Studying English Literature and Language, 3rd Edition

@ PART TWO

CRITICAL AND CREATIVE STRATEGIES FOR ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION                     

This carries through the commitment to systematic and sensitive textual analysis and to forms of interpretation that are as critical as they are creative.  There are further examples of the strategies for initial analysis and full interpretation in action, along with an alternative framework organised by linguistic level. This part of the website is also rich in examples of and further ideas for longer projects. These are the kinds of thing that might be undertaken for independent study, dissertation or major project. Many of them cut across ‘English’ as language and/or literature and/or culture, and some of them push at the edges of what the subject might yet be. All of them can be inflected in variously critical and creative, historical and contemporary ways. There is an extra section devoted to kinds of re-reading and re-writing.  The, emphasis, as always, is on developing your own responses and lines of enquiry in relation to those of others.

@ 2 contains the following:     

@ 2.1 INITIAL ANALYSIS, FURTHER EXAMPLES

Prose fiction – worked example

Critical essay – worked example

@ 2.2 FULL INTERPRETATION CONTINUED

Poetry + +

Play script + +

Critical essay + +

@ 2.3. LONGER PROJECTS: FURTHER SAMPLE STUDY PATTERNS  

Adaptation and continuation

Children’s literature and childhood revisited

Language, media, power and pleasure

English at the edge: further ‘limit’ cases

translating—transforming

games—playing

life—work 

@ 2.4  FURTHER RE-READINGS AND RE-WRITINGS

Emily Dickinson ‘I’m Nobody’

Nonsense narrative: ‘There was an old man . . .’

Re-Joyce!

Patient (and not-so) Griselda: Chaucer’s ‘The Clerk’s Tale’

Whose Dora? Freud’s ‘Fragment of an Analysis . . . of Hysteria’

@ 2.1 INITIAL ANALYSIS, FURTHER EXAMPLES

This gives more examples of how the opening moves (Notice—Pattern—Contrast—Feeling) and the core questions (Who, What, When, Where, How, Why and What if?) can be applied to texts in very different genres. The texts featured are the opening of Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights (in 2.2.3) and Peter Childs’s critical essay on it (in 2.2.5):   

2.1.4    Prose Fiction – Worked Example

2.1.5    Critical Essay – Worked Example

@ 2.1.4  Prose fiction – worked example 

Here is a sample initial analysis of a piece of prose fiction. This uses the ‘opening moves’ and ‘core questions’ introduced in 2.1 and there applied to a poem by Blake. Here the prose passage featured is the opening of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (supplied in 2.2.2). Read it and come to your own provisional conclusions before reading on.  

Opening moves tend to notice the formality of the writing (especially Lockwood’s manner), the sharpness of Heathcliff, the overtly ‘wild’ and explicitly  pointed scene-setting of ‘Wuthering Heights’, and the (to us) relatively emphatic punctuation, especially the frequent exclamation  marks and em-dashes (! and —). There is a pervasive patterning of description-reflection and speech-response signalled by the indentation; and the contrasts are dramatic and obvious between Lockwood’s verbose and citified courtesy and Heathcliff’s strained and curt country ways. Feelings, meanwhile, may be divided and even conflicting: between sympathy for the narrator and antipathy towards Heathcliff, vice versa, or a sliding combination of both. The servant Joseph, too, may also be in the picture somewhere as an object of instant dislike or a subject of foreboding.  

Core questions tend to elicit preliminary responses along the following lines:

What? In very brief, it’s about a visitor’s first impressions of the country-side. More fully, it’s about Mr Lockwood looking for a ‘misanthropist’s heaven’ and getting more than he bargained for. Meanwhile, what modern readers might want to know more about could range from the meaning of words to placing in the world: what precisely does or did ‘misanthropist’ mean? and is this a faithful image of ‘Brontë country’? Though most people would have no trouble as categorising – and perhaps recognising – this as ‘classic nineteenth-century novel’ or, say, ‘rural melodrama in the making’.

Who?   Lockwood as first-person narrator and Heathcliff and Joseph as figures that he observes within the novel; Emily Brontë and pseudonym ‘Ellis Bell’ outside it as authors, addressing novel-readers then and us now.

Where? Fictionally, between Wuthering Heights and the Grange in some ‘beautiful’ yet wild and windy landscape. Factually, though also partly in imagination, between the village of Haworth in the North of England and wherever we as modern readers reckon we are now or would care to say we ‘come from’.

When? Somewhere between the mid-nineteenth century and, say, the early twenty-first. Though a few years can make a big difference either way: between 1847, the year of the first edition when Emily was still alive and 1850, the year of the second when she was not and sister Charlotte added a Preface and Biography; between when I as present author am alive and writing (2011) and you as present reader are alive and reading (    ) but I may not be.

How? In many ways. Through various strategies (narrative, dramatic, reflective and descriptive) and in various styles (pervasively formal and literary but also, on occasion, spikily speech-like). The delight and the devil will be in the detail.

Why? Why written? Presumably for relief and release, of pleasure and pain, to express oneself and engage others. Why read? Perhaps for those things too, but in a different direction and order: to be moved and attracted, diverted and distracted. (All the usual reasons – but in singular ways and to very various ends.)

What if . . . ?  You have or have not already read this novel? Or seen the film? Or heard Kate Bush’s song? What if you live in the country or the city? Come from the North of England – Yorkshire even – or in some other county or country entirely?  are reading this because you have an urgent essay or analysis to write (perhaps on some other novel)? or are thinking it would be interesting to respond to Emily Brontë and her book – perhaps all of it, not just the opening – in and on some other terms entirely?

@ 2.1.5 Critical essay – worked example

Here is the framework for initial analysis presented in 2.1 applied to a critical essay. The essay featured is that by Peter Childs from his Reading Fiction: Opening the Text (supplied in 2.2.5).  Again, read it and come to your own provisional conclusions before reading on.  

Opening moves in an initial reading of this essay tend to notice that it is deliberate and clear in explaining what is being done, for all the complexity of ideas and textual detail. There is a general pattern of idea + example + analysis and, while contrast is itself obviously the a premise of the whole approach, this is diversified and deepened by relating it to issues of names and naming, and heaven and hell. The feeling of the essay is one of attentive order while also being sensitive to nuance and alert to the possibility of sudden passion. The atmosphere is analytical and theoretical, but also emotionally engaged and engaging.  

Core questions help draw up a list, an inventory, of the raw elements this essay is made up of:

What? In very brief, roughly, it’s about the meaning of names in Wuthering Heights. More fully and precisely, it’s about the significance of the naming of the author of Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë (pseudonym ‘Ellis Bell’) and of its two main protagonists: ‘Catherine Earnshaw/Linton’ and the orphan ‘Heathcliff’. What many people want to know more about is the theory of ‘dialogism’ and the exact meaning of ‘androgynous’.  What kind of text?  A critical essay, for sure, but also one that shows how it is put together and seeks to teach as well as tell.

Who? At the textual core and critical centre of attention – Emily Brontë as author and her fictional characters Cathy and Heathcliff. But the theorist Bakhtin is around there too and, slightly further out, the critic and novelist Lodge, who summarises his ideas. Childs as writer and each of us as readers are in the picture too – though whether reckoned to be on the outer edges or at the critical core is an interesting point. (It depends who you see – and say and put – in the foreground or the background, and assume to be vaguely absent or absolutely pervasive.

When and Where?  (The same applies to these.) The ‘whens’ range from ‘1801’ to ‘1500’ in the novel, across the first dates of publication of the novel (1847, 1850), through 2001 and 2012 (the dates of publication of Childs’s book and the present one), and so to whatever date it is you are presently reading that within this about the other. The ‘wheres’ are equally various, and at exactly corresponding stages and levels: the North of England, factual and fictional (the latter including ‘Thrush cross Grange’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’); Gloucestershire and Oxford Brookes (universities of); wherever you are reading this ‘here and now’.

How? It’s all done with words, of course – Brontë’s, Childs’s, Bakhtin’s, Lodge’s, etc. The trick is to see the how they join up and may come apart: the particular synthesis they offer and analysis they need. That means also asking how your and my words (and worlds) may come into play with all of this.

Why? Because we are part of the problem as well as the answer. As were Brontë et al then in their own times and terms – and still are now in yours and mine. There are no snappy answers to all of this. But there are some more or less considered and informed suggestions – such as: because we are all more or less interested in why women and men react to one another and life and love and death as they/we do; because past imagined realities can sometimes seem more pressing and important than present lived realities – and even transform the latter; well, because . . .  And that naturally brings us, last but not least, to

What if? What if you have an essay to write now and you are reading this to see if it will help? What if it’s different from this one in specific text and topic (that’s almost inevitable) but perhaps similar to it in basic problems encountered and ways of dealing with them (that’s at least a possibility). What if essay-writing in fact has many common tried and tested as well as experimental structures and strategies – but each essay tends to look so different because it’s talking about a different text and topic. In short, what if you read and write on and see for yourself . . .   

@ 2.2 Full interpretation continued

This section both complements and supplements the analyses by level/stage and the critical and creative interpretations in Part Two of the book. The material is organised as follows: 

2.2.2 Poetry + +

2.2.2a.             Analysing Blake’s ‘London’ by levels/stages

2.2.2 b Critical—creative interpretation of Blake’s ‘London’ 

2.2.4 Play script + +

2.2.4 a. Analysing Wilde’s The Importance . . .  by    levels/stages

2.2.4 b. Critical-creative interpretation of The Importance . ..        

2.2.5 Critical essay + +

2.2.5 a Analysing Child’s essay by levels/stages

2.2.5 b. Critical-creative interpretation of Child’s essay

@ 2.2.2  Poetry + +

This gives a sample analysis and interpretation of William Blake’s ‘London’ (see 2.1.3)  using the framework for full interpretation introduced in 2.2. The analysis is done in the three levels/stages: Language—Text; Literature—Genre; Culture—Context. These come together in an overall Critical—Creative Interpretation. Try going through this analysis and putting together this interpretation for yourself before reading on.

(a)        Analysing Blake’s ‘London’ by levels/stages

(b)        Critical—creative interpretation of Blake’s ‘London’ 

2.2.1 (a) Analysing Blake’s ‘London’ by levels/stages

Language—Text  

‘London’ is a complete text in itself, as well as being one of a series called Songs of Innocence and Experience. Though called a ‘song’, and printed in black and white here, it was etched in black-brown (now orange-sepia) handwriting in the original and was flanked by hand-coloured illustrations for other poems. Its initial effect was therefore as much visual and tactile as verbal, though there is a lyrical, song-like quality that can be heard when the text is read out loud. The aesthetic effect can therefore be delightful, even while the purpose is evidently to provoke and shock, to make think and feel. This is a first-person account (monologue) in the present tense, so we have a strong and immediate sense of speaker as observer.

Most of the words are still common and familiar (‘street’, ‘flow’, ‘Man’, ‘voice’); only ‘charter’d’ and ‘ban’ may need explaining (and therefore annotating), while ‘Harlot’ and ‘blights’ are now simply archaic. The names (proper nouns) ‘London’ and ‘Thames’ give a sense of specific place, though the modern reader will also be aware that many other words (e.g. the common nouns ‘Man’ and ‘Infant’s’), are capitalized but would not be nowadays. Meanwhile, many of the common nouns are prefaced by adjectives that fill out how we are to view the particular place or person (‘charter’d street’, ‘blackning Church’, ‘hapless Soldier’, youthful Harlot’). Two of the phrases stand out as especially striking: ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ (l.8), which compresses mental and physical senses of constraint and is clinched by alliteration; and ‘Marriage hearse’ which telescopes together two states of life and death that are usually kept apart (and so is a kind of oxymoron). All the sentences declare or describe (state) and, though the punctuation varies, each verse offers a sketch made up of a few brief impressions. The text is held together (cohesion) by verbal repetition (‘charter’d’, ‘mark’ as verb and ‘marks’ as noun; ‘cry’, etc.) along with variations on similar structures (‘In every cry / voice /ban’, and the adjective + noun structure already mentioned). Another major unifying factor is the verse-form, which we pick up next.    

Literature—Genre

What is immediately recognisable about the text as literature is that it is in verse. This is visually obvious from the disposition of the lines on the page in blocks of four (quatrains) with regular spaces between, and orally and aurally obvious if you speak or hear the lines read out loud. To be precise, there are four quatrains in all, each with alternating rhyme (abab, cdcd, etc.; those in stanzas 2 and 4 share a rhyme); and every line carries four main stresses, so the whole thing has the feel of a popular lyric or ballad (hence ‘song of experience’). Such are the text’s formal properties as the literary mega-genre we call poetry.

In terms of its express substance and subject-matter, and its distinctive atmosphere and attitude, the genre of this text may be further identified as, say, ‘grotesque’ in general and ‘urban gothic’ in particular. For the poem confronts us with the disturbing side of ordinary life on the city streets: visible signs of human distress (‘Marks of weakness . . . woe’) and sounds of ordinary human suffering, despair and anger (‘cry of fear’, ‘sigh’, ‘curse’) against a backdrop of dismal religion and deadly privilege (‘blackning Church’, ‘blood down Palace Walls’). All this is viewed through the eyes and projected through the sensibility of a deeply concerned ‘I’ who ‘wander[s] thro’ each charter’d street’.

The literary traditions and conventions in play are various. On the one hand, looking back,  this poem recalls an ancient tradition of complaint about the desperation and desolation of city life, which is the usual obverse of a pastoral that celebrates simple country living (classical examples can be found in respectively, Juvenal’s Satires and Vergil’s Pastorals). On the other hand, looking forward, it anticipates the dark, dangerous and routinely depraved – as well as deprived – side of the modern urban under-class, which in turn are close cousins to the twilight demi-monde encountered by wanderers in and spectators of the modern metropolis (see 2.10). Examples from nineteenth-century writing, fictional and factual, range from the Londons of Dickens and Mayhew to Dostoyevsky’s ‘underground’ figures and Baudelaire’s flâneur. More particularly, as one of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, Blake’s ‘London’ is to be understood as uttered by ‘the voice of the Bard! / Who Present, Past and Future sees’ (see introductory note accompanying the poem). This is evidently a voice and a vision that is expressly prophetic as well as poetic. Generically, then, the kind of ‘vision’ in play has to be grasped in broadly moral and religious as well as specifically literary terms. It has to be seen in broadly social and specifically historical terms too. That is what we turn to next.

Culture—Context 

The insistence on London as a ‘charter’d’ place, governed by signed and sealed privileges for the few that marginalised or utterly excluded the majority of men and all women, sets the historical scene and social tone of the poem. Published in 1794 – nearly forty years before the 1832 Reform Act, which extended the vote to men who paid more than £10 a year in rents or rates in the boroughs (40 shillings in the counties) over a hundred and thirty before women got the same voting rights as men in 1928  – it speaks from and for a world in which the legal rights and employment opportunities of most city-dwellers were deeply constrained and highly vulnerable. So humanity in general (‘Man’) is here represented by ‘the Chimney-sweeper’s cry’, ‘the hapless Soldier’s sigh’, ‘the youthful Harlot’s curse’ and ‘the new-born Infant’s tear’: each of them a menial occupation or dependent state in its way, and all of them characterised in terms of a disembodied fragment of human suffering. In modern, specifically Marxist terms we might talk of the ‘Marks of weakness, marks of woe’ traced ‘in every face I meet’ as the physical signs of people’s universal alienation from one another and themselves; and the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ would stand for the internalised, habitual and virtually self-inflicted suffering that comes from accepting such constraints as the inevitable and inescapable order of things – what the Marxist social critic Gramsci calls hegemony (see 2.6).

It is in this overall cultural context of exclusion, isolation and dependency that one could dig deeper, look closer and draw attention to such specific social and historical allusions as: (i) the routine brutalising of child labour in ‘the Chimney-sweeper’s cry’ (children were used to go up the inside of chimneys); (ii) ‘the blackning Church’ (city churches dirty from coal-fires even before the Industrial revolution); (iii) ‘the hapless Soldier’s sigh’ (most soldiers were either conscripted or drawn from the ranks of the rural dispossessed or urban unemployed) and their life ‘Runs in blood down Palace walls’ because, at this time of Revolution in France, they were charged with defending or attacking the stately homes of aristocrats. The final, most pointed and poignant reference featured here is that to which the poem as a whole builds: from the first mention of ‘every Infant’s cry of fear’ in the second verse to the still-rhyming and disturbingly chiming near-repetition of it in ‘the youthful Harlot’s curse’ which ‘[b]lasts the new-born Infant’s tear’ in the last verse. The reference is to gonorrhea, the sexually transmitted disease that was the scourge not only of prostitute and prostitute-user alike but also of partners and babies born to them. In this respect ‘the Marriage Hearse’ that is blighted with ‘plagues’ is the marriage bed where the disease was further transmitted (into the heart and the hearth of that very respectability around which the whole social edifice was organised and supposed to aspire to) and so on to the baby born blind or dead as a result.

All these references are in a sense specific to Blake’s work, life and times ‘there and then’. But they also resonate with issues current in our own lives and times, ‘here and now’.  An underclass of the urban poor, life that can feel alienating and meaningless, child labour, prostitution, fear of sexually transmitted disease, the legally protected power of a wealthy minority, the routine misery of an excluded majority, soldiers dieing for dubious causes  . . . the list goes on. Some of these may ring loud bells close to home: you may know of an area of a city, certain ‘midnight streets’, where such things might feel acute, risky, dangerous. Others may feel more remote but still acute: media images of slum dwelling and distress in the ‘Developing World’. It all depends who and where you are. But these too are relevant contexts for your reading of the poem, even though they could hardly be known by Blake at the time of writing – for all his prophetic vocation.  

2.2.1 (b)   Critical—creative interpretation of Blake’s ‘London’ 

Here we extend all the above analyses, insights and information into some sustained critical and creative responses to Blake’s ‘London’.  For convenience, these are distinguished as critical interpretation leading towards an essay or analytical commentary and creative interpretation leading to a rewrite or performance. But, as usual, these processes and activities are best seen as naturally complementary rather than mutually exclusive. The one may support or turn into the other, and the dynamic of that relationship is recognised here. 

A critical interpretation of Blake’s ‘London’ (taking the form of an essay or analytical commentary) might begin with the pervasive contrast between the light, lyrical form of the poem and its stark and distressing content: sounds that chime and sense that jars. In fact, distress and disease (including ‘dis-ease’, lack of ease) and a sense of isolation and fragmentation are key issues to build around. Everywhere in the poem we see and hear, not whole and healthy humanity  but parts of people in anguish, pain, fear and anger (‘in every face . . . Marks of weakness, marks of woe’, ‘cry of fear’, ‘ban’, ‘Soldier’s sigh’, ‘Harlot’s curse’, ‘Infant’s tear’). These are, so to speak, the ‘street cries’ of London in a mean and pained rather than cheerily commercial vein. Meanwhile, the fact that the distress is seemingly universal (‘In every cry of every Man’; ‘every’ is used six times) only serves to underscore the fact that this is the suffering yet far from silent majority: the menial, dependent and vulnerable here giving vent to their pains. Conversely, by strong implication, there are others, a powerful minority, who are physically absent yet whose influence pervades the whole scene: those protected by charters, those whose chimneys are swept, those who can afford to use prostitutes. In this respect, there is a deep social divide at the heart of the poem’s political vision; and though it may not be expressly ‘class-conscious’ in a later nineteenth-century sense, it is latently, grumblingly ‘revolutionary’ in a late eighteenth-century sense. It burns with the barely extinguished rage of the French Revolution and hints darkly at the palpable, painful conditions for just such another revolution on the other side of the Channel, at the heart of the British metropolis. Another fifty-odd years would see such feelings concentrated in the rallying call of The Communist Manifesto (1848): ‘Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains’. 

Taking another line, we may expressly recall that the ‘I’ of the poem, as introduced at the beginning of Songs of Experience, is ‘the Bard / Who all things Past, Present & Future sees’.  This is therefore a prophetic vision of things as they will or might be as well as a poetic version of things as they are and seem. It carries a sense of threat as well as warning. Seeing and saying the Bard’s future – including our present – this way, the modern reader may well be led to reflect upon the relation between Blake’s moment ‘there and then’ and our own various moments ‘here and now’. This relation may be grasped in terms of continuities as well as distinctions. Depending upon one’s particular social situations and political orientations, this could be a good point to stress the continuing relevance of a more or less local and immediate vision of urban decay and deprivation (somewhere you personally know or know of); or, alternatively, to broaden focus and extend the frame to the global imbalances and iniquities of ‘rich’, ‘developed’ nations and ‘poor’, ‘under-developed / developing’ nations (rich ‘Northern’ and poor ‘Southern hemispheres’, for instance). Either way, locally or globally, the distressing spectacles and haunting spectres of the displaced and dispossessed, child labour, prostitution and death by war and disease are still not far to seek nowadays – and if not with one’s own eyes and ears then with those of the modern multi-media, news and documentary, in film fiction as well as photojournalistic fact. In short, there is a counterpart to Blake’s ‘London’ near you. (Such perspectives could be projected along a variety of lines – New Historicist, Cultural Materialist, Sexual Political, Postmodern and Postcolonial – depending on the  particular materials identified and arguments made; see 2.6—9.) 

What’s more, to press that vision further in Blake’s own times and terms, this is a good point at which to turn to other poems on similar themes in Songs of Innocence and of Experience: to ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ with its disquietingly ‘innocent’ celebration of a child chimney-sweep’s death; to ‘The Chapel of Love’ which is anything but, with ‘“Thou shalt not” writ over the door’ and the constraining effect of ‘binding with briars  my joys and desires’ recalling the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’; and so on to ‘The Sick Rose’ where, like the venereal disease that ‘blights with plagues the Marriage Hearse’, its sickness is caused – and life destroyed – by the ‘dark secret love’ of an ‘invisible worm that flies in the night’. All these and other poems from the Songs – as well as larger narrative and dramatic poems such as Blake’s America: A Prophecy and Vision of the Daughters of Albion – might be invoked to extend and deepen the sense of  Blake’s revolutionary politics, sexual as well as social. They might also be used as case studies to focus the very different ways in which Blake’s radical vision has been ignored, marginalised, slyly patronised or rapturously celebrated before and since the late 1960s, when he and his illustrations were introduced to a modern mass readership courtesy of contemporary print technology as well as changes in aesthetic sensibility and political sympathy.  This is also, therefore, a point at which a substantially critical interpretation might turn into – or grow out of – an expressly creative one.

A creative interpretation (realised as a performance, adaptation or rewriting) could also begin with any aspect of Blake’s ‘London’ that sticks in the mind (on the lips, in the throat): ‘the charter’d Thames’, ‘mind-forg’d manacles’  ‘the youthful Harlot’s curse’, ‘the Marriage Hearse’. All offer ways into the who, what, when, where, how and why of the poem. So do the many texts and contexts, products and processes, that the poem has been realised through and implicated in. Each is accessible as sight or sound, and perhaps touch, taste and smell too. Most immediately ‘there and then’, is Blake’s poem as initially etched, ornamented and pressed by hand on paper in various versions, each of them unique (see Blake ed. Keynes 1974 and the Blake Archive at http://www.blakearchive.org/blake). Most immediately ‘here and now’, there is the poem as electro-reprographically mass-produced in black on white in the present book, either with or without notes and line-references but in any case  unadorned. More remotely, in the mind’s ear, there are the ‘cries’ (and ‘sigh’ and ‘curse’) of Blake’s ‘London’, made more audible if read out loud; though these are voices that in any case call out to be filled with the cries and sighs and curses of a city street or other place you know. But wherever you begin in imagination or go by way of research, the first and most crucial thing is to get to know the poem well, inside-out and outside-in. ‘Ex- the text’: express, experience, experiment, explore, ex/change its words and worlds  – for yourself and with others. For only you can:

• Try ‘London’ out loud, on tongue and ear. It is a ‘song’ so get the feel of its chiming sounds and jarring sense.
• type or write it out a few times – differently. Gauge for yourself how it is punctuated and laid-out. Notice, for instance, where you might expect a comma (end of l.2); the use of the colon (l.8); and the lack of a full stop before the final verse break (l.12). Why? Then experiment with alternative lay-outs and fonts for playful and pedagogic reasons (cf. above p. 000).     
• learn it by heart (lung, stomach) walking around,  sitting or lying down, ‘wandering streets’ – ‘charter’d’ and otherwise.
• whisper it silently to yourself in your mind’s ear, in odd moments, before going to sleep, on waking. See if you’ll dream about it. It is a vision.
• pick up words and phrases that have stuck with you, perhaps ‘mind-forg’d manacles’, ‘Marriage Hearse’, ‘mark . . . marks . . . marks’; ‘cry . . . cry’; ‘tear . . . tear . . .’.  Turn them over. Grow voices, situations, other words and worlds from them. See where they take you – what you make of them.
• picture it as it might have been done by Blake then (it’s a poem that doesn’t have an illustration of its own) or how it might be done by someone else now (a painter, photographer, film-maker). Yourself with a camera-phone and recorder perhaps. 
• smell it, taste it, feel it . . .! How might Blake’s late eighteenth-century ‘London’ smell? And what of the touch of soot, walls, flesh . . .?  
• adapt it into modern street-art (for midday as well as ‘midnight streets’) or a text-message (sent at midnight or while wandering) – as well as of course prose or play or other poem – documentary realist, phantasmagoric symbolist . . . 
• adopt it as a cry (sigh, curse) from, for, about or against your own world. What are the ‘Marks of weakness, marks of woe’ – or strength or joy – in the faces you meet every day or night?  
• Make it ‘Yourspace’, whether an actual place you know or virtual space you grow. Model it closely or freely on Blake’s ‘London’, so as to make ‘Londons’ otherwise, ‘Other-than-Londons’ – yet still influenced and perhaps inspired by his version-vision. 

In all these ways, and others barely touched upon, critical and creative interpretations intertwine and interanimate one another. Critically close reading can take the form of creatively intensive speaking and listening, and critically wide reading can inform extensive writing and rewriting. (For further ways of opening up and running back lines of enquiry, see 4.3.) 

A critical commentary accompanying any of the above activities would therefore need to do two things: (i) compare Blake’s ‘London’ as you found it with whatever you made of it; (ii) reflect on the processes (knowledges, technologies, modes and moments of communication, composition, revision, reproduction) that went into the one and came out of the other. Going through the steps of the expressly critical interpretation above will help in this. Critical and creative approaches can feed – need not fight – one another.  

Overall, then, in theory, it is possible to think of Blake’s and other people’s ‘Londons’ (your own included) as points of departure and arrival on an openly ongoing continuum: a vastly mobile and multiple mass-mess of critical-creative-(re-)readings-(re-)writings-in-contexts-across-intertexts . . . In practice, however, just when and where you cut into and out of this process, precisely how and why, is what makes the crucial difference. For while the play of differences and references is potentially infinite, whatever you come up with in the end will always be both single and singular, and hopefully informed by your own considered and informed preferences.

‘Infinity in the palm of your hand’

Around the same time he was composing ‘London’, Blake also wrote and etched The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In this (on plate 14) he famously proclaimed ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite’. Aldous Huxley was moved to write a book of that title The Doors of Perception (1954) and that in turn prompted the name ‘The Doors’ for the late 1960s rock band that included Jim Morrison. In a more homely yet still sublime vein, Blake also enjoined people, most immediately his readers, ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour’ (‘Auguries of Innocence’, from the fair copy in the Pickering Manuscript, c. 1803). In the present context, all these lines of Blake can be taken as a founding principle – and informing perception – for reading and writing that is, simultaneously or by turns, close and wide, delicate and deep, finite and infinite. By strong implication, they are also open invitations to study and live life, accordingly – in the present terms, creatively as well as critically. It’s as complex – and simple – as that.

Postlude

Using the above activity with William Blake’s ‘London’ as a guide, perform the same kind of work and play with any children’s nursery rhyme you can recall or find.

(For examples, see Opie and Opie 1996; and compare Petrucci 5.1.4 and ‘There was an old man’ @ 2.4.1).  

Also see: 5.2.2 for Beck’s (1931) map of the London Underground and Bryson’s (1995) response to it; and see @ Prologue for an example of a city street as a focus for activities in reading, re-writing and research, including web-based anthologies.

READING: Blake 1979; the Blake Archive at http://www.blakearchive.org/blake, Ackroyd 2001 for London: A Biography; Süskind 1985  for Perfume, a grotesque thriller told through the smells of eighteenth-century France (film 2006). For textually sensitive and contextually alert readings of a range of poems – with attention to the politics as well as the poetics – see Eagleton 2007.

@ 2.3.  LONGER PROJECTS: FURTHER SAMPLE STUDY PATTERNS

This section contains some more study patterns and lines of enquiry in and around the following areas:

2.3.1    Adaptation and continuation

2.3.1 a Great Expectations – Dickens’s and others’

2.3.2    Children’s literature and childhood revisited

2.3.2 a ‘Little Red Riding Hoods’ and ‘Childhoods’

2.3.3    Media, language, power and pleasure

2.3.3 a Word-Image relations

2.3.3 b Word-Sound relations

2.3.3 c Power and pleasure, pain and disempowerment

2.3.4    English at the edge: further ‘limit’ cases:

2.3.4 a translating—transforming . . .

2.3.4 b games—playing . . .

2.3.4 c life—work . . .

Notice that these areas get increasingly ‘fuzzy’ and ‘edgy’ as the lines extend beyond ‘English’ as currently constituted. These are some of the dynamic ways in which this subject and its objects of study may be re-realised and re-cognised in the very process of becoming a variety of projects.  It is then not so much a matter of what English is as of what English becomes . . . what you project it as becoming.   

@ 2.3.1   Adaptation and continuation

Adaptation deals with how texts are transformed from one genre or medium into another, often nowadays from novel to play or film (page to stage or screen), sometimes the reverse. The novels of Jane Austen, the Brontës, Dickens and Forster turned into TV serials or one-off films are the classic contemporary instances; as are the TV and film versions of Shakespeare. But in principle texts can be adapted across any kind of interface: poem into radio play; song into video promo or advert; fairy tale into video game; and so on. The defining feature of adaptation is that texts should be not just communicated in a different form but substantially changed in the process; transformed as well as transferred (translation is a special case we pick up later) – in short adapted not just adopted. Questions about adaptation typically begin with the matter of ‘how faithful’ the adaptation is to ‘the original’ (Is it a ‘close’ or ‘loose’ adaptation?) and then judged according to taste. If ‘close’ it may be reckoned ‘faithful’ or ‘slavish’; and if ‘loose’ it may be reckoned ‘free’ or ‘unfaithful’. Either way, the assumed original is taken to be a measure and yardstick for the presumed success of the adaptation. In more subtle and sophisticated approaches to adaptation it is recognised that different media (and by implication genres) simply have different material capacities and formal properties, with different contextual and communicative ‘affordances’ – that a film or radio play demands to be treated on its own terms not those of print and paper. In many cases it also turns out that the supposed ‘original’ is itself not the ‘first and only’ word on the matter but simply the latest surviving text or the most famous one. Other versions lurk in the background. Shakepeare’s Hamlet is a classic literary case, existing in two earlier and shorter versions (the First and Second Quarto, 1601  and 1603) before the Folio version (1623)  on which most modern editions are based; and there are other people’s ‘Hamlets’ before (see below and 2.2). The Four Gospels of the Biblical New Testament are the canonical religious instances: none of them is absolutely ‘original’ (the manuscripts all date from well after Christ’s death) and they are far from identical in substance or style. In these respects it’s not just a matter of Shakespeare and the Bible being adapted later on. In a certain sense they are adaptations. 

Continuation usually takes the form of sequels, following up with what happens next or later on, and may be by the same or a different author or director (e.g. Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe / Baron Von Munchausen and The Godfather / Star Trek / Alien 1, 2, 3 . . .). Sometimes the continuation takes the form of a ‘prequel’, casting back to what happens before. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is the classic novelistic example, charting the back-story of the supposedly mad Mrs Rochester of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) to the Caribbean. Rhys gives her a distinct name and identity (Antoinette the young West Indian creole woman), and charges the relationship with her husband, Edward the young Englishman, with a specifically interracial and colonial as well as female-male dynamic (see 5.2.3). Star Wars IV is a classic film prequel in that it presents the pre-history of the Empire before the events of Star Wars I, II and III; while Dr Who pops about time with gay abandon and approaching ten ‘Doctors’ to date. A third kind of continuation takes the form of a parallel history or interlude part way through, in which case it serves to present known events from a different point of view or in a different dimension. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) is perhaps the best known theatrical example of this. The play puts two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the messengers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, centre-stage and in the foreground, while the main characters Ophelia, Gertrude, Claudius and Hamlet himself are relegated to the background and glimpsed only intermittently and from afar. The effect of this essentially simple background-foreground switch is to expose the most profound problems and throw up some intriguing possibilities. For Rosencrantz and Guildenstern it’s not just a matter of ‘losing the plot’ (they never really knew what was going on in the first place) but of lacking a fully developed ‘role’ or ‘character’ of any kind. Stoppard’s version – in effect an ‘inversion’ – makes for poignantly funny theatre as well as a kind of pervasive existential crisis.

Yet other common kinds of continuation include telling the story through a different narrator and transposing the action to a different time and place. A couple of examples of this in Part Five are modern re-tellings of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719; see 5.2.2). One is through the eyes of the slave Friday, Geoff Holdsworth’s ‘I call him Monday Afternoon’ (1994), which subverts and sports with the white narrator’s presumption about his power to name and control (‘I call him Friday’). The other is J. D. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), which adds a female castaway as narrator, a tongueless and enigmatic Friday, and a teasing guest (dis)appearance by the original author (hence the ‘Foe’ of Coetzee’s title). (The notion of ‘continuation’ is further complicated by the fact that Defoe’s fictional novel is itself in part a continuation of factual accounts based on the life of Andrew Selkirk and other stories and histories of ‘desert island’ castaways. The formula is mythic and magnetic, as witnessed by the endless cartoons and the long-running and popular format of BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs (1942). Celebrities get to discuss their life, play their favourite music and take a favourite book. (They can take ‘Shakespeare and the Bible’ anyway – though it doesn’t specify which editions/adaptations.) And so the continuation story goes on. Wherever you look, you tend to find one or two and more. Lloyd Jones’s Mr Pip (2006) is another contemporary example in the Anthology (5.3.1). It takes Charles Dickens’s Great Expectation (1860—1) and places the novel in an expressly modern, semi-literate context on a Pacific Island in the throes of an armed struggle. Here the narrator is a young native girl and the reading of the novel serves to counterpoint her personal development and that of her family and community as well as the fate of her white European teacher of English. Something similar in strategy, though different in substance, takes place in Azar Nafisi’s, Reading Lolita in Teheran (2003).

We could continue piling up examples of adaptations and continuations, because people keep on writing, filming and broadcasting them. They are also, in passing, the stock-in-trade of headline writers, cartoonists and the makers of adverts: parts of that great and amorphous store of intertextual reference and allusion that most people know even if they don’t know ‘the original’ (which usually isn’t anyway). But you’ve already got the idea. In fact you have probably thought of umpteen other examples unknown to me while reading this. The important – and endlessly fascinating – thing is to pull on a promising textual thread that interests you, grasp it as part of an intertextual fabric, and follow through whatever lines of enquiry open up from there. See where you get and what you make of it. You may even be inclined to write an adaptation or continuation yourself.

Great, Low, Different and Other Expectations Here is a simple yet powerful study pattern radiating around Dickens’s Great Expectations (first serialised with illustration in All the Year Round, 1860—1). Even this is only a beginning; for it traces (and re-weaves) an array of actual lines of descent and possible lines of enquiry in various directions and dimensions. These are here mainly afterwards but a few reach earlier and around the same time; they are increasingly (re)produced and circulate in print, film and/or other media as time goes on; and in terms of authors and locations they go round the world and back again several ways. Indeed, other people were in on the critical and creative act from the beginning.  On the advice of Edward Bulwer Lytton, Dickens changed the novel’s ‘original’ suspended ending, (in which the two protagonists Pip and Estella remained apart) to a conventional happy one in which they meet again.  The more you look into them, such things tend to have happened with classics of all kinds. (Ibsen produced, under pressure from a German theatre company, an alternative ending for A Doll’s House in which Nora stayed with her family. Beckett considered an ending for Waiting for Godot in which one of the tramps actually did leave – rather than saying ‘Let’s go’ but both not budging.)  As a result,  similar patterns – comparable in principle but each time unique in practice – can be found and made for most texts you are likely to be studying. Meanwhile, as with ‘celebrity’, the concept of ‘classic’ is increasingly instantaneous and often managed and marketed. (Even just being a ‘follower’ of a transient tweets changes its reach and status.)   So, while time will tell about what eventually lasts, by exploring such processes (however compressed) you can also virtually tell the time about what seems to matter at the moment. Exploring adaptations and continuations – the categories often overlap or blur in practice – is a good way of doing both.

Compare any of the following originals and adaptations (and perhaps also explore the ways in which the ‘originals’ are often themselves ‘adaptations’ of yet earlier versions): 

• Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet (as a script) with one of the many children’s versions in story book form, with a comic book version (for children or adults), with one of the filmic adaptations (e.g,. Romeo + Juliet, dir. Baz Luhrmann, 1996), with the stage musical West Side Story (1957, created by Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein), and finally with the online improvised tweet adaptation Such Tweet Sorrow (at www.suchtweetsorrow.com, created Mudlark and The Royal Shakespeare Company, 2010)
• Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955) and one or both of the film adaptations directed by Stanley Kubrick (1962) and directed by Adrian Lyne (1997)
• Laurence Sterne’s novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-69) and the film A Cock and Bull Story (2006, dir. Michael Winterbottom)
• Any English translation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and the current English stage musical version of the novel adapted by Cameron Mackintosh from the French musical (itself adapted from the French novel).

Go on to consider the following questions:

In the transferral and transformation from the original form to its new version, what has been added, cut, changed or reordered? What clues does this give to the preferred interpretation in each case?

How have any features you consider to be particularly ‘textual’ (e.g. verbal descriptions of setting, scene or chapter breaks) been reworked and refigured for another medium and other modes?

Can you find other adaptations and transformations of the above texts? In what other media and contexts, and perhaps cultures?

What other ‘original’ and ‘adapted’ texts can you think of that you might like to follow up? (Again, be prepared to look earlier and elsewhere in addition to along the lines you first come across.)  

See 2.3.1 (a) Great Expectations – Dickens’s and others’. Also see: Children’s literature . . . revisited (4.4.3); Rewriting Crusoe’s Island (5.2.2); Romance revisited (5.2.3); Writing, reading, response and rewriting (Part Three).  Further study patterns for adaptations and continuations of Shakespeare, Defoe, Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Woolf and others – sometimes developed along different lines – can be found @ 4.4.2; also Translation and translation studies, @ 3.

READING: On adaptation, see Hutcheon 2006; Sanders 2006, Cartmell and Whelehan 1999. On novel-film adaptation, see McFarlane 1996; Stam 2002. For fuller arguments on the rewriting of classic texts, including ‘textual interventions’ by students in Hamlet, Robinson Crusoe and Jane Eyre, seePope 1995; also Knights and Thurgar-Dawson 2006 on ‘active reading’ and Scholes 1985 on ‘textual power’. Many of the ‘classic’ texts are featured in critical editions by Norton, Bedford, Broadview, Oxford, Cambridge and others, which now often include information on adaptations for stage, radio, film and TV, and currency in popular culture as well as sources and precursors. The web, used wisely, is invaluable in these areas, but be careful to use reliable and reputable sites; see 1.2.5.

2.3.1 (a) Great Expectations – Dickens’s and others’

Below is one of many possible diagrammatic representations of the relations among an ‘original’ and its ‘adaptations’ – both in novel and in film. This diagram is centred on Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (for the opening of which, introducing its here Pip, see 5.4.5) and includes Lloyd Jones’s related novel Mr Pip (see 5.3.1).

Other Dickens stories very frequently adapted and continued are:  A Christmas Carol (not forgetting ‘Muppets’ 1992 and ‘Simpsons’ 2003 versions) and Oliver Twist (notably Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver!, first staged 1960, revived 2008—11; film 1968)

(Some of the above information was from Philip Allingham, ‘Great Expectations in Film and Television, 1917—1998’ on The Victorian Web http:// www. victorianweb.org/authors/dickens (accessed 21.12.10).) 

Still other diagrammatic shapes and original/adaptation interrelations are, of course, possible. See, for example, the ‘triangulated’, ‘squared’ and ‘open’ patterns including versions of Wuthering Heights (1.2.4 and 1.2.5). And yet others again could be projected out from and around the versions of Robinson Crusoe by Defoe, Coetzee, Holdsworth and many, many more (see 5.2.2). As so often, these extend ‘before the original’, in the latter case with accounts of Andrew Selkirk and other shipwrecks and castaways (see @ 5.2.2).           

@ 2.3.2 Children’s literature and childhood revisited

‘Children’s literature’ and ‘images of childhood’ – nowadays usually styled ‘constructions’ or ‘representations’ – are popular choices for longer projects. The areas are distinct but they often overlap, so they will here be treated together. There are many pre-conceptions and plain misconceptions about ‘children’ and ‘childhood’, and even some persistent confusion about the difference between children’s literature (which is nearly always written by adults for children – and incidentally other adults) and children’s writing (which in educational contexts at least is nearly always written by children for adults – and incidentally themselves). Here we concentrate on the former, children’s literature, which is what most people doing ‘English’ want to read and write about Children’s writing is what people doing ‘Education’ tend to study, so they can understand how better to get children to do it in the first place (in the early years) or do it better later on. (For a transcript of some older children speaking in class, see 5.3.1.) Education people also need to know about children’s literature (from nursery rhymes and fairy tales to teen and young adult fiction); but again they often have a practical, professional and pedagogic aim in view. Though of course they may just be interested in and enjoy reading (or re-reading) Alice in Wonderland or Swallows and Amazons, The Hobbit or Harry Potter like anyone else. Who isn’t? (Yet who admits it?!)

For it’s a widely observable fact (and sometimes carefully guarded secret) that many people have an interest in reading children’s literature when they get older, and most people are interested in childhood anyway, their own at least and sometimes other people’s. The curiosity motivating such enquiries may be personal or professional, and specific or general. Often is it is a mixture. Thinking about WHY is something to keep coming back to in the course of the project. It is important because it informs method and aim, but is not usually clear at the beginning.. If you are studying ‘English’ it is in education even if it is not with or for ‘Education’; so there is usually some mix of personal and institutional motivation. In any case, you may be curious to revisit what you yourself used to read when young (or missed out on) and wonder why: how did it affect your view of the world and influence your reading habits, and how do you see them in retrospect? Or you may be thinking about what to read or present to a particular child or group of children now, whether as relative, friend or teacher. And now you will be thinking about what influence it may have on the way they make sense of the world: will it provide good or bad role models? are you imposing on them? will they like or resent or ignore it – or prefer something else? In any event, you are likely to be involved in weighing a wide variety of materials and moments, and engaging with a complex variety of roles: yourself as a child then and as an adult now; what you liked to read and other children might (or might not) like to read; yourself and other people as ‘critical’ writers about or perhaps ‘creative’ writers of children’s literature.

What’s more, we then we have to add in the matter of  all of us as in some measure critical-creative re-readers and re-writers of what it was, is, might have been or might yet be to be a ‘child’. Childlike and open, even awesome? Childish and awfully immature?  The choice of suffix makes a big difference. Indeed, the term ‘childness’ has been coined to distinguish a state which is neither and yet positively marked as an abiding image distinct from the actual historical period of childhood (Hollindale 1997). For the awkward yet unavoidable fact is that ‘children’s literature’ and ‘childhood’ in the present context are largely the constructs of adults in academic and educational discourses. And while adult academics have certainly been children at some point (even if it’s not always believable) and some of them may still regard themselves as – even sometimes act like – ‘children’, they are no longer. In strictly biological and historical terms, that is. Except in retrospect or by projection or in imagination . . .  But that, of course, is what makes all the difference. Ignore or avoid tackling such issues, and you risk producing a project that is ‘simplistic’ and ‘theoretically unaware’ (to recall the usual comments of assessors faced with such work). Fully recognise and wrestle with such issues – with what it has meant, and can or may yet mean to be or become a ‘child’ and then somehow an ‘adult’ (a countervailing concept which is just as complex and contentious – reflect on and read about them at length – and the work you produce will be called ‘subtle and sophisticated’ and probably ‘theoretically informed’ too. Because it is.

It’s now time to home in on some particular texts and children’s writers, and some more specific topics: to begin putting out some actual lines of enquiry and form some substantial study patterns. But even then we have (again) to be careful with that term literature (see LITERATURE,  1.3). In engaging with children’s literature, we often immediately get involved with many other modes and media, not just writing and print alone. In fact, most traditional and much recent story material is not, in the narrow sense, ‘literature’ at all. It often also circulates as film or comic or animation, and most stories for young children have always been illustrated or orally communicated: for ‘what is the use of a book . . . without pictures or conversations?’, as Alice asks at the very beginning of her Adventures in Wonderland. Many children nowadays see a film or cartoon or read an abridged version before – or instead of – ‘reading the book’ as a whole in its printed form. This makes a difference to expectation as well as popular cultural knowledge. The most obviously instances are the pervasive ‘Disneyfication’ of Pinnochio, Snow White, Cinderella,  Beauty and the Beast, Kipling’s The Jungle Book and Milne’s Winnie the Pooh  in the popular imagination (see Zipes 1999); and something similar may be said of epic film serialisation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Rowling’s Harry Potter.  Viewers of the films are more numerous than readers of the novels; though some people are both and make comparisons accordingly. Quite a few also read and view or even contribute to the burgeoning webs-sites and ‘fanzines’ dedicated to the various communities which such ‘cult fiction’ stimulates and supports. ‘Children’s literature’ is thus an especially protean category: it manifests in many media and serves to express the interests and identities of many individuals and communities.  

Meanwhile, at every turn, we are constantly confronted by ‘images of children’ and by extension ‘categories of childhood’. Many – but far from all – are cheering. Bouncing babies, pampered tots, cheeky kids cramming food in their mouths before rushing out to play . . ..  But there are also children who are pot-bellied and fly-blown and starving to death; and older children who are tear-stained or hard-faced from years of neglect and abuse; or others gone missing . . .. All these and more are familiar, stereotypical, even clichéd ‘representations’ or ‘constructions’ of childhood (because they are highly mediated) – notwithstanding the genuine realities of lives full of happiness and health or misery and horror (which are actually and deeply  lived). Though of course these are extremes. The realities, if not the images, are usually much more mixed and complicated. And that is why it is so important to grasp the images in process of re-construction and re-presentation as they become parts of various discourses (see Part Three for all these key terms): from memoir and reminiscence and reverie of childhood to full-blown auto-biographical re-construction and fictional re-creation. (This is where the CULTURAL, COMMUNICATION and MEDIA aspects of English tend to come to the fore.) Meanwhile, as far as the study of English as LITERATURE is concerned, we tend to be confronted by a whole host of questions about, say, Wordsworth’s or Dickens’ or Joyce’s or  Lawrence’s  or Woolf’s or Morrison’s own childhoods; and about their more or less fictional representations of those childhood in, respectively, The Prelude, Great Expectations, A Portrait of the Artists as Young Man, Sons and Lovers, To the Lighthouse and Beloved (for this last, see 5.4.6). In all these case, ‘childhood’ (extending from infancy through youth and the specifically modern category of ‘the teens’ to young adulthood) is something constructed not just in the facts of a life but the acts of story-telling and image-making that offer to turn it into ‘the life’ – always, it turns out, one of many. Meanwhile, through and beyond those words, there hovers the sense we make of them by reference to whatever actual parent-child, teacher-pupil and generally older-younger, cross-generational worlds we already know. Or think we know. Interpreting ‘images of childhood’ is potentially as complex and vexed – and fascinating and important – as that. 

But even that is not all. We really need to add history and culture to the mix for the full reconstruction and representation of childhoods. For they also change and vary and are many. In many Classical and ‘traditional’ cultures, for instance, children were and are basically adults-in-waiting, subjects to train-up, almost invisible as such. On this, for all their many other differences, Aristotle and Plato basically agreed. They put a slightly different valuation on ‘child’s play’; but they both thought childhood was something you should grow out of and transcend. This was the dominant view throughout Europe till the late eighteenth century, and in many cultures and communities (including some European ones) still is. Children may be left to play and grow up – but otherwise should not be heard or seen. Then get on with the rest of life like everyone else.  

In many Romantic, post-romantic and ‘modern’ cultures, however, childhood is a precious and privileged time. So everyone indulges youth or wants to remain young, and children are firmly at the centre of all sorts of pictures – ideologically and ‘ideally’ at least. We also know (or believe we know) much more about children’s imaginary as well as visible lives. This may be expressed aesthetically and ethically in persistently Romantic images of the ‘child of nature’ projected so vigorouly by Rousseau and so pithily and paradoxically put by Wordsworth :  ‘The child is father of the man’. Or it may be couched in the scientific and clinical discourses of modern child-centred psychology or childhood-focused psychoanalysis, Freudian and otherwise (see 2.5). Though there may still be a lingering suspicion that such re-runs of the ‘nature-nurture’ debate are adults’ constructions of a more or less idealised or demonised ‘child’ and not the views of children themselves. All these issues are likely to crop up naturally when you pick up a particular children’s book and begin to think about what the author made of children and childhood then – and what you make of his words in your own world now.  The difference with a longer project is that you have to reflect on and read about such things systematically as well as sensitively. That is what turns initial, perhaps idle curiosity into seriously enjoyable study. And that in turn may prompt you to become not only a re-reader of children’s literature but also a rewriter of it. Alternatively you may feel moved to begin – or continue – writing about your own childhood. As was said at the beginning, childrens literature and childhood are distinct yet overlapping areas of activity. It is always up to you to gauge what kind of overlap there is, and how far it may be best covered (filled in or out) with critical reading and/or creative writing. Your childhood or someone else’s, real or imagined. They will have to cross at some point if the interpretation is to really mean something and be worth doing.

See 2.3.2 (a)  Two patterns: ‘Little Red Riding Hoods’ and ‘Childhoods’. Also see: ‘Versions of Aging’ and ‘Epitaphs and (almost) last words’ (5.4.5—6); because old age and death are also parts of the picture – distinct and overlapping, with birth and childhood too. Further study patterns and lines of enquiry for NURSERY RHYMES, NONSENSE VERSE, Alice in Wonderland, CONTEMPORARY CHILDREN’S LITERATURE and YOUNG ADULT FICTION are @ 4.3.3.

READING: Children’s literature: Reynolds 2005; Hunt 2003; Hollindale 1997; Rose 1992; Bettleheim 1976. Fairy Tales (rewritten): Tatar 1999; Carter 1978, 1991.; Zipes 2006; Warner 1994; Propp 1975.  Nonsense: Haughton 1996: Carroll 2000; Lear 1947. Nursery rhymes: Opie and Opie 1997, 1987. Children and childhood in and out of literature: Jenks 1996; Phillips 2003.

2.3.2 (a)  ‘Little Red Riding Hoods’ and ‘Childhoods’

The two study patterns that follow feature various versions of a classic fairy tale (LITTLE RED RIDING HOODS) and some fictional representations of children (CHILDHOODS). These are best seen as quite distinct to begin with. Look at and weigh each in turn. How might some such lines of enquiry and patterns of study be developed for texts and authors or genres you are interested in? (You might of course already be interested in some of these.) Then go on to see what overlaps could be explored between and across the two areas. How might the ‘Little Red Riding Hoods’ and the ‘Childhoods’ be made to work with or play off against one another? Critically and/or creatively, fictionally and/or factually, perhaps drawing on authors’ lives and times as well as works. What stories and histories of children or images of childhood might they help generate? Don’t forget to include your own. (Some similar yet different lines and patterns are offered @ 2.3.4)

2.3.3 Language, media, power and pleasure

The lines of enquiry and study patterns presented in this section concentrate on language in the modern media. But they also extend to older and other technologies and cultures, including literature. This is done so as to encourage the making of fresh connections between kinds of text (and periods and cultures) that otherwise tend to get treated separately. There is also an emphasis on the relations between power and pleasure – and by extension, powerlessness and pain.

A major appeal of doing a project on language in the modern media is that there is just so much of it, and some of it you may feel strongly about and be immediately engaged with. Songs, advertising, news, stories, interviews, announcements, exchanges – from a single word or phrase (a song-line or logo or headline) through to whole ways of saying, seeing and being in the world: the discourses of ‘fashion’, ‘life-style’ and ‘celebrity’, for example, or the coverage of the latest war or sporting event, oil-spill or information-leak. What’s more – much more – it’s all there, here, virtually everywhere, it seems. On TV and dvd, in films and on the radio, in magazines and books, on web-sites or shop-fronts, accessed by i-phones or lap-tops, chatted about by voice-phone, text-messages or e-mail. Much of the time it seems to be just ‘there’ – almost unnoticed, on the edge of awareness, with just enough force to emit a minimal signal and slightly inform and irritate or amuse. Then gone, and onto the next one. And so on.

This is obviously a problem too. The modern media are so copious, ubiquitous and ceaseless – so colossal in quantity and mixed in quality – that the first question  selection (WHAT, WHO, WHEN, WHERE?) and the next, as usual more or less together, is methodology and rationale (HOW and WHY?). Which media items, how studied and with aims in view? Given our primary concern with Language, English, the most pressing thing is to sort how the ‘the words’ relate to all the other sights and sounds – even smells and tastes and textures – in play. After all, the words of a song seen on a video or heard on a headset or danced to at a live concert have similar structures and meanings but different values and effects. Television and newspaper news stories tell and shoe differently. The phrase ‘fondant swirl delight’ feels rather different if you once read it on a box or have one in your mouth; as does ‘lobster thermidor’ if you read it on a menu or have one swimming in a next to you. The following table should help you make a preliminary yet all-important inventory of what kind of language you are looking at or listening to, the forms of communication it keeps company (or is confused) with, and therefore what kind of  verbal (and non-verbal) objects, processes and practices you are dealing with. Where – where precisely in each column -- would you place the words of the media items and occasions you are analysing, interpreting and exploring and experimenting with yourself:

(i) LANGUAGE—MEDIA  Read this matrix down and across so as to identify the precise word-image-music relations you are dealing with, and to establish the general modes and specific media genres in play. Every instance is in some respect unique.

Words spoken written printed on screen

Images foreground background still moving black/white colour abstract representational

Music dominant incidental/background song dance instrumental genre: classical, jazz, folk, pop, rock, etc.

General mode face-to-face real-time delayed same-space different space recorded one-way, two-way, many-way broad-cast

Specific media genre (medium + genre) e.g. Service encounter at supermarket checkout + bill. Academic lecture + Power-point. Mobile phone text to friend. Radio chat-show + phone-in Tv hair-dye ad for women Buddy road movie parody

The modern media – especially the contemporary multi-media – are obviously highly technologised and increasingly fast and mobile. Downloading or uploading virtually anything from virtually anywhere is becoming a more or less routine aspect of life for many people in the contemporary Westernised worlds. But we should emphasise virtually and Westernised, and perhaps worlds too. These anythings – which often appear to be almost everything – are only ‘real’ in certain highly mediated senses, and, notwithstanding the hype, are far from routine for everybody. Still for many people, especially in Asian and African countries, a mobile phone or lap-top – even a radio or television – is either unknown or on the edge of awareness or an exotic good owned by someone else. ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ worlds – including what used to be called ‘the rich North’ and ‘poor South’ – may be potentially ‘one world’ and a great big ‘global village’ (currently updated as ‘glocal megalopolis’). But there are worlds beyond as well as within worlds, and not everybody belongs to them equally. This has to be born in mind when celebrating universal connectivity. ‘Only connect’ is a distant potential – not a routine reality – for well over half the world’s population. Like the illusion that everybody in the world understands – or is at least regularly exposed to – some form of ‘English’, it’s just not true.

It’s also important not to overstate the difference between the modern ‘multimedia’ and earlier or alternative modes of communication. This offers to turn relative distinctness into absolute difference and threatens to separate off contemporary cultural processes and practices as POST-MODERN in an exclusive sense from those of ‘traditional’ cultures at large, as though the latter were all superseded and the same and the ‘now’ were all and utterly ‘new’. Again, this is just not true or only part of a much bigger and more continuously variegated picture. In fact there is rather a lot of similarity between, say,  reading the page of a glossy illustrated  magazine or ‘scrolling’ down the image-filled text of a web-site (the archaic term is significant) and both reading and viewing a medieval illuminated manuscript, especially if it really is a scroll that you gradually unfurl. What’s more, medieval manuscripts were written and punctuated for voicing out loud even when read alone (there was no ‘silent reading’ in medieval monasteries and courts). Such oral-aural and visual features are especially clear when the text includes a score and is cued for singing (e.g. ‘Sumer is icumen in’, @ 5.1.5). Something similar may be said of Blake’s etched, ornamented, illustrated and uniquely hand-pressed poems (see ‘London’ 4.1.2 and 4.2.2). This is expressly a ‘Song of Experience’. And while it is visibly a ‘literary’ work, it is also in some measure – with the emphasis on measure – a pronouncedly and audibly lyrical piece in its rhythms, rhymes and other sound-effects.

It’s also worth recalling that the sheer material complexity, mass appeal and ubiquity of the nineteenth-century novel. Dickens’s novels, for instance, fully illustrated and released in large magazine format lavishly interleaved with adverts (themselves illustrated), poured forth in vast quantities from the then-new steam printing presses for the eager weekly or monthly consumption of a massively increased and constantly expanding readership. They were read out loud in inns and coffee houses for those unable to read, and delivered in his famously theatrical and oratorical style by Dickens himself when on tour. His tours extended across America (carried by the rapidly extending railways) and it is true history, not an apocryphal story, that East coast crowds waited for the landing of the latest steamship from England shouting to those on board ‘Is Little Nell dead?!’. Very like the expectantly awaited and much-hyped release of Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire some hundred and fifty years later (?), this was marked by long queues and massive sales – as well as the odd cheerfully malicious saboteur sporting tee-shorts announcing ‘Dumbledore is Dead!’. They had picked this up from leaks on the web just before official publication. This configuration of ‘instant-tee-shirt + web-link-leak’ marks a significant and symptomatic difference. But it does not make a total difference to the formula ‘technology-resource + human-nature-resourcefulness’ that distinguishes every stage and level of culture and communications – notionally ‘traditional’, ‘industrial’, ‘Western’, ‘hi-tech’, ‘post-modern’ or otherwise. Similarity with Difference is the rule in such matters; just as ‘Compare and contrast . . .’ is the formula in all meaningful approaches to more than one text..Both these principles are at work and in play in the sample study patterns on Word-Image and Word-Sound relations. And indeed it is often a matter of Word-Sound-Image relation – still and moving, ‘live’ and recorded.

Activity

Identify, explore and extend a current line of advertising by a well known company or brand. Perhaps begin with just a single line of text – the slogan, a memorable exchange or the logo – and then run out the project from there, to whatever sources and resources you can get hold of. (For example, at the time of first drafting this activity, August 2011, the recent series of Cadburys crème egg adverts, together with inventive plays upon it, was available on youtube, and Google was running a series of adverts inside London tube trains.) Once you have identified your initial object and begun to work over and play with it . . .

Consider the following critical questions:

ADVERTS

Who are the adverts by, and who are they directed towards?

Why do the adverts appear where they do? What do you think is the rationale behind their location – their sites of communication?

(How) do the adverts relate/respond to a particular moment within a particular cultural context?

What language does the line of advertising employ? Describe the form and function of the language.

What discourses are in play? What agendas are at work?

How does the language interact with image, layout, colour, sound, etc.?

If you are looking at a series of adverts, how do they relate to each other? Is there a narrative?

Go on to consider some possible creative responses. For example, you might create a new advert for the series, playfully but coherently extending its linguistic and other (e.g. visual) strategies. You might seek to subvert (or divert) the initial ad and its projected designs on its audience/consumers. Or you might develop an alternative but relatable product or project – again thinking of everything from particular words, lines and images to overall sales pitches and marketing strategies. (This being an ‘English’ project, you are likely to say quite close in to the words, ‘the verbals’. But the rest of the world, virtual and otherwise, naturally beckons too. And that is formed and transformed in discourses of all kinds, including verbal ones. Wor(l)ds are like this.)    

Try a similar activity with some FUNDRAISING or CHARITY literature.

Again, go through the critical and creative phases. In reality these tend to overlap but it is still analytically useful to keep them more or less disticntfor example a letter from Oxfam, or the website material of Cancer Research UK, and consider, are there other questions which need to be asked of this kind of text in order to fully explore its workings?

Also see:  Technology and the subject (Prologue); English – by media 1.2.4; CULTURE, COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA, 1.3.3;  War on – of – Terror 5.2.5; Media messages and street texts 5.2.6;. LANGUAGE, 1.3.1 Discourse;  Drama, theatre, film and tv and Narrative in story and history: novel, news and film (Part Three)  AESTHETICS, 2.10; @ 1.10—11: English with Theatre of Film Studies; English into Cultural, Communication and Media Studies; Adaptation 4.4.2;  @ 3 Aesthetics and pleasure, art and beauty; and @ 4.4.4 for study patterns on NEWS STORIES, PERSONAL ADVERTS and PROBLEM PAGES, and for lines of enquiry between and beyond them.

READING: Media, communication and culture: Williams 1970, 1971, 1983; Willis et al 1990; Bennett et al 2005. Language and power: Fairclough 1995, 2008; Kress and Hodge 1985. Pleasure (aesthetics): Armstrong 2000; Cazeaux 2000, Malpas 2003; Textual theories of pleasure, joy and desire: Barthes 1977, Kristeva 1984 and Cixous 1998 and Braidotti 2002.  Also see Reading in next section (2.3.5).

2.3.3. a Word-Image relations

Here is a diagram that draws together some of the many word-image relations in and around texts featured in the Anthology in the book (Part 5):

Word-image relations, still and moving, in the media

2.3.3 b Word-Sound relations 

Meanwhile, ‘the word’ in drama as other verbal performance arts, is always inextricably bound up with sound as well as sight. Voice quality, gesture, movement and response – along with costumes, sets and lighting when it all gets more obviously theatrical – are all elements of the immediate speech-in-action and bodies-in-motion that make up drama in performance as distinct from the words on the page of play scripts. Add a live audience and you have a fully dramatic event. In fact, all drama and verbal arts in performance are essentially ‘multimedia’ in design and appeal because they are emphatically multimodal. (‘Medium’, narrowly understood, applies to the technology (e.g. megaphone, telephone, radio); ‘mode’ to the sensory and physiological apparatus (sound through speaking and hearing in all three cases). So the only really definite and defining difference between older and modern ‘multimedia’ is that the latter are highly ‘mediated’ – not that they are ‘multi’. Further, it is the highly technologised nature of the modern media that again makes this difference relative and marked – but not absolute and in every respect. Writing with pen and ink or with type-writer are relatively low-technology (not ‘no-technology’) options and stages. 

All this is worth stressing and getting right from the start. Otherwise there is a tendency (quite widespread) to assume that ‘Language in the Media’ – especially in the increasingly integrated Information Communication Technology (ICT) systems which are ‘tele-‘ and ‘multi-‘ with personalised ‘apps’ for good measure – are the only show in town and that’s ever been on the planet. Film and tv are distinctively and characteristically modern technological processes and cultural practices. And the successors of dvd, blu-tooth, catch-up and recall systems will ceaselessly (at a cost) keep on updating and upgrading ‘the Modern’ so it’s a shiny new and immediately desirable Contemporary. But it is a genuinely moot point whether this will fundamentally change the underlying and informing Communications dynamics – interpersonally and politically, economically and aesthetically. A sheer (or mere) ‘Revolution in Technology’ may or may not be sufficient to ensure a radical transformation. The acid or alkali litmus test of this is still likely to be the kinds and degrees of dialogue and monologue entailed at various levels and stages of whatever media process or practice we choose to analyse and isolate. (That process itself always has shortcomings as well as advantages when dealing with ‘whole’ cultural systems that are always both larger and more detailed as well as essentially open-ended.)

For all these reasons Drama, theatre, film and TV are treated as distinct and differently mixed media/modes on substantially the same continuum in Part Three. How different and how much the same are themselves the questions at issue. And there are no quick-fix answers – technological, theoretical or otherwise. But there can be close critical attention to particular instances, and creative thinking across the spaces and times between then. Compare and contrast – though it sounds all too familiar a formula – is still a good way of getting going. Critique and recreate – much less familiar perhaps but well worth thinking about – is a good way of carrying through. The next study pattern offers some points of reference and sketches some lines of enquiry passing between and beyond. It is only a sample, again drawn from texts featured in the current Anthology (Part Five). But it may suggest some things you can do with texts – plays, films, performance pieces and the like that you are studying. And once you have explored it on its own immediate terms (‘Word-Sound’ dynamics), you can supplement and complement with the ‘Word-Image’ dynamics explored. Both aspects are fully integrated in many actual practices; but it is sometimes more effective as well as easier to approach them separately in the first instance.  

Word-sound, including word-music, relations in the media

2.3.3 c   Pleasure—Power, Pain—Disempowerment 

There remains the matter of ‘language, media, power and pleasure’ signalled in the title to this section. This last should perhaps be more specifically focused in terms of power and pleasure; for both need to be kept firmly in mind and in the same perceptual frame – in ‘stereo’ if possible, but at least ‘bi-focally’. This is important to grasp the power-pleasure dynamic as a kind of whole – potently desirable, pleasingly empowering or just ‘satisfying’, depending how you want to inflect it. Theoretically, it’s about relating keeping Politics and Poetics, Aesthetics and Ethics in live relation. And the consequence and implications are played out in every ‘every breath you take , every step you make’ (as Sting sings it) – and in the present context, in every word of English (or any oteh language) you or I  speak, write, hear or read. For words say things and therefore communicate information. But they also say things in certain ways – in specific substances and forms and with particular styles – and they thereby communicate feelings and attitudes. They offer visions as well as versions of events. In other words – and part of the point is always that other words (and images and music and so forth) could have been used – language in actual use always has an AESTHETIC as well as instrumental dimension. It is something in itself even while it does something in some other respect. That is why attention is drawn here to pleasure as well as power. ‘Language and power’ get full and proper attention in discourse analysis of the media (where discourse can be defined as ‘Language variety in use as an expression of power’; see discourse) . ‘Language and pleasure’, however, often gets ignored completely or tagged on as an afterthought, or separated out as some more or less separate phenomenon that is only treated by literary or cultural studies as if it were purely (or merely) aesthetic (also see @ aesthetic). But in reality the two are intimately and intricately combined. Just as all words involve kinds of power (which itself is best grasped as a dynamic and changeable relation between the more or less powerful/powerless with corresponding potential for being more or less dis/empowered); so all words also involve kinds of pleasure and, conversely, kinds of pain (the pleasure-pain relation is to some extent variable too, depending how these feelings are experienced and represented – the pleasurable thrill of ‘horror’, for example, or the awesome/ awful apprehension of ‘the sublime’ or ‘ecstatic’). The second matrix below is designed to help make useful distinctions between ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ while also allowing for subtle connections and, indeed, occasional inversions.

POWER—PLEASURE  Read down and across and around the figure below with a particular text or kind of text in mind. Do this in any configuration several times until you have in effect ‘squared the circle’ to your own satisfaction. Most immediately you may do this with a modern multimedia text and, in conjunction with the LANGUAGE—MEDIA figure above, analyse the specific convergence of all these  categories with respect to the text(s) in mind (hand, view, prospect . . .).  Naturally – as demonstrated in the intervening figures – this kind of analysis may be extended in practice (not just in principle) to any kind of text or cultural practice from any period or place. As always, the delight as well as the devil are in the detail: the specificity and singularity of whatever is featured; along with the power and pleasure you yourself experience in exploring it. So, again, seriously enjoy whatever you are studying in and through whatever ‘English’ you put in play. That includes using it as a prompt or platform for creative work as well as critical play: 

POWER through birth, blood class, social status (land, money, influence) age, family status sex and gender ethnicity religion nationality, region	PLEASURE through sight     sound    touch     taste     smell    movement . . .        ‘wholeness’ – closed and total, or evolving and emerging  ‘holeness’ – fragmented and partial, or flexible and open
Experienced dynamically as the relation between the powerful and powerless, through coercion (force) consensus (agreement) co-operation conflict leading to what is differently DISEMPOWERING or EMPOWERING	Experienced dynamically as the relation between pleasure and pain, through presence or emergence absence or lack or ceasing or indirect representation or controlled release leading to what is differently PAINFUL or PLEASING

Fig.  Squaring the circle? Power, pleasure, powerlessness and pain in and around texts 

2.3.4    English at the edge: further ‘limit’ cases

The field cannot readily be seen from within the field.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles (1841)

[t]he ‘liminal’ is the limit of the current stage and the threshold of the next.

Victor Turner, Ritual and rites of passage (1984)

[L]iterature perhaps stands on the edge of everything.

Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature (1992:47)

This final section on longer projects is an invitation to push possibilities up to and beyond their current limits. An earlier title for it was ‘Extreme English’. For at some point, I suggest, especially towards the end of their programme, everyone should push both themselves and their subject to the limit and the nearest extreme. This is what Vygotsky ([1934] 1977) calls ‘the zone of nearest development’ and moving into it is essential to the process of independent learning. That way we learn to look over the edge and see what we are doing in English in relation to what someone else is doing, and to extend both of them to what is nominally ‘not-English’. At the very least, this serves to reassure us of the shape and firmness of the spaces we routinely inhabit – to consolidate the ‘field of English’ as we currently know it. (Hence the first epigraph from Emerson above, previously discussed in 1.3.) But some people (perhaps all of us some of the time) want to push further and not just look but also step over the edge: to treat edges (plural) as borders for crossing rather than boundaries for being bound by, perhaps even to reconfigure the edge–centre and map-terrain relations entirely. For there is never just one edge any more than there is is just one centre; both are multiple and moving (see English as one and many, 1.1). And maps, too, are drawn from different perspectives and for different purposes; scales are variable and some things – such as feelings and senses of belonging or longing – barely get on the map at all (see 5.4.2 and Appendix d).

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Time for a radical re-vision . . .?

To remind yourself just how many and various the ‘edges’ around the fields of English can be, turn to the double-page spread of English and/as other subjects (6.2.2). This can be read round as a clock or compass and it gives an indication of the very many directions and dimensions in which the subject can be developed – both ‘in itself’ and in relation to its closest ‘others’. This is also a good place to undertake a personal reprise of what you now understand by English language, literature, culture (6.2.1). Your views will have changed, perhaps radically, since you started your programme (compare 1.2.1). Together, these acts of review may help prompt a radical ‘re-vision’ of where you are in relation to the subject as a provisional ‘whole’ (see 1.2.10). It may also suggest what ‘holes’ you want to fill and lines of enquiry you want to follow through while concluding this particular phase of study.

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It is therefore out of a sense of English as an ongoing adventure that the present concluding gestures are made. They pick up on the invitations to ‘establish boundaries’ and ‘cross borders’ issued at the opening of the Prologue (pp. 000), and re-issue them in terms of English as in the fullest and most dynamic sense a project, a ‘throwing forward’– not just a series of more or less fixed objects (set texts) approached through more or less predictable subject positions (recognised theories). In particular, you are encouraged to treat ‘limits’ as liminal – not ‘limiting’. For what is ‘liminal’ (from Latin limen, ‘threshold’) is not a stopping but a staging point: it is a stage or level you go through after due preliminaries. Cultural anthropologists such as Turner (the second epigraph above) re-introduced the term and specifically identified it with ‘rites of passage’ from, say, childhood to adulthood, or being single to being married, or becoming a mother or a father (see Turner 1984). In the present context, the notions of ‘English at the edge’ and the ‘limit as liminal’ are especially appropriate to the current stage because this is when you are concluding study with a major piece of work and preparing for the rest of life beyond. The final project may then be grasped as both a summary and a preliminary act: a door that closes on one world and opens on another. It is in every sense a defining moment that allows you to define yourself and the subject in a fresh relation to one another. (De-fine, from Latin via French, precisely means establishing limits and thereby categorising.)  Ideally, then, such processes of ‘re-vision’ and ‘de-finition’ take place towards the end of your programme, and they are ‘liminal’ in that they usher in a new phase and level of understanding.

Such transitions and transformations (‘rites of passage’) are addressed practically and at length in Part Six: ‘Taking it all further: English and the rest of your life’. There they are framed in terms of ‘life and learning’ and ‘transformable skills’ and specifically span the worlds of study, work and play. Here they are framed in terms of a summary project pushing the limits of study within your programme; but there is a corresponding emphasis on what are here characterised as . . . translating—transforming . . . games—playing . . . life—work . . ..  The suspension dots and compound dashes are reminders that these are still only sample study patterns and that other lines of enquiry are possible between and beyond. And the overall aim, again, is to offer examples of thinking through language and experimenting with design. The specific texts, materials and topics are indicative not definitive (further possibilities are sketched @ 2.3).

2.3.4 (a)  translating—transforming . . .

Translating is what we do whenever we transpose the words of one language or variety of a language into the words of another. It is never a mere transference of like for like, entailing absolute identity, but is always a transformation of one thing into another, involving approximate correspondence. That is why translating is here tied to transforming:  with the –ing in both to emphasise ongoing process, and the pairing to remind us that ‘translating—transforming’ is something that goes on any time we put notionally the same thing another way: from paraphrasing a passage to writing an essay on a text (and thereby translating-transforming it). The emphasis on transformation also relates to transformable skills and transformative knowledges (1.2 and 6.4). ‘Translation’ in the usual sense considered now is simply a more specific case of all this ceaseless verbal and cultural change and exchange.

Translation as such is conventionally distinguished as of two kinds: inter-lingual translation between different languages; and intra-lingual translation within the same language. The distinction proves serviceable and is used in the general framework below: Thus we can translate French or Japanese into English, and vice versa (inter-lingual translation) or we can translate Old English into Modern English or, say, a Glaswegian working-class spoken variety into a Received standard written variety, and again vice versa (intra-lingual translation). For most purposes all this is clear enough and depends upon a pragmatic distinction between what count as ‘different languages’ and what counts as ‘the same language’. The rule-of-thumb is that speakers of ‘different’ languages cannot readily understand one another, while speakers of the ‘same’ language can. Bakhtin (1982) refers to the babble of different languages as polyglossia; babble within the same language he calls heteroglossia.  

But the distinction is not absolute and can cover a connection. Theoretically, this is because ‘inter-’ and ‘intra-’ are relative terms, and depend upon how you conceive the relation between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. Culturally and historically, this is because one language influences another, and because one stage of a language becomes another. For example, French and Japanese have both contributed words to English and thereby changed it, and the reverse also applies. These processes are two- and many-way and ongoing. Meanwhile, it is observable that one stage of a language turns into another. For instance, most people would not recognise the original language of the poem ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’ (c. 1000 CE) as English, it looks and sounds so ‘foreign’ (more like Dutch or Swedish, say) and that is precisely one reason it is sometimes called Anglo-Saxon rather than Old English (see 5.1.1). And yet they would have no trouble in recognising and understanding the accompanying translation into Modern English

The case of Kelman’s rendering of Glaswegian colloquial speech in his novel How late it was, how late (5.3.2) points up the problems and possibilities in other ways. Some people were not able to understand – or willing to recognise – the dialect and/or the swearing of the novel as acceptable forms of ‘English’ worthy of winning one of the most prestigious literary prizes in Britain (the Booker prize of 1994). There was evidently a problem of ‘translation’ in a particularly vexed and complex sense. It was inflected in terms of nation, region, class and propriety on a number of vital interfaces: Scots/English; working-class/middle-class; taboo/respectable; colloquial speech/formal writing; ordinary language / extraordinary literature. Translating in the fullest and most flexible sense ultimately requires us to take on board just such issues of cultural politics and poetics along with matters of language and style more broadly conceived. What’s more, we ourselves are always in on the verbal act because we always belong to a certain historical stage of the language and have access to certain social and cultural varieties. (It obviously makes a difference with the Kelman – or any other text – whether we come from Scotland or regard ourselves as working class or do or don’t mind swearing, etc.) Puty more formally, each of us has a determinate yet dynamic relation to both the language being translated from (the source language) and the language being translated into (the target language). Needless to say, as with all things connected to language, these invariably turn out to be variable sources as well as moving targets.     

Translating, then, actively speaking, can be grasped as a process of intervention as well as interpretation; for it always involves transformation not just transference.  It is what each of us in one way or another does – into and out of one discourse and variety of language, if not between languages – as well as what we find others have done. In fact, we may be quite used to the idea of translations as something we can readily draw on in English, almost without thinking: translations of modern French and German theorists and philosophers, for example; translations of novels and plays from Europe, South America and Japan; the Old and New Testaments of the Bible; classical Greek and Roman texts of all kinds. But we may be less alert to the acts of translation—transformation each of us is regularly engaged in on a day-to-day basis: how we say something to friends or family or people we don’t know, in seminar discussion or group presentation or over coffee, in a work situation or when out socialising, in a text message or on a job application, in an essay on poetry or in a poem we may write ourselves, and so on. The following project ideas may help identify some area or aspect of translation—transformation that interests you.

Compare different English versions, including adaptations, of a frequently translated text, concentrating on a single part, e.g.: The Odyssey (Sirens); Metamorphoses (Pygmalion);  Bible (Genesis, Psalms, Sermon on the Mount, Revelations); Rubaiyatt of Omar Khayyam; also Old English (‘The Seafarer’) and Chaucer (General Prologue portrait). This can be done variously, with or without detailed knowledge of the source language. You might go on to add a version of your own, as poem, novel extract/short story, stage or radio play, film script, etc.

Translate/transform a text from one variety of language into another, perhaps in the manner of another author, movement or period, or into another genre or medium. This might involve rewriting or responding to, say, a Shakespeare or Milton sonnet through a contemporary theory or in the format of a tabloid problem page (cf. Agbabi and Fanthorpe in 5.1.2); doing Defoe in the manner of Austen or Dickens, a Brontë novel  in the manner of a Wilde play, or some such combination (see 5.2.2, 5.2.3, 2.2); or perhaps an epitaph or obituary in whatever language, mode or medium comes most readily to mind and hand (cf. 5.4.4—5).   

Draw on any of the generic and thematic clusters of texts in the Anthology (Part 5) – ‘Science and Fantasy Fiction’, ‘Performing poetry, singing culture’, ‘Dramatising “English” in Education’, ‘Mapping journeys’, etc. – and add examples of other texts and kinds of text  that interest you and may interest others. These may be in other varieties of English (representing other dialects or discourses) and perhaps other languages entirely (if so, turn them into some form of English). Go on to identify and build generic and thematic clusters that are not represented in Part 5.  

The following framework is an attempt to register the full range of problems and possibilities relating to translation—transformation. It maintains the broad distinction between inter-lingual translation between nominally different languages and intra-lingual translation within nominally the same language. But it also leaves plenty of room for play across these spaces in a variety of directions and dimensions; for the external polyglossia of different languages contributes to the internal heteroglossia of the same language. (Ideally, like many of the diagrams in this book, it would be computer-modelled in 3-D and with movement over time; cf. the openly mobile diagram of close-wide reading in 1.2.4.) So it is still left to you to translate—transform these terms, texts and designs into ones that suit you better. Initial references are to texts featured in the Anthology in Part 5; indicative references to other classic texts and authors follow, and can be greatly extended . . . (see further reading).

Here is a sample array of translations / transformations relating chiefly to texts featured in the Anthology (Part 5):                        

Old English: ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’ (5.1.1).

Medieval English: North-Western (Pearl); West Midlands (Piers Plowman); East Midland(Chaucer) (5.1.1)

Early Modern English: Wyatt (5.1.1); Shakespeare (5.1.2, 5.4.4); Milton, Pope (5.1.3)   

‘Primitive’ or ‘Restricted’ (made-up): Hoban, Riddley Walker  (5.2.4); also Burroughs, Tarzan; Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four; Burgess’s ‘Nadsat’ in Clockwork Orange; Golding’s ‘Neanderthal’ in The Inheritors; cf. ‘Autism’ in Faulkner’s, The Sound and the Fury; Haddon, The Improbable Incident .

Australian Greek: πo, ‘7 Daiz’ (5.1.5) ; Singapore English: Wei Meng, ‘I spik Ingglish’ (5.1.4)

Anglo-Indian: Kipling ‘Muhammad Din’ (5.2.1); also Rushdie, Roy, ; American Chinese: Amy Tan, ‘Feathers from a thousand li away’ (5.2.1) 

African Englishes: (Igbo) Achebe Things Fall Apart (5.4.5); (Yoruba) Tutuola, Palm Wine Drinkard (5.3.2); (Afrikaans) Fugard, Boesman and Lena (5.3.3); also Coetzee,

Caribbean: Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (5.2.3);  Nicholls, ‘Tropical Death’ (5.4.5); Scott, ‘Uncle Time’ (5.4.4)

Scots English >> Leonard, ‘This is thi six a’clock niws’ (5.1.4) ; Kelman, How late it was, how late (5.3.2); Bolam, ‘Gruoch’ (5.1.4); also Burns . . . Gray . . . Welsh . . . Kay

Welsh: Thomas (5.3.3); also . Irish:  Doyle (5.3.2): also     . Northern (Yorkshire); Brontë (2.2.2)  

INTRA-LINGUAL, within nominally the same language

TRANSLATING—TRANSFORMING                                                   

INTER-LINGUAL, between nominally different languages

Irish <<>>English: Friel, Translations (5.4.3); also Synge, O’Casey, Blasket islanders, . . . 

French (>>German) >> English:  Rilke—Shapcott, ‘Rose Poems’ (5.4.3); also Montaigne; Baudelaire . . . 

German >> English: Sebald, Austerlitz (5.4.3); also Goethe; Nietzsche; Kafka; Brecht . . .

Norwegian: Icelandic Sagas; Ibsen; Strindberg;

Spanish >> Cervantes, Don Quixote; (and Portuguese, inc.  South American): stories by Borges, novels by Marques, Allende . .

Italian >> English: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, . . . Calvino, Eco, 

Russian >> English: Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Mayakovsky, Tstvetaeva, Bulghakov, 

Medieval: French Romance (e.g. Malory’s Morte D’Arthure); Norse sagas; Celtic (Irish, Welsh and Breton) tales (Cuchulain; Mabinogion) ; Italian: Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde . . .

Aramaic >> Greek (>> Latin) >> Englishes,: Bibles, 10th—20th cent (@ 5.4); also ‘Noah’s Flood (@ 5.2)

Latin >> English: Vergil’s Aeneid (Gavin Douglas . . . ) and Pastorals; Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Arthur Golding . . . Ted Hughes); Plautus’s Comedies, Plutarch’s Histories (Thomas North . . .)  Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (Chaucer, Elizabeth I, . . .)

Greek >> English: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: versions by Chapman, Pope; cf. versions by Joyce (Ulysses), Walcott (Omeros); Atwood (Penelope);  Plato; Aristotle; tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides; Comedies by Aristophanes; Histories by Herodotus and Thucydides, . . .

Arabic >> English Omar Kayyam, Rubaiyyat;Fitzgerald; also Rumi

Japanese >> English: Basho haiku (@ 5.4); Murasaki, Tale of Genji; Murakami, novels . . . 

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The above is a full but far from exhaustive array of the kinds of ‘English’ text that may be explored in terms of translation—transformation. This emphasises the interlingual and intralingual dimensions of the subject and confirms the dynamic relation between external polyglossia (between different languages) and internal heteroglossia (within the same language). Cued by texts featured in the Anthology in Part Five, there is a gradual engagement with the most remote and intimate aspects of ‘English’ in relations to its various ‘others’: from Japanese and Arabic to ‘bhangra’ and ‘blography’. 

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Also see: ‘Translations / Transformations’ (5.4.3) for cluster of texts; 2.3.2 Adaptation and continuation; Writing and reading, response and rewriting; @4 Translation and translation studies. 

READING: Introductory Bassnett 2008; Venuti 2000 (reader); Lefevere 1992; Baker 2008 (encyclopedia). 

2.3.4 b games—playing . . .  

‘Games’ and ‘play’ have great resonance for anyone working in and around English. ‘Language at play’ is one of the more capacious definitions of literature, poetry obviously but also extending to novels and fiction-making in general, as well as ‘plays’ (i.e. dramas) as such. Moreover, such is the more or less rule- and role-governed nature of language, like life at large, that both are commonly and with good reason spoken of in terms of ‘games’: from Wittgenstein and others’ notions of discourses as distinct ‘language games’ to Berne’s and Goffman’s notions of life as ‘games people play’ and ongoing representations of self and/as/to others.  Pedagogically, meanwhile, games of one kind or another are essential in many areas of teaching and learning English, from early years to ELT; while any advanced approach to English Language and/or Literature is sure to come to grief if it foregoes the seriously playful aspects of these subjects in favour  of some unduly solemn notion of scholarship. In short, ‘games—playing’ is essential to the substance and the method, practice and theorising of the subject. You don’t have to be an especially ‘interactive’ learner or caricature ‘postmodernist’ to believe this. You just have to observe and take part in the games that language allows us to play, and the further play that literary texts introduce into the various systems. So you might like to develop a project expressly with ‘games’ or ‘play’ or – to accentuate the complex relation among them and the ongoing process – what is here telescoped together as ‘games—playing’.

But the phrase ‘games—playing’ can also be telescoped out. So it’s worth distinguishing the two terms ‘games’ and ‘play’, even while recognising their dynamic connection. Game tends to be identified with the rule-governed and role-constrained end of things: the rules of the game, roles of players, formal functions of pieces. Play is what actually goes on in the course of the game: how a particular strategy develops or move is executed, precisely how a player plays, the way some goal or end is achieved. If game supplies the overall framework as a given, play is what you actually make of it on some particular occasion. There is a useful analogy with language here, which also serves to confirm its game-like structure and playful possibilities. Language conceived as a whole system (Saussure’s langue) is a kind of formal game in that it is informed by the underlying rules of grammar and requires a generalised competence (in Chomsky’s sense). Language grasped as a series of actual utterances, however – Saussure’s paroles – are words in play in the world and fill out the abstract system with specific performances. Hence, the intrinsic creativity and partial unpredictability of verbal play, even while the rules and roles of the language game ensure a fair measure of comprehensibility and predictability. In fact, with games-playing in general – from games of football and chess to playing the stock-market or Russian roulette – there is always a productive tension between the game as a whole in theory and play in practice as it actually unfolds. That is why games-playing is such an endless source of both fascination and frustrations. Always in principle a variation on a theme, it is never the same difference in practice.

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What’s your game . . .?

The following general categories may help you identify the kinds of games—playing you are interested in. They are designated by their Greek terms and every kind of game – and then each instance of playing it – can be characterised by one or more of these properties:

agon   where competition is dominant (cf. antagonism), pitting one person or team against another (e.g. footbal, tennis, chess)

alea   where chance is dominant, submitting oneself to fate or fortune (e.g. roulette, the lottery, spinning a coin)

mimesis  where simulation is dominant, assuming the personality or taking the role of another (e.g. role-play, charades, ‘pretend’)

ilinx   where vertigo is dominant, aiming at giddiness or, in extreme cases, ecstasy (e.g. carousels, driving fast, raves) 

Gauging which of these properties (qualities, motivations, effects) is dominant for whom, when, where and why is a large part of the fascination. They can vary not only from game to game to game but also from player to player and from participant to spectator. (See Caillois 1961 for the initial categories, and Cook 2000: 114—116 and Pope 2005: 119—120 for further explication and examples.)

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Here, then, are some of the main areas in which ‘games-playing’ can provide a focus for critical and creative projects in and around English. (Representative theorists and key studies are included in brackets, and again the texts cited are simply indicative.)

Language games ranging from children’s rhymes and nonsense verse to cross-words and quizzes (Opie 1968, Farb 1974, Crystal 1998).

Language at large as a series of ‘games’ considered philosophically (Wittgenstein 1953, Lecercle 1994) and politically (Lyotard 1989).

Culture defined in terms of ‘play’ with an emphasis on its ceremonial and ritualistic aspects (Huizinga 1944, Caillois 1961, Turner 1982).

Learning defined in terms of play with an emphasis upon transitions between stages and levels (Vygotsky 1934, Winnicott 1971), and with language play at the core (Cook 2000).

Literature as a series of games or game-like systems, from grammars of fairy-tale, detective story and other more or less formulaic narratives (Propp 1924; Greimas 1974) to cues and constraints for generating creative writing (OULIPO 1981;     ).

Literary Theory as a celebration and demonstration of wor(l)d play on the literature/philosophy interface (Derrida 1991, 2004; Hassam   ); along with alternative configurations of poetics/politics, aesthetics/ethics (Haraway1991, Shepherd 2003).

Games and games-playing in their own right (with cards or counters, on pitches, on boards, electronically) and as formats and resources for fictional development, e.g.:

•  CARDS in Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ( 187  ) and Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (197 ); ◦ CHESS in A Game at Chess (15  ); Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (187  ); ◦ MIND-GAMES in Borges’s Labyrinths (19   ); Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (193 ); Egan’s Diaspora (1997); ◦ VIDEO-GAMES, including adaptations of fantasy and science fiction texts such as Lord of the Rings and Blade Runner; ◦ VIRTUAL WORLD-GAMES such as SimCity and Second Life.  

Plays – including ‘plays within plays’ – that sport with their own artifice and expose their own rules: Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600), including ‘The Mouse Trap’; Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966) including ‘Hamlet’; Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (19   ); cf. McDonagh’s The Pillow Man (5.3.3) (Boal 1984)

Also see: Poetry and word play; Drama, theatre, film and tv (Part Four); Play – recreation and re-creation (6.5). 

READING: Culture and/as play: Huizinga 1944, Caillois 1961, Turner 1982, Willis et al 1990 (youth and ‘common culture’). Philosophy of play: Derrida 1966, Carse 1987, Lyotard 1989, Pope 2005: 119—23.  Play as learning: Winnicott 1971, Cook 2000. Language play and games: Wittgenstein 1953, Farb 1974, Crystal 1998, Cook 2000. Literature, language and play: Derrida 1966, Pope 1995, Knights and Thurgar-Dawson 2006, Swann, Pope, and Carter (2011).  

2.3.4 c   life—work . . .         

The phrase ‘life—work’ is here offered as a handy portmanteau for carrying through a number of relatable projects. Again, as with translating—transforming and games—playing, these may initially feel ‘at the edge’ of English as conventionally conceived. But again, on further reflection and investigation, it becomes clear that such concerns are close to the core and the beating heart of the subject as it may come to be known afresh. And even in a mundane sense the relation between ‘life’ and ‘work’ is likely to become pressing at some point, most obviously in the transition between learning and earning, study and getting a job. These concerns are picked up practically throughout Part Six: ‘Taking it all Further – English for Life, Work & Play’. Here they will be addressed academically from within the project space of your programme of study. And as usual the aim is to stimulate and support ideas for genuinely independent, critical and creative study. Consider, for instance, the following categories of activity organised around the core notion of ‘Life—work’. And notice how the constantly varying relation between the two terms ‘life’ and ‘work’ opens up a wide range of conceptualisations of what, together, they might mean and do, beyond as well as within formal study. 

Fig. Life-work im/balance

A configuration of some the above might suggest a project at some ‘life-work’ interface as you conceive or construct it. As always, the trick is to bring the terms and concepts into contact with your own experience and to configure them in relation to a variety of lives and works – actual and virtual, real and imagined –that you already know and would like to know better or differently.

Also see: Getting your bearings (1.2.1); The new Eclecticism? (3.10); Living, learning, earning (6.1)

READING: Theorising life/living in culture: Bergson 1910; Dewey 1945; Whitehead 1953; Guattari 1989, Haraway 1997, Braidotti 2002. Representations of work/working in and out of literature: Williams 1972, Williams 1983: 334—7, Bennett et al 2005: 374—6.  

The present ‘limit’ cases were framed in terms of a triad of paired terms: translation—transformation and games—playing and life—work. Each might be taken in many directions with various kinds of material for individual projects. And taken together they anticipate the final emphasis on ‘Life, Work and Play’, including transformable skills and transformative knowledges, in Part Six. But of course many other projects are possible. For English really is always at the edge, and each of us is re-establishing our boundaries and pushing our own limits all the time. Yet other project possibilities based on the various topics and texts featured in the Anthology in Part Five, especially ‘Crossings’ (5.4.), are suggested on the web @ 2.3.1. Turn to those now if you are thinking of doing a project in such areas as Poetry that answers back; Rewriting revisited; War on – of –Terror; Media messages and street texts; Dramatising ‘English’ in Education; Mapping Journeys; Epitaphs and (almost) last words. But of course the possibilities are virtually infinite, even if actually finite in any particular instance. In fact, all English is in some respect ‘extreme’ and what appears to be a ‘limit’ always turns out to be liminal when pushed further. Whatever you do now by way of summary will also be preliminary to what you do next. Having done ‘English’ fully – seriously and with enjoyment, extremely, up to and beyond the limit – will surely lead to doing ‘English-otherwise’.

@ 2.4   FURTHER RE-READINGS AND RE-WRITINGS

These are some more examples of critical and creative activities that involve kinds of re-reading and re-writing. They feature particular authors, texts, genres and topics, but in practice as well as principle similar strategies may be readily be extended to others:

@ 2.4.1  Emily Dickinson’s ‘I’m Nobody – Who are You?’

@ 2.4.2  Nonsense narrative: ‘There was an old man . . .’

@ 2.4.3  Re-Joyce!

@ 2.4.4  Patient (and not-so) Griselda: Chaucer’s ‘The Clerk’s Tale’

@ 2.4.5  Whose Dora? Freud’s ‘Fragment of an Analysis . . . of Hysteria’

Forms of interpretation in the fullest sense, these are emphatically – energetically, resistantly, resiliently – kinds of seriously playful, powerful and pleasurable project. So they naturally go by a range of names: intervention (Pope 1995, 2005, 2011); active reading (Bartholomae and Petrosky 2006, Knights and Thurgar-Dawson, 2006); transformative writing or ghosting (Scholes, Comley and Ulmer 2006). The arguments and theories informing this kind of activity range from American ‘Reader-response’ and German ‘Reception Aeshetics’ through Bakhtinian ‘dialogism’ and ‘answerability’ to Postmodern playfulness (on its serious side) and Deconstructive ‘difference as deferral/referral’ (différance) (on its more re-constructive and re-creative sides). The broad theoretical positions and critical approaches are rehearsed in those areas in Part Three, and the more specific articulation of re-reading/rewriting as an assemblage of critical-creative activities is developed in Part Four (Writing and reading, response and rewriting). In many respects, such interpretative activities are simply the natural and logical extension of the notion of ‘response’ as something that we all have and do. They just push the process further to its logical (some would maintain illogical) conclusions: re-reading as re-writing, interpretation as intervention. How il/logical is for you to decide for yourself. So is the matter of how (with which texts, where, when, why, and for whom, etc.) you are going to do it. And so is the matter of whether you are going to do these kinds of thing on your own and/or as a group, for written projects or oral presentations, using a variety of what media, and so forth (cf. ‘Actual and virtual ‘English’, local and global community’, @ Prologue).

The present section of the website is therefore clearly framed by and broadly corresponds to its numerical counterpart in the book: Textual activities and learning strategies (2.4). The difference is that we here take a number of specific lines (paths, trajectories) through some specific materials: those listed above. To be sure, potentially all and any of the skills, knowledges, modes and occasions of study may be actively involved in this. But as these are particular texts implicated in and constitutive of particular contexts (educational and academic as well as more broadly cultural and historical) that actual materials used for illustration will be determined and determinate – though still in principle wide open and potentially infinite.

@ 2.4.1 Emily Dickinson’s ‘I’m Nobody – Who are You?’

This is what can be called a ‘split text’ activity. It takes a text that exists in at least two manuscript or published versions and gets people to respond to them separately then compare their responses. As throughout this part of the book, the emphasis is upon actively responding through kinds of rewriting as well as rereading.

In this case the text in play is Emily Dickinson’s ‘I’m Nobody’, which can be found in the book anthology at 5.3.4. This is the poem found in Emily Dickinson’s manuscript as precisely edited and published by Thomas Johnson in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, London: Faber, 1970. For the present purpose this version is called TEXT B. 

Another version of this poem, freely edited and repunctuated by Mabel Loomis Todd and T.W. Higginson, can be found in their Poems by Emily Dickinson, Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1890. This version is reproduced below and is called TEXT A:

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us – don’t tell!
They’s banish us, you know

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

These two versions of ‘the same text’ can of course simply be read and compared accordingly. The interpretation would then obviously take the form  of a critical and analytical re-reading. What is offered here is a way in through re-writing and it is suggested that the formal analysis come later, after an initial act of creative engagement in which a further synthesis is produced. Either way, as always, the overall emphasis is upon critical-creative interpretation through combinations of re-reading/re-writing. To be more precise, in this particular case, it is proposed that you do this.

(If you are on your own, do first one then the other of the following text/task activities. If you are in class, split into two groups so that each group will concentrate on just one of the text/tasks to begin with, and then come to compare them later.)

TEXT/TASK A

Retaining the overall form of this text (the one reproduced above), re-write it so as to produce an alternative which is different yet recognisably related. Restrict your changes to relatively localised matters of word choice and combination, punctuation and lay-out: inverting, substituting, deleting, adding, re-sequencing, etc.

The result should be a complete and provisionally finished text that can be readily compared with the one you based it on.  

TEXT/TASK B

Freely combine and adapt Text B (the one in the book anthology, 5.3.4) with the short text below (B ii), which contains biographical and contextual information. Aim at a fresh text that clearly combines elements of the two you started with, but let it be in any form, genre or medium you have a mind to. For example, in print it might be part of a novel or of an educational textbook; or it might be from a stage-play or film; or it might take the form of a web-site with links.

You will not be able to produce the whole thing, but should be able to draft or script parts and sketch or speculate about the rest.

(B ii) 

Emily Dickinson (1830—1886) lived all her life in Amherst. Massachusetts. By the age of 30 she had become an almost total recluse, never leaving her father’s house and garden, dressing completely in white, receiving very few visitors, and carrying on most of her many friendships almost solely by means of correspondence. She wrote well over a thousand poems; but only seven were published during her lifetime. The above poem was not one of them. I was found after her death, with the rest, carefully parcelled up in a chest. Since their fist publication in the 1890s (when many of Dickinson’s distinctive features of punctuation, meter, and idiom were ‘standardized’ or simply changed by the editors) her poems have steadily increased in readership and reputation. Indeed, since the 1960s ‘Emily Dickinson’ (as both poet and personality) has become something of an enigmatic iconic figure, especially amongst feminists. The text in the book anthology (featured here as Text B, from Johnson’s edition) restores Dickinson’s word choice, punctuation and meter to that actually left by her. It is generally agreed to be a preferable text to that produced by Todd and Higginson in 1890 (here featured as Text A). This present biographical text (B ii) is itself a conflation of the entry on Dickinson in The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (2006) with information in the introduction to Johnson’s edition (1970) and a chapter by Nancy Walker, ‘Wider than the Sky: Public Presence and Private Self in Dickinson, James and Woolf’ in Shari Benstock (ed.) The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, London: Routledge, 1988, pp. 372—303.

Once Text/Tasks A and B have been done, these very different re-writings of notionally ‘the same text’ may serve as the focus for a wide range of discussions and further activities. These include detailed comparative analyses, more exploration of Dickinson’s poetry and life, and further re-writings along similar or different lines. Attention may be focused on such aspects as:

• the effect of the detailed differences between the two initial texts of Dickinson’s poem (Texts A and B) in terms of word choice and punctuation.

• what is common to the two initial texts and what does – or does not – get carried across into the re-writes.

• the overall differences between an approach to interpretation that is substantially Formal (even Formalist) based on intensive reading/re-writing of the ‘text in itself’, ‘the words on the page’ (Text/Task A) and an approach that is substantially Historical (even Historicist) based on extensive  reading/rewriting of ‘text in context’ and ‘words in the world’ (Text/Task B). (A review of the Theoretical Positions and Practical Approaches in Part Three will help at this point, especially 3.2—3 (Text-based and Formalist approaches) and 3.5—8 (Contextual and Historicist approaches.) 

• the areas of actual and potential overlap between these two approaches and activities, and how they can enrich, intensify and extend one another. (The ‘Close reading – wide reading’ relation is crucial here, as modelled in 1.2.4, and this is carried through from ‘Initial analysis’ of text (2.1) to ‘Fuller interpretation’ in context (2.2).) 

For further comparison and contrast:

Here are just a couple of the many rewrites produced in response to these texts and tasks. Compare them with your own texts and with Dickinson’s:

Responses to Text/Task A

I was some body! But who were you?
Couldn’t you have been some body too?
Then there were two of us. Oh well . . .!
We should’ve welcomed her – no?

How dreary to be a nobody
How private like a toad
Croaking her name the dark night through
Under a stone by a road.

And here’s the beginning of another:

He’s nobody. Who’s she? . . .

Response to Text/Task B

(This was read out loud by two voices: a woman’s for the text of the letter; a man’s for the narrative commentary in brackets.)   

Dear Nobody

I’m Emily – Who are you?
I know – you are – not Emily – too
(She said, putting on her white dress)
There’s only one of me. You as well.
(She said, not answering the door)
Don’t tell – or pull the bell
(She said, in a letter to a friend
which was not posted
till much later
then advertised and published and read
by EVERYBODY!)

yours

E.D.     

And here’s the beginning of another:

from: e.d.@FROG

to: x.h.@BOG  . . .

(More detail and discussion as well as further examples can be found in the chapters referred to immediately below.)

Go on to try the above ‘split text/task’ activities with any text that survives in more than one manuscript or edited version. The contrast between narrowly ‘Formalist’ and broadly ‘Historicist’ approaches can obviously be explored with just one version of a text (minus or plus context); it’s just more revealing when more than one version is in play. For a fuller explication of this method with Dickinson’s ‘I’m Nobody’ and further examples, see Rob Pope, ‘Rewriting Texts, Re-constructing the Subject: Work as Play on the Critical-Creative Interface’ in Teaching Literature: A Companion, ed Tanya Agathocleous and Ann Dean, New York and Basingstoke, 2003, pp. 104—124 and Rob Pope, ‘Critical-Creative Rewriting’ in Graeme Harper (ed.) Teaching Creative Writing, New York and London: Continuum,2006, pp. 130—146.  

Another ‘split text’ activity, focusing on versions of James Joyce, in and out of his own writing, can be found @ 2.4.3. And one exploring the fictional-factual nature of a ‘life’ reproduced as a psychoanalytic case study (Freud’s ‘Dora’) follows @ 2.4.5.

@ 2.4.2 Nonsense narrative and text into film: ‘There was an old man . . .’

This is a way of exploring how stories make sense by seeing how they don’t. It is about the kinds of non/sense-making that pervade every act of story-telling and story-understanding. This is also an opportunity to experiment with the transformation of narrative from one genre and medium and to another. The emphasis here is upon transformations of nonsense verse into various kinds of film. But there is much that applies to the activity of textual transformation in general and to the film adaptation of written and spoken narratives in particular.

Here is a short, complete nonsense verse current in the late eighteenth century. Read it over and out loud a few times to see – and hear – how it does and does not make sense:

There was an old man
And he had a calf
And that’s half
He took him out of the stall
And put him on the wall
And that’s all

Obviously this is a joke, a kind of ‘mock story’, something and nothing, inconsequential, trivial. In short, it is nonsense. And because it is all wrapped up with rhymes and sound patterns to conjure up a sense of being quite complete – if not quite coherent – we may add that it is nonsense verse.  

1) Begin, then, by reflecting how this little text both does and does not make sense (the non/sense aspect), and by considering the part that the sound and structure and lay-out (the verse) plays in all this. Where precisely do conventional sense-making and story expectation break down? And how does the form help offset or over-ride this? In particular, consider the importance of the third and final lines: ‘And that’s half . . . And that’s all’.

2) Now think – and if possible talk – about how you might turn this text into a film. What possibilities and problems immediately spring to mind? Broadly what kind of film do you ‘see’, and if there is to be sound (perhaps words, sound effects, music), what do you ‘hear’?

3) Turn this thinking and discussion into some overall strategic decisions and then think tactically, in detail, how these might carry through into practice. The following lists should help:

Strategic decisions

What kind of film?   Genre label, category, other films that spring to mind . . .

Acted or animated – or a mixture?

Who is it for?  Children, adults, anyone . . .

What is your overall aim?    Amuse, shock, inform . . . 

With or without sound?     Monologue, dialogue, voice-over, sound-effects, music . . .

Black and white or colour – or even a mixture?

Would it be spare or lavish?   Minimal, maximal, middling . . .

Cheap or expensive to make?   Location, large or small crew, distribution . . . 

Tactically

How in particular might you handle:

time, place, figures

sequencing of scenes and actions

the third and last lines: ‘And that’s half / all’

beginning, middle, ending

narrative and character points of view

camera positions, angles and movements

4) Finally, decide on a provisional title, clinch the genres in play, script an opening and sketch what happens overall. You might like to think of this as a brief explanation of what you have in mind to friends, or as a two-minute ‘pitch’ to someone who might be prepared back it. Either way, assume they have no prior knowledge of the nonsense verse it is based on and of what you might do with it. This could be done as a thought experiment or worked up as an actual presentation. The above strategic and tactical decisions may well inform but they should not mechanically drive this. Be interesting and informative.

For a fuller account of these activities with this and similar ‘nonsense’ texts, se Rob Pope, ‘Sense and Non/Sense in narration’ in his Textual  Intervention: Critical and Creative Strategies fort Literary Studies, London and New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. 81—99. This includes examples of student responses, a detailed analytical apparatus and theoretical reflections on narrative, non/sense and film. Also relevant is the section on ‘Narrative in story and history: novel, news, film’ in Part Four of the present book.

Further work and play with the complex non/sense-making aspects of narrative might begin with the analysis and adaptation of Don Barthelme’s ‘The Death of Edward Lear’ and Angela Carter’s ‘The Werewolf’ (both in the book anthology, 5.2.1). The text—film dynamic could then be further explored with the other short, complete narratives by Kipling Atwood, Tan and Eggers in that same section. The texts in ‘Romance revisited’ (5.2.3), ‘Novel Voices’ (5.3.2), ‘Voice-play, dream-drama’ (5.3.3) and ‘Mapping journeys’ (5.4.2) could all be very productively and enjoyably explored using similar techniques and with similar technologies in mind. And the same in principle applies to any text, including those by Dickinson, Freud and others featured in the present web section, @ 2.4.

@ 2.4.3 Re-Joyce!  Life and/or/as writing . . .  

This is a life-writing activity spanning fictional and factual texts. To be precise, it is a life-rewriting activity involving the re-reading and re-writing of a notionally ‘novelistic autobiographical’ discourse through a nominally ‘historical, biographical’ one, and vice versa. There are two main texts in play, so in class the first part can be organised as a ‘split text/task’ activity: each text can be addressed by one group in relative isolation initially and then the two groups go on to compare texts and pool their various findings and makings. One person can work on each text in turn.       

The two main texts in play here are:

1. the opening of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), from ‘Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road . . . to ‘His mother had a nicer smell than his father.’ (This cannot be reproduced in full for copyright reasons; but even these tops and tails of the passage will serve to illustrate the principles. Joyce’s A Portrait is widely available.)
2. the opening of the biographical blurb about Joyce that prefaces Harry Levin’s influential collection, first published in 1963 in the UK as The Essential James Joyce and in the US by Viking as The Portable James Joyce:

James Joyce was born in Dublin on 2 February 1882. He was the oldest of ten children in a family which, after brief prosperity, collapsed into poverty. He was nonetheless educated at the best Catholic schools and then at University College, Dublin, where he gave proof of his extraordinary talent. In 1902, following his graduation, he went to Paris, thinking he might attend medical school there. But he soon gave up attending lectures and devoted himself to writng poems and prose sketches, and formulating an ‘aesthetic system’. Recqalled to Dublin in 1903 because of the fatal illness of his mother, he circled slowly towards his literary career. During the summer of 1904 he met a young woman from Galway, Nora Barnacle, and persuaded her to go with him to the continent, where he planned to teach English.

(NB. You don’t need to know anything else about Joyce or his work to get the basic idea of this activity. Some knowledge of his work and life is fed in later.)

This activity takes the form of a kind of dance in EIGHT STEPS, so feel free to vary the moves and add your own. The first three steps are illustrated with brief samples of student work, designated A1 and B2 etc., depending on the text and step in play. The other five are simply marked by an instruction. As usual, this is serious play – with equal emphasis on both turns – so feel free but keep focused.  Have a go at producing your own rewrites before reading on. And be prepared to analyse critically and tease out the theoretical implications, even from the most seemingly odd offerings. They invariably throw revealing light on the initial texts by Joyce and Levin as well as themselves.

STEP 1  Rewrite the title of each text in some way that you consider interesting (provocative, playful). 

e.g.     

A1.1     a portrait of an artist as a young man

A1.2     A Picture of Me as a Kid Writing

A1.3     Some Self-obsessed Confessions of the Irish Piss-artist as a Guilt-ridden     Adolescent Catholic

A1.4     Wot – no Pictures of Artisans as Old Women?!

B1.1     An Inessential Joyce (UK version)

B1.2.    The Insupportable Joyce (US version)

B1.3.    Which James Joyce? A Consumer Guide to English Literature.

One of a series including Which Woolf? and What the Dickens!

STEP 2  Recast the first sentence of each text so as to draw attention to relatable persons, places, times and points of view that are not mentioned. (This involves a quick search on the web or in the library, or the provision of a little extra information readily available in standard reference books.) 

e.g.

B2.1. Mrs Mary Jane (‘May’) Joyce (née Murray, b. 1859) gave birth to her first son when she was 23 years old.

B2.2  (to be sung) ‘In Dublin’s fair city, where the maids are so pretty, the world sets its eyes on sweet Jai-aimie Joyce.’

B2.3  February 1882. Fog on the Liffey. Famine not long before in Ireland. What was one birth among so many deaths? Who notices or cares when a ‘star’ is born?

(Sample rewrites of the opening of A Portrait (A) are featured in the next step.) 

STEP 3  Combine the openings of the novel and the biography so as to produce the beginning of a third, composite and hybrid text.  However strange or apparently nonsensical the result, it will cast oblique yet revealing light on the distinct natures of the two texts you have drawn together.

e.g.

A/B 3.1  Once upon a time James Joyce was born in Dublin on 2 February 1882 – and a very good time it was.

A/B 3.2.  Joyce James. Cow moo. Born along down upon the good road time. 2.2.82. Very Dublin was. February was. In, in, in. A, a. It. When?

STEP 4  With all the resources at your disposal (the library, web, critical and creative intelligence, rhetorical skill), make a case for Text A (A Portrait) being ‘truer’ than Text B (the biographical sketch). Define your criteria and produce your evidence. 

STEP 5   Add some sights, smells, a sense of touch and a touch of music to Text B (the biography). Take them away from Text A (the novel) and replace them with perfectly sensible but relatively ‘sense-less’alternatives.

STEP 6   See what happens to Text A and Text B if you try to turn them into

• first-person narration (singular or plural, ‘I’ or ‘we’)
• second-person narration (again singular or plural, ‘you’).

Put whoever you choose in the ‘I’ or ‘we’ or ’you’ positions: James Joyce; his mother or father or wife; Harry Levin; a version of yourself; someone else entirely.

STEP 7   (Linguistic)  Draw up lists of the three main kinds of noun in Text A and in Text B: common nouns (e.g. time, children); proper nouns / names (e.g. baby tuckoo, James Joyce); and pronouns (e.g. He, it). (You should therefore have three lists for each text.) What do these lists show you about the way the wor(l)d – the ‘world within the word’ – is constructed in each text? What would be the consequences of changing the proportions and re-categorising the perceptions?

STEP 8     (Literary historical) Get hold of a copy of Joyce’s Stephen Hero (an earlier version of A Portrait) and of one the ‘classic’ of Joyce (by Ellman or O’Brien, for example). Read them for what they tell or show you about the issues involved in writing a life, whether nominally ‘fictional’ or ‘factual’, ‘of ‘oneself’ or ‘another’. Then consider how you might rewrite parts of them – separately or together – so as to explore the dynamics of life and/or/as writing. If possible, do this on your own and then with other people. (That way the self/other dynamic of auto/biography is thoroughly in play in the process of re-writing as well as re-reading.)   

A fuller version of this activity can be found in Rob Pope, ‘Critical-Creative Rewriting’ in Graeme Harper (ed.) Teaching Creative Writing, New York and London: Continuum, 2006, pp. 130—146. This activity can be compared with the re-reading/re-writing of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and life in terms of one another (@ 2.4.1) and that of Freud’s case study of ‘Dora’ (@ 2.4.5). For an overview of relevant issues, see the entry on ‘Auto/biography and travel writing: selves and others’ @ 4.

@ 2.4.4  Patient (and not so) Griselda: Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale

This is an activity that is especially good for older classic texts that have been the subject of a great deal of critical and creative attention, that have often been imitated, adapted and continued as well as commented upon and critiqued. Indeed, with classic texts there are often identifiable sources and previous versions by other people that can be fed into the critical-creative mix. Such is the case with Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale, as with many of the other Canterbury Tales, and as it is with many of Shakespeare’s plays (for a comparable activity with Shakespeare’s and other people’s Hamlet, see @ 3.1.2).

The Clerk’s Tale is a particularly challenging case of old texts meets new readers. Its story of ‘patient Griselde,’ the poor and long-suffering peasant girl who is married to and severely tested (some would say tormented) by an aristocratic husband, Marquis Walter, rings all sorts of alarm bells for contemporary readers tuned for democracy and sexual equality. Its emphatically Biblical underpinning – Griselde’s patience recalls that of Job and her motherly suffering that of Mary, mother of Christ – poses problems for a student body that is often secular or committed to other religions or other than-medieval versions of Christianity (from Hinduism and Islam to Christian evangelism). What’s more, interpretation of The Clerk’s Tale is further complicated for internal and external reasons. It is intrinsically complicated by a fictional narrator, the Clerk, who himself evidently takes issue with the patient Griselde story as traditionally told: he twice interrupts his own telling to complain of Marquis Walter’s apparent cruelty. And it is extrinsically complicated by the fact that Chaucer follows the outline of his acknowledged story source (the telling of the tale by Petrarch – and there is another telling by Boccaccio) but frequently diverges in detail and differs in emphasis. There is also an ‘envoy’ at the close of Chaucer’s telling in which the Clerk offers the tale as a counter in the ongoing argument about marriage across The Canterbury Tales, scoring points off the Wife of Bath in passing.

Subsequent to all this, of course, ‘patient Griselda’ (usually spelt with an ‘a’) has become a familiar phrase and persistent cultural reference, and Chaucer’s work has been the occasion of sustained critical attention and is now the focus of a major academic and educational industry. A particularly provocative modern revisiting of The Clerk’s Tale occurs in Caryl Churchill’s play Top Girls (1982), where Griselda’s legendary patience is explored alongside the very different value systems of a whole host of female heroines from history as well as story. These include Pope Joan and the Victorian explorer Isabella Bird. 

In all these respects, then, Chaucer’s re-telling of this familiar tale can stand for the interpretative complications of many a classic re-telling. And for all these reasons, The Clerk’s Tale and other such texts are best grasped through yet further acts of re-writing as well as re-reading. What follow are some of the strategic ways in which such rewriting may be undertaken, along with some brief samples from much longer works indicating what particular students have actually done with The Clerk’s Tale. We lead with the general strategies as these are widely applicable, and follow with an illustrative snippet of the specific application here.

1) Rewrite as though by ANOTHER AUTHOR, through a different yet revealing world-view, perhaps in ANOTHER GENRE.

e.g. The Clerk’s Tale through Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (Kate Wood)

dear God,

I am fourteen year old. I han always been a good girl. May be you can send me some sign to tell me what is happening to me. I han always looked after my Fader best I can. I tend to sheep, do spynnynge. Eek cooke and fecche his ale [ . . . then of her husband] His mynde is amyss. Yesterday he cam to my chaumbre a-nyght  and sayde the peple speke up and doune of the shame of been sometime in servage to child born of small village – tho it been hir village. He also sayde he moste tak myn doghter. Tho she be our doghter and his doghter also. He sayde what he do wil be al for the beste. I not so sure. Be this thy wil too o god?  […]

2)   Put together a COLLAGE of significantly related texts in a form (format, genre) you feel effective.

e.g.  ‘The Love Song of Griselda’: The Clerk’s Tale through quotations from T.S. Eliot, Old and New Testaments, Shakespeare, G.M. Hopkins, et al. (Jane Jordan)

(The numbers refer to the author’s notes below.)

a condition of complete simplicity

(costing not less than everything) (1)

The Angel said to mary, ‘an a sword shall pierce your heart’ (2). In her image a sword has pierced mine too. Mary, blessed are you among women. Blessed was the fruit of your womb (3). You raised me as the mother of God, I am the mother of heirs to a kingdom.

I am the Lord’s servant, may it be to me as you have said (4).

I cam naked into this world and naked shall I return (5).

My husband is my Lord, my life, my keeper, my head and my sovereign (6). […]

Love, honour and obey my earthly Lord (8) […]

One last kiss ere I leave thee (10) Thou mastering me God! (11). So hard – and a sword has pierced my heart. And in the quietness my silent voice can scream and scream.

‘Absalom, O Absalom, my son! (12)   […]

(1) T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (opening)

(2)  Luke 2.35.

(3)  Based on Roman Catholic ‘Ave Maria’ (Hail Mary)

(4)  Luke 1.38

(5)  Book of Job 1.21; compare The Clerk’s Tale, ll.931—8.

(6) Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, Act V. […]

(8) Based on Medieval marriage service, Sarum usage. […]

(10) Shakespeare, Othello, Act V – Othello to Desdemona before he strangles her.

(11) Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland.

(12)  King David on being told of the death of his son, Psalms.

3) Recast and update the text as a DRAMATIC SCRIPT for a stage play, film or tv.

e.g. ‘Trinasty’ – The Clerk’s Tale as TV soap opera (Mark Bradley)

Walter: Your daughter out there – she looks after you OK?

Janicula: Grisella? Yeah. She’s a good girl – she studies hard at school, keeps the house fine. Since my wife died

Walter (cuts in): Is she dating any guys?

Janicula: No. No. She’s a good girl – she never no trouble. Her mother – God rest             her soul – never

Walter (cuts in again) Janicula, my friend. This is gonna surpise you. I wanna marry your daughter.

Janicula: Marry her?! Mr Maquisa – you joke with me? A poor girl – a rich man   like you?

Walter (curtly): I have no time for jokes, Janicula.   […]

Fuller detail, including samples of the students’ critical commentaries on their rewrites along with other strategies applied to The Clerk’s Tale, can be found in  Rob Pope, ‘Rewriting Texts, Re-constructing the Subject: Work as Play on the Critical-Creative Interface’ in Teaching Literature: A Companion, ed Tanya Agathocleous and Ann Dean, New York and Basingstoke, 2003, pp. 104—124 and, even more extensively, in World and Stage: Essays for Colin Gibson, ed. Greg Waite, et al. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998, pp. 93—109.  For a comparable activity with Shakespeare’s and other people’s  Hamlet, see @ 3.1.2, and for further discussion of ‘Adaptation and continuation’ see @ 2.3.1. Full guidelines on rewriting in various modes, genre and media can be found in the book,  ‘Further strategies for critical-creative writing’ (2.3.3).  For yet other critical-creative interpretations of a ‘classic’, culturally central and expressly religious text (the ‘Ten Commandments’, Biblical and otherwise), see Rob Pope, ‘Rewriting the Critical-Creative Continuum: 10 x . . .’ in Creativity in Language and Literature: the State of the Art, ed. Joan Swann, Rob Pope and Ronald Carter, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 250—64.

@ 2.4.5  Whose ‘Dora’? Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

This re-writing activity involves not only an exploration of narrative through dramatisation but also an exploration of academic discourse through performance. It plays in the space between supposedly factual transcript and palpably fictional script; and it exposes, through experiment, the apparently objectifying apparatus of critical commentary and scholarly annotation as these tend to conceal as much as they reveal. The text featured here is Sigmund Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905), commonly known as ‘Dora’, after the pseudonym Freud gave his patient, an eighteen-year-old from a well-to-do Viennese family. But much the same strategies can be used to explore any instance of ‘life as case study’ and ‘interview as evidence’. In fact, its use can be extended to any text that employs academic discourse and scholarly apparatus to represent its object objectively and thereby veil or exclude the subject positions of interviewer and analysts. So similar things can be done with academic essays and presentations of all kinds, other people’s and one’s own. (The creative and critical approach to the sample English essay in ‘Critical essay +’ (2.2.5) points towards similar possibilities too.)

You don’t have to know anything about Freud or Freudian psychology to read and respond to the extract from ‘Dora’ presented below, and to see the point of the activities that follow. Most of them can be done from ‘cold’ and only the later ones require fuelling with further knowledge and specific enquiry. So read this text through feeling for a preliminary sense of the narrative structures and dramatic voices in play; and look out for the verbal strategies and textual devices that turn the encounter into (i) an interview; and (ii) a case study. (Both aspects will be picked up in the activities that follow.) This extract is from about halfway through the text. Freud is telling how he pressed Dora about her second dream, in which she dreamt her father had saved the family from a fire but her mother wanted to return to save her jewel-case. (The numbers in brackets and the notes they refer to immediately below are Freud’s):

Much of the dream, however, still remained to be interpreted, and I proceeded with my question: What is this about the jewel-case that you mother wanted to save?’

‘Mother is very fond of jewellery and had had a lot given her by Father.’

‘And you?’

‘I used to be very fond of jewellery too, once; but I have not worn any since my illness. Once four years ago’ (a year before the dream), ‘Father and Mother had a great dispute about a piece of jewellery. Mother wanted to be given a particular thing – pearl drops to wear in her ears. But Father does not like that kind of thing, and he brought her a bracelet instead of the drops. She was furious and told him that as he has spent so much on a present she did not like he had better just give it to someone else.’

‘I dare say you thought to yourself you would accept it with pleasure.’

I don’t know (1). I don’t in the least know how Mother comes into the dream: she was not with us at L— at the time’ (2)

‘I will explain that to you presently. Does nothing else occur to you in connection with the jewel-case? So far you have only talked about jewellery and have said nothing about a case.’

‘Yes, Herr K. had made me a present of an expensive jewel-case a little time before.’

Then a return present would have been very appropriate. Perhaps you do not know that ‘jewel-case’ [Schmuckkästchen] is a favourite expression for the same thing that you alluded to not long ago by means of the reticule you were wearing (3) – for the female genitals, I mean’

‘I knew you would say that.’ (4) 

‘That is to say, you knew that it was so. The meaning of the dream is now becoming even clearer. You said to yourself: “This man is persecuting me; he wants to force his way into my room. My ‘jewel-case’ is in danger, and if anything happens it will be Father’s fault.” For that reason in the dream you chose a situation which expresses the opposite – a danger from which your father is saving you. In this part of the dream everything is turned into its opposite; you will soon discover why. As you say, the mystery turns upon your mother. You ask how she comes into the dream. She is, as you know, your former rival in your father’s affections. In the incident of the bracelet, you would have been glad to accept what your mother had rejected. Now let us put ‘give’ instead of ‘accept’ and ‘withhold’ instead of reject’. Then it means that you were ready to give your father what your mother withheld from him; and the thing is question is connected with jewellery. (5)

(1) The regular formula with which she confessed to anything that had been repressed.

(2) This remark gave evidence of a complete misunderstanding of the rules of dream interpretation, though on other occasions Dora was perfectly familiar with them. This fact, coupled with the hesitancy and meagreness of her associations with the jewel-case, showed me that we were here dealing with material which had been very intensely repressed.

(3) This reference to the reticule will be explained later.

(4)  A very common way of putting aside a piece of knowledge that emerges from the repressed.

(5)  We shall be able later on to interpret even the drops in a way which will fit the context.

(The text can be found in Freud’s Case Histories I: ‘Dora’ and Little Hans’, trans. Angela Richards, London: Penguin, 1977, pp.104—5. ) 

PRELUDE – DOING IT IN DIFFERENT VOICES Read the text out loud using four different voices: three for Freud in his various roles as narrator, interviewer and annotator, and one for Dora as interviewee. The apparently simple transformation of text into performance – from print to speech, narrative to drama, authorial monologue to acted dialogue – shows up some highly complex dynamics: about who controls the discourse and how; and about what potential spaces there are for the production of resistant and alternative interpretations. (Try doing this for yourself before reading on.)

The following are some rewriting opportunities opened up by discussion of the above reading-out-loud. They are here represented merely by titles and brief comments so as to give the idea. The actual projects were much fuller and the occasion for reading-round, research and extensive critical commentary comparing the Freud with the re-write. (Of the many studies of this case history, one of the most valuable and stimulating is still the collection In Dora’s Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, 1985; and see below for further reference).

Dora as Annotator and Translator: Dr Freud’s ‘Explanation Complex’  Where the roles and levels of textuality are more evenly distributed, and the overall patient-doctor role is reversed.     

Educating Dora  In which Dora, like the eponymous heroine of Willy Russell’s Educating Rita, is not so much educated by her mentor as eventually instrumental in educating him.  (for an extract from Russell’s play, see the book anthology 5.3.1).

Ida Bauer: The real ‘Dora’ who stood up   Based on a reconstruction of how the actual woman behind ‘Dora’ broke off the treatment with Freud, leading to an account of her later life counter-pointed with Freud’s continuing brooding over – and efforts to revise and recuperate – this ‘fragment’. 

Not-So-Happy Families – the Group Therapy Version   Treats the problem as to do with the family and friends (especially the Father and Mother and Herr K. – rather than the individual as such, Dora. This was also a Gestalt Psychology approach that emphasised that emphasised present choices and future possibilities rather than past conditions and childhood.

Sherlock Freud as Sigmund Holmes: The Case of the Missing Genitals – sorry, Jewel-case   Playing on the far-from-coincidental contemporaneity of Conan Doyle’s fictional super-sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, and Freud’s role as an equally tireless investigator of the unconscious. Both, it is argued, are late 19th and early 20th –century celebrations of the Western (male) myths of positivist rationalism and comprehensive empiricism.

If you read the above Freud text out loud and then considered its implications, you may well have come up with ideas for rewrites along similar lines – or quite different ones altogether. ‘Translating’ a text into a different medium, genre, discourse or, indeed, language (this is translated into English from the German, notice, as the editorial gloss within square brackets on ‘jewel-case’ [Schmuckkästchen] confirms) always puts the text under fresh pressure, exposes the textual structures and strategies from a fresh angle, and opens up a sense of process and potential play. The same can be said of and done with any text when stretched in a variety of directions and dimensions. The process is simply more obvious, and the potential for interpretation much richer, when the text is of ‘classic’ and perhaps ‘iconic’ status: culturally central and perennially contentious.

For more detail on the above and further examples of rewriting of the Freud text, see Rob Pope, ‘Critical-Creative Rewriting’ in Graeme Harper (ed.) Teaching Creative Writing, New York and London: Continuum, 2006, pp. 130—146. An overview of Freudian and other psychological approaches to language, literature and culture, can be found under ‘Mind and Person – Psychological approaches’, 3.4.  Other rewritings that explore the life/work and fact/fiction dynamic are @ 2.4.1 (Emily Dickinson) and @ 2.4.3 (James Joyce).