Studying English Literature and Language, 3rd Edition

@ PROLOGUE: CHANGING ‘ENGLISH’ NOW

@ Prologue actively mobilises many of the issues raised in the book Prologue: crossing borders, establishing boundaries, exploring texts in context, etc. It also offers a preliminary work-out and play-around with most of the skills explored in ‘Doing English’ (1.2). Some of the activities can be picked out and done individually; but when linked and done continuously they form a flexible and capacious project. Either way, the material is designed to be readily adaptable for a wide variety of occasions and courses. Most immediately, this is an extended practical prelude to the present book. Theoretically and methodologically, it enacts the kinds of ‘plural’ and ‘eclectic’, ‘critical and creative’ approaches to the subject featured in Parts One, Two and Three. ‘English’, here again then, is what you make as well as find it to be: in your own terms and times and places as well as those of others; in your immediate academic community as well as the communities around and beyond, before and to come. This is ‘Changing English Now’ – whatever, whenever, wherever, whoever . . . that may be.

@ Prologue contains the following:

@ ACTUAL AND VIRTUAL ‘ENGLISH’, LOCAL AND GLOBAL COMMUNITY

Key terms and concepts

Prelude one – individual response

Prelude two – joint response

Prelude three – taking one another for a ‘walk’

@ INITIAL IMPRESSIONS OF.... ‘ACTUAL’ COMMUNITY

Sample seminar format:  ‘Green-space, Street-scape, Museum/Gallery’

@ FURTHER IMPRESSIONS OF.... ‘VIRTUAL COMMUNITY’

Examples from print and the intranet

Reflecting on the practice, theorising the action

Ten more propositions and provocations

Connecting with the rest of the book

@ ACTUAL AND VIRTUAL ‘ENGLISH’, LOCAL AND GLOBAL COMMUNITY:

An ongoing project in response, reading, rewriting and research

All the activities in @ Prologue are concerned with textual representations of people in place and time. We begin with places you are getting to know or think you know already – and then get to know differently, perhaps better. This naturally entails getting to know other people and places and times and similar yet different representations of them. ‘English’ of one kind or another is always in the picture somewhere. The following epigraphs will help set the scene:

Significant literary work can only come into being in a strict alternation between action and writing: it must nurture the familiar forms that best fit its influence in active communities.

Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street (1925—6)

You could see your own house as a tiny fleck on an ever-widening landscape, or as the center of it all from which the circles expanded into the infinite unknown.

Adrienne Rich, ‘Notes Towards a Politics of Location’ (1984) 

Only the local is universal.

William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography (1951)

‘Initial and Further Impressions of . . .’

Initial Impressions begin where you are: with more or less spontaneous written responses to local conditions (say, course and college, town and country) and with face-to-face presentation and discussion in seminar. This is the ‘home base’ of your actual community. Further Impressions take you somewhere similar but different: to the same places recast in the light of further information and reflection (grasped globally and historically, for instance) and to the making of a collaborative web-based anthology. This is the site of your virtual community, and it extends to books and the library as well as the web.

• Initial Impressions, then, are about first thoughts and first drafts, responding in a relatively individual and immediate sense – to places, people, texts.
• Further Impressions, however, are about second and third thoughts and more complex responses – and the texts are more obviously collaborative and mediated.
• Initial and Further Impressions, together, are therefore about search and re-search, vision and re-vision: processes of writing and reading and presenting as these extend to processes of re-reading and re-writing and re-presenting.

The products, meanwhile, range from short texts by a single author to complex texts authored by many, and from scribbled notes to fully finished pieces – spoken, written and screened.

In terms of skills and knowledges, ‘Initial and Further Impressions’ rehearses the kinds of process gone through and resource drawn on in many kinds of extended study. It also models the processes engaged in every time you go from a first reading to a re-reading and reading around, and from initial notes to a rough draft to a finished piece of writing. The primary medium and overall subject is obviously ‘English’. Though what precisely these are ‘impressions of . . .’ and who exactly is being impressed and doing the expressing – the material objects and human subjects in play – depends very much upon where and when and who you are. In sum, this is an open invitation to explore ‘Changing English’ now and again (afresh), for yourself but not on your own.   

You can explore each ‘Impression’ on its own or, for full effect, do both together. There are some Key terms and concepts to get warmed up theoretically, and some   Preludes to get warmed up practically. Otherwise go straight to the Impressions. 

Preludes One and Two involve kinds of individual and collaborative response of a more or less immediate and impressionistic kind. Prelude Three involves more sustained memory work and narration. All three Preludes readily connect to material generated by other people doing the same task and to texts and images already existing elsewhere. Each of these preludes can be valuable and enjoyable in itself, and they are especially effective as a series. They also anticipate the kinds of material and activity featured in the Initial and Further Impressions.

Key terms and concepts

Conceptually, the key axes on which everything revolves are those signalled at the close of the Prologue. At the centre is the interface between a variety of words and worlds, your own and other people’s:

LOCAL—GLOBAL                   

ACTUAL—VIRTUAL                         

WORDS / WORLDS    

SELF—OTHER             

CRITICAL—CREATIVE

Meanwhile, the array of strategies and processes involved, as indicated above, is characterised by the prefix ‘RE-’. This never really means just doing something ‘again’; it always, ideally, means doing things ‘afresh’ – differently and perhaps better: Re-Writing, Re-Reading, Re-Presenting, Reflecting, Researching, Revising / Re-visioning.

Together, through re-iteration and collaboration, these strategies make for repetition with difference, ongoing variation (also see 1.2.9). There may or may not be an overall sense of improvement (achieved progress); there will certainly be an enhanced awareness of complexity, sophistication, multiplicity (emergent process).

Prelude one – individual response

The above, then, is your own singular text fixed in time and place. It has all the essential coordinates of a historical event (person, time, place) and all the components of a textual reference (author, title, date, place of publication).  Currently its title is ‘Prelude One’, but you could add one of your own to catch what you have written.  (This also, notice, has the main ingredients of a formal contract, declaration or acknowledgement, like those made when formally submitting a piece of written work; see 1.2.6.)    

You could go on to compare your text with those of other people who are doing the same activity. You could also compare it with other versions or visions of the same institution (city, area, country), including images as well as words: in the prospectus, in newspapers, in conversation, in the library, on the web. (If the activity has been done before, it could also include written responses on other occasions, perhaps in previous years.)

Here, for instance, are some texts used when comparing student responses to Oxford and to Oxford Brookes University. The last three are from Oxford: One City, Many Voices (Oxford: Gatehouse: 2004), a collection of impressions of Oxford from people living on the streets as well as from academics, writers, social workers, etc.

INSPIRE   DEVELOP  EXPERIENCE   SUPPORT  JOIN   NETWORK  LEARN

Selection of capitalised words on hoardings round the building sites at Oxford Brookes University, UK – the first ‘signs’ of the university that met visitors 2010—12.  

“Small place, Oxford, and very expensive. No local people. We don’t meet local people. No big shops. It’s in the Top 50 Crap Cities book.”

Anonymous, Oxford: One City, Many Voices, p. 30.

“We came to Oxford in the hot, dry sunny summer of 1976 – the impression of the city was that it was full of punts, girls wearing long, flower-covered dresses and straw hats, and masses of brown grass in the parks. All this was a contrast to the first time I had come to Oxford when I was nineteen, and had arrived on the back of a Lambretta from London, to visit a school friend who had eloped with her lover and was working in the Co-op in Cowley Road”

Ann McPherson, Oxford: One City, Many Voices,  p.54.

“As soon as we got off the ferry, we knew we wanted to be here because we are psychics. We prefer England. We knew the whole situation – the land, the water, the free spirit. It’s a free place. We want to live mainly in Oxford, in the country, a nature area. Nature seems near in Oxford city centre.”

Thea and Addie, Oxford: One City, Many Voices, p.40.

Prelude two – joint response

The above is your joint and more or less collaborative text. It, too, has all the essential coordinates of a historical event (persons – plural, time, place) and all the components of a textual reference (authors – plural, title, date, place of publication). You might add a title or two of your own, other than ‘Prelude two’. As with parts of the rest of the text, this may be suggested by one of you and agreed by the other, or you may have alternatives to offer. The point is that the text will be different from anything that each of you would have come up with on your own (as in Prelude One). In that sense it is a collaborative venture and should be acknowledged accordingly.  (Incidentally, when it comes to formally submitted work, failing to acknowledge collaboration is a form of plagiarism; see 1.2.6.)

You could go on to compare your text with those of other groups of people who are doing the same activity. Or compare it with your own individual response if you did Prelude One. Either way, you could also compare your joint text with other versions or visions of the same institution (city, area, country), including images as well as words: in the prospectus, in newspapers, in conversation, in the library, on the web. In practice, many of those will have been collaborative or at least the product of a joint effort. (Again, if this activity has been done before, it could also include written responses on other occasions, perhaps in previous years.)

Prelude three – taking one another for ‘a walk’

Each of these ‘walk talks’ could be written up as a text later. You could also turn the pair of them into a joint piece, pointing up the comparisons and contrasts. If there are many such ‘walk talk texts’, they could be put together in an anthology. Selecting and sequencing the contents and prefacing the whole with a brief rationale and introduction could be a project in its own right.

Comparison can again be made with other kinds of ‘walk’ texts in various genres: on the street and in the country, locally and elsewhere. For examples of the latter, see  ‘Daffodils?’ (5.4.1) and ‘Mapping Journeys’ (5.4.2).

The following texts featuring ‘walks’ in and around Oxford were offered for comparison and to help cue the ‘Impressions ’ activities that follow. They were accompanied by analytical and critical questions that can also be applied to many such texts, including your own:

• What kind of ‘walk’ does each writer take us on? 
• How would you describe the style, genre and point of view of each piece?
• What different versions or visions and valuations of Oxford do they offer?
• And how do these compare with your own view of Oxford so far? 

‘When I think of Oxford I think of friends made there, work done there, and a host of enchantments: places like Addison’s walk, vistas like the curving view of the High seen from the corner of Longwall Street, sounds like the various college bells disagreeing with each other about what time it is, and layers of historical, literary, biographical and personal associations which, woven together and arranged in a space, make a map in my head of that rich slice of the world bounded by St Anne’s College, the Parks, Magdalen Bridge, Christ Church Meadows, and Oxford railway station.’

A.C. Grayling, ‘What Time It Was’, Oxford: One City, Many Voices, p. 33.

I walk the streets of Oxford

Wanting to be on my own

Minding my own business

When suddenly I’m confronted

By somebody I don’t know.

Have you got a cigarette paper?

Have you got a 20p?

Have you got this; have you got that?

I reply I haven’t.

No questions about how you are,

Or how far you are going

Or what the day is about.

It’s just the Land of Have You Got?

Anne, ‘The Land of Have You Got?’, Oxford: One City, Many Voices,  p. 62

‘Living in Oxford – what a friendly place. I’m the man in the street – ‘Wotcha, mate!

How’s it going?’ ‘Yeah, nice one.’ I can stop and chat, have a laugh. There’s nothing

like a pint after a hard day’s graft.

Living in Oxford – what an expensive place. I’m the giro geezer down in town during the day. I’m the one who always owes money the day I get paid. Not so many stop and chat now, to be honest, and in my old clothes, I feel like a twat.

Living in Oxford – what a lonely place. Signed on for sickness benefits now. You’re picking up your giro just to get off your face.’

Damien, Untitled, Oxford: One City, Many Voices, p. 8.   

@ INITIAL IMPRESSIONS OF  . . . ‘ACTUAL’ COMMUNITY

‘GREEN-SPACE, STREET-SCAPE, MUSEUM/GALLERY’

(i) Visit THREE kinds of space locally, and in each case bring away a written impression. The three categories are Green space, Street-scape and Museum/Gallery, and each of the written impressions should be no more than 40 words (i.e. up to 120 words in all).  

Such spaces can be readily identified with the aid of a map and local guidebook.

For Oxford, for instance, the following lists are supplied, with the three different kinds of places highlighted on a map:                                       

Green space	Street-scape	Museum/Gallery
South Park Headington Hill Park Port Meadow Christ Church Meadow Botanic Gardens	Cornmarket Street Queen Street Cowley Road Eastgate Centre St. Giles	Pitt-Rivers Natural History Ashmolean Modern Art History of Science

Writing tip Include something specific and particular, catching a significant detail even while establishing a general atmosphere. Your response might be prompted by such things as

• a particular object, person, group, . . .  
• a snatch of overheard conversation, a notice in a window . . .
• the texture of a wall, the smell coming from a shop, a certain light, . . . 

Feel free to include any associations or images that arise, too, but make sure they are prompted by or attached to those places.. Give a sense of being there and then.

You may want to take notes, think about and re-draft your impressions. (All writing worth reading tends to involve rewriting.) When you are ready, write each of your responses to these world-spaces in the word-spaces provided. This should be clear and big enough for you to read out loud from.   

Green space

Street-scape

Museum / Gallery

Sample Seminar Format: ‘Green Space’, City-scape, Museum/Gallery’   

This is a sample seminar format for an hour session, as well as a tried-and-tested strategy for this particular activity. It models encounters and exchanges in speech and writing with cumulative individual and group dynamics. Many variations – and other strategies entirely – are of course possible.  

1.  Form three groups  (15 minutes)

(a) Go straight round the group reading out loud your written impressions of whatever ‘Green Space’ you visited – without saying anything else. Don’t add any comments, context, apologies, justification as a writer – just read it out. Everyone else listen attentively in silence. Then go on to the next person till you have finished.

(b) Now go round reading out loud your written impressions of whatever ‘Museum’ you visited this time pausing after each reading for comment from the listeners. The author must still say nothing. But the listeners can comment on the account they have just heard:  how it was structured; from what points of view; with what emphases; anything they noticed about the language. Keep focused upon the text rather than the person, treating this as an occasion to be critical and analytical. (But the author mustkeep quiet!) 

(c) Then go round reading out loud your written impressions of the Streetscape accompanying each reading with comment from the writer. Now the listeners must remain completely silent. But each author can add comments before, after or even during the account, as s/he wishes. These comments might include anything from what general additional information on context to what s/he decided to put in or leave out. (But the listeners must keep quiet!) 

2. Brief whole group discussion (5 minutes)

Discuss how it felt  

• all reading straight round without comment
• each reading in turn with comment
• being a listener who may or may not comment on someone else’s work
• being a writer who may or may not comment on their own work

What does all this tell you about

1. the relations between speaking and listening and the nature of group dynamics?
2. the roles of ‘writer ’ and ‘reader’ and the relations between them? 

3. Composite texts – three groups again (20 minutes)

(The composite text is the one where all three ‘impressions’ are drawn together – the one you were asked to do a ‘fair copy’ of that is ‘legible’.)

(a) Back in your three groups, circulate the written-up version of your composite text for the others to read silently.  Carry on doing this until everyone has read everyone else’s and your own text comes back to you. Keep comment to a minimum at this stage. The main thing is to get acquainted with what other people have written 

(b) Now have a free and open discussion (still in sub-groups) about your various experiences of putting together these composite texts. What structural principles did you use? Did you draw your three separate impressions a little or a lot? Refer to your notes if you wish and draw in anything else that seems relevant.  

(c) Finally, decide as a sub-group which two of your composite texts you would like to be read out as a pair to the group as a whole. This can be all for sorts of reasons but the most immediate reasons is that the two should in some way ‘work’ off one another as a pair– whether because they are very different or similar or a mixture.

4. Composite texts – whole group again (10 minutes) 

The six composite texts chosen are read out loud in pairs to the group as a whole.  They should be read out by someone other than the person who wrote them.

The rest of the group should be silent at this point and just listen. 

All the composite texts, duly revised and redrafted, can be put on the intranet for the course. They will then be available for use in one another’s anthologies. This expressly virtual stage of the project is set out shortly. But first . . .

Alternative and appropriate technologies: a note of caution and reassurance 

Anthologies can be – and often are – produced on paper, and they may even be realised in performance (through live readings or as an ensemble, for instance). Meanwhile, some such ‘Further’ impressions can be established without having to go step by step through the previous ‘Initial’ impressions stage. In short, there are always alternatives. It’s just that the use of the internet for the second stage of the present project opens up a prospect of dynamics in group study and text-handling that are distinctive and potentially valuable. They are especially so when it comes to large groups of people, a multiplicity of texts, multi-layered tasks and the potential for far-reaching (‘tele-’) communication ( 1.3). Even so, current technology is only ever one of many possible learning resources – never itself the absolute source of knowledge. It always depends who does what with it and how. Alternatives using other modes of communication are usually available. And sometimes older ‘technologies’ – pen, paper, flip-chart, chalk and talk and face-to-face talking-back – turn out to be more appropriate, effective and enjoyable too.

@ FURTHER IMPRESSIONS OF . . .‘VIRTUAL’ COMMUNITY

Towards web-based anthologies

This is a web-based, screen-to-screen extension and refinement of the above ‘Initial Impressions of . . .’, which was seminar-based and face-to-face.  These two activities obviously go together as broadly actual and virtual dimensions of the same project. Equally obviously, there are ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ aspects of both parts: speaking and reading from the page in seminar are ‘virtual’ relative to the ‘actual’ places observed and experiences registered. Conversely, communicating by computer requires ‘actual’ participation through logging onto a system, loading up text and responding actively to what is there. In other words, there are ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ dimensions to every act of communication and whatever is said or done is always more or less ‘mediated’ – if only by virtue of the fact that we use words (our most routinely ‘virtual resource) and do so in highly codified and conventionalised ways.

That said, we now turn to an example of the more expressly technologically mediated aspect of ‘doing English’ in virtual communities: the production of an interdependent network of web-based anthologies – all of them interrelated yet each unique. There are basically three steps in this process, the first and last are critical—creative and the one in the middle is relatively mechanical:

1. Revise, refine or even replace your ‘Initial Impressions’ in the light of earlier feedback, further reflection and subsequent research (This is precisely what makes these impressions ‘further’. Alternatively, you can come in at this stage and simply generate text from this point on.)
2. Upload your revised / replaced versions onto a group web-site so that everyone can read each others but no-one at this point can change anything. (This is a relatively straightforward mechanical matter and is standard for ‘noticeboard’ facilities; the present example uses a standard wiki on an institutional intranet.)
3. Put together an individual Further Impressions anthology comprising: (i) your own revised text; (ii) two texts chosen from those by other members of  the group; (iii) an extract from a relevant printed source; (iv) a link to a relevant web-site; (v) a Prologue setting up the rationale of your anthology and commenting on the process of its composition. (Again, this is relatively routine with current wikis and educational VLEs (virtual learning environments). In large courses, the best working group tends to be the seminar; though all the anthologies can be made public to everyone on the course at the end.)         

Use of mobile phones, cameras and recorders . . .  You can also incorporate still and moving images and sound recordings of your own ‘on location’ if the technology is readily available and widely accessible. This potentially enriches and further transforms the project, but it also complicates it and may prove technically awkward. For every technology brings with it its own (changing) costs and benefits and its peculiar dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. This has to be firmly borne in mind. That said, this is an ‘English’ project in the fullest sense. As far as possible it should engage actively, not just analytically, with English as ‘Culture, Communication and Media’ along with English as ‘Language’ and ‘Literature’ (see 1.1 and 1.3).  

To be sure, the emphasis is upon ‘the word’ and verbal texts. And to be precise, we are primarily concerned with ‘word/world’ relations and with processes of speaking and discussion, and (re)reading and (re)writing. But ‘English’ nowadays is increasingly multimodal (not just verbal) and the active use of audio-visual media in and on location, productively and collaboratively, makes a refreshing change and opens up yet other dimensions not covered by just clicking on a link to a an already exiting web-site.

So go multimedia ifyou have the resource, time and inclination. If not, remember that you are always immediately and richly multimodal whenever you speak and interact face-to-face with one another. Seminars and web-sites both, in various ways, involve kinds of ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ communication. And ‘the word’ has crucial and distinctive roles to play in both.  (For a novel exploring the use of personal communications technology, on and off campus, in and out of courses, see Brooke Biaz (aka Graeme Harper), Camera Phone, Parlor, 2010.) 

Here is some more detailed guidance on each of the three steps for FURTHER IMPRESSIONS. This is followed by some examples of the kinds of material that come into play at this stage.

Step one: Revise, refine or even replace your ‘Initial Impressions’ drawing on (i) further knowledge and (ii) finer know-how.

The text you are revising (or replacing) is the composite text of 150 words that you put together from your three smaller impressions so as to be legible and passed round within the session. Do this drawing on two rather different ways of knowing. 

(i) Further knowledgeThis features samples from texts providing the kind of detailed historical and cultural knowledge available about just one of the ‘spaces’ already featured; also references for other relevant resources, including web-sites. The aim (to adapt the words of Alexander Pope) is to show that ‘a little more knowledge is a valuable thing’. Initial and immediate impressions are essential but only get you so far in ‘knowing’ a place. Fuller understanding and appreciation depend upon ‘knowing about’ too: about what happened there previously and about who and what is involved – but may not be immediately visible – now. In that respect a full ‘sense of place’ is both immediate and mediated: the product of a directly perceived ‘here and now’ and an indirectly  grasped ‘there and then’. The former is what you see and feel, hear and touch in front of you; the latter is what you get when you look – and look for – back and around, deeper and further. Both also entail ‘enquiring within’: thinking and feeling about what the connections are with your own pasts and presents and even projected futures.         

Example In the case of Oxford, a diverse sample of material is supplied on one of the ‘street-scapes’: Cowley Road.   One is economic, historical and relatively impersonal in emphasis, an extract from a local history detailing changes in the kinds of shops on the road from the mid twentieth to early twenty-first centuries 1959 (from Annie Skinner, Cowley Road: A History, Oxford: Signal Books, 2008, pp. 69—71). The other is cross-cultural, contemporary and more personal: thoughts and feelings occasioned by seeing the international call numbers advertised in a shop on Cowley Road (from James Attlee, Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey, Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 143—4). These are supported by references to other printed material related to Cowley Road and other of the featured ‘spaces’ in, for example, Oxford: One City, Many Voices (2004); Jan Morris, Oxford (1964) and  David Horan, Oxford: A Cultural and Literary Companion  (2008); as well as to web-sites and archives for Oxford newspapers, local radio and local history societies. (Oxford is relatively rich in such resources; but most cities have plenty once you look. Librarians and colleagues in other departments – Architecture, Planning and Art, say, not just History – as well as web-searches will help in turning them up.)      

(ii) Finer know-how This involves refining your verbal technique and thinking again – afresh – about overall textual strategy. The following questions should help:

Is your text immediately engaging? If it feels vague, monotonous or limited, consider including:

• a reference to a particular place (tree, exhibit, building);
• a sense of specific time (e.g. season, morning, afternoon, clock-time);
• some words heard or seen (e.g. a snatch of conversation, a sign);
• use of some other sense as well as sight and hearing (e.g. smell, touch, taste).

Look again at your opening and parting words: do they engage and sustain interest? 

Does it hold together well? Could it be more openly inviting?

• If it feels bitty and random, consider how you might exploit comparisons and contrasts, what feature might be repeated and varied, how the tone could be made more consistent.
• If it feels over-schematic and mechanical, loosen it up with something arresting, a stray yet relevant detail, a rhetorical question or a cut-across from another voice – including perhaps something more teasing or provocative in your own voice.

Such changes might be prompted by memory, imagination or further knowledge and acquaintance. So also revisit some of the places, to see how your feelings and observations have changed now that you know more and differently. In this way your ‘research’ (academic, abstract, virtual) may prompt a ‘re-searching’ (personal, concrete, ‘actual’) of the spaces themselves. You visit them afresh not just again.

And so back to the writing. Finally, as always, think of the effect you want to produce on your reader/listener, not just what you want to say as a writer/speaker. Check this by having reading it out loud to someone else, and then have them reading it silently to themselves. What works on the tongue and the ear as well as the eye is the acid test. Don’t throw away everything from the initial draft, but do be prepared to re-think and re-shape.          

Step two: Put your revised text in the ‘public’ domain so that it can be read and possibly used by others from your group.  As already indicated, this should be not more than 150 words in total and made available in a ‘read-only’ format at this stage. For reasons of practical convenience and social cohesion – doability and knowability – the best group size is around a dozen to twenty-odd people, which is the range for many seminars. Otherwise, on larger courses, there may be too many ‘impressions’ to read and digest. All the work can still be made public to everyone on the course, and perhaps others beyond, at the very end. This is where the intranet really comes into its own: the ease of multiplying copies and arranging various stages and levels of access; also the capacity to recombine and link materials in virtually infinite configurations, which we turn to next. (Some of this can be done by circulating printed copies, but only with relatively small numbers and with greater difficulty.)

Step three: Put together your individual anthology drawing on the texts produced by your group and other materials around and beyond. This should comprise:

• your own text as revised/replaced and entered on the web-site. This should be without any further change at this stage. Treat it as already in the public domain: a text in its own right not subject to further rewriting in this form. 
• two other texts selected from those produced by other members of your group. Choose these for their intrinsic interest and quality and also because they are similar to or different from one another and yours, in emphasis and form. The main thing is to think singularly about each text in its own right and strategically about the overall effect of all of them together. Which is worth reading for itself and how do they play off one another? What are the points and what pattern do they make?
• an extract from a relevant printed source. Again, choose it for intrinsic interest as well as strategic relation – by comparison or contrast – to the other materials featured. This text may be from a book or article in the library, a newspaper or magazine, a leaflet, or even a copy of a notice. Whatever it is, it should be properly referenced (see 1.2.6).
• a link to a relevant web-site. This, too, should add something interesting – and perhaps another dimension – to your anthology. So it might be a site of immediately ‘local’ interest or connect to an issue of a more ‘global’ nature. And it might well be and do both; for most web-sites are in various ways ‘glocal’. In any case, make sure your link works and that it will be accessed at a point that best suits the effect you are after. (Various ‘linking’ devices are commonly available: highlighting a ‘hot’ term, adding a separate icon, or simply pasting in the web address (for which also see 1.2.6). If you think the link may be missed, use more than one device: ‘belt and braces’ is best to be on the safe side.)
• a brief ‘Prologue’ to introduce  your anthology to the reader.  This should give some indication of the rationale and aim of your particular selection/collection: what ideas and materials went into its making and what kinds of response you hope it may elicit. This, too, is a critical and creative as well as an instrumental and informative text. So there’s an art in getting the tone and balance right. Make your purpose clear and stimulate interest in what is to follow – but don’t be ponderous or give too much away.

Examples from print and the intranet

Here are some more examples of the kinds of text and perspectives that can be brought into play round this point. They all help enrich the mix and extend the sense of possibilities. (Again they are simply indicative. Places alter cases.)

• Percy Shelley’s strongly negative view: ‘They are very dull people here’. He was subsequently thrown out of the University of Oxford for, amongst other things, publishing his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism during his first year (1810—11).

• Oscar Wilde’s rose-tinted reflection: ‘Oxford is the capital of romance . . . the sordid realities of life were kept at a distance’. In Wilde’s case the charm of distance was only increased by age and experience, hence his later observation: ‘the two great turning points in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford and when society sent me to prison’.

These and other more expressly ‘literary’, university-based views of Oxford – including those of Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), C.S.Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien – can be found in David Horan, Oxford: A Literary and Cultural Companion, Oxford: Signal, 2nd edn, 2002, here Chapters 4 and 6.   

Contemporary texts of a more specifically historical and broadly cultural nature are, for example, Annie Skinner, Cowley Road: a History (2008) and James Attlee, Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey (2007) (Also see above, Towards web-based anthologies – Examples.)

All these printed texts, literary and otherwise, can in turn be compared with more or less fictional and factual representations in TV and film. In the case of Oxford the most famous ones are those based on Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels, adapted for TV in the 1980s, followed by Lewis in the early twenty-first century. Other Oxford-based novels adapted for film and TV make excellent grist to this particular mill, as well as being intrinsically interesting and quite distinct in their visions and versions of the place. A highly revealing pairing is Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), in which a late Victorian working-class youth finds there is no place for him and his kind at ‘Christminster University’ (a thinly veiled version of Oxford) alongside Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), which projects the upper-class decadence and hollow despair of student days in the 1920s.

Oxford happens to be unusually profuse in such literary and historical, print and media representations. But most big cities – and indeed whole regions – have corresponding resources to draw upon for comparison and contrast. The main thing is to engage with a range of kinds of writing and a variety of media – fictional and factual, historical and contemporary – and with culture at large (including popular - and cross-cultural dimensions) alongside whatever passes for the dominant ‘high’ or ‘art’ culture.

Here are some examples of impressions of Oxford written by students of Oxford Brookes University, from the university intranet:

“I unpack the pieces of past that I’ve brought and try to make this blank canvas my home.

Cheney’s trees mask the bustling, busy streets of Cowley and Headington. From my safe student world I am blind to the society I am now a part of. A society crowded with homeless people, people trying to make a living, people who have so little, and yet still are smiling. There is a sense of community here, a sense that struggling alone is hopeless, but struggling as a unit will somehow lead to triumph... that facing poverty with a smile will show a metaphorical middle finger to the ‘other side’.

It starts at Magdalen. The bridge crosses the river, and the classes. To cross this invisible barrier seems the job of the thousands of Brookesonians, oblivious and naive - permanent tourists. This strange limbo between Cowley and ‘proper’ Oxford seems scattered with tourist traps, carefully laid and always on the prowl. They seem to groan with the overwhelming weight of thousands of ‘OXFORD UNIVERSITY’ t-shirts. For £4.99 it seems anyone can pretend.”

Katie Smith, Oxford Brookes University student

“Two Halves

Oxford is a city of two halves.

Floodlights presumptuously announce Oxford’s many majestic buildings, towering their crests and spires over high street shops and drunken tourists.

Young men flash past on vintage town bikes in a blur of tweed and breeding, and sun-stained tramps ask for spare change with sunken smiles and drug drawn eyes. I am not enclosed in a bubble of tweed and tradition, or naked to the bruising reality of poverty.

Oxford forces me into two halves.

My imagination gets caught on a chandelier peeking at the street below, and I am far away from the neon gore of modern life, transported into an exotic world of Victorian grandeur.

But it’s a thin beauty, glimpsed through frosted windows and iron gates. The City of Spires is so high on its own clouds it has forgotten the ground it stands on.”

Holly J. Norcop, Oxford Brookes University student

“Before I arrived in Oxford I thought without a doubt it would be the sheer beauty of the city that would blow me away. Before I arrived it was all about the magnificent architecture, triumphant parks and rich culture. The naivety of an excited, soon to be student shining through. But after living here for a short while and properly experiencing more of what Oxford has to offer, I’m surprised with what has made the biggest impression.

Don’t get me wrong, the city centre is beautiful and the museums and colleges and theatres and gardens and restaurants and shops and clubs are all top notch, but when you peel back the skin of this seemingly flawless city, dig a little deeper, some shocking truths are revealed.

My Big Issue collection is rapidly increasing, and My Issues are getting Bigger.”

Dani Tomasi, Oxford Brookes University student

“It is easy to become deluded in Oxford. Visions of grandeur, that sort of thing. You find yourself battling amongst swarming tourists with their heads up to the sky like mindless sunflowers in agreement with Matthew Arnold. I even saw one tourist walk into a lamp post and I imagine he romanticised the whole fucking story as he recounted it to his family back home. He wore that bruise proudly like a mortarboard on a graduate's head.

I now resign to keep my head down when in Oxford, eyes fixed on the floor. I see the discarded fag-ends of the homeless mingle with the dead skin cells of scholars. The colourful appliqués of vomit, looking awkward, artistically applied to the pavement outside a college and opened condom wrappers wink from beneath the blanket of Autumn on the banks of the Isis.”

Megan Williams, Oxford Brookes University student

“The blue dome rises into view, waiting for me beyond the trees. It had always been there; it would never leave. The signpost greets me with open arms: "Bodleian Library; Broad Street; Pitt-Rivers Museum", and my eyes begin to prickle-I am a raindrop, returned to the ocean.

Watery metaphors come easily to me here, and passing these reefs of sandy stone and shoals of scholar fish, I realise why - the city seems to exist beyond a veil, a thin partition between it and the rest of the world. It has its own atmosphere; it has grown over many centuries, its rooms lived in by succeeding generations, populated with curious creatures. It is tended, kept and treasured as if it were alive.

Perhaps then the best way to approach Oxford, as a newcomer, is to treat it like water: just let it wash over you, and enjoy the sensation.”

Joanna Courcha, Oxford Brookes University student

For some comparable readings, writings and representations of ‘London’, see 2.1.3. And for further cross-references to work and play round ‘place’ and ‘space’, see the end of @ Prologue. 

Whatever the size of group, the outcomes of the above activity will be multiple and potentially ongoing. There will be as many anthologies as there are people who take part: each unique and all interconnected.  The materials generated, meanwhile, will offer a series of correspondingly singular yet also overlapping  ‘impressions’ (‘mappings’, ‘snapshots’, ‘images’, ‘versions’, ‘visions’ – alternative terms are possible, each with its own resonance) of a considerable number of ‘spaces’ that also seem to be aspects of ‘the same place’. (All the examples supplied were in some sense ‘Oxford’; just as yours will be covered by the single name of a city or region.) Greenspace, Streetscape, Museum/Gallery were, of course, simply three conveneitn yet arbitrary categories to start with; there could have been others such as ‘Poor’ and ‘Rich’, ‘Old’ and ‘New’; ‘Commercial’ and ‘Residential’ and ‘Industrial’ and ‘Agricultural’.  But even they were not strictly the start. You were and are, wherever and whenever you are/were, for example in Preludes One, Two and Three. Meanwhile, again, most immediately, we are all somehow ‘together’ in and on this part of the website ‘@ Prologue – Changing ‘English’ Now’. . .

The effect should, quite properly, be both dizzying and reassuring.

Dizzying because texts, like people, always turn out to be both multiple and singular – apparently one but also many. They – we – readily connect to one another – and another and another . . . And the contexts keep on varying, too, one folded withon or around another and another another . ..

Reassuring because each of us always tends to begin from and return to where we are, with the texts and contexts immediately to hand and in mind. With who and what we think and feel ourselves to be, along with what we read and write: connecting ourselves ‘here and now’ to others close by, talking directly to and with us, or communicating more indirectly from within the covers of books and from screens.

Changing English Now is like this. Is us . . . multiple and ongoing . . . like this project. We are our project.

Reflecting on the practice, theorising the action

Doing the project is one thing. Reflecting on it is another. The two come together in reflective practice and theory in action. So here is a reprise of the terms and concepts introduced at the end of the book Prologue and the beginning of this web Prologue. These inform the practices and theories of the rest of the book and web-site, and they also help connect the above activities to specific sections in each of its six parts.

Theoretically, the above ‘Initial Impressions’ and ‘Further Impressions’ project revolves on a number of conceptual axes:

Actual—Virtual   ‘Actual’ because based on immediate encounters with places and face-to-face exchanges with people; ‘virtual’ because drawing on mediated materials in books and on the web and involving screen-to-screen exchanges on the intranet. And always on the Actual/Virtual interface because always working and playing across the World/Word interfaces of experience/expression and realisation/representation.

Self—Other  ‘The Self’ as a single person and in some sense an ‘individual’ in dynamic relations with other people and the rest of the world –‘the Other’. Though in another sense ‘the self’ is plural and ‘dividual’ (divided, fragmented, heterogeneous) –‘selves’ – and there is no monolithic ‘Other’ either, just ‘others’. To invoke the personal pronouns and the subject positions identified with them, it is best to see all  ‘our-selves’ in continuous exchange with ‘our-others’: as ‘I, me’ and ‘we, us’ and ‘you’ and ‘she, her’ or ‘he, him’ and ‘it’ and ‘they, them’.  In short, EnglishesRUS

Critical—Creative  ‘Critical’ in that understanding and judgement as well as analysis are at work in the sifting of words and the selecting of texts; ‘creative’ in that things have to be made as well as found, and made up as well as found out – texts and relationships and kinds of knowledge, for example.    

Local—Global  ‘Local’ in so far as we are directly concerned with more or less close and familiar places and faces, the here and near, which is also ‘global’ because it’s a part of what’s regional and national and international and because it’s the most immediate location where global flows of people and things – the weather, communication signal, products – cross and mingle. (Thus ‘Oxford’ is a city in the South of England in Europe in the World and is the cultural and historical space where rain comes, winds blow, sun shines, peoples and products from the East and West, North and South meet and stay or go on.) In short, the here and near is the most immediate connection to the elsewhere and far.  But it’s not all homogeneously ‘glocal’. Local/global interfaces present themselves very differently on the street, in parks, in museums and galleries. These are heterogeneous space-times, connecting various ‘heres and nows’ to various ‘theres and thens’ at variable rates. Place is not a single or simple concept any more than the lived experience and living expression of it is single and simple. Though it is made more so when we draw up our accounts. Each of us differently yet interdependently.

Ten more propositions and provocations

RE-, as signalled in the title and outlined in the preamble to this activity, is a particularly suggestive and productive prefix. It can mean doing things not just again but afresh. And often the fundamental critical and creative point at issue is how far a particular instance of an activity (whether a text or a seminar, say) is the one or the other: mere repetition (again) or valuable variation (afresh). The following rather long, designedly recursive and readily extendable list is an attempt to pick up and knit in some of the most useful ‘re-’ words. (Like the ‘Declaration of Interdependence’ in the Prologue of the book, which it partly recalls, its purpose is provocative and pedagogic.)  In fact – if anything is – ‘re-’ is both code and key to the dynamics of the present project. So it should help establish the main terms of reference and trajectories of the book too. Here are another ten propositions by way of provocation: 

In responding to places and people we both ‘answer back’ and ‘ask questions’ of our own.

In reading a text we always in part rewrite it, in our heads if not on the page or screen.

Particular acts of (re)reading and (re)writing may or may not directly involve other people; (re)presenting materials – orally and in person or on the page or screen – nearly always does.

Ongoing activities of (re)reading and (re)writing  and (re)presenting gradually produce the (changing) communities and institutions we variously call ‘English’ and ‘Literature’ or ‘Criticism’ or ‘Creative Writing’.

Most immediately all this activity takes place in and constitutes our particular programmes and courses – the actual community as we experience it locally. Ultimately it contributes to and constitutes the subject(s) called ‘English’ at large.—the virtual community as we experience it globally.  

All these activities and communities and institutions gradually get refreshed or reinforced – varied afresh or repeated again – as do our personal patterns. Meanwhile, reflecting on these processes – thinking about, modelling, theorising them – can make all the difference.

Re-searching – with the emphasis on ‘searching afresh’ rather than just ‘searching again’ – can also be the difference that makes a difference: as long as the knowledge brought to bear results in a fresh way of knowing, nor just more of the same old same old.

‘Re-searching’ as an active, ongoing, critical-creative process is the life-blood of all genuine education, ‘higher’ or otherwise. ‘Research’ as an achieved, high-status, peer-reviewed product is relatively rare and often more rarefied. It is the mark of the academic researcher.

Revising your own knowledge and ways of knowing is a good practical place to start: from the ways you re-read by taking and making notes, to the ways you re-write and re-present yourself in the world (in diaries and on blogs as well as poems and stories and essays). 

Re-calling, re-casting, revisioning, re-membering . . . are just some of the other words – with the emphasis on the re- – that may help you do this. Afresh not just again . . .

Connecting with the rest of the book

The above ‘Initial’ and ‘Further’ Impressions relate in particular to the following sections of the book and website:

Overall perspectives on the subject

Prologue: Changing ‘English’ Now

Crossing borders, establishing boundaries

Texts in contexts: literature in history

Technologising the subject: actual and virtual communities

Forewords! Some propositions and provocations 

Also see: Seeing through theory; English Literature and Creative Writing; English Language Teaching

Specific skills

1.2.  ‘Doing English’, especially

Taking and making notes

Close reading – wide reading

Library, web, ‘home’ – an ongoing cycle

Seriously enjoy studying English!

Famous poetic example of a ‘street-scape’ at night, with related activities:

2.1. Worked and played example: William Blake’s ‘London’

Theoretical synthesis relating people to places in time

3.9 The new Eclecticism? Ethics, Aesthetics, Ecology . . .

More on response and rewriting, and life-writing and place

4  Key Terms, Core Topics

Writing and reading, response and rewriting

@ 4 Auto/biography and travel writing: selves and others

Texts representing and recreating places

5.4.2 Mapping Journeys

Also see: 5.2.6 Street: signs, graffiti, word-art; 5.4.1 Daffodils?

On the ongoing relation between life inside and outside education

6 Taking it all further: English and the rest of your life