Zola and anti-semitism - short review of my book

A review by someone called 'Paul' - (I don't know him!) - on a site called 'Good Reads'. I think he's got what it is I was trying to write about. (But I would say that, wouldn't I!)

"When anti-semitic forces in 19th century France wrongly jailed Captain Alfred Dreyfus, novelist Émile Zola put his head above the parapet with his famous 'J'accuse' letter. Zola was found guilty of libel and sentenced to a year in prison. Instead he fled to London and Michael Rosen tells the story of Zola's time in exile. 

With fascinating insights into Zola's way of writing, complicated family life and the slowly changing political situation in France this is a warm and engaging read. The influence Zola had on socialist thinking on anti-semitism and the reaction to his novels in contemporary France and England I found particularly interesting. 

I've long been an admirer of Zola's work, and after reading this book now have a much richer understanding of Zola as a person. Also the striking modern resonances of this case make it so important to learn from this story. "

Suggested ways of categorising pupils' talk about books, poetry and plays

When we make comments about literature (or when children or school students are in pairs or groups in a classroom) it's possible to evaluate how they are talking.

One way to do this is to make transcripts of what they are saying.

These can be when they are in conversation with the teacher or with each other in pairs or groups.

The nature of the conversation will depend greatly on how it is set up: what kinds of questions the teachers sets, or indeed if the questions originated from the students themselves.

This is worth experimenting along the lines of what seems to be the most useful and fruitful way to set things up so that pupils do the most amount of engaged reflection.

When you look at a transcript of how the students talk, it's possible to categorise the comments. Here are some suggested categories:

1. Experiential - this where we relate what is in the text with something that has happened to me or to someone I know.

2. Intertextual - this is where we relate what is in the text to another text.

3. Intratextual - this is where we relate one part of the text to another part.

4. Interrogative - where we ask questions of the text and voice puzzles and are tentative about something.

5. Semantic - where we make comments about what something in the text means.

6. 'Harvesting' - where we indicate that we are making a comment based on 'harvesting' something from elsewhere in the text.

7. Structural - where we indicate we are making a comment about how a part or whole of the piece has been put together, 'constructed'.

8. Selective analogising - where we make an analogy between one part of the text and something from anywhere else (e.g. as in 1, 2, 3). There will be an implied 'set' or 'series' being constructed here around a motif or theme or feeling. (see previous blog).

9. Speculative - where we make speculations about what might happen, what could have happened.

10. Reflective - where we make interpretative statements often headed by 'I think..'

11. Narratological - where we make comments about how the story has been told e.g. about narrators, methods of unfolding a story, what is held back, what is revealed. ('Narratology'). It may include an awareness of how stories have episodes, and sudden 'turns' or 'red herrings', flashbacks, flash forwards etc.

12. Evaluative - where we make value judgements about aspects of a text of the whole.

13. Eureka moments - where we announce that we have suddenly 'got it'.

14. Effects - where we sense that an 'effect' has been created in us (or in others we have observed) because of the way something has been written.

15. Storying - this is where we make a comment which is in essence another story. This is not trivial. It will almost certainly involve the making of a 'set' or a 'series' ie something has been selected from the original text in order to trigger off the new one. This is an implied generalisation.

16. Descriptive, - where we recount aspects of the text. This may well be more significant than it first appears because we can ask, why was this moment selected for the recount?

17. Grammatical - where we draw attention to the structure of sentences - syntax, or how individual words are used grammatically.

18. Prosodic - where we draw attention to the sound of parts of the whole of a piece ie the 'music' of it.

19. Effect of interactions: where we draw attention to how people interact ie how people (any character) treats another, how they 'relate' and what is the outcome of how they relate.

20. Imaginative - where we move to another artistic medium in order to interpret what we have been reading or viewing....this may well involve more 'generalising' or 'abstract thought' than first appears because it involves 'selecting' something from the original text and creating some kind of 'set' or 'series' with it in creating something new. If pupils are asked 'why' this can be teased out.

21. Emotional flow: these are comments which show how feelings towards the protagonists change. Some people have invented 'flow maps' where  you can draw up a kind of graph or chart, with the key moments in the plot along the bottom axis, and emotional states on the vertical axis...then you can label the line on the graph.

22. 'Author intention' - this might come partly under the category of 'speculative' - above - ie what the author could have written. Or it might be part of 'effect' ie how has the author created an effect. Word of warning: if this is separated from 'how it affected me' or 'how it affected someone else', this is of course speculation. The routine of a good deal of 'criticism' is to assume precisely the opposite ie because there is a certain literary feature - e.g. alliteration using a 'hard' sound, that it has a specific 'effect' - e.g. being insistent or heavy - and that the author intended these, which may or may not be the case.

23. Contextual - every piece of literature comes from a time and place. The person reading or spectating it will not be in exactly the same time and place. Many responses and critical ideas and thoughts go on because of this 'gap'. Students may well know or speculate about the gap, or the context ('They didn't used to do that sort of thing in those days') and of course, may ask questions and/or we offer them information or they are encouraged to research the context(s).

24. Representational or symbolic - where we make comments about what we think something 'represents'. This might be about 'character' where we say that a person 'represents' the class or type he or she comes from...'typical x kind of person'. It might be about parts of the landscape or the nature of the landscape - as it represents a particular kind of challenge to the protagonist. It could be a feature in the landscape/cityscape ie a particular kind of tree or building. It could be a single object that represents something more than itself - a torn piece of paper. And so on.

25. Extra-textual - comments that have apparently nothing to do with what's in the text and are about what's going on in the classroom or they are about pupils' interactions. Often these are as they seem to be but just occasionally they may well relate to how the pupils are interpreting e.g. a personal comment about 'You always say things like that...' may well be an indirect comment about this text and others.


In terms of teaching, we may want to emphasise one, some or several of these responses. We may want to develop one, some or several. We may want to induce the students to ask 'why' about any or all of them so that we can advance their ability to reason and rationalise. We may want to compare any of these with how the teacher or critics have responded in order to take the comments and thinking to a new level.

This list is derived from several years work with MA students looking at how children and school students have responded to literature in the classroom. The students have been on 'Action Research' courses and it evolved that they wanted to access their pupils' ways of thinking about literature and to help them develop and advance as critical readers.

Feel free to use, adapt, change in any way you want. You may want to add for example specific aspects of texts to do with e.g. syntax, plots.

On the other hand: you may want to dispense with all of this and simply offer pupils a matrix for how to interpret a given text, with key points in the text explaining it in the approved way,  followed by standard ways of presenting these points in writing. Some people believe that is a better way to proceed.

Or you may want to combine some aspects of the exploratory method with this final point so that it's not an either/or.

The arts, literature, purpose, feelings, critical thoughts

1. What are the arts? 
Traditionally they are activities and outcomes ('things') or ('productions') like:
painting,
dance
song
poetry
pottery
sculpture
drawing
fiction
photography
mime
drama
film and TV drama and dramatic series, soaps and serials
musicals and opera
storytelling


2. What are they for? Many different things including
To entertain and amuse
to show us aspects of life and 'nature' (ie the world as seen by us)
to help us think about aspects of ourselves
to draw us into thinking and wondering about materials
to draw us into thinking and wondering about how we communicate with each other
to show us possibilities for thought and action through inviting us to think about how others do things, say things, feel things...(empathy)
to offer us a 'safe place' (sometimes called 'containing' us) in which we give vent to feelings or witness feelings, we find difficult to voice or admit.
to offer us hope


3. Is there anything particular about literature?
Literature, traditionally, is poetry, drama and fiction but clearly overlaps with such things as film and TV drama.
Because these are so wordy, they have the possibility of exploring many different ways in which we talk to each other, think, have emotions, and write.
This doesn't make literature better or more significant than other arts.

4. What do we do with literature?
Primarily we read it, or we 'spectate' it if it's performed.
The reading process is complicated and involves many aspects of our minds and faculties:
eg
our feelings
our willingness to be convinced by the creatures, beings and people and their interactions
our willingness to be affected by these
our ability and willingness to 'gather up' whatever precedes the moment we are reading or spectating. This enables us to 'follow' what's going on.
Some of this is to do with language - how words stick together (and of course individual words themselves)
Some of this is to do with recognition of motifs - that is scenes and interactions that exist in other parts of literature and in other arts
Some of this is to do with a willingness to find several meanings at once in 'figurative' language such as metaphors, metonymy, similes, allusions.
Some of this is to do with our willingness to allow our own experience to help us find parallels with moments in the literate which are similar or analogous with our own.
A willingness to reflect on any or all of this, either on our own or with others.

5. It is quite possible to construct very different means of getting young people to explore some or all of this. For over a hundred years, there have been a variety of methods of getting  young people to answer questions about the literature they've been asked to read.
This may include questions about:
what the author intends
what is the meaning of very small parts of the text (words, phrases, single sentences)
how a text is constructed
what are the effects of different parts of the piece of literature
what is the overall meaning of the text
how the text fits (or doesn't fit) a given 'genre'
how the text is 'in conversation' with some other texts that precede it ('influence')
how the text has 'used' texts which precede it ('intertextuality')

It may include questions of
what the text has to do with the time and place in which it is written ('context')
how the text has been interpreted differently by different people at different times

6. The problem with some of the previous types of question is that they assume a generalised 'reader' who does indeed know what the author intends, what the 'effects' are on readers, what symbols or metaphors 'mean'.

7. In schools we have the problem of wanting children and young people to enjoy literature whilst having to fulfil some very specific demands given to us by questions in exams. There is a 'correct' way to respond to literature and an 'incorrect' way. This may well run counter to some of the reasons in my number 2 (above).

8. One key way in which we respond to literature is create literature (and other arts). We may well find out a good deal about a piece of literature by trying to write something 'like it'. There isn't much room for this in school curricula because it isn't 'critical'. However, it may well be something that can feed into critical approaches. It may well clarify a good deal of things to do with structure, purpose, how to create effects, and generalised views (see 11 below).

9. It may well be that in the limited time available there isn't time for young people to explore fully what kind of effect a piece of literature is having on them. The critical approach has to kick in very early on. It may turn out that the young people hardly have a chance to explore 'affect' ie how the piece really does produce emotional effects.

10. Some of the categories that occur in the critical approaches may run counter to how literature works. One of these is 'character'. I would argue that we are not first and foremost affected by 'character'. We are affected by interactions between characters and the outcomes of those interactions. This means we are affected by parts of scenes in a 'dynamic' way. . It's what characters do with each other in the piece or say to each other or about each other (or what the narrator tells) that causes the effects. Again, if we examine things in too small pieces - too much on single words -  we may not notice that it's the comparisons and contrasts across a whole piece that do the work.

11. An interesting part of how we talk about the arts is that when we select things to talk about or when we make comparisons between something in a piece of literature with another piece of literature, or between a piece of literature and something that happened in our own lives, we are in fact 'generalising'. In other words, we don't need to make a general comment or an abstract comment in order to generalise! When we select one 'event' and compare it to another 'event' that we've selected, we are creating a 'set' or a 'series'. We have noticed some common characteristics. Even very young children can do this. It may well be that in order to help young people make generalised comments, that we can first elicit the comparisons ('what were you reminded of?' In your life? In other pieces of literature? In the arts in general? On TV?) and then ask them to reflect why? The generalised or abstract or evaluative/reflective comment may well flow after.  General, abstract, evaluative, reflective thought may be reached this way.

12. There are some key aspects of how a piece of literature is told ('narratology') . There are key differences in narration, in how we know what we're being told, how things are revealed and concealed, how we are given specific and selective viewpoints, whether characters' and or narrators' views are 'reliable', 'true' or 'ironic', how we know (or not know) what characters think.

13. Even if we know how to talk about literature it doesn't follow that we can write about it. This is one of the hardest things to learn how to do. This blog does not address 'how to write an essay'!

What'll happen if 'business' gets fed up with Trump and Bannon?

Business (capitalism) likes to present itself as 'not political'; it just gets on with doing business. Some of us think this is nonsense: it just kicks the huge, daily, pressing matter of how we are organised to make a living (and how we are engineered to be so unequal) into touch. It's supposedly just 'nature', 'life', 'how it is'. (It isn't 'nature'. It's humanly made and very political!)

Even so, every now and then, business has to get political and all sorts of 'voices of business' come into the political field and express an opinion because, they say, what's going on is 'threatening business' - and we should all quake. That's because, as I say, 'business is nature'. If business is 'threatened' then surely that must mean the end of all things and we won't know how to organise ourselves to make and distribute the things we need and want.

Usually, what 'threatens' business are people like Corbyn because they want to shave off a teeny bit of the tax privileges, or defend areas of public ownership or dare to suggest that everyone is entitled to live somewhere or have enough money to live off without borrowing themselves into the grave. All this 'threatens' business.

The Remain-Brexit thing was interesting because 'business' was forced to argue with itself about which of the two arrangements was better for business. Clearly, they can't make up their mind about that - and anyway we should always remember that no matter how united business are that the mass of people should earn the least possible money, they are not united on the matter of how to beat the next business person. They are at each other's throats in competition with each other, and the key way for them to do that is to keep pay as low as possible.

Now business has got another problem: Trump-Bannon. Their aim is to create a new world. They are biblical. They want a new world where all those old alliances based ultimately on America being world top-dog, battled for through wars and 'spheres of influence' is being pushed to one side. The new dominance has got to come through nationalism - which as a bloke on the radio said this morning - we know how that ended 1914-1918 and 1939-1945. So, though US sanctions on Iran may look like good old US foreign policy, a new nationalism is being pursued, with something else behind it: a weird and mystical 'end of times', 'last battle' thing: some kind of final showdown. These people are mapping the biblical Armageddon on to the modern world.

We might quake in the face of this. Why not? We might wonder if we have enough resources to combat it. We might wonder if there are enough people in the US to defy it. I do.

On the other hand, Trump-Bannon have another problem: business. Business likes to be non-political? Well, one of their biggest guys decided he would be. That seems to have gone down well with at least one section of people as represented to us as the 'rust belt'. If not 'well' then 'well enough'. But how is modern business taking it? Trump-Bannon seem hell-bent on making enemies of anyone they think of as 'liberal', not as committed to their view of a world conflict with Islam and so on. One problem: a vast section of business is 'liberal'. I don't mean socialist, or even socialistic. I mean with liberal attitudes to social and religious matters. What's more business doesn't like cataclysm. Business likes consent. Business doesn't like thousands of people out on the streets. Business doesn't like the pages of its newspapers full of stories about chaos in central government.

I very rarely do crystal ball stuff but I can't help feel that very soon, Trump-Bannon are going to face real problems from their own kind. All sorts of big business types are going to express serious worries about what they're up to.

We often talk of fault lines and contradictions for those in power. I can't help thinking that Trump is going to face some of these: big ones.

I wouldn't do anything more by way of the crystal ball than that. I would hope that those who supported Bernie Sanders and many others would know how to stick up for working people, if those in power were at each other's throats.

Tory and LibDem lies about Labour wrecking the economy

Every BBC Question Time,  a Tory or LibDem politician comes on and talks about the terrible deficit inherited from Labour and 'Labour wrecked the economy'.  Here's the raw stat: 

Deficit

2007-08 – £ 40.3 bn
2010-11 – £ 145.1 bn


That large hike was caused by the crash-and-bailout. 

(Economists can argue about: what is a 'sustainable deficit' in either gross figures or in figures in relation to the GDP. They can also argue about what this deficit means for a country that has a currency that is held by other countries (ie sterling). They can also argue over whether even that large deficit was 'sustainable'. They can also argue over what was the best way out of that higher deficit - austerity which lowers government income or spending on growth projects (a la Keynes). )

Ultimately, though the lie is that 'Labour caused the high deficit' and that Labour 'wrecked the economy'.

 
The crash-and-bail-out caused the higher deficit. 

If anyone on the Question Time panel who blames Labour for this, then it's down to them to say what they would have done instead of the bail-out. At the time no one was saying £40.3 bn pre-crash deficit was too high, and very few right-wingers were saying that the bail-out was wrong. 

So, the lie is sold over and over and over again.

(There is of course the question of what caused the crash in the first place! It wasn't 'Labour', it was an economy in which it's fine for people to sell debt to each other without that debt being related back to anything in the real world ie ('speculation'). So money was being 'invested' in projects that had no chance of producing returns. And people lent huge amounts of money to those doing this phoney investing. The worst thing that Labour did was not contest this. But of course neither did the Tories or LibDems. They all thought they could ride this and take the cream off the top. At the end of the day, though, politicians didn't cause the crash, the crash was capitalism doing its thing at a particular stage in a particular part of world capitalism.)

My Emile Zola tour! See you at one of these?

I'm doing various events over the next few months to talk about 'The Disappearance of Emile Zola, love, literature and the Dreyfus Case' published by Faber and Faber.

February 8 Goldsmiths, University of London

February 13 Conway Hall, London - arranged by Newham Books (Sold out)

February 21 Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham

February 23 Bookseller Crow, Crystal Palace, London

February 27 Tabernacle, West London, 5 x 15

February 28 Jewish Book Week, London

March 1 Festival of Idea, Bristol

March 10 Ways with Words, Keswick

March 15 Muswell Hill Bookshop, London, 6.30

March 22 Bookmarks Bookshop, London, 6.30

March 28 Oxford Literature Festival, Oxford

April 21 Cambridge WordFest,  Cambridge

April 24 Prospect (magazine) Book Club

May 4 Shakespeare & Co Bookshop, Paris

May 12 Institut Français (French Institute) London

May 24 Charleston Literature Festival

May 25 Bath Literature Festival

May 27 Hay Literary Festival

June 4 Stoke Newington Literature Festival, London

June 15 York Festival of Ideas, York

"Look-and-guess"? That's not the 'alternative' to universal, systematic, synthetic phonics teaching!

Strong advocates of universal systematic synthetic phonics teaching (what is in place in English schools at the moment) will buttress their case by typifying what others do or have done as inviting the children to 'look and guess', and/or 'look at the picture and guess the word.' This is, in short a lie. It's not what the opposing argument claims.

This use of the word 'guessing' is overcharged. Let's leave to one side the 'words and picture' example for the moment. The word 'context' can mean a variety of things including: the underlying grammar of a sentence - which children will know; it can mean the underlying and implied semantics (meaning) of the sentence as implied by, say, the opening two or three words.

It's very difficult (impossible?) to tell whether a child, at exactly the moment when reading a phonically regular text is using which of these three elements to read-for-meaning: phonics, semantics, syntax. So, take one of the phonics schemes. Ask a child to read it. It may well be that the child will use all three of these methods in different combinations at different times.

It's a great irony. The phonics schemes are trying very hard to make their texts fun and enjoyable. They've employed the great Julia Donaldson, for example. The irony is that the more fun and enjoyable they are, the more a child will want to read for meaning and you can't stop the child doing that. If you want to only teach the alphabetic principle, then forget the enjoyment bit! Just do word lists, blending, nonsense words. That's the abstract way. But of course the phonics schemes writers and devisers know that that's not possible because of young children's motivation. So they mix 'alphabetic principle' with semantics - and by virtue of the sentences being coherent and cohesive - with syntax too.

It's a triumph of mixed methods! Which is where we all started from - in my case 'The Beacon Readers' devised in the 1920s, still going strong in the 1940s/1950s which strongly advocated 'mixed methods'.