 27 years, overcoming her instinct “wanting the house as it’s always been, as her husband had last seen it.” (275) But she overcomes these retrograde feelings and spends six months in Calcutta with her younger brother : “There she will have a room, the first in her life intended for her exclusive use.” (275) Spring and summer she’ll spend in the northeastern US which her children and friends. Another remarkable shift is Ashima’s comment on Gogol’s and Moushumi’s divorce: “Fortunately they have not considered it their duty to stay married, as the Bengalis of Ashoke and Ashima’s generation do.” (276) Ashima is the focalizer in this passage, so “fortunately” reflects her opinion. The ensuing tasks enable the students to fathom the change in Ashima: – Task 3.2.1 Follow Ashima’s development in the second part of the novel: describe her attitude towards women working (p. 162), making friends (p. 162–3) and living alone (p. 275).

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– Task 3.2.2 Compare Ashima’s life in the last part of the novel with that of Moushumi’s mother (p. 247). – Task 3.2.3 What does the following sentence say about Ashima’s development? “Fortunately they [Gogol and Moushumi] have not considered it their duty to stay married, as the Bengalis of Ashoke and Ashima’s generation do.” (p. 276)

Phase 4 II.4.6 Nikolai Gogol, names, identity and the title of the novel One of the central themes permeating the novel is the question of names. The Bengali tradition of pet name/good name, the maternal grandmother’s prerogative of naming her grandchild, the letter which never arrives, the Russian surname given to a Bengali child as a first name due to the fact that Nikolai Gogol’s book saved the father’s life ; later Gogol’s revulsion at his strange name, his name change to Nikhil, which lends itself to be Americanized to Nick, his irritation when his girlfriends find out about or mention his previous name. To immerse the students in this theme a quotation from Romeo and Juliet may serve as an intro; however, if the teacher prefers to press on with the narrative to preserve the flow of the reading, this can easily be omitted. – Task 4.1 The quotation below is from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The famous lovers belong to two clans, Juliet to the Capulets and Romeo to the Montagues, which fight each other. Analyse the lines and paraphrase Juliet’s view of names. Juliet: O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name; Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be a Capulet. Romeo: [Aside] Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this? Juliet: ’Tis but thy name that is my enemy ; Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.

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What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name, And for that name which is no part of thee Take all myself.

The central passage is the proverbial “that which we call a rose /By any other name would smell as sweet”; Juliet postulates the total arbitrariness of the signifier, a world in which bodily signifieds reign supreme. In students’ terms she says that names are mere conventions without substance. However, in The Namesake we get a different message: names do matter, they endow their bearers with cultural connotations. In Gogol’s case the exotic Russian associations of his name make him feel homeless: it suggests that he is neither Bengali nor American. The next task explores Gogol’s attitude to his name: – Task 4.2 Analyse the passage in which the difference between good name and pet name is explained. Find out why the parents can’t name their son in the traditional Bengali way (pp. 25–26). – Task 4.3 Describe the origin of Gogol’s name (p. 18) and the reasons for his change to Nikhil (pp. 99–100). Does Gogol share Juliet’s view of a name?

II.4.7 An assessment task to elicit the literary competences acquired by the students The following assessment task covers the central aspects of the novel: The novel is largely about the integration of immigrants into American society. Compare the willingness and success of the first and the second generation of the Gangulis. (400 words)

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Most of these central points ought to feature in the essay : – Ashoke integrates quite easily because of his job. Still, he behaves like a typical Bengali husband, expecting his wife to stay at home, he never tells her that he loves her. – Ashima has a to overcome much bigger hurdles: being at home alone with baby Gogol is very challenging, contacts with American neighbours difficult. One way of never fully integrating into American society is spending every weekend with other Bengalis. When Ashoke dies, Ashima becomes the bereaved Bengali woman. However, even before the death she started working part-time in a library, making American women friends. Finally she decides to divide her life between the States and Calcutta, straddling the borderline between the two cultures. – Gogol is a typical second-generation immigrant identifying with the host culture in terms of friends, food and outlook. Changing his name is an expression of this, since Nikhil is turned into Nick in American English. During his time with Maxine with Maxine he is at the furthest remove from his Bengali roots. The shock of his father’s death brings him back to Bengali culture. By marrying Moushimi he finds another hybrid trying to dissociate herself from her Bengali origins. Infidelity and divorce are American concepts, Gogol thus gets fully embroiled in the American way of life. – Sonia can follow in Gogol’s slipstream, Gogol has fought the battles for her, she can embrace American culture freely. In terms of the competences activated by these tasks, the focus is clearly on 8.I, 8.II and 8.III.: The Namesake is a typical realistic novel whose narrative pull fascinates the reader. Symbolic elements exist but they are not quintessential for the understanding of the text. Knowledge about the social and historical background is needed: the tasks enable the students to acquire it, i.e, 9.III is activated; in addition the writing skills described in the CEFR have to be deployed in the assessment task, B1 being the minimum requirement. With the competences listed in C1 and C2, the quality of the essay will improve.

II.5

Radicalised young Muslim men: Kureishi’s “My Son the Fanatic”

While Azhar in the previous Kureishi story is first and foremost a passive victim of racism, in this story the Muslim son of a largely non-religious Pakistani immigrant becomes radicalised, a highly topical theme which covers the timespan from the 1980s to the present day, from Alkaida to ISIS. The special irony is

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that Ali’s father Parvez could be seen as an example of successful integration into the host culture, and until his radical change Ali also lived according to western norms, studying accountancy, having an English girlfriend and being a good consumer. His father’s notion of success is to see his son in a good job with a happy western family. For this reason he works long hours as a taxi driver and foregoes many luxuries of western life. When his son gets rid of all the paraphernalia of a western youth, his CDs, books and fashionable clothes, he is devastated and asks his fellow cabbies for advice: they diagnose drug addiction and Parvez observes the son meticulously and even searches his room without finding any trace of banned substances. Then he realises that his son gives his belongings away rather than selling them to obtain drugs. When he hears murmuring sounds form Ali’s room he realises that the son is praying. Ali berates his father for drinking alcohol and eating pork, calling Parvez’ philosophy of enjoying yourself without hurting others “‘a bottomless pit’”. (129) On his way back home with his confidante, the prostitute Bettina, who had advised him on Ali in the car, he spots his son and offers him a lift. Reluctantly Ali gets in, taking great exception to Bettina, especially when she touches Parvez’ shoulder. Bettina tries to speak to Ali about his studies and his father’s love for him, but the latter only replies: “Then why does he let a woman like you touch him like that?” (130) and jumps out of the car. When getting back home Parvez can’t focus on anything except drinking and finally storms up the stairs to Ali’s room and hits him, prompting the final reply : “So who’s the fanatic now?” The following tasks elicit the crucial elements of this story of a hybrid cultural situation which leads to total alienation between the generations: but in contrast to the typical conservative Muslim father versus his westernised children, as in Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, the situation is inverted and anticipates the pattern of most ISIS recruits. – Task 1 List the clues the father has for his son’s radical change. Ali throws out fashionable clothes, new video tapes and CDs (119) Ali splits up with his English girlfriend, his English friends no longer call (119) – Task 2 Parvez feels that he’s been a good father. Point out why. He had worked long hours and spent a lot of money paying for his education as an accountant (119)

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– Task 3 Find out how old Ali must be. Find passages in which Parvez refers to his son. What does this say about how the father sees his son? Throughout the text he refers his son as “the boy”. Since he’s at university Ali must be at least 18/19. Parvez never acknowledged that ‘the boy’ has become an adult. This may contribute to his rebellion against his father. – Task 4 Describe the community of taxi drivers and point out Parvez’ position in this group. Parvez had had a model son, excelling in the British education system. His dream of doing well in Britain seemed fulfilled (120), therefore his standing in the group was high. The other drivers’ sons made trouble: skipping school, joining gangs; Parvez blamed them for this, so he had to expect the same for himself now that his son has taken a wrong turning – Task 5 Follow up the drug-taking hypothesis and list the reasons which speak for or against it. For: – his belongings disappear, he no longer studies Against: Ali’s room is orderly (119) he looks his Dad straight in the eye, his pupils are not dilated (122) he has no mood swings he doesn’t sell his belongings, he gives them away – Task 6 Describe Parvez’ view of religion. After a traumatic experience inflicted by a mullah when he was a boy in Lahore he avoided all religion the mullahs thought they could tell other people how to live “while their eyes roved over the boys and girls in their care” (123)

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– Task 7 Explain the attitude towards integration in the Punjabi community. At night, during their shift they form a cultural island within British society (120) However, there is no religious component to this. They drive prostitutes around and sometimes accept their sexual services “‘a ride in exchange for a ride’.” (121) On the whole they are fairly well integrated in British society. – Task 8 Look for a passage which sums up Ali’s extremist views and compare them to the manifestoes of Islamist groups today. There is a passage at the top of page 126 which sums up Ali’s world view. (Ali addressed … prostitutes) – Task 9 Characterize Bettina and her relationship to Parvez. She is a counsellor rather than a prostitute to Parvez. (121–22, 129 bottom) She teaches him how to detect drug use, at the end of the story she attempts to reconcile father and son, but signally fails. – Task 10 Why is there no mention of the mother in the story? The story is focused on the father – son conflict. Parvez relationship to his wife seems to be quite distanced: he and the other cab drivers like working at night so they can sleep “during the day, avoiding their wives.” (120) For intimate questions like Ali’s change he talks to Bettina. – Task 11 Compare Parvez philosophy of life with Ali’s. Which makes the more convincing case? Ali’s argument that “millions and millions of people share [his] belief” (129) is flawed. Parvez could claim the same for his view “enjoy yourself without hurting others” (129) is most likely to be shared by even more people. – Task 12 Answer Ali’s final question.

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Ali certainly has a point there. However, he goaded his father into a violent response. Parvez is fanatical about regaining his son’s affection, while Ali is fanatical about an abstract religious ideology which ultimately doesn’t respect human life.

Phase 3: Post-task: creative responses After this lengthy and detailed scholarly analysis of the story a more creative approach is called for to digest the analytical data in creative writing: – Task 1 Ali writes a letter to his mother about his relationship to his father. The mother is totally excluded from the narrative, so her position in this maledominated household has to be imagined. This gives the students a great deal of imaginative freedom – Task 2 Bettina texts Parvez after their encounter with her son. Bettina’s character as a counsellor and genuine friend of Parvez is clearly established in the story. This circumscribes the content of the text. – Task 3 Ali has gone to Syria to do jihad. He writes an email to his father. From Afghanistan to Syria and Iraq this is a path many radicalised young Muslims have taken. The students are bound to have read reports about such people, which enables them to write easily about this subject. Assessment task Setting a writing task is by definition a comprehensive way of assessment. By going through various drafts, which the teacher reads, making suggestions to improve the content of the essay, a portfolio process can be initiated stressing the formative nature of the assessment. Show in Hanif Kureishi’s short story “My Son the Fanatic” how multiculturalism is presented. Discuss especially the integration of immigrants from Southeast Asia into British society. (400 words)

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These are the main points which should be dealt with in a good essay : – there are two types of multiculturalism: on the one hand Parvez and his taxidriver pals, who blend into British society without any major friction: They have their little island of Punjabi culture at night in the cabbies’ office, but on the whole they are examples of good integration. – Ali, on the other hand grows, into an example of integration gone sour: initially he is a diligent student of accountancy with an English girl-friend; then he picks up the bug of Muslim fundamentalism, which leads to total alienation from the father. In this day and age he would join Islamic State in Syria. He is not addicted to banned substances, as his father first suspect, but to the much more destructive drug of fundamentalist Islam. Since this is a realistic story not heavily relying on symbolism, the main literary competences activated by these tasks is 8.I; however, irony plays a central part in the narration, hence 8.II is also required.

II.6

Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine”

This story by Jhumpa Lahiri depends on knowledge about the 1971 war between India and Pakistan, which resulted in the birth of a new nation, Bangladesh. The salient feature of the story is the arbitrary borders between nations in the colonial and postcolonial world. The setting is the US; a Bengali family is regularly visited by Mr. Pirzada, who is a visitng researcher from what at the beginning of the story is East Pakistan.To the father, Mr. Pirzada, is not Indian, whereas his daughter Lilia can’t see any difference between them: he does exactly the same things as her parents and speaks the same language, so he can’t be the Other. The set of tasks given below enables the students to get insight into this conventionbased Othering. Pre-task Check the historical facts about the 1971 war between India and Pakistan. While-task 1. Compare Lilia’s version of events with the one you found in the internet. What age is the I-narrator when telling this story? What age is Lilia in the story? 2. Determine to what extent the parents have adjusted to the American way of life. Search for the relevant passages. 3. Compare the father’s reasons for not calling Mr. Pirzada an Indian with Lilia’s view of her parents and Mr. Pirzada. 4. Write down the categories Mr. Pirzada falls into according to Lilia’s father.

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5. Compare Lilia’s mother’s view of the American lifestyle and education system with that of her husband. 6. Point out a symbolic detail which shows that Mr. Pirzada lives mentally in Bangladesh. How does this make Lilia feel about life in the US? 7. Compare Lilia’s response to the war in East Pakistan with that of Mr. Pirzada. 8. Look for symbolic passages showing the characters’ response to the news of all-out war between India and Pakistan (pp. 36, 39, 40). Answers 1. The historical facts are rendered accurately. The way they are related points to the likelihood that the I-narrator is Lilia the adult telling her personal story from a distance. In the story she is 10. (24) 2. The parents are highly educated, they are part of the ‘drain brain’ of the 1960s from India to the US. This means that they have adjusted to the American way of life to a large extent. The father is climbing up the academic ladder, getting tenure. (34) The mother works part-time in a bank and “has her hair bobbed to a suitable length” (27) and like her husband, she makes fun of “the peculiar eating habits of her co-workers.” (35) A mother working is an alien concept in Bengali culture. It shows the high degree of acculturation the mother has achieved. Food, however, is a demarcation line between the immigrant and the host culture; the proper ingredients of Indian food is what they miss most: “the supermarket did not carry mustard oil”. Other complaints are that “doctors did not make house calls, neighbours never dropped by without invitation.” (24) To make themselves feel more at home “they used to trail their fingers, at the start of each new semester, through the columns of the university directory, circling names familiar to their part of the world.” (24) This behaviour is typical of people in the diaspora: they attempt to create a ‘little Bengal’ within the US. For this reason Lilia is not surprised to see Mr. Pirzada coming for dinner. 3. The father relates the historical facts about Partition establishing a ‘them and us’ dichotomy. In 1947, which Lilia associates with independence from Britain, the father’s narrative is “one moment we were free and then we were sliced up … like a pie” (25) The gory connotations of “sliced up” are enhanced by “Hindus had set fire to each other’s homes” (25). As a result “Dacca no longer belongs to us.” (25) 4. The father’s narrative implies that Mr. Pirzada is the Other, a concept which “made no sense to [Lilia]” (25) The father’s history lesson for Lilia was triggered by Lilia referring to Pirzada as “the Indian man.” (25) Lilia’s childlike logic is very powerful and backed up by the palpable circumstances she describes:

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Mr. Pirzada and my parents spoke the same language, laughed at the same jokes, looked more or less the same. They ate pickled mangoes with their meals, ate rice every night for supper with their hands. Like my parents Mr. Pirzada took off his shoes before entering, chewed fennel seeds after meals as a digestive, drank no alcohol. (25) Lilia’s argument points up the absurdity of the self versus other dichotomy foisted by nationalists on entire peoples. 5. Lilia’s mother is the chief defender of life in the US: instead of constant insecurity due to potential civil strife, Lilia has a secure life in the US. The price she pays is losing touch with the history of her parents’ country of origin: “How can she possibly know about Partition?” (27) She brushes aside the father’s stricture that Lilia learns nothing about the world. His criticism of the myopia of the American High School curriculum is borne out by Lilia’s description of her history lessons :“We learned American history, of course, and American geography. That year, and every year, it seemed, we began by studying the revolutionary war.” (27) This blinkered view is highlighted by the history teacher’s response to Lilia reading a book about Pakistan in the library instead of preparing yet another presentation on the American revolution. As this book is not part of Lilia’s report, the history teacher sees “no reason to consult it.” (33) Mr. Pirzada has a pocket watch in his breast pockets set to Bangladeshi time. He lives in two time zones simultaneously, which gives Lilia the feeling that their “meals and [their] actions were only a shadow of what had already happened there, a lagging ghost of where Mr. Pirzada really belonged.” (31) 6. Lilia is deeply worried about Pirzada’s seven daughters. She prays with a piece of Mr. Pirzada’s chocolate in her mouth that “Mr. Pirzada’s family was safe and sound”, although “she had never prayed for anything before.” (32) Mr. Pirzada seems fairly unperturbed by the horrid events at home: in a semblance of Asian placidity he calmly creates “a well in his rice to make room for a second helping of lentils.” (31) Regardless of the news showing tanks rolling through his home town. On the other hand, when he is carving the pumpkin he hears an Indian official threatening a military intervention: at this news his hand slips, “and made a gash dipping toward the base of the pumpkin.” (36) As a result the “jacko’-lantern wore an expression of placid astonishment, the eyebrows no longer fierce, floating in frozen surprise above a vacant, geometric gaze.” (36) To a large extent the pumpkin’s expression reflects Mr. Pirzada’s state of mind: the placidity, the frozen surprise. Externally Mr. Pirzada’s mood was never “fierce”, but his eyebrows may have been a result of his bottled up emotions. In fact, towards the end of the story he loses his composure: when Lilia returns from tricking and treating she finds him with “his head in his hands.” (40) She also sees that the

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“pumpkin had been shattered, its thick shell strewn in chunks across the grass.” (40) The symbolic transference from object to person is patently obvious. Post-task Write a 300-word entry in Lilia’s diary, either before or after Halloween. The Halloween night is a watershed in Lilia’s feelings: before that event Mr. Pirzada is shown as an uncle who wants to protect his niece; after that night Lilia takes care of Pirzada. As regards the literary competences activated by these tasks, a good command of 8.I and 8.II is sufficient. It is a fairly straightforward realistic short story which doesn’t overly depend on symbolism, although there are such elements: the jack-o’-lantern which is accidentally disfigured by Mr. Pirzada is an obvious example of an object representing Pirzada’s state of mind. But an understanding of the text as a whole doesn’t hinge on a decoding of this symbol. As a final evaluative task I suggest the following: Describe the way Lilia is navigating between her Indian home culture and her American host culture. Does she feel more Indian or American? Give examples of when she tends more to the one or the other. If the theoretical introduction to hybridity sketched out above has been given to introduce this story, the task could be worded in a more scholarly way : Describe Lilia’s hybridity. Which element of her hybrid existence is stronger, the culture of her parents or that of her host culture? As regards literary competences, this task requires a good grasp of 8.1, 2 and 3. In spite of its symbolic elements, it is still primarily a realistic narrative with accessible symbolism. With more advanced students in their final year a basic grasp of the terminology of postcolonial studies can be a reasonable goal: in this case 9.III is also activated. The ensuing points should feature in a good essay : – Lilia is in tune with American culture in many ways: the Halloween ritual of ‘trick or treat’ is in her bloodstream, she studies American history (rather too many times) at school. – The appearance of Mr. Pirzada resuscitates her Bengali side: she learns about the war near her home country and questions the arbitrary borderlines set up by politicians: to her Mr. Pirzada is one of them, despite her father teaching her otherwise. She becomes curious about the part of the world her parents and Mr. Pirzada come from and uses her time in the library to research this subject.

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Bharati Mukherjee’s “Orbiting”

Mukherjee is the first significant Indian-American writer, the grand old dame of this prolific community. She was born in Calcutta in 1940 and moved to the States in 1963, then with her Canadian husband to Montreal and finally back to the US. By contrast, Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London in 1960 and grew up in Rhode Island. However, both writers deal with hybridity in most of their work. Mukherjee’s short story “Orbiting” shifts the perspective somewhat: the main protagonist, Renata, is a fourth generation Italian who changed her name to Rindy so as not to remind the world of this fact. She was dumped by her boyfriend Vic, who acts very much like a New Age American liberal, being into macrobiotics and yin and yang, but is nonetheless a hybrid: his father is called Vinny Riccio and he grew up in Little Italy in an American town called Verona. Her sister Carla, who changed her name in junior high to Cindy, is married to an American, Brent. Cindy’s and Rindy’s parents illustrate a case of internal Italian colonialism: while the father is “a proud son of North Italy” (58) the mother is Calabrian-born. The father “had one big adventure in his life, besides fighting in the Pacific, and that was marrying a Calabrian peasant.” (58) These are the two exploits of his life: fighting for America, his birth-country, and acculturating a woman from an inferior part of his country of origin. The frame of the story is the preparation and celebration of that most American of all occasions, Thanksgiving. Ironically it is now the father who is out of sorts after his retirement, while his ‘foreign’ wife is much more balanced, she “began to find herself and signed up for a class in Paterson” (60) This background highlights the finer details of emigrants living in the American diaspora: the intra-Italian north-south colonialism, the predictable moving away of the daughters from their family culture. There are highly symbolic images illustrating the father’s inbetweenness: “a sixty-five year-old man in wingtips and a Borsalino hugging a wet bird” (58) i. e. the turkey for Thanksgiving, which comes out of the freezer rather than being fresh killed as in past, better days. The fact that Dad is third generation Italian and “very American” makes Italy “a safe source of pride for him.” (58) The further removed the country of origin, the more it is idealised. Superimposed on this hybrid situation is the plight of the recently retired father who feels marooned at home “acting funny.” (59) His only raison d’etre is seeing his daughters married. The fact that Rindy lives in a dump practically without furniture is not encouraging, more reason for gloom. At the previous year’s thanksgiving Vic displayed his consummate cookery skills, which the father mistook for Vic’s readiness “for other commitments” (57) like marriage. But he lives in an antiquated world: for a young American of Italian extraction cooking is “self-expression”, not “cooking for someone.” (57) About half way through the story the joker in the hybrid pack appears: Ro, an

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Afghan exile, Rindy’s lover. “All over the country, I say to myself, women are towing new lovers home to meet their families.” (63) But Ro is a tall order for both the American-Italian older generation and Brent, the American husband of German extraction of Rindy’s sister Cindy. He is a refugee from a war-torn country which was totally unknown in the US before the American military intervention: “Brent may actually have an idea where Afghanistan is, but Dad is lost.” (72) When she first mentions the name Ro to her parents, her Dad whispers “Bo? Now she’s messing with a Southerner” (67), which is a tell-tale remark documenting the father’s fear of any type of Other. When Ro lets himself in with Rindy’s key the parents holler for the cops. Rindy’s reaction to such racial prejudice is a sudden decision to marry Ro if he asks her. The fact that Ro comes from an Afghan upper-class family, is punctiliously polite, knows the world of the rich (“he skied in St. Moritz and lost a thousand dollars in a casino in Beirut” (72)) is beyond the imagination of Rindy’s relatives. The tale of his escape from an Afghan jail with the help of tunnels and forged American visas alienates the father even more. Next, the title of the story is explained: “For six days I must orbit one international airport and another” (73). Ro is a citizen of “transit lounges” (73). It is blinkered, prejudiced people like Rindy’s Dad and her sister’s husband who want to keep him on this circuit forever. The latter asks the typical question which is asked even more these days: “‘Say, buddy,’ he jokes, ‘you wouldn’t be ripping us off, would you?’” (73) Asylum seekers of all times are suspected of benefit fraud. Although the story is set in the 1980s it hasn’t lost any of its topicality. Ro has a special work permit, so he guts chickens in Little Kabul while saving up for his university studies. He has been tortured in Afghan jails. At the end of the story his scarred body represents for Rindy a chance “to heal the world” (74): on the one hand Ro needs her love and care, on the other she can bridge the chasm between racially prejudiced America and the world of refugees orbiting airports. This is illustrated superbly by the men socialising at the dinner party : when offered Scotch by the father Ro has to explain that Muslims don’t “imbibe alcoholic spirits.” (69) This clashes with the father’s notions: “In my father’s world grown men bowl in leagues and drink the best whiskey they can afford.” (69) With the arrival of Cindy and her husband Brent there is another failed attempt for the American men and Ro to find common ground: Dad and Brent go on about American football, asking Ro for his opinion, but they predictably draw a blank. However, he does score points when deftly carving the turkey with his dagger. He gains the admiration of another outsider at the party : Franny, Brent’s 12-year-old daughter from his first marriage, who deliberately excludes herself totally from the family, her venom being directed especially at Cindy. She’s insulated from other people by her earphones, but when Ro is carving the turkey. “Franny is practically licking his fingers.” (74) So the out-

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siders form a new community ; Rindy’s willingness to marry Ro is an attempt to unite the two worlds. The objective of the tasks for this text is to get students to deal with the rich hoard of topics embedded in this story : hybridity is certainly the main theme illustrated by the gulf between Americans of different extractions and Ro. The latter embodies the tortured victim of civil war in a developing country becoming a refugee, a problem multiplied tenfold in our time. Another theme is the generation gap within an American-Italian family : the daughter is part of the camp of American liberals, using her sexuality freely, not worrying about not being married at 27 and bent on breaking tribal boundaries in order to “heal the world”. On the other hand, the father clings to a world with clear borders where daughters get married early to a member of the clan and men drink whiskey. Since Mukherjee uses the form of the modernist short story which begins in medias res, the main narrative strand being unfolded in the protagonists’ interior monologue, the trial class found it difficult to get the basic situation of the story. It is therefore advisable to set some tasks aiming at understanding the plot first: – Task 1 Give a character sketch of the main persons, focusing on pp. 57–61. Describe the relationships within the de Marco family. – Task 2 Compare the mother to the father. Find out about the differences between the Italian regions they come from. Find passages which illustrate how they are doing in the present. – Task 3 Who is Vic? Find passages which describe his role in Rindy’s life. These tasks devised for mapping out the basics of the story overlap with tasks aimed at the fundamental theme of hybridity, or self and Other : the internal Italian north/south divide is a form of subtle internal colonialism. So even from a purely Italian perspective the de Marco couple are hybrid. What is superadded to this is the fact that the father is third-generation Italian in the States, whereas the mother is an immigrant who presumably struggles with the English language or is at least marked out by an accent. Vic, on the other hand, in spite of being of Italian descent and growing up within the Italian diaspora, is an American liberal without a trace of his ethnic background in his lifestyle. The next task fathoms the family relationship which gets most coverage in the

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story : Rindy’s way of dealing with her father, which highlights the generation gap between conservative parent and progressive daughter : – Task 4 Find passages which illustrate the relationship between Rindy and her father. Decide whether they are close or rather distant. Rindy basically humours her ageing father the way you deal with a child: “He wants to stay and talk about Mom, which is the way old married people have. Let’s talk about me means: What do you think of Mom?” (59–60) Another instance of her distance is her description of her father standing in the flat with a dripping bird, which makes her laugh. The next tasks delve into the hybridity theme directly. – Task 5 Describe the way Rindy met Ro. Point out the differences between Vic and Ro. I’ve commented on this above: Ro is the ultimate Other, whereas Vic is homegrown. – Task 6 Analyse the way the three men, Rindy’s father, Brent and Ro socialise. Name the respects in which Ro sticks out and the way he tries to fit in with his American hosts. As mentioned above, Ro’s refusal to drink alcohol and his ignorance of American football mark him out as the stranger lacking masculinity. By using highly academic vocabulary he tries to indicate his educational status when confessing his ignorance: “I’m deferring to your judgement because currently I have not familiarized myself with these practices.” (71) – Task 7 Find the reasons why Rindy decides to marry Ro if he asks her. The more the family show their rejection of Ro, the more Rindy is willing to marry him. Ro is her chance “to heal the world.” (74) “I realize all in a rush how much I love this man with his blemished tortured body.” (74) – Task 8 Look for the passage which contains the title of the story. Explain the symbolic meaning of “orbiting”.

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Where is this story located on the literary assessment grid? It has a fairly dense network of symbolic elements and needs a thorough understanding of the historical and social background: it is more demanding than some of the short stories analysed above. Apart from categories 8.I, 8.II and 8.III, which are demanded by most short stories, 9.III is also essential. This doesn’t mean that they must know all the facts about Afghanistan in the 1980s or the Italian north/south divide: what is necessary are research skills to explore these topics on the internet fairly swiftly. The tasks force the students to delve into the historical background, making them aware that a country like Afghanistan was unknown to most Americans before the military intervention. Ignoring this leads to a different assessment of Brent and Rindy’s father. An assessment task might run as follows: Describe the difference between the two generations of the de Marco family. Give examples of where there is a fundamental gap. (400 words) These are the crucial points which ought to be mentioned in a good essay : – Rindy and Cindy are third-generation immigrants, and they display the typical features of the third generation: they practically disown their Italian roots, the most noticeable feature being the Americanising of their first names: while their parents still call them: their parents still call them Renata and Carla, but they got rid of this in junior high. Rindy defies her father’s expectations of finding a suitable match for marriage and feels ready to wed an Afghan refugee. – After retirement the father has nothing to do but hope for Rindy to get married soon, if possible with a husband of Italian descent like Vic. The latter, however, dashed these hopes by leaving Rindy in spite of cooking for the family at the previous Thanksgiving. The father uses his Italian heritage as a paradisal safe haven when he can’t cope with the American present. His wife, a first-generation immigrant, manages to achieve a degree of integration: she has just started to find herself, signing up for a class in Paterson.

II.8

Self and Other on Home Ground: Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

As pointed out in the theoretical introduction to this chapter, hybridity is not the only manifestation of the Self/Other dichotomy. Another group with is often Othered by society are people with special needs. Autism is a typical example of

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this, and with Haddon’s novel there is a highly readable, fascinating fictional account of it. John Levi Masuli comments on the novel, pointing out the sanity/madness dichotomy in Haddon’s book: The novel compels us to introspectively reflect on the notion of madness vs sanity. For Michel Foucault, for instance, madness is a social mechanism, an oppressive category which relegates those who do not conform to normative institutions or the prevailing discourses of knowledge to categories of abnormality and therefore must be isolated from the civic life. (Masuli)

Maybe for the very reason that it shines a torch on a category of abnormality Mark Haddon’s novel had a very positive reception when it was published in 2003; another factor is doubtless the consummate artistic form in which the trending subject of autism is dealt with. Scientific interest in autism was surging in the early 2000s, as documented by Stuart Murray. As the reviewer of The New York Times pointed out, “Christopher Boone is an unsolved mystery – but he is certainly one of the strangest and most convincing characters in recent fiction.” (New York Times) In 2012 a stage version premiered in the West End and then transferred to Broadway, ample proof for how the tale has captured the public’s imagination. Despite Haddon’s disclaimer in a 2009 blog that “curious incident is not a book about Asperger’s. … the book is not specifically about any specific disorder,” (Wikipedia) the 15-year-old Christopher Boon is in many ways a textbook case of Asperger’s syndrome. Researching autism spectrum disorder in order to better understand Christopher’s behaviour, the behaviour of the Other, is the main objective of this chapter. However, there is an additional objective: apart from reading fiction, which features prominently on the syllabus of upper secondary schools, students should learn to read academic prose from various fields to be properly prepared for their university studies: most textbooks in most courses are in English, so techniques how to deal with this text type have to be taught as well. The lead question for the reading of the novel is whether the blurb on the cover, which confidently states that Christopher suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, is right, or if the sceptics are to be believed, who have criticized the book “as not accurately depicting an autistic person’s thought processes.” (autistic) The latter view is put forward by somebody who suffered from Asperger in his youth: he says he doesn’t recognise his own state in the depiction of Christopher’s consciousness. However, autism is a spectrum disorder, so individual symptoms may vary. In this project the students have to decide after the study of a graded corpus of literature on Asperger’s syndrome, which view is most likely to be correct. Already after a first reading assignment (up to p. 30) the students in the pilot

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project made the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome for Christopher taking their cue from the blurb. However, they had no idea of what this syndrome is. To delve deeper into this matter it is best to give the class the following task: – Task 1 In what way is Christopher different from other children his age? The pilot class were 17, so they were still able to remember the consciousness of a 15-year-old. Groups of three are ideal for this close-reading of the first 25 pages. The salient points are the following: – he knows all the countries of the world and their capital cities and all the prime – numbers up to 7507 (p. 2) – he can’t read facial expressions (pp. 2–3) – he hugs a dead dog (p. 4) – when screamed at by Mrs. Shears he puts his hands over his ears, closes his eyes and – presses his forehead into the grass – he is intent on detail, stating his age as “15 years, two months and 2 days.” (p. 7) – he can’t stand being touched, which is why he hits the policeman (p. 9) – he can’t understand jokes (p. 10) and metaphors (p. 19) – he has a precocious interest in and knowledge of astronomy (p. 12) – he can’t tell lies (p. 24) After this first tally of Christopher’s idiosyncrasies it is time to give students a first medical text to see whether these symptoms correspond to the medical definition of Asperger’s syndrome. The strategy is to start off with a fairly simple, short article and then move up to a longer definition abounding in typical academic vocabulary and complex syntax. The first text, whose first half is given below, is from WebMD, the most visited website for healthcare in the US: Asperger’s Syndrome – Symptoms Although there are many possible symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, the main symptom is significant trouble with social situations. Your child may have mild to severe symptoms or have a few or many of these symptoms. Because of the wide variety of symptoms, no two children with Asperger’s are alike.

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Symptoms during childhood Parents often first notice the symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome when their child starts preschool and begins to interact with other children. Children with Asperger’s syndrome may : – Not pick up on social cues and may lack inborn social skills, such as being able to read others’ body language, start or maintain a conversation, and take turns talking. – Dislike any changes in routines. – Appear to lack empathy. – Be unable to recognize subtle differences in speech tone, pitch, and accent that alter the meaning of other’s speech. So your child may not understand a joke or may take a sarcastic comment literally. And his or her speech may be flat and hard to understand because it lacks tone, pitch, and accent. – Have a formal style of speaking that is advanced for his or her age. For example, the child may use the word “beckon” instead of “call” or the word “return” instead of “come back.” – Avoid eye contact or stare at others. – Have unusual facial expressions or postures. (WebMD) A modicum of scaffolding is called for even with this comparatively simple text. The pilot class were in their fifth year of English, which meant that their vocabulary was still somewhat limited. A first technique in the group work is, of course, peer scaffolding (cf. Keller): the better students can help the ones with a less ample vocabulary. Even so, the words in bold in the text above were not known. The task is therefore as follows: – Task 2 Try to guess the meaning of the unknown words from the context; if this doesn’t work, see whether there is a word in French/Latin or a Germanic language which has the same root. In countries where French or Latin are compulsory the root of the Latin or French derived lexis is often known. The only words which remained obscure after this procedure in the pilot were ‘empathy’ and ‘posture’. Apart from ‘facial’, whose derivation from ‘face’ was spotted by some students, all the words were guessed from the context. In contrast to the procedure recommended by Bradley and Bradley (http://iteslj.org/Articles/Bradley-Scaffolding/), who posit that the teacher must “simplify the language by shortening selections”, peer scaffolding and some help with the methodology how to guess unknown words is sufficient to grasp a fairly simple medical text.

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As indicated above, following up the critical reception of the novel one notices one central bone of contention: while many reviewers praised the book for its accurate portrayal of Christopher’s Asperger’s syndrome, there was also the opposite response. First and foremost there is Haddon’s comment referred to above that “if anything it’s a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way. The book is not specifically about any specific disorder.” He also claims that he is not an expert on autism spectrum disorder or Asperger’s syndrome. Since students tend to take an author’s statement as gospel truth it is better not to give this passage to them right away. Literary criticism from the New Critics of the 1940s to the more recent poststructuralist school teaches us to distrust authors’ contentions about their work, but 17-year-old students cannot be expected to understand the rationale of this position. A more pedagogically fruitful criticism of the novel comes from a reader who suffers from high functioning autism, another term covering Asperger’s, himself: Mark Haddon did not use the word “autism” in his book, let alone claim to portray autism accurately. … However, seeing that The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has became very popular, I feel that I must explain why it should not to be taken seriously when many people … recommend it as reading material on autism … While reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, I noted that Christopher is highly self-aware, and could articulate his thoughts so clearly. This was very different from my own experience. … Years later, I figured out why. The book was written by someone pretending to be autistic. No wonder I was puzzled! It was usually people with autism pretending to be “normal”, not the other way around! (autism) While the final remark is rather naive (novelists do imagine characters different from themselves by definition), it can serve as a challenge to the statement in the blurb. Having read in the medical article that Asperger’s is a spectrum disorder the students realised that there are different shades of the disorder, so one sufferer’s account need not reflect the way everybody else experiences it. In analogy to Christopher’s detective work on the murder mystery of who killed the dog, the class are given the following overarching task covering the reading of the entire novel: – Task 3 Decide in the course of reading the novel if Christopher’s symptoms correspond to the description of Asperger’s in the medical texts.

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To deepen the students’ understanding of the condition another relatively simple medical text is given to the class. One passage which corresponds to the symptoms displayed by Christopher is quoted here to illustrate the degree of difficulty of the text: People with Asperger syndrome sometimes find it difficult to express themselves emotionally and socially. For example, they may : – have difficulty understanding gestures, facial expressions or tone of voice – have difficulty knowing when to start or end a conversation and choosing – topics to talk about – use complex words and phrases but may not fully understand what they mean – be very literal in what they say and can have difficulty understanding jokes, metaphor and sarcasm. For example, a person with Asperger syndrome may be confused by the phrase ‘That’s cool’ when people use it to say something is good. (What is Asperger’s Syndrome?) The first point is already mentioned in text 1 and is expounded by Christopher in a lengthy passage at the beginning of the novel on pages 2 and 3. The last point corresponds exactly to what Christopher says in the book on pages 10 and 19, confirming that he does suffer from Asperger’s. The text is longer than the first one on the disorder, but it is clearly written for lay persons, the vocabulary and the syntax being quite simple, so it is another step leading to understanding scientific texts. The next rung on the ladder is the longest text, written for a science-literate readership. But the knowledge of the condition derived from the first two short texts enables students to guess the meaning of many unknown medical terms. In addition, setting the reading of the novel up as a detective story in analogy to Christopher’s role as Sherlock Holmes in the murder mystery of the dog introduces a ludic element which motivates students to persist despite the partly daunting difficulty of the third text on Asperger’s. Let me quote a paragraph which corresponds in content to the one from the second text cited above: The current drafts of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSMV) proposes two core features of autism: a) social and communication deficits and b) fixated interests and repetitive behaviors. The social communication deficits in highly functioning persons with Asperger syndrome include lack of the normal back and forth conversation; lack of typical eye contact, body language, and facial expression; and trouble maintaining relationships. Fixated interests and repetitive behaviors include repetitive use of objects or phrases, stereotyped movements, and excessive attachment to routines, objects, or interests. Persons with ASD may also respond to sensory aspects of their environment with unusual indifference or excessive interest. (Autism Speaks)

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What is striking is the pervasive use of noun phrases, a general hallmark of formal style: all the features of autism are expressed by using nouns, in stark contrast to the way they were described in the previous texts: here we have “social communication deficit”, whereas in the first text it ran “children with Asperger’s syndrome may …not pick up on social cues and may lack inborn social skills” and in the second “People with Asperger syndrome sometimes find it difficult to express themselves emotionally and socially”. As long as the noun in the scientific text is ‘deficit’, which has a precise equivalent in German and many other European languages, there is no problem for the students. But later phrases like “excessive attachment to routines” are of a much higher order of difficulty. However, the first two accessible texts serve as scaffolding for this challenging piece of scientific prose. In addition, the same techniques demonstrated above, namely guessing words from the context or their Germanic or Romance roots, enable the students to glean the gist of the article. So the next task runs as follows: – Task 4 Compare this paragraph from a medical website with the two previous passages on Asperger’s. Focus on the second paragraph of the first text and try to find the sentences which correspond to each other in content in texts 1, 2 and 3; point out in which way the third text differs in style from the others. Use the techniques applied to the first two texts, namely guessing words from the context or their similarity to German or French words to understand the new text. Don’t use a dictionary. The first phase is group work to carry out the task. The objective is to find out whether the scaffolding by the simpler text and the techniques of guessing unknown words enable the students to get the gist of the paragraph. A second step is to allow them to look up four key words in a dictionary to see if this minimum suffices to achieve an understanding of the text. After this lengthy theory-laden first phase of the reading process during which the pilot class only got as far as p. 77 in about four weeks, it is time to read on swiftly to enable the students to experience what the eminent Hungarian psychologist Csikzedentmihalyi has called “flow”. (Csikzedentmihalyi) Chunks of about 25 to 30 pages can be read from week to week. After the first heavily teacher-initiated phase the lessons can be led by students now : two prepare questions about the pages read for that day, which then can be dealt with first in group work; then the groups report back to the class, triggering a plenary discussion. The teacher discusses the question with the two students who are presiding over the lesson during the group work phase. Then the latter take over.

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The overarching question whether or not Christopher displays the symptoms of Asperger’s listed in the medical texts remains at the back of the students’ minds. After finishing the book there is a last intertext to round off the task cycle. On July 4th 2009 The Guardian published an article entitled “The curious incident of the straight A student”. The reference to Haddon is obvious. Aged 13, Alex Goodenough handed in a 97’000-word text about space-faring aliens when asked to write the first chapter of a novel. As opposed to Christopher, Alex is prodigiously gifted in languages. The article unfolds the tale of woe of Alex’s experience with the English education system: despite having 5 GCSEs with top marks aged 15, the local sixth form college refused to accept him when they heard the word Asperger’s. The next school also rejected him, but in the end Alex and his mother prevailed: after protracted litigation with a sixth form college which didn’t want to offer him a place, Alex’s mother Jan won the case. But before this juridic victory Alex had to teach himself maths and physics alone at home, in total isolation. After going back to college for the upper sixth he got an offer for Trinity College, Cambridge to study engineering. In the end he turned to a science-based subject like a great many juveniles with Asperger’s. This intertext from the real world can help to bridge that gap between fact and fiction; the following task encourages students to explore this: – Task 5 Compare Christopher’s story with that of Alex Goodenough: list the similarities and differences. As a final assessment task the critical controversy mentioned above can be used: Some critics have argued that the book is not really about Asperger’s syndrome, but just about a child being different from other children, while others praised Mark Haddon for presenting the state of mind of an Asperger’s patient in an exact way. Argue a case for one or the other of these opinions. (400 words) It seems to me that the second view is borne out be a careful analysis of the book through the prism of medical literature on the topic; however, Mark Haddon is the source of the first view, so it has to be taken into account as well: – society produces outsiders by its strict, prejudiced code of behaviour. Anyone with a psychological idiosyncrasy like Christopher is treated as the Other, pushed to the margins of society. If you don’t know anything about autism the story still obviously shows what happens to outsiders; the happy end is just an attenuating gesture, Christopher will remain an alien. – The novel gives a picture-perfect portrait of Asperger’s syndrome, one of the manifestations of autism. The comparison with the excerpts from the medical texts shows so many parallels that they can’t be mere chance. However, from

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this specific case of a psychological disorder we can generalise about what happens to people who are different in our society. This mini-syllabus is a useful tool to bridge the gap between literary and scientific texts, the novel motivating the students to grapple with the often neglected genre of scientific prose. As regards competences, this projects goes beyond the literary categories 8 and 9 in my grid: 4.III and 7.III cover the medical texts, the manual cited in 7.III being the equivalent of a scientific text in terms of difficulty. Elements of the literary categories 8.I, II and III also feature in the text: in order to fully understand this realistic contemporary novel readers must have a grasp of irony and the concept of the unreliable narrator: although Christopher can’t lie, his limited perception of events has to be second-guessed by the reader to get an insight into what really happens.

II.9

The generation gap: another manifestation of Self and Other

As pointed out by Said, Childs and Tyson in the first chapter of this section, the dichotomy between Self and Other lies at the bottom of the problems caused by hybridity and leads to racism and hate. However, the Self – Other divide exists also within a racially monolithic society : the upper classes see the working classes as the Other, a theme dealt with in the next chapter dedicated to Tony Harrison; but even closer to home, within the basic building block of society, the family, there can be the same division: the generation gap is a slogan from the 1960s, the young of the hippie generation Othered their parents, and this was reciprocated by the older generation. Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse” was written at that time and is an exemplary poem depicting this conflict. To fathom the family dynamics some sociological literature must be consulted first. Traditional families are supposed to be closely knit units, the children obeying the parental guidance. In Tom Scanlan’s terminology this is “the family of security” of the past: “The family of security means love, warmth, protection, and mutuality”. (152) However, there is a downside to this hierarchically structured social unit: It may depend on self-destructive sacrifice which corrodes one’s vital will and independence. To flee this domestic tyranny means individuality, free will and selfexpression. Yet such freedom may rely on a brutal disregard for others, which eventually isolates and crazes. (152)

Obviously it is the children who are seeking individuality, a life freed from the tyranny of their parents. This desire reached its apogee in the 1960s and early

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70s, a result of flower power and the student revolt, the time when Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse” was written. And even if today’s generation Y is much less critical of the social order imposed on them by their elders, and fully integrated in the consumer cult of our time, the revolt against the parents is still a central feature of teenagers’ lives. Hence reading a poem in which the parents are branded as the malevolent Other will strike a chord, if it is accessible for ordinary people and non-native speakers. This is precisely what Philip Larkin (1922–85) was aiming for : he spearheaded the so-called Movement in the 1950s, a group of nine poets who developed a poetics diametrically opposed to Modernism with its cult of difficulty and allusion. Larkin put it as follows: As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its sole, freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief in ‘tradition’ or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions to other poems or poets. (Larkin 1983:79)

The “myth-kitty” is a scathing jibe at the heavy use of mythological allusions in Modernist poems like The Waste Land, which is obviously not the poetic fare for school. By rejecting ‘tradition’, which implies the necessity of a thorough knowledge of literary history as a prerequisite for understanding poems, Larkin’s poetry is by definition accessible for upper secondary students. His motives for writing poetry are also catering to a young contemporary audience: he deliberately writes for ‘the common reader’ or ‘the man next door’. In his essay “The Pleasure Principle” he insist that “at bottom … poetry is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure.” (81–82) In a profile written in 1956 John Shakespeare quotes Larkin’s fundamental notion of the function of poetry : “‘Poetry,’ he believes, ‘should keep the child from its TV set and the old man from his pub.’” This is a tall order, but with Larkin’s kind of poetry an attempt can be made to keep today’s pleasure-seeking youth from all the technological gadgets which have supplanted the TV. The first stanza sounds like a cri de coeur of many a disgruntled teenager in full puberty : They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. (Larkin 1988: 180)

The taboo word ‘fuck’ gives a special edge to the expression of alienation from the parents. Even if the exact meaning of the phrasal verb ‘fuck up’ may not be known to students they scent the venom behind the lines. The speaker is an adolescent in the age-range of the students in upper secondary school. The outrage in the first three lines gives way to the sarcasm in line 4.

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In the second stanza the anger is replaced by empathy. The speaker is clearly older, presumably a young adult in his twenties: But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats.

The realisation that the parents were the victims of their own parents enables the speaker to put his own misery in perspective: his grandparents lived in a time of “old-style hats and coats”, a world with strict norms constricting the public behaviour of adults. They reserved their aggression to the household, making his parents witnesses of conjugal disharmony, the grandparents thus ‘fucking them up’. In the third stanza there is yet another shift of tone: Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.

The poem moves from the particular to the general: while there were distinct voices of teenagers and young adults, here we have a speaker generalizing about the fate of mankind using poetic images to illustrate the human plight. “Man” is generic for all mankind, the image of the sudden dropping off of a coastal shelf has abysmal qualities, figuring the Fall of man. But this is not the end of the poem: in the last two lines the tone shifts again, a tongue-in-cheek conclusion dripping with irony attempts to give the analysis of the human condition a lighter note. But on balance it is just a facetious way of trying to ward off the devastating content of the poem. However, the last two lines do appeal to teenagers from troubled family backgrounds because they voice an attitude which is dormant within them. The way the family is presented can be measured against the sociological categories for different family types mentioned at the beginning of this chapter : the expected love, warmth and protection of the “family of security” turns into domestic tyranny which has to be fled. At least in stanza 2 the brutal disregard for others turns into some kind of empathy. But the last stanza spells out the doom of all mankind. The popularity of the poem is highlighted by the statistics mentioned in an article by Jehanne Dubrow : “This Be the Verse” appears in Larkin’s last poetry collection, High Windows, published in 1974, the year before my birth. The poem is perhaps one of Larkin’s most quoted, most anthologized. … On YouTube, viewers can listen to recordings of Larkin, his

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delivery a mix of deadpan inflections and sincerity. Once, at a poetry conference – 2 a.m. and most of the room drunk on cheap vodka – I heard a group of twenty people recite “This Be the Verse” from memory, all of them so sure of the words they might as well have been declaiming the Pledge of Allegiance. (Dubrow)

In addition, there is a song version of the poem by the English singer/songwriter Anne Clark. Playing this may enable students to feel about the poem like a pop song, which has positive vibes. How are we to deal with this poem in the classroom? Obviously the three stanzas have to be dealt with individually, so I suggest giving only one stanza at a time to groups of four. The first task consists of five steps aiming at enabling the students to chart the basic facts of the poem. The first task is divided into 5 steps in order to guide the students’ analysis: – Task 1 – Step 1: Guess how old the speaker is. List the reasons why you arrive at the age you think he is. – Step 2: Define the meaning of ‘fuck up’ without consulting a dictionary. Explain why it doesn’t have the original meaning of the four-letter word ‘f-u-c-k’. After these two tasks the groups report their findings to the class. The ensuing tasks deal with the second stanza, which is now given to the class: – Step 3: Compare the attitude of the speaker to the parents with the feelings expressed in stanza one. – Step 4: Look up the words you don’t know in an English-English dictionary. Note down what you find out about the speaker’s grandparents. – Step 5: Compare the tone of the first stanza to that of the second. Guess how old the speaker of the second stanza is. The first two lines of the third stanzas present the biggest challenge. The image of the coastal shelf was not understood in the pilot and needs some illustration. If you google ‘coastal shelf ’ there are a number of illustrations; the legend says ‘continental shelf ’, but the two are obviously synonymous. (cf. Wikipedia Continental shelf). The dropping off of the shelf is clearly illustrated. It tapers off to the abyssal plain, “an underwater plain on the deep ocean floor, usually found at depths between 3000 and 6000 m. Lying generally between the foot of a continental rise and a mid-ocean ridge, abyssal plains cover more than 50 % of the Earth’s surface” (Wkipedia, abyssal plain) Getting the students to understand this geographic terminology is an end in itself, contributing to their science literacy. To save time the teacher may just project this image which graphically illustrates the deepening of the coastal shelf:

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This material should suffice to enable students to visualise the devastating image Larkin creates for the handing on of misery from generation to generation. The task runs as follows: – Task 2 Google an illustration of the “coastal shelf”. Read the first paragraph of the English Wikipedia entry for “abyssal plain”. Use the Merriam Webster dictionary to find out the meaning of ‘abyss’. – Task 3 Discuss in your group how pessimistic the speaker is about mankind. Then the last two lines, which give the poem a final ironic twist, have to be put in contrast to the solemn statement of the first two lines of the stanza: – Task 4 How are the last two lines meant? Compare the tone with that of the first two lines of the stanza. Decide what the overall message of the poem is. The ironic tone of the last two lines renders this facile solution of the human predicament questionable. The speaker doesn’t decide not to have any children to be able to do more partying but because he feels mankind is doomed. A comparison of the poem with a passage from Larkin’s diary on the same subject can illuminate the background: What kind of home did they create…? I should say it was dull, pot-bound and slightly mad … However, the problem wasn’t the house but the individuals in it. My mother, as time went on, began increasingly to complain of her dreary life, her inability to run the house and the approach of the war. I suppose her age had something to do with it, but the monotonous whining monologue she treated my father to before breakfast, and all of us at mealtimes, resentful, self-pitying, full of funk and suspicion, must have remained in my mind as something I mustn’t under any circumstances risk encountering again. (Motion 14)

This passage largely represents the scathing dismissal of the parents of stanza 1. Especially the last line flags up the reason for the deep-seated aversion to family life. There is only one line which is in tune with the more understanding view of stanza 2: “I guess her age had something to do with it.”

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– Task 5 Compare this passage from Larkin’s diary with the poem and point out the similarities and differences in terms of the child’s attitude to its parents in the two texts. At this juncture the sociological terms introduced at the beginning of the chapter can be given to the students: – Task 6 Read the text below about different types of families. Decide whether the family presented in this poem is the ‘family of security’ or the ‘family of freedom’. Is there a person in the family with “brutal disregard for others”? Obviously the parents try to preserve the family of security, their faults partly being to strictly enforce their traditional notion of the family. In the second stanza the speaker understands that the Victorian grandparents had done the same to them. But the speaker’s own breaking free may indeed result in isolating or crazing the offspring because s/he has no positive values. In Janis Joplin’s words “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”. A poem with such a strong emotional appeal lends itself to a creative approach. In free verse students can produce heart-felt texts venting some of their deepseated anger. Without any prompting on the teacher’s part the results will be in free verse. – Task 7 Write your own poem about the stanza you analysed in groups. Make the age of the speaker clear in your text. Don’t try to use rhyme or metre, but express the raw emotion of a teenager/young adult/ adult. – Task 8 Compare the form of your poem with Larkin’s and point out the formal differences. Comparing traditional verse with free verse and prose is an opportunity to introduce some basics of scansion. Even if there is some dormant knowledge from mother-tongue classes it is worthwhile starting from the beginning: – Task 9 Read the poem aloud to your neighbour, exaggerating the stresses. Mark the stressed syllables in the text and find out if there are any regular patterns. Then listen to Larkin reading his poem. (Larkin youtube)

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After this “scanning of the poem” (Brooks/Warren: 498) by the students the fundamental iambic pattern becomes clear. However, listening to Larkin’s reading highlights the difference between “verse pattern” and “verse instance” i. e. “the rhetorically expressive rhythm” of the poem. To prevent verse from falling into a sleep-inducing te-tum te-tum pattern some feet are substituted when the meaning warrants it. Larkin stresses “they” in lines 1 and 2, thus emphasising the parents as agents of the destructive behaviour. In stanza 2 the emphasis of “they” falls into line with the iambic pattern. So Larkin uses “rhetorical variation” to constantly stress the agents who bring about perpetuated human misery. The result of this dip into scansion is a heightened awareness of the students of the way a basic iambic metre is used flexibly by a poet, and that a variation of the metrical pattern links the metre with the meaning, i. e. form and content correspond. In terms of the literary competences activated by the tasks to this poem, the main categories are 9.I, 9.II and 9.III. Poems require most of the skills listed in category 9: however, there is a slightly truncated narrative element in this poem which points to 8.III. Since poetry is generally seen as the most difficult literary genre its elements are listed in category 9 of the assessment grid. However, a poem with a fairly clear narrative surface level like this one can be understood on the basic realistic level like a short story. It is the subtlety of tone and imagery which render it more difficult than realistic prose texts. A final task for formative assessment could be the following: – Task 14 Describe the differences in tone in the three stanzas. Decide what the final message of the poem is. (400 words) The following points should be contained in a good essay : – In stanza 1 a disgruntled teenager vents his spleen, the tone is straightforward, full of aggression and blame – In stanza 2 the speaker has mellowed: s/he understands that the parents were subject to the same treatment, a mild irony is mixed with a tone of empathy. – The first two lines of the last stanza are almost solemn in tone, propounding that mankind is doomed. But this give way to dire self-irony in the last two lines. – The final message is one of despair about the human condition. But not having any children isn’t a panacea making life fun. The shadow of depressive hopelessness over the human condition darkens the seemingly cheerful ending of the poem.

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Here a grasp of the subtleties of irony on the part of the speakers is needed. To say that the main statement of the poem is an easy advocacy not to have children is falling short of grasping the complex web of shifting tone and irony. The message that misery is passed on unwittingly from generation to generation is devastating, but the tongue-in-cheek conclusion of the last two lines is not a valid solution for the human predicament.

II.10 Tony Harrison’s “Them & [uz]”: Other and Self in the class system Another level of the confrontation between Self and Other are the class divisions in society. In Britain there is a centuries-old antagonism between the ruling class and the working class: the 19th century Prime Minister Disraeli’s diagnosis of “two nations”. In the early 21st century this split may have been somewhat attenuated since the Tories are no longer of the Thatcherite variety who believed that “there no is such thing as society”. But when David Cameron tackled the monumental debt the nation incurred due to the credit crunch and the bankers’ irresponsible behaviour in 2008, his slogan “we’re in this together” was lampooned by left-wingers who pointed to the City getting away with it scotch-free, while working people had to put up with wage cuts and higher taxes. This chapter offers a full analysis of the linguistic dimension of class struggle, starting in the 1940s and reaching up to the present. It is of greater difficulty than the texts analysed so far. It is therefore advisable to tackle this sociolinguistic mini-syllabus with the most advanced classes, preferably in their last year before going to university. The research techniques and system of references is akin to the work done by university students. The entire syllabus offers valuable insight into the development of English speech, illustrating the contempt of upper-class RP speakers for working class accents in the 1940s to the re-emergence of local accents in educated speech in the 1990s. It helps students comprehend why they find it difficult to understand their British peers when visiting England. The poet whose work highlights the social gulf most vocally is Tony Harrison. Born into a working-class family in Leeds in 1937 one central theme of his work is the social and linguistic discrimination people from his background suffered. As he puts it in his poem “Classics Society”, he, the bright working-class kid who studies Latin, is given the task to translate English classics like Edmund Burke’s analysis of British society into classical Latin, the language which until 17th century was deemed to be superior to “rude” English, the tongue present-day leaders use “to cast their spell”:

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And so the lad who gets the alphas works the hardest in his class for his translation and finds good Ciceronian for Burke’s a dreadful schism in the British nation. (Harrison 2006:120)

Studying Harrison means immersing the students in social history and sociolinguistics. The historical perspective is crucial. The response to a broad Leeds accent in a grammar school in the 1940s was totally different from today : with the advent of the 60s, pop heroes like the Beatles cultivated their native accents and became linguistic role models. The Thatcher government’s attempt to insist on Standard English in terms of vocabulary and pronunciation was a desperate rear-guard action which petered out in the Blair years. Now some Tory MPs also have distinct local accents, and linguists define Standard English only in terms of grammar. (cf. Trudgill) With the poem “Them & [uz]” we go back to the post-war period. It illustrates the struggle of a bright working-class boy with an interest in poetry with his English teacher who wouldn’t have poetry desecrated by a Yorkshire accent. In a first phase I shall give a scholarly explanation of the sequence of two poems before giving a blueprint how to deal with them in the classroom. Them and [uz] (for Professors Richard Hoggart and Leon Cortez) I a_ai, ay, ay! … stutterer Demosthenes gob full of pebbles outshouting seas – 4 words only of mi ’art aches and … ‘Mine’s broken, you barbarian, T.W.!’ He was nicely spoken. ‘Can’t have our glorious heritage done to death!’ I played the Drunken Porter in Macbeth. ‘Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of those Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose! All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see ’s been dubbed by[ˆs] into RP, Received Pronunciation, please believe [ˆs] Your speech is in the hands of the Receivers.’ ‘We say [ˆs] not [uz], T.W.!’ That shut my trap. I doffed my flat a’s (as in ‘flat cap’) my mouth all stuffed with glottals, great lumps to hawk up and spit out… E-nun-ci-ate! (Harrison 2006:122)

The beginning of the poem is a tall order : Greek script and an obscure reference to the Greek orator Demosthenes. This is the classical erudition Harrison ac-

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quired as a scholarship student of Classics at Leeds University. The two Greek syllables are the sound the chorus make in Greek tragedy in a state of heightened tragic emotion, while the homophonous “Aye aye!” is a typical interjection of a Cockney stand-up comedian. The poem is dedicated to “Professors Richard Hoggart and Leon Cortez”: the former is one of the leading researchers into working class literacy, while the latter is a comedian who dubs Shakespeare into Cockney. Thus what is considered high-brow culture and low-brow comedy is put on a par. Line 2 is based on the legend that Demosthenes, a stutterer, practised public speaking by shouting louder than the surf with his mouth full of pebbles. This has its exact parallel in Harrison’s dedicatory poem to his sequence The School of Eloquence, of which “Them & [uz]” is a part: Heredity How you became a poet’s a mystery! Wherever did you get your talent from? I say : I had two uncles, Joe and Harryone was a stammerer, the other dumb. (Harrison 2006: 111)

The total lack of articulation of his working-class elders “hurt him into poetry” (Auden). The figure of Demosthenes making himself heard against the odds is a role model for the budding poet. A line from “On Not Being Milton” expresses this struggle succinctly : “Articulation is the tongue-tied’s fighting” (112), Harrison seeing it as his mission to articulate the plight of the working class. “Them & [uz]” illustrates this theme by going back to the classroom in which the young Harrison, called up by the initials of his first and middle name, T.W. , is taunted by his English master on account of his thick Leeds accent: “mi art aches” is the young Harrison’s rendering of the first line of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”: “My heart aches”. The Standard English possessive pronoun ‘my’ is replaced by ‘mi’, a typical feature of Non-Standard varieties; ‘art’ displays the equally typical aitch-dropping. The English Master’s response is swift: his heart is broken by T.W.’s barbaric rendering of the Keats ode. Reading classical poems in this accent does the glorious poetic heritage to death; it can only be recited by people like him, who are “nicely spoken”, i. e. speak Received Pronunciation. The laconic line 6 spells out what roles working-class kids were allowed to play in a drama society’s performance of a Shakespeare play : “the speech of kings” is, of course, Standard English with RP, working-class accents are at best comic. In line 9 we hear the voice of the grown-up Harrison excluded from the elect who have access to the groves of poetry ; in brackets he comments on the English teacher’s apodictic statement: Keats was a Cockney, so he didn’t read his poems in an RP voice. The chief battleground for the war of accents is the pronoun of inclusion, us, the teacher’s pronunciation [as] being pitted against the working-class [uz]

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in the title of the poem. Whoever uses the latter pronunciation is considered a pleb belonging to a tribe of ruffians. Lines 11–12 contain a pun on RP: Receivers are people controlling a business that has gone bankrupt. The ironic implication is that the company dealing in dialects and accents has gone bust and is under the control of the upper-class RP speakers. A second meaning of receivers is, however, someone who buys and sells stolen property, suggesting that the English teacher monopolising poetry is a criminal selling something he stole. The final four lines bring in two images combining accent with physical action: “doffing my flat ‘a’s” means replacing the short northern [æ] in words like pass by RP [A:]. “Doffing” is taking off the worker’s flat cap to the master as a submission gesture. Finally the young Harrison is forced by his teacher to get rid of the glottal stops which are typical of most Non-Standard accents the way you hawk up, i. e. spit out phlegm from your throat; a working-class accent is like a sore throat you want to cure. The last word is the teacher’s tyrannical command to speak clearly, without glottal stops or any guttural sounds. After the considerable difficulty of the first 16-line sonnet, the sequel is more accessible: II So right, ye buggers, then! We’ll occupy your lousy leasehold Poetry. I chewed up Littererchewer and spat the bones into the lap of dozing Daniel Jones, dropped the initials I’d been harried as and used my name and own voice: [uz] [uz] [uz], ended sentences with by, with, from, and spoke the language that I spoke at home. RIP, RP, RIP T.W. I’m Tony Harrison no longer you! You can tell the Receivers where to go (and not aspirate it) once you know Wordsworth’s matter/water are full rhyme, [uz] can be loving as well as funny. My first mention in the Times automatically made Tony Anthony! (123)

In the first two lines we have a self-confident voice declaring war on the upper class who think that poetry is its preserve: in fact, it is only lease-hold, not freehold, so it will go back to its original owners. The eminent men of letters are demeaned as “buggers”, the ultimate expression of disrespect. A working-class mouth chews up literature and spits the bones into the lap of the father of

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Received Pronunciation, Daniel Jones. As a sign of emancipation the more mature Harrison starts using his first name rather than his initials, which he connects with humiliation in the classroom. With the use of his own name goes the use of his own voice, intoning triumphantly the Leeds variety of the pronoun of inclusion. The defiance of prescriptive grammarians is expressed by ending sentences with prepositions (preposition) which in the 50s was still regarded as wrong. Then follows the ultimate statement of liberation: “and spoke the language that I spoke at home.” Finally he has freed himself from the shackles of his English master. Received Pronunciation is relegated to resting in peace. The non-aspirated place the Receivers are told to go is, of course, ‘ell’, the working class equivalent of its nobler cousin ‘hell’. The fact that water and matter rhymed in Wordsworth’s poetry points to his thick Cumbrian accent, which has been totally repressed by the Receivers. The final couplet is an ironic jibe at the literary establishment: the Times wouldn’t except the colloquial first name Tony since it is not dignified enough. These are complex poems, and especially the first part calls for some teacherled sequences. However, due to the availability of the internet in most classrooms the background can partly be researched by the students. The game is worth the candles since it gives insight into social and sociolinguistic realities which dominated England until recently : the class-ridden nature of English society with accent as a social marker.

II.10.1 Teaching the first part of “Them & [uz]”: the ‘nicely spoken’ teacher’s suppression of the young working-class lad Phase 1 Now it is time to give a pedagogic frame for presenting these poems to the students. To begin with it is best to give the students the text and listen to Harrison’s rendering of Part 1. (Harrison Part 1) Due to their complexity, the first two lines are best left for later analysis when the context of the poem has been established. – Task 1 Visit the following website to find an explanation for the line on Macbeth: http://www.answhers.com/Q/What_is_the_purpose_of_the_drunken_porter_sce ne_in_Macbeth. Google who John Keats was and copy/paste the first line of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”; visit the English Wikipedia site on ‘Received Pronunci-

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ation’, and then the following site to explain ‘aitch-dropping’. http://grammar. about.com/od/fh/g/H-dropping.htm. The topmost websites of the “drunken Porter” just give the text of the scene. Students need a commentary like the following: “The Satirical porter scene written in earthly prose is intended a comic relief in the grim tragic atmosphere.” (Porter) The first two paragraphs of the Wikipedia entry on Received Pronunciation (RP) are enough to explain the English master’s RP accent. The contrast to ‘aitch dropping’ is obvious if one picks an entry with a usable definition like the following: “H-dropping is common in many dialects of British English.” (Aitch dropping) If the students don’t manage to understand the texts on the web it is best to give them these passages to speed up the process. – Task 2 The poem is set in a classroom. Find out when the teacher speaks and who the pupil he addresses is. Leave out the first two lines, focus on lines 3 to 12. Consult the results of your internet searches on Task 1. This task establishes the ‘dramatic situation’. Without understanding the words pointed out in Task 1 carrying it out is not possible; even so, the teacher may have to give the groups some support to grasp the overall meaning. The next task aims at the pun on Receivers: – Task 3 ‘Dubbing’ means ‘to change the sounds and speech on a film or television programme, especially to a different language’ (Cambridge Online Dictionary). Find out what it means in this context; ‘receive’ is used in the term ‘Received Pronunciation’, where it means ‘the accent received from upper-class people of the older generation’. However, “Receivers” also means ‘one that receives stolen goods’. (Merriam Webster) Explain this wordplay. This is most likely to need some prompting on the part of the teacher. The final four lines as well as the first two are best explained in a teacher-led manner. The only task for these lines is for the students to determine the contrast [ˆs} v. [uz]: – Task 4 Listen again to line 13. Find out what sounds the phonetic script represents. Which word is pronounced differently by which social group?

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Phonetic script can be found in every dictionary or the internet. At this stage the ruling class/working class dichotomy has been established, so the students in the pilot were able to do the task without the teacher’s help. The final three lines need some guidance since, as explained above, they are fairly complex. The “flat a’s” can be illustrated best by playing the first two lines of the poem “Book Ends”, which is dealt with below. Harrison’s own reading makes the short northern ‘æ’ clearly audible: – Task 5 Listen to the first two lines of another poem by Tony Harrison. Focus your attention on the way he pronounces the word “last”; in what way is it different from Received Pronunciation? Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead we chew it slowly that last apple pie. (Book Ends)

– Task 6 The verb “doff” means ‘to take off ’. Read the following excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on ‘flat cap’ and find out how this is relevant for the poem: In British popular culture, the flat cap is typically associated with older working class men, especially those in Northern England, and the West Country, (‘flat cap’)

Taking off the flat cap as a gesture of submission may have to be shown by the teacher. For line 15 the terms “glottals” (consonants made at the back of your throat, typical of northern dialects) and “hawk up” (bring up phlegm) as well as “enunciate” (pronounce in a clear, articulate manner) have to be explained. Then the follow-up task is manageable – Task 7 The speaker doesn’t literally take off his flat cap, but he does eliminates some phonetic elements from his speech. Explain which elements and why he does that; guess who speaks the final word in the poem. Only now, after this step-by-step analysis, does it make sense for the teacher to explain the cryptic first two lines, elucidated in my interpretation above. This will round off the reading of the poem, clarifying the main theme. After so much hard textual work the students need a creative outlet for all the information they had to digest:

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– Task 8 T.W. tells his working-class mother about what happened in the English class. Write a dialogue. (200–300 words)

II.10.2 Teaching the second part of “Them& [uz]”: T.W.’s rebellion Now it is time to listen to the second part of the poem: (Harrison Part 2, see above) – Task 1 Guess the age and the tone of voice of the speaker in this poem. The defiant, self-confident tone is obvious. Some more tasks are needed to fathom the finer points made by the speaker, though. – Task 2 Read the texts about leasehold, Daniel Jones and the use of prepositions. Apply this information to your reading of lines 1–8. Since the entries on these two items are lengthy and complex it is best to give the students two extracts from texts on the web: Leasehold is a form of land tenure [owning land] or property tenure where one party buys the right to occupy land or a building for a given length of time. (Leasehold)

Finding a passage succinctly stating the connection between RP and Daniel Jones is not easy. Therefore it is best to give the students the following quote: Daniel Jones transcribed RP pronunciations of a large number of words and names in his English Pronouncing Dictionary. (Daniel Jones)

The following line refers to a grammatical shibboleth old-style grammarians insisted on in the first part of the 20th century : One of the most frequent questions I’m asked is whether it’s acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition. I know many of you were taught that you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition, but it’s a myth. In fact, I consider it one of the top ten grammar myths because many people believe it’s true, but nearly all grammarians disagree, at least in some cases. (Preposition)

It is best if the teacher explains this briefly to enable the students to understand the rebellious nature of line 7. The pun in line 11 is within the grasp of the pupils. They may have to google R I P, but then comprehension is easy. Lines 11–14 require more elucidation; hence another bundle of quotations is needed:

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– Task 3 Read the passages below; find an example of a word that is not aspirated in the first poem. Guess which word is not aspirated in the phrase ‘go to ….’ Then read the passage on Wordsworth. as·pi·rate noun \’as-p(«-)r«t\ linguistics: the sound of the letter “h” (Aspirate)

Received Pronunciation was coined in 1869 by the linguist, A J Ellis, but it only became a prestigious accent associated with the upper classes in the early 20th century. William Wordsworth: Cumbrian lad [poet] who did not let Cambridge [upper class university] rob him of his northern vowels. Celebrated by Tony Harrison, self-proclaimed laureate refusenik [protester], in his poem against received pronunciation Them & [uz], for rhyming “water” with “matter”. (Wordsworth)

The final couplet can be guessed by the students if they are given a hint about the social standing of The Times: – Task 4 “The Times” is traditionally a posh, i. e. upper-class newspaper. Find out how the speaker is making fun of the upper classes. Tasks 4 and 5 are quite demanding; hence it is advisable for teachers to help the students if they can’t cope with them. After all these comprehension tasks some ‘creative relief ’ is called for. The speaker’s aggro may resonate with many students who also had oppressive teachers. – Task 5 The grown-up Tony Harrison meets his former English teacher 10 years after he left school. Write a dialogue. (200–300 words) Reading these two poems turns out to be an entire syllabus on the history of class and accent in England. What has to be added is the development since the 1950s is the rise of Estuary English and the decline of RP. The best topical example is the speech of teachers in the television series Educating Yorkshire. (Play Educating Yorkshire 2 min. 30 sec ) It is obvious that only the voice-over narrator speaks RP; the head’s speech has the typical Yorkshire vowels and a great many glottal stops, the sounds the

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young Tony Harrison had to “hawk up and spit out”. So times have changed, for better or worse. However, the old ways still persist in Britain’s most traditional schools like Harrow, a so-called Public School, which paradoxically means private fee-paying school to the tune of 30’000 pounds a year. It may be useful to show the students excerpts from a youtube clip on Harrow (Harrow : AVery British Education: 6 min. – ) What is striking are the cut-glass RP accents of the house master and the other staff. The students may have the odd glottal stop, but all the vowels are RP. No young Tony Harrison to be found within miles of the venerable institution. – Task 1 Compare the accents of the teachers and students in Yorkshire and Harrow. Which is easier to understand? Which are the features that differ? Use the insight gained in lines 13–16 of the first poem. As a final assessment task the following can be given: Describe how the young T.W. revenged himself on his English teacher. (400 words) – first and foremost by becoming a poet – He deliberately kept the non-standard features of his speech, especially [uz], the pronoun of inclusion. – He didn’t obey the grammar rules dictated by traditional grammairans and ended his sentences with prepositions. – He insisted on being called Tony, not T.W. – He managed to be mentioned in The Times, the paper of the literary establishment, presumably as a poet, so he made it. In terms of literary competences, this poem clearly makes high demands: a great many descriptors of 9.III are activated by this complex text. Obviously this material is best used with students in their final year just before the exams.

II.10.3 Diglossia: a lower and a higher variety of the same language used in a language community Gaining such deep insight into class and accent makes it worthwhile devoting half a dozen lessons to the two poems. I’m even suggesting a sequel delving deeper into this issue: an obvious point of interest is the comparison of the English situation with the sociolinguistic circumstances in the students’ countries. The profoundest echo is to be expected in diglossic countries like Germanspeaking Switzerland and Norway.

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So the next follow-up task is the comparison between T.W.’s predicament and the sociolinguistic rules of conduct in the students’ language community : – Task 1 Compare the young T.W.’s linguistic situation with the circumstances in your country. Define the social standing of dialect in the two societies. In Germany there is similar situation in some regions: there are standard speakers who never speak dialect and in some areas the local dialect has a negative connotation. However, this does not apply to the south, i. e. BadenWürttemberg and Bavaria. Austria has similar traits, Viennese standard speakers having the highest social prestige, but dialect is by no means totally discredited. German-speaking Switzerland, on the other hand, is thoroughly diglossic: everybody speaks dialect most of the time and standard German is only used in formal situations like education and national politics, and in writing. The same is the case in Norway, where the situation is complicated by the fact that there are at least two standard varieties for writing. The issue of the pros and cons of dialect will stimulate heated discussions. To give this exchange of opinions a linguistic base the concept of diglossia has to be defined: Diglossia is a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects of the language … there is a very divergent, highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any section of the community for ordinary conversation. (Ferguson: 325)

This is a formidable piece of scholarly prose, so a task needs to be set to guarantee the understanding of the basic principle: – Task 2 Give an example of a country with a diglossic language situation. Define the low and the high language variety. In diglossic countries like Switzerland and Norway this is easiest. But dialect features in almost all speech communities, so a discussion of the function and status of German dialects yields some insight into the sociolinguistics of the students’ countries as well. In Britain the question of how Standard English is defined and whether or not it should be inculcated at schools was subject to heated debates in the late 80s

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and early 90s when the conservative government put the teaching of Standard English on the national curriculum. Most sociolinguists dismissed this goal by demonstrating that there is no such thing as Standard English vocabulary. (cf. Trudgill) The whole discourse was clearly politicized, left-wing linguists taking on the Tory government, which adopted attitudes like the one of the young T.W.’s English master. A particularly telling example is Peter Trudgill’s article “Dialect and Dialects in the New Europe”: One way of combatting dialect hostility is to point to those fortunate societies which have greater respect for language varieties … according to many measurements of per capita income, the three richest countries in Europe are Luxemburg, Switzerland and Norway. The entire indigenous population of Luxemburg is dialect-speaking … In Switzerland, too, the majority of the inhabitants are dialect-speaking … Norway is also one of the most dialect-speaking countries of Europe. … The myth that dialects are ‘inadequate’ – that they cannot be used for educational or intellectual purposes – seems particularly strong in Britain. German Switzerland shows that nothing could be further from the truth. Two Swiss-German professors discussing the work of Heidegger will combine the use of the appropriate vocabulary with Swiss-German dialect pronunciation and grammar. (Trudgill 1994: 45–46)

Trudgill seems to have an axe to grind, the ghost of the young T.W. is haunting these lines. A sober analysis will show that the prosperity of these three countries is given by a flourishing financial sector (still performing well even after the demise of bank secrecy laws) and North Sea oil. He totally ignores the fact that in a diglossic society like German-speaking Switzerland, where one speaks of medial diglossia, i. e. Standard German is almost exclusively used for writing, while speaking it is limited to school lessons and the national parliament, children from working-class backgrounds don’t master it after 9 years of schooling and are therefore excluded from white-collar jobs. Precisely these questions can be raised by the task connected with this text, which in the pilot led to heated exchanges: – Task 3 Read this excerpt from an article by an English sociolinguist and discuss if dialect can lead to richer societies. Point out the pros and cons of diglossic societies compared with the situation in England. (See above Trudgill 1994) This mini-syllabus raises sociolinguistic language awareness combining poetry with excerpts from scholarly articles. Since all university students in the German-speaking and Scandinavian world have to read scholarly texts in their studies, enhancing reading comprehension of academic prose should be one of the main objectives of teaching at pre-university level. Combining it with the

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traditional reading of literary texts is a way of integrating it in the curriculum. (cf. above Haddon)

Il.10.4 Assessment tasks This formidable set of poems clearly elicits the most advanced literary competences: 9.I, 9.II and 9.III are needed to do justice to the text. The knowledge of literary history and sociolinguistics required far exceeds what even a university student might know. But through the series of guided tasks provided in this syllabus this knowledge can be acquired. Finally some assessment tasks to test the students’ grasp of this syllabus is of use for teachers. Rather than specific questions on a passage in the poems, topics for short essays deliver a more holistic approach. They are written with the texts of the poems at hand, but without the notes accumulated in the teaching process: – Task 1 Explain the social background T.W. comes from and point out to what extent this was an educational handicap in the 1940s. Seminal points: – As a working-class child he had a thick local accent which was deemed vulgar by the educational and cultural authorities. – As a result he was bullied by his English teacher who thought only RP was an appropriate accent for reading poetry aloud. – Task 2 Describe how the sociolinguistic situation in England has changed since the 1940s. – With the advent of the Beatles and other pop stars from working-class backgrounds in the 1960s local accents got much more exposure and prestige. – Until the 1990s the Conservative governments tried to teach Standard English and RP at schools, but the tide was turning and nowadays you can hear local accents in BBC broadcasts.

– Task 3 Point out why the difference in pronunciation of ‘us’[ as] versus [uz] is so important to Harrison.

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– [as] stands for the ruling class, it implies that working-class people are the Other, as in ‘them and us’. – [uz] is the pronoun of inclusion, it evokes being part of your family, of a social group, which enables you to assert your rights in a society which tries to keep yu at the bottom of the pile. About 150 words per task if written in the classroom might be a good first leg. After a first assessment by the teacher the texts can be elaborated on at home to start a portfolio process which can also be assessed in the end.

II.11 Them & [uz] within the family: Tony Harrison’s “Bookends” As pointed out in the chapter on Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”, the confrontation with the Other can take place within families. The father – son gap is highlighted in the two “Book Ends” poems. The occasion for the poems is the sudden death of the mother. There is a fine reading of the first part of the poem by Harrison on the web (Book Ends Poetry Archive): I Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead we chew it slowly that last apple pie. Shocked into sleeplessness you’re scared of bed. We never could talk much, and now don’t try. You’re like book ends, the pair of you, she’d say, Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare… The ’scholar’ me, you, worn out on poor pay, only our silence made us seem a pair. Not as good for staring in, blue gas, too regular each bud, each yellow spike. At night you need my company to pass and she not here to tell us we’re alike! You’re life’s all shattered into smithereens. Back in our silences and sullen looks, for all the Scotch we drink, what’s still between ’s not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books. (Book Ends, Poetry Archive)

The situation of the two males after the mother’s decease is precarious: they are sitting in the living-room, the mother’s last apple pie symbolically elevated to the

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Last Supper, supplemented not by wine but Scotch, a token of the macho culture the father is used to and to which the son reverts when coming home. After this shattering event the silence is much more painful than when the mother acted as commentator, comparing them to book ends. The chasm between them is created by the son’s education, turning him into a ‘scholar’ aspiring to a higher social status, in contrast to the father “worn out on poor pay”, thus bringing the class differences into the home. The male bonding ritual of drinking whisky cannot bridge the gap. The mother’s pertinent simile, comparing them to book ends, is reinforced in the final line: what separates these devices propping up books on a shelf are books, metonymies of education. The threefold repetition mimetically represents the barrier keeping them apart. Now these insights have to be turned into tasks: – Task 1 Describe the ‘dramatic situation’, i. e. the main characters and how they interact in the poem. Make a hypothesis who is meant by “she”, “we” and “you”. – Task 2 Give an outline of the action of the poem. Find out why the speaker and the “you” are together. – Task 3 Guess the age of the characters. Focus on lines 15–16. The pilot revealed that the identification of the personae is difficult. Many students saw the “we” as a married couple, the “she” being the daughter. Hence the hint at the last two lines which clarify the age gap between speaker and addressee; this should make students revise their earlier guess. – Task 4 Determine the setting of the poem. Focus on lines 5 and 6. Look up the verb “hog” and the noun “grate” in a dictionary. This task makes the students aware that the location is the parental home, thus clarifying the dramatic situation. Lines 9 and 10 confirm this: the original coalfired fire place has been replaced by a gas-powered one, which again indicates the remoteness of the characters from their original state of proximity in the happy nuclear family.

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– Task 5 Look up the term “book ends” in a dictionary. Find out why the female character uses this simile for the two other persons in lines 5–6. Then go to line 16 and see how the image is used there. If the students can’t identify the father-son pair and the mother’s death, teacher intervention is needed. In order to promote literary reading skills a brief excursus on symbolism can be added here. Visualizing the image of the book ends shows the physical distance between father and son. The threefold repetition of “books” in the last line makes the gap between them palpable. The poem lends itself to a revision of the term simile and symbol: “like book ends” in line 5 is followed by the usage of books as a symbol in the last line. The second poem on this subject tackles the issue of poetry and genuine feeling: II The stone’s too full. The wording must be terse. There’s scarcely room to carve the FLORENCE on it– Come on, it’s not as if we’re wanting verse. It’s not as if we’re wanting a whole sonnet! After tumblers of neat Johnny Walker (I think that both of us we’re on our third) you said you’d always been a clumsy talker and couldn’t find another, shorter word for ‘beloved’ or for ‘wife’ in the inscription, but not too clumsy that you can’t still cut: You’re supposed to be the bright boy at description and you can’t tell them what the fuck to put! I’ve got to find the right words on my own. I’ve got the envelope that he’d been scrawling, mis-spelt, mawkish, stylistically appalling but I can’t squeeze more love into their stone. (Bookends Poetry Archive)

Again, the contrast poet versus crude working-class man is at the centre of the poem. The father urges his famous son to devise an inscription for the mother’s headstone, but in spite of the intoxication by whiskey, inspiration fails to come when he is together with his father. The terse wording can only come when he is alone. But opening the envelope with the father’s suggestion makes him realise that raw emotion does not depend on verbal sophistication: the “mis-spelt,

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mawkish, stylistically appalling” words of the father do convey his love and grief more genuinely than a verbally accomplished poem. This poem does not need as many tasks as the previous one since the dramatic situation is clear from the reading of the first text. – Task 1 Find out what “stone” the poem is about. – Task 2 Describe the relationship between the two characters. Use your insights from the first poem. – Task 3 Explain the speaker’s dilemma concerning the inscription on the stone. – Task 4 Write your own inscription for such an occasion In terms of literary competences, elements from 8.III, 9.I and 9.II must be activated to solve the tasks. This pair of poems is undoubtedly easier than the “Them & [uz]” sequence, so far fewer tasks are needed to lead the students to an understanding. But to some extent it is predicated on having read the first two poems to fathom the father – son relationship. As an assessment task I suggest the following: Describe the role of education in the two poems. What effects does it have on the two main characters? (400 words) – The books the son read form a barrier between him and his uneducated working-class father form a visible barrier between the two of them. The mother’s metaphor of ‘bookends’ for them visualises the gap between them, books constituting a physical obstacle between the father/bookend and the son/bookend – In the second poem the poet son has to admit that he is incapable of finding the right words for the mother’s headstone. He gets taunted by his father for drying up on this important occasion. The son has to admit that all his education hasn’t enabled him to ‘squeeze more love in the stone’ than his uneducated father. Education has its limits, even if ‘stylistically appalling’, his father’s words are the most fitting for the occasion. This mini-syllabus based on four poems by Tony Harrison covers a great deal of ground: students gain insight into the social and sociolinguistic situation of

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1940s England. Some fundamental sociolinguistic terms like Standard English, dialect/accent and diglossia are introduced to enable students to make a comparison with their own sociolinguistic conditions. The teacher then provides some material from the present to illustrate how attitudes to working-class accents have changed. Linguistic and social awareness are greatly enhanced by reading these poems. The second set of poems explores the father – son relationship; once more the son’s education is metonymically represented by the books between the symbolic book ends is the main cause for the rift between the two. The syllabus helps build up the competences in category 9: The descriptors referring to poetry in 9.I and 9.II are needed to establish the formal side of the poems. 9.III is particularly central to carrying out the tasks: a grasp of irony, metaphor, simile and symbol is quintessential for an adequate reading of the poems. The importance of the “social, political or historical background” of a text is illustrated by the tasks. By doing these tasks students can explore the intrinsic nexus between a literary text and the context it is embedded in.

Part III: Gender

III.1 Gender in language Students at upper secondary school are most likely to be familiar with gender issues like male chauvinism and sexism from reading literature in their mother tongue. This chapter aims at deepening the students’ understanding of this pervasive theme by presenting contemporary poems and a modern play in which gender roles take centre stage. Carter and Long state that “[r]eading texts as a woman is an experience in which one finds a particular kind of role or position constructed in and through the language system.” (187) By choosing texts by contemporary feminist women, the eminent feminist dramatist Caryl Churchill (1938–) and the poet Carol Ann Duffy, (1955–) I offer students the opportunity to read texts whose authors are aware of the pitfalls of a sexist language system and highlight this bias in their writing. After an initial section raising the students’ awareness of gender bias in the language system, there is a sequence of texts moving from poetry to drama: first the students are given a poem about gender roles by Simon Armitage, one of the most acclaimed contemporary male poets born in 1963, which means that even as a man he is aware of the brittle nature of gender stereotypes. This is followed by a juxtaposition of poems about love by Duffy and Philip Larkin (1922–1985), a much more traditional poet in terms of gender. Different groups have to deal with poems covering a similar aspect of love by Duffy and Larkin without being given the name of the author, the main task being to decide and explain why they think the poem is written by a man or a woman. The Churchill play presents women from different historical periods, thus encouraging the students to find out about changing gender roles from the 11th to the 20th century. To begin with, exploring the male bias of English and German sensitizes the teenagers to aspects of their own and a foreign language. Compared to German, English seems to be less male biased, since most nouns are not gendered. Therefore a confrontation with the hidden male-dominated terms widens their awareness.

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Carter and Long quote some examples: “odd-man-out, the man in the street, man hours, manslaughter, man-made, overmanning, manhandle.” (187) To stimulate students discover the sexist bias inherent in the English language a first task functions as a teaser : – Task 1 Look up the words above in a monolingual dictionary. Find out the different meanings of the word man. Give the translations in your first language and find out how the English language differentiates between the different meanings. Translate the other words into your mother tongue and decide in which language they are more gender-biased. Depending on the students’ first language the results may be similar to the gender-structure of English or differ considerably. In the following I’m going to focus on an example in the German-speaking world: there is an intriguing article by Deutsche Welle which highlights the gender-biased nature of German and adds a brief example of similar problems in English: German is a gender-specific language, but the University of Leipzig has decided to bravely ignore the grammar rules. A ground-breaking feminist linguist tells DW why the German language needs to be overhauled. Since nouns referring to people are gender-specific in the German language, gender and language have been a topic of public discourse in Germany over the past several decades. In the 1980s, it became common practice to always include both the male and female versions when referring to groups of people: ‘Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter’ (female employees and male employees), ‘Kolleginnen und Kollegen’ (female colleagues and male colleagues), etc. Previously, the male plural had been used to address mixed groups. Now the University of Leipzig is taking gender equity in language one step further by implementing socalled ‘generic feminism’ and using the female form to address males. In the official university charter, a male professor (Professor) will now be referred to as Professorin, the female version of the word. A footnote will explain that both male and female professors are included. The decision to modify the university’s usage of the German language came about rather spontaneously after university leaders simply tired of the cumbersome double-gender abbreviation Professor/in and decided to scratch the slash. … The state of Washington in the north-western United States has recently done something similar to the University of Leipzig. They rewrote the entire state constitution in gender-neutral language. So ‘chairman’ was replaced with ‘chair’ and ‘freshman’ with ‘first-year student.’ (Deutsche Welle)

For the students there are two steps for the task: – Task 1.1. Compare English and your mother tongue with regard to the dominance of the masculine form. Which is more suited for gender-neutrality?

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– Task 1.2. Read the article by Deutsche Welle. Discuss in groups what you think of the projects of the University of Leipzig and the state of Washington. Then report your findings to the class. In a next step it is important to point out the changes which have happened in the English language to eradicate a male bias. A striking example for these changes is the example quoted by Carter and Long: Male dominance is also regularly encoded in grammatical patterns such as: The student who takes these examinations will find that he has to prepare well. (187)

The book was published in 1991; the remarkable fact is that since then the gender-neutral plural they/their has firmly taken over so that one probably wouldn’t find such examples any more. Entering everybody thinks they in the Yahoo search engine, it spews up dozens of pages with this form, including the page ‘Everybody thinks they quote’. When typing in everybody thinks he there are no hits at all, except Bible.org with a Harry Truman quote “Everybody has the right to express what he thinks.” This proves the point that the English language is moving towards a less male-biased state.

III.2 “You’re beautiful… I’m ugly”: female and male stereotypes questioned No subject is more controversial for a teenage audience than the gender-biased view of love. The following mini-syllabus on gender and notions of love starts off with Simon Armitage’s poem “You’re Beautiful”, which contrasts male and female qualities as binaries and therefore induces students to reflect about male/ female stereotypes. – Pre-reading task 1 An obvious pre-reading task for small groups is the following: 1. Make a list of male and female qualities; arrange it so that each typical male element is next to its female equivalent. 2. Compare your list with that of another group. 3. Present your list to the class. After this brain-storming the students are ready to tackle Armitage’s poem. Born in 1963, he is one of the major contemporary British poets with a vast number of poems to his name which, among other topics, probe personal relationships. After giving the text of the poem to the students it is advisable to

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listen to Armitage’s rendering of “You’re Beautiful” on the Poetry Archive website. You’re Beautiful because you’re classically trained. I’m ugly because I associate piano wire with strangulation. You’re beautiful because you stop to read the cards in newsagents’ windows about lost cats and missing dogs. I’m ugly because of what I did to that jellyfish with a lolly-stick and a big stone. You’re beautiful because for you, politeness is instinctive, not a marketing campaign I’m ugly because desperation is impossible to hide. Ugly like he is, Beautiful like hers, Beautiful like Venus, Ugly like his, Beautiful like she is, Ugly like Mars. You’re beautiful because you believe in coincidence and the power of thought. I’m ugly because I proved God to be a mathematical impossibility. You’re beautiful because you prefer home-made soup to the packet stuff. I’m ugly because once, at a dinner party, I defended the aristocracy and wasn’t even drunk. You’re beautiful because you can’t work the remote control. I’m ugly because of satellite television and twenty-four hour rolling news. Ugly like he is, Beautiful like hers, Beautiful like Venus, Ugly like his, Beautiful like she is, Ugly like Mars. You’re beautiful because you cry at weddings as well as funerals. I’m ugly because I think of children as another species from a different world. You’re beautiful because you look great in any colour including red. I’m ugly because I think shopping is strictly for the acquisition of material goods. You’re beautiful because when you were born, undiscovered planets lined up to peep over the rim of your cradle and lay gifts of gravity and light at your miniature feet. I’m ugly for saying ‘love at first sight’ is another form of mistaken identity, and that the most human of all responses is to gloat. Ugly like he is, Beautiful like hers, Beautiful like Venus, Ugly like his, Beautiful like she is, Ugly like Mars.

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You’re beautiful because you’ve never seen the inside of a car-wash. I’m ugly because I always ask for a receipt. You’re beautiful for sending a box of shoes to the third world. I’m ugly because I remember the telephone of ex-girlfriends and the year Schubert was born. You’re beautiful because you sponsored a parrot in a zoo. I’m ugly because when I sigh it’s like the slow collapse of a circus tent. Ugly like he is, Beautiful like hers, Beautiful like Venus, Ugly like his, Beautiful like she is, Ugly like Mars. You’re beautiful because you can point at a man in a uniform and laugh. I’m ugly because I was a police informer in a previous life. You’re beautiful because you drink a litre of water and eat three pieces of fruit a day. I’m ugly for taking the line that a meal without meat is a beautiful woman with one eye. You’re beautiful because you don’t see love as a competition and you know how to lose. I’m ugly because I kissed the FA Cup and then held it up to the crowd. You’re beautiful because of a single buttercup in the top buttonhole of your cardigan. I’m ugly because I said the World’s Strongest Woman was a muscleman in a dress. You’re beautiful because you couldn’t live in a lighthouse. I’m ugly for making hand-shadows in front of the giant bulb, so when they look up, the captains of vessels in distress see the ears of a rabbit, or the eye of a fox, or the legs of a galloping black horse. Ugly like he is, Beautiful like hers, Beautiful like Venus, Ugly like his, Beautiful like she is, Ugly like Mars. Ugly like he is, Beautiful like hers, Beautiful like Venus, Ugly like his, Beautiful like she is, Ugly like Mars. (Armitage “You’re Beautiful”)

The binary female/beautiful versus male/ugly is the cornerstone of the poem. The Mars/Venus contrast is common knowledge. However, there are subtle modulations in the juxtaposition of stereotypes in the poem. The contrast in the first 13 lines is the female being stereotypically sensitive, cultured, compassionate, whereas the male speaker is aggressive, violent and desperate.

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The refrain corroborates this by drawing on the mythological figures of Venus and Mars, which may have been prompted by John Gray’s bestseller Men Are from Mars, Women from Venus. As the poem continues the stereotypes are less pointed: the humanitarian (in Bertrand Russell’s sense) belief in “the power of thought” is opposed to the speaker’s atheism: “mathematical impossibility” suggests a rationalist worldview, but believing in “coincidence” is not necessarily the opposite. Preferring homemade to “package stuff” is typically feminine, but the yobbish speaker’s defence of the aristocracy when he is not even inebriated is somewhat bewildering: if anything, he would do that to irritate his mates. The 24/7 TVobsession of the speaker makes him seem crude compared to the lady’s pristine unacqaintedness with technology. The next three couplets continue this contrasting of female versus male stereotypes: she cries at weddings and funerals, to him children are aliens; she shops for beautiful clothes with strong, lively colours which suit her ; his shopping as purely utilitarian. Her birth is likened to the birth of Christ, the unknown planets mimicking the star of Bethlehem and the gift-bearing of the magi, while he is only able to gloat at the misfortune of people who believe in love at first sight and consequently fail. This gives the impression of a stereotypical playing off of the charming female against the brute male. However, after the next refrain the contrast gets blurred: her never having seen the inside of a carwash versus him always asking for a receipt may still fit in with the notion of beauty untainted by modern, profitorientated society against the speaker’s emphasis on money. Her sending a box of shoes to the third world befits the charitable maiden; however, he doesn’t only remember the names of his ex-girlfriends but also the year Schubert was born, which belongs to the highbrow world of the lady. Next, her sponsoring a parrot (which is bound to have a certain ironic connotation) is contrasted with his sighing, which is likened to a collapsing circus tent, an overly spectacular expression of grief so far totally absent from the speaker’s emotional range. After the next refrain the lady’s ability to laugh at rather than be intimidated by uniformed men is juxtaposed with the speaker’s role as a police informer, albeit in a former incarnation. What remains in this life seems to be the mind-set of a police constable in disguise. Next her healthy eating habits (at least three of the five a day) are opposed to him being a carnivore, the despicable nature of which is corroborated by an outrageous comparison of a vegetarian meal to a woman with only one eye. Next her uncompetitive view of love is contrasted with the professional footballer’s obsession with winning: the speaker casts himself in the role of the captain of the team winning the FA Cup. Then the contrast gets somewhat more blurred: the lady’s simple beauty with a simple buttercup in her buttonhole provides a contrast for the speaker calling the World’s Strongest Woman a muscleman in a dress. This comparison is perfectly apt, women with

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bulging muscles defy the characteristics of their sex and are therefore extremely masculine. As the poem proceeds there are more and more incongruities slipping in, thus ultimately questioning the binary male/female dichotomy. The final image is quite puzzling: the lady not being able to live in a lighthouse is contrasted with the speaker’s pubescent shadow play “in front of the giant light bulb” of the lighthouse, instead of helping “vessels in distress” he projects parts of various animals, “the ears of a rabbit”, “the eyes of a fox”; instead of helping the ships in distress to navigate safely to the shore, he indulges in childish fantasies. The final image “the legs of a galloping black horse” bears uncanny resemblance to the horses of the Apocalypse , thus spelling the doom of the crew of the vessel: instead of light, the lighthouse projects everlasting darkness. The key for group work on the poem is a remark of Armitage’s after reading the poem on the Poetry Archive website: “I once read this poem in Liverpool and a lady came up to me and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m ugly as well.’” Since Armitage reads this poem on the website of the Poetry Archive it is best to play his rendering first. Before tackling the content a sociolinguistic footnote is apt: Armitage pronounces ‘ugly’ with a full Yorkshire vowel /u/, which differs considerably from RP: if students have done Tony Harrison’s poems this needs no further comment; if not it is worth pointing out that RP has lost its exclusive prestige and that many educated speakers speak in their local accents. To deal with the poem in the classroom, it is best to split up the class into several groups and give each group about 10 lines to analyse. The tasks run as follows: – Task 1 Analyse your lines and state why the poem is written in couplets. – Task 2 Define the main differences between the speaker and the addressee. – Task 3 Report your findings to the class using a diagram. Explain the binary oppositions. Point out the lines which don’t really fit the basic contrast. Then there is an obvious post-reading task: – Task 4 Write a poem using the form of Armitage’s text. Include Armitage’s refrain to indicate the theme of your poem.

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Methodologically it makes sense to use a portfolio process ‘draft-revise-present’: students show their first version to fellow students and take some of their suggestions on board. Finally some of these revised poems are read out to the class. As an assessment task I suggest the following: – Task 5 Make a list of what you consider typical male/female characteristics. Then discuss the way male and female stereotypes are used in the poem. Decide if the poem displays a male chauvinist point of view or if the feminine side is represented in a fair manner. (400 words) The man points of the essay : – male qualities: strong, self-centred, in control, rational, domineering – female: soft, submissive, emotional, empathetic, helping others – the poem starts off reflecting these stereotypes more or less faithfully. However, incongruous elements start creeping in more and more, militating against this stereotypical dichotomy. But the last couplet shows up the male speaker as an irresponsible adolescent who doesn’t take human lives very seriously. Such an emotionally charged topic lends itself to peer portfolio work: students read each other’s essays and respond to them either in writing or orally. After the feedback every student revises their piece, taking some of the suggestions on board. As for the literary competences activated by the tasks for this poem, there is a narrative element in it which requires the same skills as reading a realistic novel, i. e. competence 8.I. in the grid sketched out above in chapter I.6. However, as the incongruities in the couplets accumulate, a detailed evaluation of metaphors and symbols is called for, which evokes 8.III. In addition, there is a strain of self-irony permeating the poem, which depends on a knowledge of the social background, e. g. the couplet “I’m ugly because once, at a dinner party, /I defended the aristocracy and wasn’t even drunk”, where the working-class origin of the speaker is satirised. To fully appreciate this a partial grasp of 9.III is required.

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III.3 The male versus the female view of love: a medley of poems by male and female poets After dealing with “You’re Beautiful” it is best to give this next batch of poems without the authors’ names to the class. Seven groups dealing with different poems is the best procedure. Before tackling a selection of poems a pre-reading task is called for to enable the students to tune into the subject. – Task 1 Write down a list of pop songs which have love as their subject. Can you remember any lines which define what love is? – Task 2 What are the differences between men’s and women’s view of love? List some of the typical features.

III.3.1 Guessing the author’s gender In the following I’m going to first give a reading of the poems for the benefit of the teachers, followed by tasks, including some hints how the pilot group interpreted them. This sub-chapter of the mini-syllabus on gender is a juxtaposition of poems on the subject of love by Carol Ann Duffy and Philip Larkin. Apart from the gender difference there is also a generation gap: Larkin (born in 1922) was the most acclaimed member of the so-called Movement of the 1950s, while Duffy was born in 1955 and became prominent in the 1990s has achieved great fame as Poet Laureate. In the latter’s work the 2005 collection Rapture is an obvious choice for love poems, since the entire volume chronicles a love story from its tender beginnings via a state of rapture to its final demise. In Larkin’s work the subject of love occurs frequently, almost always as a source of embarrassment and disillusionment. He is the most notorious bachelor of modern English poetry, his personae often present love and relationships as doomed to failure. Dealing with the anonymous poems is a test if the students have developed a sensitivity for the difference between male and female takes on the subject when reading Armitage’s text The poem for the first group is Duffy’s “Name”:

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Name When did your name change from a proper noun to a charm? Its three vowels like jewels on the thread of my breath. Its consonants brushing my mouth like a kiss. I love your name. I say it again and again in this summer rain. I see it, discreet in the alphabet, like a wish. I pray it into the night till its letters are light. I hear your name rhyming, rhyming, rhyming with everything. (Duffy Guardian)

The beloved’s name is apprehended like magic, it has turned “from a proper noun to a charm”. Its vowels are compared to jewels, the breath threading them to a chain. The consonants feel like a kiss, the speaker repeats it like a magic mantra. The “summer rain” may be a hint at fertility, the parched lovescape of the speaker finally rendered fertile. The name is “like a wish”, i. e. desire has taken over, but it is prayer which lights up the night with the letters of the magic word. The name “rhyming with everything” emphasized by the threefold repetition, spells out the sense of harmony with the world in the state of rapture. In the pilot one girl pointed out that the imagery of jewels being threaded on a metaphorical string of breath bore the hallmarks of a feminine imagination, which seems to me an apt comment. The whole sense of magic emanating from the beloved’s name bears a feminine stamp. Searching for masculine and feminine characteristics is, of course, a subjective pursuit, but discussing opinions about it sharpens the students’ sensitivity for gender. The next poem is also by Duffy, but its first impression is quite different: You Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head, so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name,

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like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables like a charm, like a spell. Falling in love is glamorous hell; the crouched, parched heart like a tiger ready to kill; a flame’s fierce licks under the skin. Into my life, larger than life, beautiful, you strolled in. I hid in my ordinary days, in the long grass of routine, in my camouflage rooms. You sprawled in my gaze, staring back from anyone’s face, from the shape of a cloud, from the pining, earth-struck moon which gapes at me as I open the bedroom door. The curtains stir. There you are on the bed, like a gift, like a touchable dream. (Duffy, poetryarchive)

Again the name acts like a charm, but it is also likened to salty tears. What is perplexing is the phrase “dreaming you hard, hard, hard”. To students the obvious male connotations overrule the other aspects of the poem, so most thought the speaker is a man. Stanza 2 carries on this masculine strain: the oxymoron “glamorous hell”, the comparison of the “crouched, parched heart” with a “tiger ready to kill”. The beloved’s entry into the speaker’s life is compared to “flame’s fierce licks under the skin”. All these violent images corroborate the masculine note struck in stanza 1. At the final revelation of who wrote the poems this is a good platform to discuss stereotypes of men and women: the fierce imagery doesn’t exclude female authorship, strong women with strong emotions are part and parcel of modern post-feminist society. Stanza 3 “the long grass of routine” might be seen as a reference to the open grassland, one of the habitats where tigers roam, the speaker’s room providing the camouflage which tigers use to pounce on their victim. The “crouched … heart” corroborates the predator metaphor. To enable the students to see the grass and camouflage metaphors, an excerpt from a website on tigers’ habitat is given as an intertext for Task 3 below : Most Tigers live in Asia, specifically throughout Southeast Asia, China, Korea and Russia. Tigers like to live in swamps, grasslands and rain forests. Usually where Tigers live there are trees, bushes, and clumps of tall grass. It shades the Tiger from the sun when it’s extremely hot. Not only does this protect them from the sun, it also helps them to camouflage with their surroundings and surprise their prey. Unlike other cats, Tigers love the water and are very sensitive to heat. Tigers are very powerful swimmers. Most Tigers will soak in water usually after making a kill. Tigers are most likely found eating grass or other animals such as deer, buffalo, wild cattle and wild boars, also from time to time they will eat fish and crabs. (Tigers)

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This passage even establishes a link between the “parched heart” of the speaker and the tiger’s need to avoid dehydration by soaking in water. After the kill of the beloved the speaker’s heart metaphorically soaks in the water of love. Alternatively, the idiom ‘kick something into the long grass’, i. e. hiding it so as to forget it, and immersing oneself in daily routine is a possible connotation. Another image intensifying the drought imagery is the flame licking fiercely under the skin, highlighting the intense pain of the unsatisfied lover, until the beloved walks into the speaker’s life in the manner of a superhero. In stanza 3 the beloved is detected sprawling, i. e. ready for the taking, anywhere, in strangers’ faces, clouds and the moon. The latter “gapes” at the persona, almost in ridicule, flouting all the conventions of romantic love associated with it. The purely spiritual sphere beyond the moon is not reached, the moon is “earth-struck”. In John Donne’s Renaissance terminology the two are only “dull sublunary lovers (whose soul is sense)[who] cannot admit absence”. But then, miraculously, the beloved materializes on the bed: however, the wording “a touchable dream” puts a big question mark behind this outcome of fulfilled desire. In formal terms the poem is a slightly modernised sonnet: there is no rhyme and the short lines 4 and 5 count as full lines, which wouldn’t occur in an Elizabethan sonnet. But the sonnet is the archetypal form of love poetry, the truncated version used here emphasising the change of conventions in modern love relationships. A reading along these lines can be elicited with the following tasks: – Task 1 Determine what the subject of the poem is. – Task 2 Analyse the images used in stanza one. Do they give a hint to the gender of the speaker? – Task 3 Close-read stanza 2, evaluating the metaphors to define the relationship between the speaker and the “you”. Read the following text and find how some of the poem’s metaphors are illustrated by it. (Tiger, see above) – Task 4 What is the speaker’s state of mind in stanza 3? Do the last two lines describe a dream or a reality?

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– Task 5 How many lines does the poem have? Do you know a traditional poetic form of this type? The skills needed for understanding the two poems are an enhanced sensitivity for figurative language (metaphor, symbol, simile) and its connotations. Images have to be visualised, then contextualised, to arrive at a valid reading of the texts. Category 8.III of the assessment grid developed in chapter I.6 doesn’t fully cover this, since there is next to no realistic narrative. Hence a command of the full range of rhetorical figures and tropes mentioned in 9.III is required; however, the other important element of this category, the subtle use of irony, does not feature in the text.

III.3.2 A male and female view of love juxtaposed: Philip Larkin’s “High Window” and Carol Anne Duffy’s “Rapture” It makes sense to alternate between a Duffy and a Larkin poem to contrast the different male/female perspectives: the ensuing analysis can be used as an independent teaching unit which illustrating gender-bias in dealing with love. High Windows When I see a couple of kids And guess he’s fucking her and she’s Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives – Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if Anyone looked at me, forty years back, And thought, That’ll be the life; No God any more, or sweating in the dark About hell and that, or having to hide What you think of the priest. He And his lot will all go down the long slide Like free bloody birds. And immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass,

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And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless. (Larkin “High Windows”)

The first five lines contain a four-letter word, which was considered quite shocking at the time of the publication in 1967. Today’s students tend to respond more brazenly : far from offending them it makes the text more attractive. The ageing speaker is looking at modern youth, hypothesising about their sexual liberation, which anyone old would have considered to be paradise on earth. Lines 6–8 contain imagery which is central for the message of the poem: the “bonds and gestures” which are obliterated resemble “an outdated combine harvester”, a gigantic rusty piece of agricultural machinery, which is a visualisation of the equally outdated bond of marriage or a gesture like proposing. The final symbol is the long slide to happiness. The childlike bliss of such an experience is only slightly tainted by the fact that the children move from high up to low down, which suggests a lowly ending to the seemingly endless journey to paradise. The following text gives a concise outline of the changing sexual mores in the 1960s; it can be given to the students after they have attempted to make sense of the first two stanzas: “Swinging London” was a term coined by Time Magazine, in their April 15, 1966 issue, in order to define the culture and fashion scene in 1960s London. … High Windows was written in 1967 amidst the “Summer of Love,” in London. The “summer of love” introduced drug use and “free” sex. During this summer, the Beatles released what a lot of people consider to be their greatest album: “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Religion’s hold on youth began to wane with this new generation of “free thinkers.” Sex was both talked about and done indiscriminately, which challenged the Church’s authority because until now sex before marriage was seen as whorish. The young took charge of their bodies and minds and revolutionized society’s tendency to be conservative. (Brookshire)

Next the speaker wonders whether in his youth the older generation had had a similar image of his generation because they were liberated from the stranglehold of fear and guilt inculcated by the church. This shows that the poem far from glorifies ‘free love’: it is about notions of paradise and their evanescence with the passing of time: the older generation always envies the younger generation its new freedoms, ‘free love’ simply replacing the liberation from the fear of hell. The final stanza contains the central image of the entire poem: the “high windows” which are “sun-comprehending”, which might mean that they entrap the sun in their glass so the eternal light is concentrated in a small space to enable mortal humans to see it. But what is beyond it is “the deep blue air that shows / Nothing”: while the church’s high windows try to catch the sun’s transcendental

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light, helping humans to make sense of life, to comprehend it within the sheltered confines of the church, which is a metonymy for earth, outside there is nothing but a gigantic, endless nirvana devoid of any meaning. Solving the task for this last stanza clearly requires a good deal of help from the teacher. It is a good example of a literary symbol, which is not confined to one meaning. In the spirit of the Reader-Response approach, the reader’s own personal reaction contributes to creating meaning. The best introduction to the poem is to show the youtube video (Larkin youtube) with Larkin himself reading a poem: at the beginning there is a view from inside a church with high windows. This should give the group working on the final stanza a clue how to visualize the complex imagery. Some critical comments may clarify the last stanza: The title of the poem High Windows has both a literal and metaphorical meaning. Literally, the high windows can be referring to a window that is on a second-floor of a building or higher, or the stained glass windows that are found in churches. “In symbology, [windows are] openings that admit supernatural light…Light from outside or from above corresponds to God’s spirit, and the window itself to the Virgin Mary” (Brookshire).

Brookshire analyses the high windows image in more detail: If you define each word individually you get: “high” is an elevated place, or exalted in character ; “windows” are openings in walls where you can look out, or an interval of time during which certain conditions or opportunity exist. I believe that Larkin meant for the title to have a two-fold meaning: on the one hand, “high windows” is an image of religion and God; on the other hand, “high windows” described a period of time that is superior to the times that came before it (e. g. summer of love). (Brookshire)

In terms of gender, the way the speaker bluntly talks about sex, the fact that the notion of love as an overarching concept containing sexuality doesn’t cross his mind, points very much to a male speaker. This is, of course, borne out by the pronoun “He” in line 14. So it is best to ask the question about the gender of the speaker in connection with the first three tasks. To prevent the students from simply reading line 14 and say the writer is a man, it is best to give the poem stanza by stanza: – Task 1 Paraphrase lines 1–5. Who is the speaker? Do you think the poem was written by a man or a woman? Give reasons for your guess. – Task 2 Read the first paragraph from an article on “High Windows” and compare it to the first stanza of the poem. (Brookshire)

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– Task 3 Analyse the imagery in lines 7–9. Look up the word “combine harvester” on the internet. What “bonds and gestures” are compared to the combine harvester? Again, is this most likely to be the attitude of a man or of a woman? – Task 4 Compare the lines in italics (9–15) to the speaker’s words in lines 1–9. Find out what the two passages have in common. – Task 5 Find out whether the poem presents ‘free love’ just as “paradise” or if in context it is seen less positively. – Task 6 Visualise the last stanza: what could the description of what is beyond the high windows say about the meaning of life? – Task 7 Read the interpretation of a literary critic: point out the statements you agree/ disagree with. (Brookshire) In this poem, 9.III from the competence grid in chapter I.5 is crucial: On the one hand, a careful evaluation of the symbols and metaphors is necessary, on the other, the speaker’s subtle self-irony has to be recognised. Students who are not able to scent the ironic element may come to the conclusion that the poem glorifies sex, or presents a dirty old man’s unfulfilled lust. The first stanza may be read like this, but the second exposes the speaker’s illusions about the bliss of the young: he was also envied by the old in his day. As for recognising the social background mentioned in 9.III, the competence implies realising when the socio-political background is relevant and the ability to do an efficient web search. This may be time-consuming and students have a tendency to consult sources in their mother-tongue. Hence I have decided to offer some relevant critical sources to speed up he process, but in order to practise 9.III teachers may decide to let the students do a web search. The Duffy poem alluding to “High Windows” is the title poem of the sequence, “Rapture”. Rapture Thought of by you all day, I think of you. The birds sing in the shelter of a tree. Above the prayer of rain, unacred blue,

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not paradise, goes nowhere endlessly. How does it happen that our lives can drift far from our selves, while we stay trapped in time, queuing for death? It seems nothing will shift the pattern of our days, alter the rhyme we make with loss to assonance with bliss. Then love comes, like a sudden flight of birds from earth to heaven after rain. Your kiss, recalled, unstrings, like pearls, this chain of words. Huge skies connect us, joining here to there (Duffy 2005: 16)

The lovers think of each other mutually. The use of the passive and then the active voice stresses the reciprocity of their mental involvement. In lines 3 and 4 there is an obvious intertextual reference to “High Windows”: above the rain, whose clouds make seeing the blue sky impossible, “unacred blue, /not paradise goes nowhere, endlessly”. As in the Larkin poem, the infinity of space and its aimlessness points to the ultimate futility of existence, “not paradise” referring to the slide image in “High Windows.” This is a good instance to introduce intertextuality : The fundamental concept of intertextuality is that no text, much as it might like to appear so, is original and unique-in-itself; rather it is a tissue of inevitable, and to an extent unwitting, references to and quotations from other texts. These in turn condition its meaning; the text is an intervention in a cultural system. (Graham)

How to broker this complex concept to a class will be elucidated in connection with the task below. The negative view of life expressed in lines 3 and 4 is reinforced in the next section: Why are humans alienated from their true selves, seeing their lives as being merely linear, simply waiting for death? The image of “queuing” suggest the traditional English habit at a bus stop, giving the reader a jolt when they see that the destination is death, which moves the image closer to a Nazi death camp. In this limbo it seems impossible for things to change for the better : whenever there is bliss, the half-rhyme or assonance in our minds is loss: whatever is truly fulfilling is lost very soon. But the tide turns in line 10, where love is compared to the sudden arrival of a flight of birds moving from earth to heaven: this is the paradise whose existence was denied in line 4. The “prayer of rain” in line three is now answered. In line 12 we encounter once more the image of pearls on a string: here the beloved’s remembered kiss “unstrings this chain of words”, which are compared to pearls. This is another intertextual reference, this time Duffy’s own poem “Name”, where the vowels of the beloved’s name are compared to “jewels / on the thread of my breath”; but here the image is reversed, the kiss “Unstrings … this chain of

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words” presumably the despair expressed in the first half of the poem. What the lovers experience goes beyond the purely finite, the purely linear expressed in a chain of words: the “huge skies”, which actually separate them, are seen as connecting the lovers separated by space. Space and time are overcome by love, which is immune to loss. The following tasks enable the students to build up a personal response to the poem, while focusing their concentration on the seminal lines and motives: – Task 1 Study the first four lines. Who is the ‘I’ (the speaker), and who is the ‘you’ (the addressee)? – Task 2 Compare lines 3 and 4 with lines 18–20 of the poem “High Windows”. Find out what “the deep blue air” in that poem and “unacred blue” in “Rapture” stand for. Look up the meaning of the unusual word “unacred” using the following link: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=414548 – Task 3 “High Windows” was written in 1967, “Rapture” in 2005. Is the second poem simply copying the first? Discuss the text below and apply it to the relation between the two poems: The fundamental concept of intertextuality is that no text, much as it might like to appear so, is original and unique-in–itself; rather it is a tissue of inevitable, and to an extent unwitting, references to and quotations from other texts. These in turn condition its meaning. (Graham)

Point out the words and images from “High Windows” echoed in “Rapture”. Does the textual parallel help you to understand the second poem? Visualise the images in lines 4–7. Draw the three metaphors based on the verbs “drift”, to “be trapped” and “queue” in these lines. a) Look up the term “assonance”. Find the assonance in this text and point out the special effect it has in these lines. b) List the images connected with the arrival of love. A similar image occurred in an earlier poem. Which one? c) Explore the symbolism of the “huge skies” connecting the lovers. Write a 50word text in which you describe the emotional journey of the speaker in the poem.

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Again, this is a complex poem: the main literary feature is intertextuality, which, stripped of its poststructuralist excrescences simply means that one text refers to elements in another. Basically this ability can only be expected at university level, therefore it is not listed among the competences of my grid. However, since the syllabus is about gendered writing, and there is this Duffy poem clearly alluding to Larkin’s “High Windows”, intertextuality can be explored in this instance. Competence 9.III from the grid above in chapter I.5 is certainly needed to understand this complex poem. Assonance is most likely to be a rhetorical figure unknown to the students, so this is an opportunity to extend the list of rhetorical ploys listed in 9.III. The fact that the top competence is needed for both “High Windows” and “Rapture” indicates that these texts are best tackled in the final year of upper secondary school.

III.3.3 Harking back to the sexual revolution: Philip Larkin’s “Annus Mirabilis” After this heart-felt, highly emotional poem, sentiments which are normally associated with the female sex, Larkin’s “Annus Mirabilis” represents a stark contrast on the emotional scale: Annus Mirabilis Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) – Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP. Up till then there’d only been A sort of bargaining, A wrangle for a ring, A shame that started at sixteen And spread to everything. Then all at once the quarrel sank: Everyone felt the same, And every life became A brilliant breaking of the bank, A quite unlosable game. So life was never better than In nineteen sixty-three (Though just too late for me) – Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP. (Larkin 1988 : 67)

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In the first stanza the speaker bemoans the fact that he almost missed out on the sexual liberation of the sixties. He pinpoints it in 1963, which was characterized by the end of the censor’s ban of Lawrence sexually explicit Lady Chatterly’s Lovers and the release of the Beatles’ first LP. The second stanza describes the erotic scene before the great sexual liberation: Sex had been so repressed that presumable the man had to bargain for it, while the woman wanted a wedding ring before acceding to male desire. Stanza three presents the sudden inroad of non-committal sex in the sixties: the hyperbolic “everyone felt the same” is clearly ironic, followed by a lottery or gambling metaphor which is said to be a win – win situation. The final stanza harks back to the first, with the important alteration that the sexual bonanza came “just too late” for the speaker, leaving a sour taste in the mouth of the reader who identified with the persona. In fact, rather than glorifying free love, the poem satirises the belief of the 60s: the hyperbolic “everyone felt the same” in stanza 2 ironically highlights the fact that indiscriminate promiscuity is not the key to happiness for everyone. In terms of gender, as in “High Windows”, what is striking is the reduction of love to sex, an attitude usually attributed to men. The dismissal of an emotional commitment like marriage as “a wrangle for a ring” is typical. There is a clear parallel to the second stanza of “High Windows”, the “bonds and gestures” compared to an “outdated combine harvester” are the exact intertextual parallel. But the speakers of both poems don’t arrive in the sexual heaven promised by the zeitgeist, they remain sad bystanders relating the merriments of the masses with trenchant irony. This content can be elicited with following tasks: – Task 1 Find out why the speaker connects sexual intercourse with the year 1963. Google the references in the text. – Task 2 Interpret the metaphors in lines 6–8. What do the metaphors stand for? Determine what is meant be “shame” in lines 9–10. Guess what change is meant in stanza 3: google “breaking of the bank”. – Task 3 Compare the last with the first stanza. What changes are there? – Task 4 Assess the tone of the poem. Determine whether or not it is ironic.

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– Task 5 Give reasons why you think this poem was written by a man or a woman.

III.3.4 “Love”: two poems with the same title by Duffy and Larkin The comparison of these two poems should throw more light on the different views of the sexes of the magic topic. Especially the Duffy poem is difficult, so this comparison should only be tackled with advanced classes in the last year of upper secondary school. The best procedure is to split the class in half, one group dealing with Duffy’s text, the other with Larkin’s poem; after their analysis they report their findings to the other group. Duffy’s poem runs as follows: Love Love is talent, the world love’s metaphor. Aflame, October’s leaves adore the wind, its urgent breath, whirl to their own death. Not here, you’re everywhere. The evening sky worships the ground, bears down, the land yearns back in darkening hills. The night is empathy, stars in its eyes for tears. Not here, you’re where I stand, hearing the sea, crazy for the shore, seeing the moon ache and fret for the earth. When morning comes, the sun, ardent, covers the trees in gold, you walk towards me, out of the season, out of the light love reasons. (Duffy 2005 : 27)

It is a dense poem heavily relying on metaphor, therefore some advice on the part of the teacher to the half of the class dealing with it will be needed. Describing love as “talent” is unusual: normally the lover is seen as the lucky recipient of someone’s love. How the world can be “love’s metaphor” needs to be fathomed: most likely the world with its exhilarating and depressing aspects mirrors the same mixed nature of love. In line 2 the leaves turning red are said to be “aflame”, “ador[ing] the wind” which “whirl[s] them to their own death”. Echoes of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” come to mind, but here the preserving aspects of the wind (in Shelley the wind is “destroyer and preserver”) are not mentioned. Calling the wind “breath” echoes the first line of Shelley’s poem even more

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closely : “O wild west wind, thou breath of autum’s being”. Only in line 4 the beloved is mentioned: he/she is everywhere due to their physical absence. Stanza 2 focuses on the “evening sky worship[ping] the ground”: it wants to be united with the ground, which reciprocates this yearning for reunion. This is clearly a grand image for the lovers wanting to be united. The night is “empathy”, presumably with the yearning lovers, the stars are compared to tears triggered by their physical separation. Then the poem goes back to the lovers: in a paradox reminiscent of the metaphysical poets, the beloved is said to be “not here”, but nonetheless “where I stand”. The sea is “crazy for the shore”, another powerful metaphor from nature to image the power the love between the lovers. Next it is the moon, a traditional symbol of romance, that “ache[s] and fret[s]” for reunion with the earth, thus mirroring the lovers’ yearning. The final triumphant image is the beloved walking towards the lover with the morning sun “cover[ing] the trees in gold”. The last line sums up some of the main elements of the entire poem: the beloved walks towards the speaker “out of the season”, leaving the ups and downs of nature’s cycle behind, and “out of the light love reasons”. As defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary to reason means to discover, formulate, or conclude by the use of reason. The season is autumn (October is mentioned in the first stanza), so walking out of the season means leaving the natural cycle of the seasons, and leaving the light love sees rationally for some transcendental sphere beyond reason. Looking at the form of the poem one notices that it has 14 lines, 5 and13 unconventionally being half lines: nevertheless it is a modern sonnet in the tradition of Petrarch’s and Shakespeare’s love poetry. Since the poem is rather complex the tasks have to be precisely targeted to enable the students to understand the key metaphors; the intertextual parallels to Shelley need not be mentioned to the students since they might confuse them. – Task 1 Discuss the statement “love is talent”. Is this the way you would define love? Write down the different opinions of the members of the group. – Task 2 Define the term “metaphor”. Use the internet if necessary. Express the statement “love is the world’s metaphor” in your own words. Say if you find this image strange or if it makes sense to you. – Task 3 There are two metaphors in lines 2 and 3. Interpret the images and try to link this with the two metaphors of line 1.

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– Task 4 Describe the logic of line 4. What is this kind of statement called? – Task 5 Paraphrase the metaphor in lines 5–7 and link them with the previous metaphors in the poem. – Task 6 Look up the term “empathy” and find out how it is connected with “night”. – Task 7 Connect the metaphor of the sea and the night in lines 9–11 with the metaphors in stanza two and find out what they have in common. – Task 8 Lines 11–13 contain the images of the sun covering the trees in gold. Decide if this conjures up a positive mood of fulfilment or the yearning for the other half expressed in the previous stanzas. – Task 9 The beloved walks towards the lover “out of the season”. Which of the four seasons is meant? The final half sentence could mean that love “reasons”, i. e. discovers light rationally, therefore walking out of this earthly light towards the beloved is a hopeful final image. Explain why the “out of season” image fits in with the final light image. – Task 10 Evaluate the images and the tone of the poem to decide if it was written by a man or a woman. The second component of competence 9.III in my grid above in chapter I.5 is crucial for an understanding of this poem: the entire text is a sequence of metaphors which have to be decoded. The first and third components of 9.III, however, are not relevant: there is no irony and love is seen in a timeless way. Only the fact that it is a modified sonnet (half-lines are counted as full lines) relates it to a literary context. But only university students of English could be expected to spot this formal allusion to the Petrarchan tradition. At upper secondary level the teacher will have to provide this background. Larkin’s “Love” strikes a different emotional chord:

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Love The difficult part of love Is being selfish enough, Is having the blind persistence To upset an existence Just for your own sake. What cheek it must take. And then the unselfish side – How can you be satisfied, Putting someone else first So that you come off worst? My life is for me. As well ignore gravity. Still, vicious or virtuous, Love suits most of us. Only the bleeder found Selfish this wrong way round Is ever wholly rebuffed, And he can get stuffed. (Larkin 1988: 150)

There are no metaphors drawn from nature here; it is rather a psychological analysis of what love actually means. The unexpected point made by the speaker is that love must be selfish. This self-centredness is the most difficult part of love. The logic of the argument runs as follows: by loving someone (and becoming part of their life) you “upset” the life of the beloved just because you want to love and be loved. This is seen as “cheek”, an audacity which “upsets” the foundations of the life of the beloved. In stanza two the tables are turned: a lover also has to be “unselfish”, putting the beloved’s needs and wishes before his own. The speaker denies this emphatically : his egotism is like the law of gravity, a natural law which will persist until the end of the universe. The final stanza wraps up the argument: whether we are self-centred (“vicious”) or selfless (“virtuous”), most of us find some accommodation with the power of love. The only exception are people like the speaker, who are “Selfish this wrong way round”, whose gravity-like egocentrism disqualifies them from any kind of engagement with love. The final two lines are a typically Larkinesque gesture of self-deprecation. The “bleeder” (a rare slang term meaning “a person who drains another of money, resources, etc.; parasite or usurer” (online dictionary) is totally rejected and his existence is not worth anything. The flippant tone of the entire poem is heightened in the last stanza: saying “get stuffed” to oneself is redirecting an ironic gibe normally aimed at others to oneself. The

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devastating conclusion is expressed in Larkin’s earlier poem “Wild Oats”, which can be used for this syllabus as well: Parting, after about five Rehearsals, was an agreement That I was too selfish, withdrawn And easily bored to love. (Larkin 1988:143)

This kind of self-centeredness is generally associated with the male sex. Finding this prevalent attitude/prejudice reflected in a poem can give rise to heated discussions in a mixed class. The theme of male egocentricity can be elicited with the following tasks: Pre-reading task Discuss in groups if love between men and women has selfish and selfless aspects. Give examples of both. While reading tasks – Task 1 Express in your own words what “the difficult part of love” is for the speaker. – Task 2 Explain why the speaker thinks he is incapable of being “unselfish”. Interpret the metaphor he uses. – Task 3 Define the difference between “most of us” and the “bleeder” (a person who drains another of money, resources, etc.; parasite or usurer) when dealing with love. – Task 4 Compare the tone of the three stanzas. The tone can be serious, the speaker expressing their deep feelings, or it can shade into being ironic, which means the statements are flippant, superficial, more of a joke. – Task 5 Decide if this poem was written by a man or a woman. Give reasons for this. In this text some of the stereotypes about men and women are presented, the former being more self-centred while the latter by implication are more selfeffacing and self-sacrificing: they are used to having their existence “upset” by the entry of a man into their lives: at least in the past they gave up their jobs and became mothers and housewives. This is what is suggested in the first stanza. An

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interesting topic for discussion is whether or not today’s young women are still prepared to do this. Thus the poem can trigger interesting discussions about gender roles. The identity of the authors is not divulged until after the final assessment task, which consists of the comparison of way love is described in the two poems, focusing on the gender question: Give a summary of how love is presented in the two poems. Ask yourself again whether the texts present a feminine and a masculine way of feeling about love. (400 words)

The central points are the following: – In the first poem a number of nature metaphors are used: “the sky worships the ground”, “the land yearns back”; the night is “empathy”, has “stars for its tears”: feeling with others and crying are feminine character traits. At the end there is the reunion of the two lovers in a timeless space. – In the second poem the tone is one of self-irony, the opposite of heart-felt love. Instead of the positive aspects of love changing two people’s lives, the focus is on the negative effect of “upset[ting] an existence”. Then there is the speaker’s utter inability to be selfless: egocentrism is like the law of gravity. As a result the speaker considers himself to be terminally incapable of love, and resorts to sarcasm, which smacks of the masculine manner of suppressing feelings.

III.3.5 A Duffy poem representing the dark side of love: “Row” Since adolescents are perfectly familiar with dissent and strife in a relationship, the following Duffy poem strikes a familiar chord. Row But when we rowed, the room swayed and sank down on its knees, the air hurt and purpled like a bruise, the sun banged the gate in the sky and fled. But when we rowed, the trees wept and threw away their leaves, the day ripped the hours from our lives, the sheets and pillows shredded themselves on the bed. But when we rowed, our mouths knew no kiss, no kiss, no kiss, our hearts were jagged stones in our fists, the garden sprouted bones, grown from the dead. But when we rowed, your face blanked like a page erased of words,

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my hands squeezed themselves, burned like verbs, love turned, and ran, and cowered in our heads. (Duffy 2005: 18)

The identical headline of each stanza sets the tone and the subject: discord between long-standing lovers. In lines 2 to 4 a number of metaphors illustrate the quarrel: first the room is compared to a ship in a storm ending in shipwreck as well as a human being going down on its knees. Then the purple colour of a bruise is transferred to the air. Finally the sun, personified as a visitor, tries to get access to the sky, is refused entry and then flees. There is a noticeable expansive crescendo effect in these images, from room/ship to air to sun/sky. The almost cosmic dimension of the lovers’ row is thus indicated. In stanza two the process of expansion is inverted: from weeping trees to day/ hours to the bed where sheets and pillows are in self-destruct mode. Interestingly, human agency is left out here. It is as if the microcosm of things reflected the macrocosm of the lovers, an inversion of the Elizabethan world picture in which the microcosm of human actions is mirrored in the macrocosm of nature, e. g. the tempest when Julius Caesar is slain. Stanza 3 highlights the absence of a peace-offering kiss, repeating it three times. Then the gruesome image of the lovers’ hearts being in their hands like “jagged stones”, rewording the proverbial heart of stone; this image is topped by the gothic “garden sprouting bones, grown from the dead”, which may be an intertextual reference to the last section of Part One of Eliot’s Waste Land: “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” (Eliot : 63) Like Eliot’s fertility gods, in Duffy’s burial the seemingly dead lovers make themselves manifest by their bones, which have replaced the living plants which used to sprout in the garden. After this gothic extravaganza the poem returns to the lovers’ living bodies: the beloved’s face is compared to a page of a book whose words have been blanked out. The speaker’s hands have to “squeeze themselves” instead of the beloved’s hand; they “burned like verbs”, the reference to language and writing thus being continued. Verbs might burn because they metaphorically represent f love as a fugitive in a battle. The final shelter is found in the lovers’ “heads”, but love as a “cowering”, i. e. hiding from their conscious thoughts. The subject of this poem reverberates in students’ minds and taps into their own experiences of rowing with somebody who is close to them.Therefore creative tasks are called for, once comprehension is secured. Again, working in groups is the aptest way of dealing with both the understanding of the poem and the creative pre- and post-reading tasks.

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Pre-reading task Describe a row you had with somebody close to you to the other members of your group. You have 3 minutes to find the relevant vocabulary for your story. While-reading task – Task 1 Stanza one contains three metaphors for the consequences of the lovers rowing. Find out what images are used to describe the pain of rowing. – Task 2 Describe the metaphors in stanza 2. Concentrate on the verbs used and explain what state of mind they express. – Task 3 Compare the two metaphors in stanza 3 with those used in the other stanzas. Decide which are the most violent images for you. – Task 4 Explain in what way the mental separation of the lovers is expressed in stanza 4. In the final line love is personified. Describe its movement and say what you think this means. – Task 5 Is this a poem written by a man or a woman? Evaluate the images used and decide whether they belong more to the masculine or feminine repertoire of behaviour in a conflict situation. The gender of the writers can be revealed now after doing the entire syllabus; however, it is also possible for the teacher to choose only two or three poems and reveal the gender then. This will lead to a discussion of the arguments put forward to prove a male ore female authorship before the gender was known. The pilot showed that especially “You” is assigned to male authorship due to its violent imagery and the repetition of “hard”, which is read as phallic. The next surprise was that all of Duffy’s poems are addressed to a woman, thus breaking the male – female binary of traditional love poetry. Only one poem “Venus”, contains a pointer to the beloved being a woman:“nor can I see / the dark fruit nipple, ripe on your breast”. (Duffy 2005: 44) Over and above there is the external evidence that Duffy had a long-standing relationship with Jacky Kay, a Scottish poetess. This can give rise to the question if women behave differently to other women than to men.

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So these can be the final overarching tasks after the identity of the speakers is revealed: – Task 1 Re-read the poems of which you didn’t guess the gender of the poet and see if your reading is changed by this fact. – Task 2 Make lists of the typical male and female characteristics described in the poems. Compare them with the lists you made in the pre-task before reading the poems. – Task 3 Write two love poems or poems about love, one with a male, the other with a female speaker. As an assessment task a critical essay is most apt: Discuss to what extent gender determines a person’s idea of love. Refer to at least four of the poems you have studied. (400 words) Some seminal points – the poems by Philip Larkin, in particular “High Windows” and “Love” show the typical male penchant towards stressing sex and being self-centredness in relationships. – Duffy’s poems, on the other hand, abound in metaphors expressing the tenderness of feeling for the beloved: in “Name” the three vowels of the name “are like jewels on the thread of my breath” or “like a kiss” (3). However, the dark side of love is expressed in some of Duffy’s poems like “You” and “Row” as well; women are also capable of conflict and anger and it is a fallacy to attribute feelings of aggression and anger exclusively to the male sex. As most poems, these texts activate the competences listed under category 9 in my assessment grid. Reaching category 9 always implies a command of the previous category : perceiving the symbolic level of a text (8.III) is, of course, crucial for a reading of these poems. But uncovering it in a poem, which has a very limited narrative strand, is more demanding than in the prose texts mentioned in 8.III; another seminal element is the ability to register shades of irony (9.III), without which the Larkin poems can’t be properly understood.

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III.4 Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls After the many poems introducing the gender theme it is essential to use other genres to offer an alternative approach; poetry is not the favourite genre of all teachers and students. In addition, it is inevitable to study the phenomenon of feminism, which has its roots in the 1970s. It may be on the wane these days, but it is still a ghostly presence which may have gripped the mothers of today’s students. The most outstanding playwright dealing with feminist issues in her play is Caryl Churchill. She has written a large number of plays which all received great critical acclaim. The most accessible one is Top Girls, which premiered in 1981. As the title suggests, women in high positions is the key theme of the play. Often career and being a mother are at loggerheads for contemporary women, so as a warm-up I suggest a discussion of the issue in the class; a boy ad a girl pair up for the following task: Pre-reading task – Task 1 Discuss in pairs if career and motherhood can be combined in 21th century society. Write down the reasons for your position. – Task 2 Discuss your answers in the full class. Are there clear differences between boys and girls? – Task 3 Discuss in groups what the definition of emancipation and feminism is. Do you feel feminism is outdated? Task 3 will bring up different notions of what emancipation and feminism mean. Hence a scholarly definition is called for which is given to the students after a comparison of their own definitions. Gerda Lerner’s notion of autonomy comprises both: Autonomy means moving out from a world in which one was born to marginality, to a past without meaning, and a future determined by others – into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one’s future. (Lerner : XXIV)

– Task 4 Discuss Gerda Lerner’s definition of the terms. Compare it to your own.

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While-reading tasks Then the students’ homework is to read Act 1, doing the following tasks to focus their reading: – Task 1 There are women from different ages represented in Act 1. Google the five historical characters and research the main beliefs about gender roles of the period in which they lived. – Task 2 Rank them in terms of autonomy, bearing in mind the society they lived in. In the following lesson five groups work on the different characters to prepare the following task: – Task 3 Present the life and times of your woman giving your reasons for where they rank on an emancipation scale from 1 to 10.

III.4.1 An assessment of the five characters in terms of emancipation Teachers can glean from this survey the elements needed to help the students do Task 3 in the previous chapter. The undisputed number one is Isabella Bird (1831–1904). Pat Barr’s biography lifted her out of obscurity : she is an admirably independent woman braving the constrictions imposed on her sex by Victorian society : in middle age she had the intrepidness to leave Britain behind and explore the world on her own. Churchill highlights the fact that she never lost touch with her femininity : “Well I always travelled as a lady and I repudiated strongly any suggestion that I was other than feminine.” (62) In spite of her age she had a love life: she impressed “Rocky Mountain Jim” (63) by her baking skills as well as the masculine ability to lasso cattle. But she preferred autonomy to marriage. Her closest relationship was to her sick sister Hennie, and the only reason why she married Doctor Bishop was the latter’s taking loving care of Hennie. After her husband’s death she had the gumption to travel to Tibet at the age of 56 as a cure for her gout and her heart-condition. The only conventionally Victorian trait was her sense of obligation to do charitable work to atone for her wanderlust. She had a congenital urge to constantly move on, which made staying in one place torture. “I always felt dull when I was stationary, / that’s why I could never stay anywhere”. (13) Hence her intrepid exploration of the globe, a character trait

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generally deemed masculine. She certainly fits Lerner’s definition of autonomy to a large extent. An intertext which might shed more light on the character is a poem by Anthony Thwaite: in his volume Victorian Voices there is the dramatic monologue “On Horseback through Hokkaido”, which is also inspired by Pat Barr’s book. In this poem we listen to Isabella relating her trip through northern Japan. As the poem is long and difficult in terms of vocabulary I put it in an appendix of this chapter, leaving it up to the teacher if he/she wants to use it. A comparison of Isabella with the other women shows that she is the only one who makes practically no compromises with the patriarchal system. However, it has to be borne in mind that the other women are very much creatures of their time: in the Middle Ages the constrictions imposed by society on women were much more crippling than in the Victorian period, which in its last two decades saw the genesis of the so-called New Woman, and finally the Suffragette movement. The juxtaposition of women from different periods induces the students to assess a character’s actions against the historical background. Historical awareness, a central element in education, is thus foregrounded. All the other characters are tainted by submission gestures to the patriarchy of their day, but bearing in mind the social circumstances one can still rank them: second in the autonomy stakes of Top Girls is Lady Nijo. But this is anything but obvious: as a courtesan of the Japanese emperor one’s gut reaction is disdain or at best sympathy with her plight. It is her father fixation which makes her accept this role at the tender age of 14. She lost her virginity in what to outsiders like Marlene is rape. But Nijo’s own assessment of the act was different: “Of course not, Marlene, I belonged to him, that’s what I was brought up for.” (3) After all, this was 13th century Japan. She maintained a certain sexual autonomy by having lovers and bearing four children. She decided to get rid of the children because she felt they didn’t fit in with her position at the emperor’s court. At the time she didn’t let her maternal feelings interfere with her desire to please the emperor, but at the dinner party she breaks into tears when realising that in contrast to Griselda she wasn’t given her children back. An instance of a miniature revolt against patriarchy was her beating of the emperor with a stick together with her fellow courtesans after the Full Moon Ceremony. More importantly, after falling out of grace at the court she decided to become a wandering nun, in analogy to the wandering Buddhist monks. Of course, she only obeyed her father’s will, as she points out herself: “I still did what my father wanted” (57), but there is a modicum of autonomy in the breaking away from her ignominious role of a courtesan fallen from grace and eschewing the strict hierarchical order of a convent. She confesses that she didn’t enjoy her rough life: “What I enjoyed most was being the Emperor’s favourite.” (58) But willy-nilly she was pushed into a more autonomous lifestyle, which she calls “repentance”

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(59) for her previous sins. But her final declaration about the last period of her life is upbeat: “I had to live for myself and I did live.” (67) Pope Joan’s life is also difficult to assess in terms of female autonomy. She denied her gender altogether, but in the patriarchal society of the 9th century posing as a man was the only way to gain access to learning and upward social mobility. In fact, she is the only woman from the dinner scene who got the top job, wielding power over the whole of Christendom. Moreover, she gained sexual autonomy by having two lovers: the first was her male companion when she was a student, the second a chamberlain when she was already Pope. But as opposed to Nijo, who knew the reproductive mechanism of her sex, she had lost touch with her biological nature altogether : she didn’t know why her belly was swelling and gave birth during a procession, which led to her being stoned to death. However, this ignorant innocence makes her less aggressively masculine and goal-orientated than the Marlene-type of woman. The most elusive character of the dinner scene is Dull Gret. Before her final monologue she only utters a few choice words, mainly of the grossly sexual kind. “Big cock” is her terse comment on Nijo’s question about Joan’s chamberlain. The devils she attacks in her tale at the end of Act 1 are very much like the Spanish soldiers who plunder her village and murder her children. So symbolically she is fighting back against the patriarchal world order of aggression and suppression. If we read the devils figuratively, Gret is an example of a working-class woman rising up against her tormentors. In fact, she can be seen as the 16th century equivalent of Joyce. The latter, however, does not fight back against the patriarchal powers, which include her sister, to live a more emancipated life. Patient Griselda is, as her Chaucerian epithet suggests, slavishly devoted to her feudal lord. There is not a shred of independence or sexual autonomy in her life-story, she is just a pawn in the Marquis’ game. In contrast to the much more emancipated Lady Nijo she gets her children back, but this is only a coup de grace on the part of her almighty husband. Churchill deliberately parades her as an example of female bondage to the male lord, a negative example which makes the gradual process of emancipation on the part of the other characters visible, which is of great pedagogic value.

III.4.2 Creative writing tasks to explore the characters After the groups have reported their findings (based on evidence from the text!) to the class, a creative writing task is an apt tool to delve deeper into the characters.

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– Task 4 Find a modern character who corresponds to your historical character in terms of autonomy. Write a monologue in which she describes her life. The students may need some guidance to see similar characters in our time. Isabella is a restless traveller whose equivalent may be a latter-day ageing hippie who after her heyday in the late 60s / early 70s no longer finds a slot for herself in society. Lady Nijo corresponds to a modern woman who was totally smitten with a much older pop star. The most famous example is the 18-year-old Mandy Smith who married the 52-year-old Rolling Stone Bill Wyman aged 18 in 1989, their relationship having been sexually consummated when she was 14. If students are interested in this modern counterpart to Lady Nijo, they can check it out on the website listed under Wyman in the reference section of this chapter To enable students to research this particular modern relationship the group is given the quote above and the following tasks: – Task 5 Find some more English-language sources for the relationship outlined in the paragraph above. – Task 6 Write a monologue of Mandy Smith in her 50s. For Pope Joan a modern equivalent is easier to find: her counterpart is to be found in the corporate world, or perhaps in politics. Total dedication to their career may mean that they miss out on having children; they do not get stoned to death, but they may be socially ostracised if they are particularly driven and merciless to their dependents. From a leftist point of view Maggie Thatcher is a possible instance of this. Finding an equivalent for Patient Griselda in the modern world is rather difficult. On peril of being deemed racist, one is most likely to find one in developing countries, where the woman’s subservience to the man is enshrined in the moral code. Lahiri’s The Namesake presents Ashima in this way in the first part; however, as the novel progresses she acquires more and more autonomy. A modern equivalent of the Patient Griselda type of bondage without a ‘and they lived happily ever after’ twist is more likely to be found in a rural setting. If the students want to follow this up further, a sociological paper on wife-beating in Indian villages reveals a reality beyond the imagination of western European teenagers. It is listed in the references section under ‘Wife-beating’. Gret is the embodiment of a woman suffering physical abuse. Only the

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Spanish soldiers morphed into devils are mentioned as male oppressors. But the father(s) of her ten children are not mentioned, presumably because they abandoned her. The Marquis, on the other hand, has far subtler ways of ensuring Griselda’s utter subjection: not by beating her, but by depriving her of her children. To highlight the topicality of the play here and now I found a Guardian article about violence against women. I put both the article and the tasks in the appendix: it is excellent extra material, but if the teacher feels this syllabus is too fraught already, they can skip it. Marlene is clearly the central character in Acts 2 and 3. She has achieved autonomy in some respects, but lacks it painfully in others. By rising to the top in the employment agency she is the one who calls the shots, but it is equally obvious that she is enslaved to the merciless competition of Thatcherite capitalism: she must be at the top, she simply steps into the shoes of all the male CEOs. Nell pays her the dubious tribute of having “more balls” (p. 100) than her rival Howard. The latter’s wife brands her as a “ballbreaker” (59) prophesying her that she will end up “miserable and lonely.” (59) When analysing Marlene’s private life one may come to the same conclusion. The way she talks about men speaks volumes: “there is always men” she says when questioned by her unclever sister Joyce, but they have a merely decorative function. The men she meets “like to be seen with a high-flying lady … but can’t take the day-to-day.” (137) She anticipates that the “fellas” expect “her to turn into the little woman.” (137). What she craves are “adventurers” with whom she can journey “into the sunset.” (137), presumably the end of her lease of youth and sexual attraction. Beyond “the eighties” which “are going to be stupendous” (137) she doesn’t see anything in the way of a future. In fact, the sunset metaphor suggests her anticipation of swift decline and finally death. At the moment she is riding on the top of the wave of her career and sexual charms, and that is all she is concerned with. Her lifestyle is totally unsustainable: she throws herself headlong into the testosterone-driven rat-race of neoliberal capitalism, all the nurturing, caring feminine elements which are part and parcel of a sustainable lifestyle are absent. This untrammelled egotism also coloured her early life: she abandoned her daughter Angie to get away from her working-class background. There are mitigating circumstances for giving her child away to her sister : given her age, 17, and the male chauvinist piggery prevalent in her working class surroundings, her future would have been a husband who would “come home pissed” addressing her “don’t you fucking this fucking that fucking bitch.” (133) Nevertheless, Churchill designed her character to display the dark side of emancipation. When embracing the free market ideology of ruthless capitalism, women lose their feminine, nurturing side. In the drunken conversation in Act 3 Marlene sings the praises of the first woman Prime Minister to which Joyce replies by

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saying that Marlene would have liked “Ms Hitler … Hitlerina” (84) thus likening Maggie Thatcher to the Fuehrer. Bearing all this in mind the conclusion is that Marlene is not an example of female autonomy but a ruthless masculine capitalist espousing Milton Friedman’s monetarism (“monetarism isn’t stupid” (84)) without the slightest compassion for the people who became unemployed and homeless as a result of this economic dogma. After all, the 80s saw the rise of ‘Cardboard City’ which was the ‘home’ of the homeless. (Cf. cardboard city) Since Marlene is the central and most complex character a number of tasks have to focus on her : – Task 1 Write a short biography of Marlene. Point out the emancipated and the unemancipated aspects of her life. – Task 2 Write a dialogue between Marlene aged 17 and Joyce, discussing whether Joyce should adopt Marlene’s baby. – Task 3 State why you think Caryl Churchill presents her as a positive or negative example of female autonomy. Since we know more about Marlene than the other characters, an entire lesson should be dedicated to carrying out and evaluating these tasks. The other characters feature in the biography as well, so a detailed look at them comes next. Marlene’s co-workers Nell and Win are of the same ilk as Marlene. In the office they are revelling in the memories of the weekend’s sexual exploits: Win uses her married lover to be spoilt and to learn the names of roses. She doesn’t mind having to “lie down in the back of the car so the neighbours wouldn’t see [her] go in.” (49) This is the behaviour of the classic mistress, there is not a shred of female autonomy in the feminist sense in this gesture. Nell boasts about having had two lovers on consecutive days, “one Friday, one Saturday,” (45) and adds that she has “never been a staying put lady”, she wants “pastures new”. (46) Most men “can’t afford” her, in the role of the traditional mistress she wants to be constantly showered with expensive presents. Although both Win and Nell have well-paid jobs, in connection with men they resort to the gender stereotypes of the most unemancipated kind. Win and Nell warrant a task to highlight this aspect of the stereotypical gender role:

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– Task 4 Compare Win and Nell with Marlene. Analyse their behaviour towards men. Discuss if the way they deal with men is emancipated or not. In the office world we encounter a woman who is the polar opposite of the highflying ladies: Mrs. Kidd. She intercedes on the part of her husband with Marlene, hoping to reverse the shame of losing the race for the top job to a woman. She abounds in gender stereotypes: “What’s it going to do him working for a woman? I think if it was a man he’d get over it as something normal.” (58) And she “put him first every inch of the way” (58). The more she pleads the more aggressive Marlene becomes, finally spitting out expletives: “He really is a shit, Howard” (59), and Mrs.Kidd’s final retort is that Marlene is one of “these ballbreakers.” (59), which is an apt description of Marlene’s type of feminism. The next task is the comparison of the two types of traditional women: – Task 5 Compare Mrs. Kidd with Win and Nell. Point out the aspects of their lives which correspond to the traditional gender stereotype. Predict what Nell and Win will be like at Mrs. Kidd’s age. As a final assessment task this should cover most central aspects: Compare two characters in Act 1 with two characters in Act 2 and 3 in terms of their emancipation. (400 words) It is not possible to sketch out the possible answers since the students are deliberately given a choice. The evaluation of the characters on the emancipation scale can be found above. As regards the literary competences demanded in dealing with this play, 8.I, II, and III are clearly necessary : but this is not enough, since Act 1 stretches the concept of realism: characters from different cultures and ages meet in contemporary London, so historical awareness, hence “the social, political or historical background of a literary work”, a descriptor from 9.III is clearly needed. On the other hand, there is no need to know about the different dramatic genres (9.II) since modern plays are no longer categorised in terms of comedy/tragedy. Dramatic irony falls into the category “subtle use of irony”: perceiving the implied author’s stance towards the characters in the play is crucial. The ironic distance to Marlene in Acts 2 and 3 is not so difficult to grasp. Act 1 is much more demanding: it is difficult to decide which of the historical characters is to be seen as a positive role model for emancipation. The symbolic level is not as important as in a poem; yet there are some central metaphors like Marlene’s “into the sunset” which have to be decoded by the students. A play always activates the basic literary competences listed in 8.I of my grid

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above in chapter I.5. Reading prose, be it in a novel or a play, is one of the basics of literary competence. The second and third act follow the logic of realistic discourse. Act 1, however, is much more demanding: for one thing, the characters’ life stories overlap, so there is no clear realistic narrative strand; then, an advanced degree of historical awareness is demanded, which clearly belongs to 9.III. As always, literary competences manifest themselves in a hierarchy of different components: the basic elements of 8.I are required to achieve a basic understanding of the text; however, to fully understand the play, a good grasp of the tropes listed in 9.III as well as the recognition of the importance of the historical background and the ability to explore it.

III.4.3 Conclusion Let me sum up the main objectives of this book: the application of the task-based approach now prevalent in language teaching to teaching literary texts is the innovative element. More independent student activity is the main result of this type of literary pedagogy, one of the basic desiderata of all teaching. The tasks guide the students’ activity, they encourage them to do independent research on the web. Over and above guiding the students, the task-based approach also enables the teacher to set assessment tasks, which can be evaluated according to the literary catogories of the assessment grid for reading proposed here. While the first six categories are largely taken over from the CEFR, categories 7 to 9 break new ground by going beyond the few literary categories to be found in the European Language Portfolio or the criteria proposed for German Abitur exams by the Conference of German Ministers of Education. Literature is rightly centre stage in upper secondary education, so teachers need tools for assessing the students’ performance. This book makes a contribution to this enterprise.

Part IV: Appendix

IV.1 Appendix 1 As pointed out in the chapter on Top Girls, there is an obvious intertext to be found in Thwaite’s Victorian Voices, which is a collection of dramatic monologues composed to give minor historical personages from the Victorian age a say. Isabella Bird, the most emancipated woman of Top Girls, is heard while riding through Hokkaido, the northernmost part of Japan. Thwaite’s note at the back of the volume gives a first rough description of the character : On Horseback through Hokkaido Can these thick pelted Calibans, deep in their dripping forests, Be human as I am, or else collateral Ancestors, the kin of apes and monkeys? Such questions exercise the gentle reader Snug in his study, holding in his armchair My books of travel: they are not my questions. Journeying, I best follow the old author – Humani nil a me alienum puto. For, from the moment England drops behind me With all its rules of upbringing and habit, 10 Sensible tracts, quotidian drudgeries, And all my dismal memories of girlhood, I grow another face, become another person. Travellers, indeed, are privileged to do The most improper things imagined with Perfect propriety. The sickly elder daughter Whose youth was spent reclining on the sofas In rectory drawing-rooms, with spinal trouble That nagged through camomile and laudanum, Now jolts on horseback through the wilderness, Land of the Rising Sun’s most northern island.

20

158 Evenings in plaited huts, gulping down rancid stews (Boar offal, spongy roots, unnameable victuals), Sake libations to the million deities Worshipped in mountain, tree and rock and river, Dim-lit interiors where elders endlessly Spell out the genealogies of tribe and tribe, And over all the mystery and the deluge Descending like a revelation on me. For God is here, among these (you say) savages, As instrumental in his signs and wonders As anywhere in tamer, temperate places. No, I do not presume the evangelical: My part is not the preaching of the Gospel, Though some could only gauge what I am doing In terms of carrying Bibles to the natives – Aunt Mary as a missionary in India Or Cousin Mary among Persian deserts. These Ainu have no written law or history – Indeed, no forms of written words among them – And, placid in their sad, sweet resignation, Only inflamed by copious potations Of rice-wine spirits, are uncomprehending At notions of a Saviour among them. If you cast doubt upon the seemly wisdom Of trusting female frailty to the dangers Exposed by such benighted sole encounters, I ask you, reader, merely to examine Your storyteller as she stands before you: Four-foot-eleven, a stumpy dumpy creature, At her age – rising fifty – unencumbered With fancies how her charms might be like tinder. I trust myself to Ito, my interpreter – Sharp-witted, vain and bandy-legged, a youth Hot for his girls, his sweetmeats and his pride. A foreign lady capable of ‘drinking To the gods’ in their intoxicated fashion Without intoxication, and whose questionings Seek out the best and not the worst in all men – They cannot harm me. Diligent and merry, The grooms who take my horses and are humble Could not depend entirely on the tardy And insufficient efforts of the niggard And selfish Church I grew in and grew up to. God numbers these in his inheritance: These heathens puzzled by the word ‘salvation’

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Will yet be saved – but not by my endeavours. The gates of Heaven are wide and full of mercy, Opening to all who follow in their fashion The instincts they may never have acknowledged, Whether Hawaii, Arkansas or Yorkshire (Parishes known or unknown, known to me), Loosed them to make their world their destiny. Peevish I may be, briefly, at my portion (I should have been a man, though would not say it Except to Ito, who’ll not understand), But this I know – accept – embrace – and glory in – The freedom of a journey that excuses All things but cowardice, bad faith, incompetence, And leaves me free to look at what was never Revealed before to the sick English daughter Of a good man who never could envisage Far from the rooms she lay in once, alone. (Thwaite: 174–176)

Here are the key words which need to be glossed to facilitate a general understanding of the poem: l. 1: pelt = fur, an animal’s skin l. 2: collateral = related but not in a direct or close way l. 3: ancestors = a person who was in someone’s family in past times l. 12: tracts = verses from the bible: quotidian drudgery = daily hard work l. 13: dismal = terrible l. 15: improper = not following rules of acceptable behavior l. 18: rectory drawing-rooms = living rooms in a house of a priest l. 18: spine = the row of connected bones down the middle of the back l. 19: laudanum = painkiller l. 22: rancid stews = fish or meat usually with vegetables which smells bad l. 27: genealogy = family history If the students have read Top Girls, the comparison of the two portraits of Isabella is an obvious task. However, the Thwaite poem is fairly complex, especially in terms of vocabulary, so a number of while-reading tasks have to enable students to understand the monologue. In addition, some key vocabulary is provided to prevent the students expending too much time looking up words and miss out on the narrative flow of the dramatic monologue. In the first verse paragraph Isabella anticipates the “gentle [Victorian] reader’s” smug gut reaction to her description of the natives she encounters: he will see them as subhuman, closer to apes and monkeys than humans, the

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literary character summing them up is Shakespeare’s Caliban. She distances herself from this colonialist attitude and quotes a slightly bowdlerised version of the Roman playwright Terence’s famous Latin tag ‘I am a human being, nothing human is alien to me’. She leaves England behind to escape the household drudgery of a Victorian woman and to forget her miserable childhood. The following tasks can elicit a basic understanding of the dramatic situation of the poem: – Task 1 Read Thwaite’s note on the poem. Find out in the course of your reading at what stage of Isabella’s biography the poem is set. – Task 2 Read the first stanza of the poem. Check on the English Wkipedia website who Caliban is and determine who speaks the first three lines of the poem. – Task 3 Compare the attitude towards the people described in lines 1–3 with Isabella’s view of them. Find out what the Latin line means. The narrative strain becomes clearer in the second stanza, where Isabella tells the reader about her childhood misery, which is in stark contrast to her elation on horseback. Hence the second stanza helps the students to get a grip on the poem. – Task 4 Read the second stanza and compare Isabella’s childhood with her present state. In stanza 3 Isabella reveals her enlightened view of the relationship between Christianity and other so-called primitive religions: instead of trying to convert them by giving them Bibles, she acknowledges that the Aino of Hokkaido, who have no written tradition and therefore are incapable of understanding the concept of a Saviour stemming from a tradition which is based on the written word, do not need to learn about the gospel. And yet, God works among these heathens as much as in England. – Task 5 Read the 3rd stanza. Concentrate on Isabella’s idea of the relation between the Christian god and the Aino non-believers. (For God is here…) Compare Isabella’s attitude to that of aunt Mary and cousin Mary.

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In the next stanza Isabella self-mockingly presents herself to the reader : short and fat, in her fifties, no longer hoping to charm men. Next she once more severely criticizes the Christian church which is dubbed “niggard” and “selfish”. The heathens will be saved, but not through the church, for “the gates of heaven are wide and full of mercy.” – Task 6 Try to picture Isabella by reading her self-description (Four-foot-eleven…) Is she an emancipated woman? If so, why? Isabella’s theology differs widely from the Victorian standard: she is convinced that the Aino can be saved without being evangelised, the common belief enacted by cousin and aunt Mary. – Task 7 Find the lines in which Isabella characterises the church; describe how she feels about it. What kind of God does she believe in? In the final stanza Isabella confides in the reader about her transgender intimations: but it must be a secret, she only tells her Japanese guide, who doesn’t understand her, that she should have been a man. But then follows her creed: her decision to leave home go on a journey to the ends of the earth give her an exaltation she never could have dreamt of when she was a sickly daughter of a clergyman, lying alone in damp rooms. Now she has company like the Aino, to whom she establishes a bond beyond language. – Task 8 Sum up in a sentence what Isabella has achieved by her travelling. Discuss whether she should or shouldn’t have been a man. What does her feeling she should have been a man say about her notion of femininity? Finally Thwaite’s presentation of Isabella can be related to Churchill’s: – Task 9 Compare the presentation of Isabella Bird’s character in Churchill’s play with that in Thwaite’s poem. Consider the masculine/feminine traits the character displays in the two texts. Reading this poem certainly sheds light on the character Isabella in the Churchill play. The crux is the vocabulary of the monologue: Thwaite represents Isabella as an erudite Victorian using a highly elaborated code. The best way to circumvent

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this problem is to add a glossary like the one above; at the same time it is important to encourage gist-reading in this long, narrative poem. The tasks focus the students’ attention on the relevant aspects, detailed understanding of every line is not needed.

IV.2 Appendix 2 More people than ever being convicted of violence against women, figures show (The Guardian, 24 June 2015) Record numbers of people are being convicted of violent crimes against women in England and Wales, but the rate of conviction has still fallen, figures show. Convictions increased to 78,773 in the past year, up 16.9 % on the previous year, data released by the Crown Prosecution Service revealed on Thursday. But those figures also showed the conviction rate for rape fell to 56.9 %. About 107,100 cases concerning violence against women and girls were prosecuted over the 12 months, a rise of 18.3 % on the previous year. The figures also laid bare the young ages of many of those convicted of rape. The majority of defendants were aged 25–59 (59 %) and 18–24 (21 %). A total of 354 defendants (just under 8 %) were aged 14–17 and 56 were aged 10–13. There were increases in the number of successful prosecutions for sexual offences, child sex abuse, domestic violence cases and honour-based violence, while more people were charged with rape than ever before in the past year. The CPS said it was investigating more historic allegations following the Jimmy Savile sex abuse scandal. Campaigners welcomed the report and praised prosecutors, the police and victims for their work in securing more convictions than ever before. But they said greater funding was required to help increase conviction rates and ensure women had access to support services. Katie Russell, a national spokeswoman for Rape Crisis England and Wales, said: “It’s clear that some progress has been made towards improving responses to this broad range of devastating crimes.” “At the same time, the report highlights that we still have some distance to travel before all survivors of sexual violence and violence against women and girls receive the justice they want and deserve and there is no room for complacency.” Sarah Green, the acting director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, said: “The increase in prosecutions shows that more women are seeking justice, with big increases for example in the numbers of rape prosecutions and child sexual abuse prosecutions.”

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“If as a society we really care about ensuring justice for survivors, we should do everything in our power to try to prevent abuse in the first place. This has to start in schools, with compulsory sex and relationships education to give young people the chance to talk about respectful relationships.” “The CPS report includes figures on the alarmingly young age of many defendants in rape prosecutions. This is a call to urgent action.” The report showed the highest conviction volumes for domestic abuse (68,601), rape (2,581), sexual offences (7,591), honour-based violence (129) and child abuse (7,469), with more than 10,000 additional defendants convicted of domestic abuse. There was a 15 % rise in stalking and harassment prosecutions to more than 12,000. Of these, 1,103 prosecutions were commenced under the new stalking offences. Alison Saunders, the director of public prosecutions, said the report was “really good news for the victims of these dreadful crimes” and testament “to the hard work we (the CPS) have done recently to encourage victims to come forward, to work better with the police and ensure specially trained prosecutors bring the right cases to court”. She said: “Where cases meet the code for crown prosecutors, we will not shy away from taking cases forward, even when they are difficult and complex.” “Of course, this additional volume of violence against women and girls brings challenges for prosecutors not only in terms of numbers, but the type of cases we are seeing – prosecutors across England and Wales are telling me that we are seeing more non-recent child sexual abuse cases and more of the particularly complex rape cases coming forward.” While there has been a slight drop in the rape conviction rate, we are bringing the right, although often the more difficult, cases to court as they are left to the jury to decide. “Anyone who is a victim of these crimes should feel encouraged by this news and confident that they will be believed when reporting these crimes.” Polly Neate, the chief executive of Women’s Aid, said: “The report demonstrates that significant progress has been made in taking more cases of domestic violence through the criminal justice system. This is positive.” “This progress must continue until we have a system where women who experience domestic violence have exactly the same level of confidence as victims of other crimes, that they are heard and believed, the system works for them and protects their human right to live free from violence.” (http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/25/violence-against-womanconvictions-record-number-crown-prosecution-service)

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– Task 1 Explore the lexical field of legal expressions used in this article, including the different kinds of crime. Look up the terms used most frequently in the text on the internet. – Task 2 Describe the trend in the number of cases of violence against women brought to court. – Task 3 Name the different types of violence against women. – Task 4 Find out what the Jimmy Savile sex abuse scandal was and why it is so important. – Task 5 What is the most worrying trend in sexual violence in your opinion? Explain why this is the worst. – Task 6 Do the women in the first act of “Top Girls” have cases they could take to court nowadays? Answers – Task 1 To convict sb; the conviction; to prosecute sb.; the prosecution; the allegation; the defendant; bring cases to court. – Task 2 The number is up, a record number of people are being convicted. – Task 3 Domestic violence, rape; child abuse; harassment; stalking. – Task 4 Savile was a famous radio and television presenter ; a year after his death in 2011about 400 allegations of sex abuse perpetrated on victims ranging from 5 to 75 were made. As a result, an Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse was launched.

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– Task 5 The answer is subjective; child sex abuse may be considered the worst. – Task 6 Lady Nijo was raped as an under-age girl at 14 by the emperor. But she had been indoctrinated in her upbringing to such an extent that that she belonged to the emperor, a bit like the 14-year old Mandy Smith’s infatuation for Bill Wyman. The other character most likely to have suffered sexual abuse is Dull Gret. In her final monologue she only mentions the killing and torture of the Spanish, but rape is normally part and parcel of the violence of marauding soldiers.

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