1. ‘That is what we do
isn’t it?’ The Production
of University English
Susan Bruce
Investigating Creative
Writing: student
perspectives
Steve May
Books Were My Liberation:
an interview with Alan Rice
Nicole King
Up Close: a round table
on close reading
Ben Knights and Jonathan Gibson
Reading and Writing Society:
the role of English subjects in
Education for Sustainability
Arran Stibbe
Developing Careers Services
for English Students
Jane Gawthrope
English Subject Centre
Newsletter
Issue 14 • April 2008
ISSN 1479-7089
3. Newsletter 14 April 2008 01
02 Welcome
Nicole King
03 Events Calendar
Articles
04 ‘That is what we do isn’t it?’
The Production of University English
Susan Bruce
10 Investigating Creative Writing:
student perspectives
Steve May
16 Books Were My Liberation:
an interview with Alan Rice
Nicole King
21 Up Close: a round table on close reading
Ben Knights and Jonathan Gibson
24 Reading and Writing Society:
the role of English Subjects in Education
for Sustainability
Arran Stibbe
30 Developing Careers Services for English Students
Jane Gawthrope
Book Reviews
34 Teaching & Learning English Literature
Ellie Chambers & Marshall Gregory
Reviewed by Peter Barry
35 Doing Creative Writing
Steve May
Reviewed by David Bausor
News, Reports & Opinions
36 Event Round-Up
40 Digital Resources at the British Library
Joanna Newman
41 Desert Island Texts
Chris Ringrose
42 IT Works!
Brett Lucas
44 The Last Word
Mick Short
Contents
Cert no. SA-COC-1530
Contents
4. 02 Newsletter 14 April 2008
Welcome
Nicole King
As this issue of the Newsletter
lands in your pigeonhole, spring
will have arrived, however
beleaguered by late frosts,
storms or even snow. Whether
or not the forsythia or daffodils
have now faded, you’ll know
the seasons have turned as
your students beat a path to your door in fretful (or
perhaps languid) preparation for their exams and
essays. As your teaching winds down and you begin to
think about exam boards and the summer conference
season, take a moment to regroup by immersing
yourself in the pages of Issue 14. In Arran Stibbe’s
helpful overview, you can find out about Education
for Sustainable Development, and why it is central
to how we teach Creative Writing, English literature
and English language. Consider the challenge of
understanding the first-year experience, as Susan
Bruce transports us to the scene of a classroom, where
learning is analysed through speech, gesture and gaze.
Dip into the interview given by National Teaching fellow
Alan Rice, whose American Studies work as a teacher
and researcher joyously and forthrightly exceed the
bounds of ‘English’ – indeed he reminds us what a rich
group of subjects ours is. Steve May details his research
into the degree expectations and experiences of
Creative Writing students around the UK and beyond.
He tells how his own practice has changed as a result of
what he discovered. Ben Knights and Jonathan Gibson
report back on a round table discussion on the topic of
close reading and where it figures in current teaching
practice. As you read these varied articles you may
notice how the idea of practical criticism makes repeat
appearances. Indeed, this foundation stone of English
studies in the 20th century (and beyond) gets critiqued,
admired and casually referenced depending on which
of our authors you read.
Further on in the issue you will find our regular
features, including Brett Lucas’s column IT Works!
where you can learn about some of the latest web-
based technologies to support and animate your
teaching; Book Reviews contributed to this issue by
Peter Barry and David Bausor; Desert Island Texts with
‘castaway’ Chris Ringrose and the new commentary
column The Last Word. In this issue’s The Last Word,
Mick Short, a new member of the Subject Centre’s
Advisory Board, provocatively questions the forked
path that now seems to divide English literature from
English language.
Since the last Newsletter, it has been a busy period for
the Subject Centre. You can quickly catch-up on some
of the many events we have held over the past eight
months in our Event Round-Up, while more extensive
event reports are available on our website. There
are also several new mini-projects which have been
funded, that we’ll report on in the next issue, but you
can find out about them now on our website’s
Project pages. We are delighted to report that
Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film, edited by
Robert Eaglestone and Barry Langford, has recently
been published; it is the sixth volume to appear in
the book series we edit for Palgrave Macmillan,
Teaching the New English.
Do you have an opinion about our subject? Perhaps you
have an idea for a Last Word commentary? Do you have
a book on teaching you’d like to review or an article in
a previous issue of the Newsletter you wish to respond
to? If so, please get in touch. The Newsletter’s success,
like our work in general, is down to your generosity and
commitment to working with us. Good luck with those
exam boards and conference papers.
Nicole King
Editor
Recycle
when you have finished with this publication please pass it on to a colleague or student or recycle it appropriately.
Welcome
5. Newsletter 14 April 2008 03
Events Calendar
Spring/Summer 2008
EVENT: The Future of the Taught MA in English
DATE: 25 April 2008
LOCATION: De Montfort University, Leicester
This one-day event will focus on the changing context of,
and pressures on, the taught postgraduate degree in English.
Participants will be able to discuss how their departments, and
the discipline as a whole, might respond to the different demands
of students, funding bodies and employers. There will be
opportunities both to consider strategic issues and to share ideas
and experiences of practical responses in terms of pedagogy and
curriculum design.
EVENT: Creative Writing: Teaching and Technology
DATE: 30 April 2008
LOCATION: Manchester Metropolitan University
The aims of this one-day event are to provide a forum for
discussion and debate. Topics and presentations will explore the
pedagogies of Creative Writing and technology. The purpose
of the day is not only to showcase new developments and share
practice, but also to provide ample discussion time to think
about what issues we are facing.
EVENT: Learning on the Language/Literature Border
DATE: 1 May 2008
LOCATION: UCLAN, Preston
This one-day event will look at how students learn and
experience English language and English literature in the
undergraduate curriculum. The aims of the day are to interrogate
the underlying assumptions of the way we approach English
language and English literature learning, and to develop an
understanding of how we can ensure students get the best
learning experience.
EVENT: Teaching: An Improviser’s Art
DATE: 1 May 2008
LOCATION: SOAS, London
This event, led by Kevin McCarron, Reader in American Literature
at Roehampton University, will draw on the parallels between
teaching and stand-up comedy, to suggest techniques and
strategies to reduce the burden of seminar preparation.
EVENT: What is Literacy in HE Today?
DATE: 13 May 2008
LOCATION: London, Bedford Square
The English Subject Centre is pleased to introduce the first of its
London Evening Discussion Groups. The purpose is to share ideas
about teaching with colleagues from across London in an informal
atmosphere. The first session will query the definition of literacy
in higher education today: Are our students literate enough?
How do we identify literacy in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd years? Is one
person’s literacy another person’s skill set?
EVENT: Networking Day for HE in FE English Lecturers
DATE: 13 June 2008
LOCATION: SOAS, London
If you teach English at higher education level in an further
education context, we hope you will join us at this networking
event. The event will give people from different parts of the
UK a chance to share experiences, curriculum content, ways of
working, frustrations and delights. The English Subject Centre will
report on work it has been carrying out in the higher education in
further education sector, looking at the various models of English
higher education in further education, and issues which have
emerged as of particular interest or concern to teachers.
EVENT: Teaching and Research in English:
Making the Links
DATE: 13 June 2008
LOCATION: University of Edinburgh
Bringing together subject-specific current practice and theory
in the area of teaching-research linkages, this workshop will
encourage teacher-researchers (including postgraduate students)
from the areas of Creative Writing, language and literature to
share ideas about topics, such as the effect teaching has on
research practice, the importance of diverse research interests in
curriculum development and provision and do our students care
if we are experts in what we teach?
EVENT: Networking Day for Humanities’ Careers Advisers
DATE: 16 July 2008
LOCATION: University of Birmingham
The English Subject Centre, in collaboration with Anne Benson
(Head of the Careers Service at UEA) is convening a third
meeting for higher education Career Advisers with an interest
in the humanities. The meeting will provide a forum for careers
advisers to discuss and share ideas and experiences, and this year
the theme will be engaging employers. Several Careers Services
will be showcasing their English Subject Centre-funded projects
to enhance services to English students.
For further details on any of these (mostly free) events please visit our website www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/events
Events Calendar
6. 04 Newsletter 14 April 2008
I suppose … debating is one of the big parts of
English isn’t it? It’s being able to express yourself
and using language and what you know from
literature, and listen and stuff; I suppose that is,
that is what we do, isn’t it? (Anna1
, Third Year
Combined Hons English student April 2007)
Something gets lost in the translation of Anna’s
observation onto the page: what doesn’t emerge
is the sense of discovery that inhabits her sentence
as she speaks it. It’s not just what she says, it’s the
way that she says it: her speech is punctuated by
hesitations difficult to reproduce in writing, but
intrinsic to its significance as an instance of the
process (not merely the product) of thinking as it
happens in the university teaching space. Anna was
answering a question we had put to her class on our
third visit to her university (which we call Baxter),
as part of TPUE, an English Subject Centre-funded
project in which Anna’s class had first participated
some months earlier. Detailed more fully in the recent
issue of Pedagogy, edited by Ben Knights and Nicole
King, TPUE pools the expertise of educationalists2
and English academics3
to examine how English
is ‘produced’ in the everyday exchanges of the
classroom. Relatively neglected as a focus of research,
these exchanges are an obvious proving ground for
some of the claims English has made about itself: that
it demonstrates a ‘continuous concern with social
inclusiveness’ (Holland, 2003); that it is ‘oppositional’
(Rorty, 1982) or particularly ‘democratising’ (QAA,
2000) or, conversely, that its role has traditionally been
to preserve the orthodox and defend hegemonic
ideologies from subversive attack (Eagleton, 1983).
Such scholarship on English is one context of our
research. The other is educationalist enquiry into
the changes currently besetting higher education
(increased audit, standardisation, larger student
numbers, the employability agenda – among others).
Some have argued that these changes reshape
traditional disciplinary priorities and/or have a
disproportionate effect on less privileged students.
But (again), there has been little examination of their
effects at the level of the classroom. So we are trying,
then, to examine the interconnections that do (or
don’t) exist between the subject matter and self-
conception of English and its pedagogic form, and also
to assess the relation between the nature of classroom
interactions and the differing levels of resources within
which they occur. To this effect, we record and analyse
English classes in three ‘types’ of universities: ‘post-
1992’, ‘pre-1992 non-Russell Group’ and ‘elite’. We pay
attention to a variety of modes of communication
– gaze, tone, silences, ‘body language’ – consideration
of which can sometimes foreground issues other to
those which arise from analysis of language alone.
From these recordings, we identify key moments
which we isolate as clips and/or multimodal
transcriptions (figure 1, ‘At the End of the Day’).
These we then use as the focus of our investigations,
and also as a mechanism of testing our own
interpretations against those of the students whose
interactions we are analysing.
In The Production of University English (TPUE) project, English academics
and educationalists together investigated how English is ‘produced’ in the
everyday classes taking place in a variety of British universities. Here,
Susan Bruce describes the project and shows how its methods can be used
to shed new light on the interpretative tools which we teach to our students.
‘That is what we do, isn’t it?’
The Production of University English
1 Names of participating individuals and institutions have been changed.
2 Ken Jones (Keele University) and Monica McLean (The University of Nottingham).
3 Also participating is David Amigoni (Keele University).
Susan Bruce is
Senior Lecturer at
Keele University,
where she teaches
Early Modern and
20th-century literature.
She is co-editor (with
Valeria Wagner) of
Fiction and Economy:
New Essays on
Economics and
Literature (Palgrave,
2007) (e-mail
s.e.bruce@keele.ac.uk).
Articles
7. Newsletter 14 April 2008 05
On the occasion referred to above, we
had returned to Baxter to show the
students two clips of a seminar devoted
to The Merchant of Venice, which we had
recorded earlier in the year, during which
the tutor, Barbara, had asked the students
to conduct a ‘trial’ of the play itself.
Dividing them into two ‘teams’, Barbara
had instructed each to ‘choose a Portia’
who, with the help of her team, would
rally and present arguments concerning
the text’s politics: was it, or was it not, an
anti-Semitic play? The clips we showed
on our return to Baxter were clips we
were subsequently to use to investigate
two sets of questions. One (addressed
in our Pedagogy article) involved the
interface between English and issues of
democracy and authority. The other (the
focus of this essay) was that students
sometimes use their interpretations
of texts, and their seminar discussions
of those interpretations, to articulate
observations which are as much about
themselves as they are about the texts
– which are ostensibly the subject of
their discussion. In returning to Baxter,
we wanted to ask the students what they
thought was happening in the clips that
interested us. And, for what it is worth,
our Baxter students articulated their
understanding of the nature of ‘English’ in
terms which broadly underscored the way
we’d begun to think about the issue in our
Pedagogy essay. Thus for Anna, English
is not only about learning to articulate
her own opinions, but also about learning
to listen to other people’s. Interestingly,
she and her classmates maintained that
English offered them ‘a lot more freedom’
than did other subjects they were taking:
History but also (surprisingly, given the
degree of autonomy one might expect
each discipline to allow its respective
disciples) Creative Writing. Both of these
were characterised as wedded to a ‘right
and a wrong way to look at the text,’
unlike English, which was a subject if
not of infinite variety, at least of infinite
hospitality: ‘in English lit,’ one student
said, ‘it’s like, your opinions are valid
and you can sort of say what you feel’.
There are shades here of the familiar
student claim that English is entirely
subjective, that interpretation has no
intrinsic delimitation. ‘What, then, if I said
to you that The Merchant of Venice was
about a train crash?’ Susan asked, in an
attempt to challenge this ‘interpretation-
as-absolute-free-for-all’ version of English
lit. This perennial (mis-) characterisation of
English deserves further research. What do
students really mean when they reiterate
this ‘anything goes’ claim about English,
and what underlies that utterance?
Excitement? Delight? Vertigo? And to
what degree is it intrinsically associated
with the perception we took this student
to be articulating here: the proposition
that English offers a particular space not
merely for self-expression, but for a kind of
self-validation?
That correlation between the articulation
of ideational observations and a process
of self-validation, dovetailed with our
hypothesis that students’ comments about
a text may sometimes act as a vehicle for
the articulation also of observations about
themselves, of which they themselves
may not always be conscious. In the clip
we showed the students, Lisa begins by
arguing that the play establishes a critical
difference between Antonio and Shylock
– that this difference is value-laden – and
that that value is signalled to the audience
by a poetics which aestheticises Antonio’s
labour and debases Shylock’s. Her tone is
a mixture of hesitancy and conviction, the
latter quality most pronounced in the final
clause of her first intervention:
Lisa: But though they are both
merchants, what they are involved in
and how they are, um … Their work is
described as very different, Um, like,
Antonio’s worries over his ships are
described in very eloquent and s- s-
sublime language about spices, the …
spreading out of/on [?] the waves, and
the waves enthroned … enthroned
with his … uh … silks. But, uh, Shylock
is the/a [?] rat sneaking in the dark and
the, the … sort of, it’s the, … It’s the
difference between the sort of glory
and beauty of ships and … the petty
trafficking that Shylock does: they’re
not the same.
Rhianna counters with an appeal to
the prestige conferred on Shylock
by his ability to access wealth
immediately when wealth is needed.
She speaks more forcefully than Lisa,
and appears impatient, both with an
argument which valorises Antonio
when all he is able to do is ‘wait
around for a ship’, and – perhaps –
with a discourse that tacitly privileges
figurative language over the power of
the event within the plot:
Rhianna: But, at the end of the day,
the amount of money, as he says it
himself, as he says somewhere, um,
would a, would a dog have 3,000
ducats to give you? Obviously he’s
proving it, the fact that the amount,
fair enough, Antonio has these ships
full of spices and silks, but at the end
of the day it’s, it’s Shylock that can
just grab 3,000 ducats and give them
lend them ****. So obviously Shylock
in some ways has, is of, of higher level
of, I can’t describe, commerce, that
sort of thing because he has more, he
has the more money available to him.
[Lisa: Sh-]
Rhianna: Whereas Antonio is waiting …
around for a ship. And fair enough, if it
comes back he’ll have a lot of money,
but … whereas Antonio, Antonio
has no money at the minute so he
can’t – he can’t lend Bassiano [sic] the
money and he has to go to Shylock in
the first place. And it’s Shylock that can
just give this money away –
[Lisa: Sh-]
Rhianna: without really noticing, so
<trails off>
Rhianna had arguably drawn the short
straw here, in having to defend the case
that the immediacy of Shylock’s access
to money trumps the cachet afforded to
Antonio and his ships.
What do students really mean when they
reiterate this ‘anything goes’ claim about
English, and what underlies that utterance?
Excitement? Delight? Vertigo?
‘That is what we do, isn’t it?’ The Production of University English
8. 06 Newsletter 14 April 2008
Time Talk Action Gaze
29.48
B: And the fact that they are both
involved in commerce, they are
both merchants, Shylock is a kind of
merchant as well. I think that’s …. ****
B: Sitting with legs crossed. She is
resting her elbows on the arms of
the chair and clasping her fingers
together at her chest
Gesturing in circling motion with hand
RH: Nods, rubbing arm, then keeps
arms folded
LH: Resting hands on books, left foot
crossed over right knee
B: At RH
Then around room – right hand side
RH: Downwards
LH: At B
29.54 LH: But though they are both
merchants, what they are involved in
and how they are, um …
Their work is described as very
different
LH: Right hand straight up from knee,
holding pen in hand. Flicking pen
in right hand and making a circular
gesture with pen
B: At LH
LH: From RH to teacher
LH: At teacher
30.04 Um,
like, Antonio’s worries over his ships
are described in
very eloquent and s- s- sublime
language about
LH: Swallows
RH: Raise of hand to gesture at boy
in her group like a silent agreement
about a point he made earlier?
LH: Looking across room, possibly to
RH: Thinking
RH: Initially looking down then to
boy, then to LH
LH: Down at paper then to B
30.14 spices, the … spreading out of/
on? the waves, and the waves
enthroned …
LH: Circling hand gesture with right
hand
B: Nods LH: To B
30.20 Enthroned with his … uh … Silks
But uh Shylock is the/a? rat sneaking
in the dark and the, the … sort of,
it’s the,
LH: Flips pen over, then points it
downwards as if pointing at word
LH: Changes grip on pen so thumb is
pressing on top of it
LH: Down then to RH
LH: Down then at B
30:30 It’s the difference
between the sort of glory and beauty
of ships and …
Points pen in air, thumb pressed on
top, wrist pointing outwards
Moves pen to left hand, lifts right
hand with fingers spread, then
brushes hair away from left hand side
of forehead, then pulls at hair slightly.
LH: B, then to RH
LH: At B
30.41 the petty trafficking that Shylock
does, they’re not the same
Left hand out to emphasise petty
Right hand pointing a finger
In this transcript from the Baxter University class, the details of both verbal and non-verbal communication become evident.
Key:
B: Barbara
LH: ‘Lisa’ – woman with curly hair on left-hand side of Barbara
RH: ‘Rhianna’ – woman on right-hand side of Barbara
AW: Arabella – woman with American accent
Timings from transcription taken from the second recording.
Figure 1 ‘At the End of the Day’
‘That is what we do, isn’t it?’ The Production of University English
10. 08 Newsletter 14 April 2008
commerce and the value of what we
class as more valuable sort of thing,
like, money-wise or even like person-
wise as well: there’s quite a lot of
question about that sort of, that sort
of, scale of things.
Here (‘what we class as more valuable sort
of thing’) there may be repeated the claim
that ready money trumps the promise of
future wealth, an assertion Rhianna then
reiterates:
Antonio has no money; Shylock has
thousands and thousands of ducats
that he can hand out and not even
notice, so therefore Shylock’s kind
of the one who has the value at the
minute really: you know, it’s all very
well saying the ship’s going to come
in: that’s like saying, ‘I’m going to win
the lottery one day, yes I’m going to
be rich’ – but at the minute you’re on
two pounds fifty a day … Not quite
the same thing essentially.
The closest we came to getting any of
the students to address the possible
correlation between their social
orientations and the arguments they
made – or, at least, the terms in which
they made them – came with Rhianna’s
affirmation that underlying both her
argument and her self-perception was a
valorisation of what she characterised as
the direct and unadorned: ‘as my friends
all know as well, that’s what I’m like, I’m
just a very, very blunt straightforward
person’, she said. Rhianna’s account of
the convergence of interpretation and
self appeals then to personality, not to
class or social positioning, or ideological
affiliation. But her implicit impatience with
the extravagant or over-interpretative,
and her implicitly ethical valorisation of
the ‘straightforward’, rehearses a contest
over language and truth that has been
played out before, in the text she has
been studying, in the verbal jousting of
Lancelot Gobbo and Lorenzo. Lorenzo’s
similar ethically charged conflation of
the honest and the straightforward is
encapsulated in his frustrated instruction
to the clown to ‘understand a plain man
in his plain meaning: go to thy fellows; bid
them cover the table, serve in the meat,
and we will come in to dinner’ (Merchant
3.5.52–5). His deceptively simple appeal
to the plain, the obvious, the direct, has
recently been associated with a class
interest counter to that embedded in
Launcelot’s witty extravagance4
; certainly,
for Lorenzo, his own plainness operates
as a salutary corrective to the suspicious
rhetorical extravagance of the Clown. ‘Oh
dear discretion, how his words are suited!’
Lorenzo remarks of Launcelot’s wit:
The fool hath planted in his memory
An army of good words, and I do
know A many fools that stand in
better place, Garnished like him, that
for a tricksy word Defy the matter.
(Merchant 3.5.60–65)
Of Lisa, we were unable to enquire what
she thought about the relation between
what she argued and the more personal
aspects of herself: she came in late, and
missed the showing of the clips. But if her
lexis differed to that of Rhianna, so too
did her method: she paid more implicit
attention than Rhianna to the way in which
the ‘tricksy words’ of the text may be
employed in it to ‘defy the matter’. More
of what Lisa says in At the End of the Day
– her references to the waves enthroned, to
the silks, to rats sneaking in the dark and to
the petty trafficking – weaves into her own
discourse close paraphrases of, or direct
quotations from, the play itself. She is also
aware that this is her interpretative strategy
of choice: while the others are explicit
about their preferences for reading for the
plot, or for characterisation, Lisa says that
she looks first at ‘the actual words the text
is using, the choice of diction’.
Lisa is, in other words, a close reader, and
close reading allows her here to articulate
something about the text that Rhianna’s
account cannot encompass: that there is
a correlation in it between the political
and the aesthetic – that the latter is not an
innocent quality. ‘It’s more beautiful’, she
finishes, and she is arguably right that the
representation of Antonio’s merchanting
at the opening of the play is not only
more extravagant, but more beautiful,
than the representation of Shylock’s usury.
But this observation leads us to a more
tendentious proposition, and to a paradox
with which we will, for the time being, end.
Close reading is not a strategy that would
come naturally to someone wedded to
the virtue of the speech of a plain man in
his plain meaning; close reading assumes,
on the contrary, that meaning is anything
but plain, even when it pretends to be
so. Close reading may embrace values
diametrically opposed to those embodied
in the phrase ‘at the end of the day’ (for
example), which insists on the ultimate
readability of action, presupposing a ‘last
instance’, by reference to which things
will become intelligible, justifiable and
clear. We don’t want to align differences
of lexis or method in any blunt, one-to-
one relation to particular ideological
interests – to insist, for example, that an
appeal to ‘plainness’ must be connected
to non-elite class positions, or only ever
characteristic of discourses that seek to
legitimate particular forms of market-
orientated behaviour. But we do want
to begin to raise the possibility that if
respective attachments to ‘plain meanings’
and ‘armies of good words’ are, like the
aesthetics of The Merchant of Venice itself,
not innocent either, that may be something
we should bear in mind when we teach the
tools of our discipline to a body of students
who originate from an ever wider social
spectrum. And if here, we have illustrated
the methodology we’ve developed, which
extends the methods of close reading to
the rather different ‘text’ of the seminar
itself, in future writings one of the things
which we may have to think about further,
is that close reading might be as inherently
political as any other kind of aesthetic
methodology is – however much one
would wish to think that it was not.
Close reading is not a strategy that would come
naturally to someone wedded to the virtue of the
speech of a plain man in his plain meaning; close
reading assumes, on the contrary, that meaning is
anything but plain, even when it pretends to be so.
4 See Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare’s Extravagancy’ Shakespeare (1: 1–2), 2005 June–Dec, 136–53.
‘That is what we do, isn’t it?’ The Production of University English
11. Newsletter 14 April 2008 09
Newsletter 14
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curriculum, and classroom practice of English in higher education. Imaginatively conceived and
professionally edited, the series will be required reading for instructors in English studies worldwide.’
– Professor Elaine Showalter, Professor Emerita of English, Princeton University, USA, and Author
of Teaching Literature
NEW!
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of classroom teaching. The volumes will be invaluable for new and more experienced teachers alike.
Published in association with the English SubjectCentre.
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15. Newsletter 14 April 2008 13
3 Steve May, Doing Creative Writing (Routledge, 2007) p.117.
direction. Others have been converted
from “dabblers” to something more driven
and serious:
I also now have found the courage to
think about being a writer and not just
an enthusiastic amateur or – the most
dreaded – ‘a simple jotter’.
(Year 2 student)
However, other students have moved in
the opposite direction:
I set out with the course thinking
that I’d like to become a professional
writer. The course has taught me that I
don’t have it in me.
(Year 3 student)
I would contend that this is by no means
a sign of failure, either for the student or
the course they have taken. As I’ve put it
elsewhere3
:
There are too many people who
harbour an untried (and probably
unrealistic) longing to write. If you
have tried, and can reflect on your
experience, and analyse why you
don’t want to pursue writing further,
you will have learned a great deal,
both about writing and about yourself.
Further, if your course has been a good
course, and you’ve made best use of
it, you should have a fairly clear idea of
how ‘creative industries’ work, and how
work gets sold. You should also, more
generally, have learned how to manage
a project from initial idea through to
completion, and to work with other
people in a flexible, supportive and
intelligent way. These aren’t negligible
accomplishments. They should place
you well whatever direction you decide
to take.
Apart from those who have decided
that writing is not for them, there are
also recurring doubts, reservations and
anxieties, expressed by students across all
institutions. The “horrible embarrassment”
of the student quoted above, and fear in
anticipation of starting the course, are by
no means uncommon:
I was very scared coming to my first
seminar, because I wasn’t sure what to
expect. I had trouble finding the room
and getting there on time combined
with the uncertainty made me very
nervous when I sat down.
(Year 1 student)
I was terrified about the Creative
Writing module – I had to do it as
part of English studies. My interest
was much more about studying ‘good
published literature’ than attempting
anything of my own. However, so far
it has been fine, and I am actually
enjoying the exercises.
(Year 1 student)
The following student’s expectations in
terms of the peer group seem to have
been confirmed:
Although my initial fears were
of a class full of pretentious,
psychologically damaged rich kids,
and generally annoying wankers,
I have learnt to put up with them.
(Year 1 student)
The same student touches on another
common theme – a lack of clarity about the
purpose and benefit of in-class exercises
(however much fun they might be):
Although I enjoy writing in my own
time and having the chance to read
other people’s work, I’m glad Creative
Writing is only one module on my
English course.
Even the student quoted above who,
because of the course, has found courage
to think of themself as a writer prefaces
that affirmation as follows:
Although the exercises seem like a
waste [my emphasis], they help me to
open myself up to other writers and
explore other points of view. With the
mastering of such exercises comes
a certain sense of confidence – I no
longer fear the dreaded workshops
and the scrutinous gaze of other
writers. I look forward to having my
work torn apart as it allows me to build
upon it. I also now have found the
courage to think about being a writer
and not just an enthusiastic amateur or
– the most dreaded – ‘a simple jotter’.
(Year 2 student)
It is extremely common for students not to
realise what they’re learning:
I don’t really think the exercises
enhance my writing but I assume
some people find it a benefit to them.
(Year 2 student)
Generally I enjoy the course, but I feel
that sometimes the exercises that we
are asked to do are not beneficial to
me as I feel I write better and have
more ideas when I am alone and in a
creative mood.
(Year 1 student)
Generally, as students progress through
the course, they do come to understand
better the purpose of what they’re asked
to do in class:
At first I was embarrassed with some
of the Creative Writing class exercises
– I found them hokey and ‘touchy-
feely’. As I’ve gotten used to them,
I now feel much more comfortable
and participate enthusiastically.
(Level 2 student)
While some of the above students find
they work better when alone, outside of
class, perhaps equally represented are
students complaining about the difficulty
of motivating themselves without the
stimulation of the workshop environment:
I have one lesson on a Friday and the
rest of the time I’m expected to be
doing work in my own time. I find it hard
to get motivated when sitting at home
and prefer to be in uni more often with
specific lessons to sit and write.
(Year 2 student)
There are clashes also between the
structure of courses, and some students’
sense of individual freedom of expression:
I enjoy my personal Creative Writing
process, but resent the formalised
structure. Ultimately, this course is a
means to an end, although I am keen
I have been encouraged to experiment, while
always being given support in my preferred
genre. In the best Creative Writing groups you
feel a real desire to help everyone achieve their
own goals, as well as follow your own.
Investigating Creative Writing: student perspectives
16. 14 Newsletter 14 April 2008
for it to become more than just that,
less laboured. Undoubtedly I will gain
from it, however quite what that will be
I’m unsure. Reading this back, perhaps
I should be paying more attention.
(Year 2 student)
It is not uncommon, in a minority of
students, to see a dislocation between
writing-for-the-course and “real” personal
writing:
Before uni, I wrote a lot on my own.
The workload quickly took that away
from me, and now, over two years
later, I’ve lost a lot of confidence in
my prose work, and a lot of, shall
I say, raw, unmanaged talent.
(Year 3 student)
“Confidence” crops up again and again
– often as something that Creative Writing
courses give to students, but equally as
something that students lack, both in
themselves and in Creative Writing as a
degree course:
I would have to agree that people
seem to almost look down on Creative
Writing – I know people who call it the
‘Mickey Mouse’ part of my degree.
(Year 2 student)
I think the moment I had to produce a
piece of creative work for a workshop
I knew I wasn’t a writer, especially if
my work was the last to be looked at,
because I just felt out of my league.
I feel that I write just enough to pass
the course and for that reason alone.
(Year 3 student)
It is remarkable how many students within
any given group think of themselves as
“the worst writer” – perhaps a quarter or
a third. And it would surely be absurd to
expect students not to experience some
sense of competition in the workshop:
I’m not keen on reading out my work
… actually I despise reading out my
work in fear of being criticised as,
generally, I feel that it’s not as good as
others in the class.
(Year 2 student)
There’s always someone in the class
who I hate and whose writing I
hate, there’s also always a rival who
I respect and fight with to find out
who’s best and then there’s a bunch of
people I don’t really give a shit about.
(Year 3 student)
I used to write all the time before I
came to university, and never tried
very hard because it was just for fun.
Here, I have to try really hard every
week, and it takes up so much of
my time. But it’s all in a quest to not
being the worst writer.
(Year 3 student)
It does seem somewhat strange that
we, as writers or experts of literature,
whose business involves the intricacies
and complexities of human relationships,
perhaps subscribe (on the surface at least)
to a rather simple model of workshop
interaction, based on equality, giving of
constructive feedback, taking of same in
good measure and co-operation towards
mutual improvement. Not all students see
things quite that way, nor have unqualified
faith in their tutorial input:
I am less confident with my writing
now, as tutor feedback has proved
detrimental to my progression. I
find the writing modules slow and
frustrating. I thought I would be a
good writer one day, now I just think
I will finish my degree bitter and
slightly twisted.
Having one tutor praise your work
and then another almost failing you
when marking it, suggests to me
that it isn’t what your write but who
you are writing for. I will continue
to write but for me only, and I feel a
completely new career path will have
to be chosen. I haven’t given up
hope though.
(Year 3 student)
My preliminary conclusions and
suggestions are as follows:
• to make sure that from their first
workshop or lecture (before if possible)
our students are aware of the way our
courses work, what they will be asked to
do and why. (I will also try to make sure
our staff are aware of these things)
• to make students aware of the purpose
of individual exercises and workshop
activities, both in terms of their writing,
and of “transferability”, both to other
writing genres and activities outside of
writing
• to make students aware of the changing
demands of our courses as they move
through the levels, and the progression
from directed to self-directed work, and
from private experiment to public display
• to be aware of the pervasive lack of
confidence among a sizeable minority
of students in almost every workshop
group, and work to build confidence in
each individual
• to be aware of the “competitive”
element that students’ private self-
evaluation entails
• to be aware of (and respect) the range
of motivation underlying students’
decisions to do Creative Writing
Postscript
Finally, I need to stress something:
these students’ contributions, written in
haste, spontaneously, without warning,
planning, or the opportunity to edit,
are overwhelmingly articulate, clear and
persuasive. I’ll leave the last word to this
third-year student, whose eloquence and
ability to draw the reader into their story
for me belie the surface negativity:
This exercise sums up my feelings
about the course. I sit and think for a
while about what I should write, and
when I put pen to paper it confirms to
me that I am no writer. If the truth be
known, I started the course as a bet
and to reduce my workload.
Our students do learn from our courses:
for me the next step is to make sure
we make them aware of what they’re
learning, and what use it will be to them,
and alongside this to work towards a
consensus concerning the nature of the
subject of Creative Writing in higher
education, including (and especially) a
definition of research.
these students’ contributions, written in haste,
spontaneously, without warning, planning, or
the opportunity to edit, are overwhelmingly
articulate, clear and persuasive.
Investigating Creative Writing: student perspectives
17. Newsletter 14 April 2008 15
At last …
a resource for teaching Creative Writing in
higher education created by creative writers.
This developing online resource will include: peer-reviewed scholarly articles, book reviews, practitioner
interviews, a discussion forum and helpful links to other sites, online articles and other resources to
help colleagues to reflect on their own teaching practice. The resource aims to be particularly relevant
to lecturers new to the field and students taking modules on Teaching Creative Writing. It will also be
invaluable to those who teach modules related to the pedagogy of writing.
We need your help. Let’s share our views and our knowledge on how, why and what we teach, when we
teach Creative Writing …
In the first instance, we invite scholarly articles which consider the following topics.
• Are there theories of Creative Writing? If so, what are they?
• What constitutes knowledge and research in Creative Writing?
• Why do we teach the way we do?
• What skills do we teach our students?
• Creative Writing & Pedagogic Research: how do they fit together?
Join the debate!
First deadline: 31 August 2008, with rolling deadlines thereafter.
Send articles and all enquiries by e-mail to
Dr Nigel McLoughlin
nmcloughlin@glos.ac.uk
Principal Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Gloucestershire English Subject Centre Project Holder
Vice-Chair, National Association of Writers in Education Committee Member, NAWE Creative Writing in
Higher Education Network
For further info www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/resources/creative/index.php
Creative Writing: Teaching, Theory & Practice
Newsletter 14
18. 16 Newsletter 14 April 2008
Books Were
My Liberation:
an interview with Alan Rice
Over the winter, Nicole King met with Alan Rice,
a scholar of the Black Atlantic who teaches English
and American Studies. He spoke of the rewards of
interdisciplinary teaching and of taking his subject
expertise, as well as his students, outside the classroom.
‘To shoot hard labour’ is an Antiguan
colloquialism that means to work hard,
very hard. It came to mind when I met
up with Alan Rice last December, in
Lancaster. Rice is the sort of lecturer we
all wish we had or perhaps strive to be: he
is immediately warm, stridently positive
about his subject(s) and (a very few minutes
will evidence) an intensely serious scholar
– the type around whom you immediately,
willingly, raise your game. Instead of just
the interview, he invited me up to Lancaster
to spend the day, have lunch, and do a
specialised tour of Lancaster; indeed he
does not do half measures. He also, by
stealth and by proclamation, reminds one
of the privileges and pleasures of being a
university lecturer.
Rice is Reader in American Cultural Studies
and English at the University of Central
Lancaster, where he has worked since
1995. He did his undergraduate work
at the University of Edinburgh, his MA
at Bowling Green State University and
earned his PhD at Keele University in 1997.
He is the author of Radical Narratives
of the Black Atlantic (Continuum, 2003)
and co-editor (with Martin Crawford) of
Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and
Transatlantic Reform (University of Georgia
Press, 1999). As these titles suggest, Rice
contributes to many subject areas, but,
more than anything, he sees himself as
an American Studies scholar and teacher.
Always a ‘really interdisciplinary animal’ his
undergraduate studies at the University
of Edinburgh helped him to understand
his passion for American Studies per se:
‘The most interesting people teaching
at Edinburgh,’ Rice told me, ‘were either
doing drama or American Literature
or History.’ From the beginning of our
interview to the end, Rice gave a collective
narrative: continuously citing the work and
mentorship of others in telling the story
of his own development. At Edinburgh,
‘there were these giants of American
history – Owen Dudley Edwards, Rhodri
Jeffrey-Jones and Sam Shepperson,’
whilst in literature, ‘Colin Nicholson and
Randall Stevenson managed to convince
me that English wasn’t all bad.’ These men
and women, such as Faith Pullin, inspired
Rice, who decided then and there that he
wanted to be a university teacher. With
only a ‘very moderate 2:1’, however, it was
an arduous process to get funded for a
PhD, and eventually required a detour
to the US.
In what he described as his ‘hiatus period’,
Rice doggedly, but unsuccessfully, pursued
postgraduate bursaries. To get by he
worked a variety of jobs, usually more
than one at time: ‘I worked as a home
help, worked cleaning cafes and worked
in the afternoons at the National Library
of Scotland.’ The idea was, he explained,
‘to keep my eye in research, mainly about
jazz music and politics … I eventually
got published in the Edinburgh Review
but still couldn’t ever get funding to do
a PhD’ It was at this early moment in the
interview that I thought of that Antiguan
phrase. For in addition to working for
wages, and doing research on the side,
Alan also became involved in local and
community politics. Friends thought he
was punishing himself, and after two
years of unsuccessful funding applications
they tried to convince him to go for
something else. ‘I was like Sisyphus; I was
just going to carry on pushing that rock
up that mountain till I got there.’ On
the recommendation of Mary Ellison, the
professor he hoped to work with at Keele,
he was offered a job as a graduate teaching
assistant at Bowling Green State University.
Although it was a long way to go, Rice
nevertheless reasoned that it was perhaps
the only way to get started towards the
PhD, and he was proven right: he did a
two-year MA in American Cultural Studies
in just one year while teaching six hours of
English Composition ‘to farmers’ sons and
daughters – totally unreconstructed kind
of Midwesterners – it was very, very busy, it
was very strange, but I loved it.’ Again, the
phrase ‘to shoot hard labour’ came to my
mind. Armed with excellent grades for his
MA, he applied for the Keele scholarship
a third time, got it and went on to write a
dissertation on the jazz aesthetic in Toni
Morrison’s novels, while teaching American
Studies to undergraduates. ‘It was a
wonderful American Studies department
with brilliant, collegial teachers like Richard
Godden, Mary Ellison and, the late – and
much lamented – Charles Swan, and very
interdisciplinary – very much jazz and
music and literature and history, all kind of
feeding off of one another.’
Books Were My Liberation: an interview with Alan Rice
20. 18 Newsletter 14 April 2008
else does it, which is, here are the three
main points, here are the other three
main points – that’s really constrictive,
because actually there never are three
main points, and that’s my problem with
it really – it makes (the lecture) almost a
consumerist thing.’
The interdisciplinary way
It was clear to me that Rice’s commitment
to interdisciplinarity stretched across
the various facets of his professional
identity. So I asked him to talk about
the practicalities and consequences of
doing interdisciplinary work and training
undergraduates in English and American
Studies. His answer, a cross between a
lecture and a sermon, was intense and
absorbing. I gained a visceral sense of
what a student in one of Rice’s no-lecture-
classes might experience.
‘When I was an undergraduate in English
literature and history, I’d get the essays
back from the English literature people
saying “there’s not nearly enough practical
criticism here – context is great but you’re
over-selling your context.” And when
I’d get my essays back from historians it
would be ‘you’re taking far too long over
this source, this document, there’s context
there but there’s not enough context.’
And I was determined that when I was an
academic that I would never say, never say,
those things to students. What they should
have been saying to me was something
along the lines of “actually, this is the way
criticism should be, but if you want to
do something more to it you could bring
this in or that in.” So what my practice
is about, for instance, showing people a
paragraph out of Beloved and then doing
almost a mind map but not literally, I don’t
do it of that paragraph. So, for instance,
you’ve got that paragraph in Beloved
which is about cannibalism.
You know the one where Stamp Paid is
looking at the window and he says “it’s not
what racism has done to black people, it’s
what racism has done to white people.”
Where they’re eating it up, they’re eating
themselves up – it’s self cannibalism and its
cannibalism and you know it’s a paragraph!
And what I suppose I do is to say, in this
paragraph we could look at Freud here, we
could look at ideas to do with psychology
and the whole psychology around
cannibalism, but you could also look at
the history of the cannibal in postcolonial
discourse and the way in which this comes
into it. Then there’s the whole thing about
American history, and the way in which
the black body which has been eaten in
order for the white culture to live and
sustain itself, and then you would almost
say, well let’s trace that in this novel. At
one point in Beloved there’s the line that
says the Ku Klux Klan are actually like
cannibals – that image goes through the
text and each time it has a different kind
of contextualisation which leads you to
somewhere else. So you can’t hold this
text in to a practical criticism – you don’t
want to hold it in to a practical criticism,
you don’t even want to hold it in to a
contextualisation around history, you want
to have contextualisation around so many
different things. Then you might want
to say, well actually, let’s have a look at
some of these pictures of lynchings, to talk
about the way in which people took away
trophies from those lynchings, cut-up the
bodies. And that’s what Morrison’s talking
about again and again. She’s not just
talking about slavery; she’s talking about
post-slavery as well. She’s not just talking
about Reconstruction, she’s not talking
about the 1950s, even. What she’s talking
about is the way in which the history of
racism has impacted us all. So I suppose
what my teaching practice is about is, as
an English teacher, and I do teach English
students as well as American Studies
students, I don’t change one iota when I
teach English students. Not one iota do
I go back to those days when I was – at
times – poorly taught at Edinburgh, being
forced into a very narrow view of textual
criticism as the be all and end all.’
Escaping the ivory tower
Although it is difficult to fathom where he
finds the time, a significant aspect of Rice’s
life as an academic is the work he currently
does outside of the classroom and the
university. A key point however, and a
lesson to beginning lecturers especially, is
that each of Rice’s activities link up – they
feed in and feed back into his courses and
books, while what he teaches and writes
gives him credibility as well as expertise
in new environments beyond the walls
of HEIs. His passion for this aspect of his
working life also has deep roots dating
back to those days in Edinburgh.
‘Even before I got into academia, I found
people who were working on ideas in a
broad sense. We had a reading group,
mainly people who were on welfare, on
the dole in Scotland, and we were all
reading Derrida (this is the mid 1980s).
When I was an undergraduate ... I’d get the
essays back from the English literature people
saying ‘there’s not nearly enough practical
criticism here’
Books Were My Liberation: an interview with Alan Rice
22. 20 Newsletter 14 April 2008
bring a whole new community into that
work. So it’s teaching in a different kind
of way.
The university gave me full support to
do this, even though it wasn’t in Preston,
which I thought was quite good, because
they/we were saying this is about
community in the larger sense. But also
it fed into my teaching as I started doing
weeks, then developed a whole module,
called ‘Monuments and Memorials of the
Black Atlantic’, for our MA course. I think
it is a great shame there are not more
public intellectuals among academics …
It’s a disgrace that the RAE culture means
we are not being public intellectuals,
both in the sense of having the time to
be involved in community actions which
feed into your academic work and having
the time and energy to do curatorial work
… Far too many academics are content
to talk only to one another, and I am not
content to do that.’
Endings
Rice and I had started our day together,
disregarding wind and rain, with a tour
of places of interest and significance
regarding Lancaster and the Atlantic slave
trade. I was shown a private residence
which is still home to the descendants
of a major slave trader, the magisterial
Lancaster Priory and parish church where,
between the pews and stained glass
windows, prominent city fathers have
towering plaques detailing their good
works, while history records their extensive
dealings in human flesh and the profits
they reaped from it. Most movingly
perhaps, was when I saw the memorial to
victims of the slave trade – the only one
in Great Britain at present – the physical
manifestation of the STAMP project. We
ended the day in Rice’s home having
tea with his partner, perusing his library
and welcoming his young daughters as
they arrived home from school. I have
written elsewhere that we don’t often
have the opportunity to visit each other’s
classrooms, but my day with Alan Rice
gave me that and more – I glimpsed a bit
of the complex process of how we juggle
our identities as teachers, researchers,
members of families and tribes. It was
quite a day. My last question to Rice
was what he’d be doing if he weren’t an
academic (and a curator and a community
activist). He replied ‘I wouldn’t want to do
anything else. It’s about the teaching and
it’s about the research and it’s about the
project thing. No, I don’t think I could do
anything else, it’s in my DNA.’
Save the Date:
The sixth Annual English Subject Centre
New Lecturers
Conference
21–23 November 2008
Registration will open soon on our website
www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Books Were My Liberation: an interview with Alan Rice
23. Newsletter 14 April 2008 21
This English Subject Centre round table in September
2007 – instigated by Mark Rawlinson of the University
of Leicester – was a response to the alarm expressed
by many colleagues in the higher education
community over the perception that the close reading
skills of undergraduates are in decline. Alan Brown
and Adam Piette provided short reflective talks, and
the day, which ended with a session in which three
small groups each designed a ‘close reading’ module,
included an intensive period of group work on specific
poems (Kipling’s ‘The Dykes’ and Simon Armitage’s
‘Not the Furniture Game’). The opportunity to spend
time with colleagues practising the skills which
were under discussion was a particularly warmly
welcomed aspect of a rich and productive event.
This part of the day was an opportunity not just to
do some close reading but also to reflect upon what
that process involved – what presuppositions and
knowledge (many of them not necessarily shared with
our students) we’d brought to the task. It was also a
salutary way of experiencing at first hand the anxieties
and excitement of a seminar/tutorial from a student’s
point of view.
An underlying principle concerned the indivisibility of
subject knowledge and pedagogic practice: that in
sharing with students our own working practices and
intellectual strategies we take part in the perpetual
actualisation of the subject1
. Indeed, ‘close reading’
has been predicated on a long-standing – though
now perhaps residual – insistence within English
literary studies that there is no gulf fixed between
the specialist knowledge of academics and what
students can work out from a text, given confidence,
argumentative stamina and a modicum of knowledge.
And yet, as Alan Brown forcibly reminded us, there
has, all the time, (and not least since practical criticism
gave way to critical practice in the 1980s) been a
paradox submerged beneath the apparent democracy
of the text-focused classroom: that ‘English’ did in
fact have designs on the formation
of the subjectivity of its students, and that its teachers
and examiners did possess a hidden knowledge or
‘true judgment’ to which students could only aspire to
conform2
. Many forms of close reading therefore lead
to students attempting to guess what is in the tutor’s
mind, or, in some cases, adopting a stance designed
to demonstrate their superiority to fellow students.
The situation at A Level – and a lot of the time in
universities – might be described as a kind of ‘cultural
obedience’: inviting the production, in response to
the actual or implied question ‘what did you think of
this, then?’ of formulaic appreciations of texts which
students had no intention of reading in their own time.
Participants looked back frequently to the origins of
close reading in the work of I A Richards and the new
critics, highlighting the embeddedness of the original
practice of close reading in teaching. Alan Brown
stressed the fact that Richards was interested less in
the establishment of criteria for ‘good’ interpretation
than in the close reading of poetry as a mechanism
for the ordering of the mind. Adam Piette looked at
the legacy of the American New Critics, whose work
implied a hierarchy of readers ranging from less to
more skilled, with themselves – an elite of poet-critics
– at the top.
Whether or not close reading should involve
judgments of literary quality was touched upon briefly.
One participant described an exercise in which he and
his students analysed and compared ‘good’ and ‘bad’
poems – and uncovered a striking unanimity about
literary value. Other participants tended to want to
distance the critical act from value judgments, in a
number of different ways – indeed, it was argued that
the encounter with a text in a seminar should engage
with the text beyond the issue of liking or disliking.
Another colleague distinguished between different
types of value judgment, saying that while she found
asking students ‘Do you like it?’ in a seminar was
Up Close:
a round table on close reading
Is close reading a dying art? In this extended event report, Ben Knights
and Jonathan Gibson highlight current thinking about one of the
fundamental processes of teaching and learning in our subject areas.
Ben Knights is the
Director of the English
Subject Centre. His
most recent book is
Masculinities in Text
and Teaching (Palgrave
2007).
Jonathan Gibson
is an Academic
Co-ordinator at the
English Subject Centre
and also writes and
researches in the areas
of Early Modern and
Renaissance Studies.
1 See, for example, Susan Bruce, Ken Jones and Monica McLean, ‘Some Notes on a Project: Democracy and Authority
in the Production of a Discipline’, Pedagogy 7.3 (2007) 481–500.
2 Cf. Alan Brown, ‘On the Subject of Practical Criticism’, Cambridge Quarterly 28 (1999), 293–00327; Robert Scholes,
The Crafty Reader (Yale UP, 2001).
Up Close: a round table on close reading
