Publishing – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Taken out of context?

Public discourse relies on the assumption that quotations accurately represent not only what someone has said but also what they meant. From traditional mainstream journalism in particular, we have the right to expect and assume that quotations on the news reflect both the intention and the context of the person being quoted. Quotations can be manipulated — intentionally or inadvertently — through selective editing or splicing separate statements together. This can exaggerate or change the meaning or the tone of what somebody said and in some cases it can completely invert the meaning from what the speaker intended. I know this, because it’s happened to me.

Back in the mists of time, I was embarking upon teacher-training. This would have been in around 1999. During the year in which I was training, the government suddenly realised that there was a teacher shortage and that the extremely recent decision that trainee teachers should pay for their own training was, shall we say, something of a mis-step. They announced that from the following year, not only would new aspirant teachers have their training paid for, those applying for what were classified as “shortage subjects” would be given extra cash: it was called the Golden Handshake. Given that there were no plans to remiburse the current year group of trainees for their costs, I was around £6000 out of pocket and I was pretty cheesed off, to say the least. I wrote to the Times Educational Supplement and received a response that they would like to use my letter. I gave them permission to do so and to be honest I felt rather chuffed about it.

They did not publish my letter in full. What they did was to take a few words out of it and included it in a wider article by one of their journalists. In itself, that would have been disappointing but acceptable, were it not for the manner in which they butchered the tone of what I said. In the context of my long letter about how I felt mistreated by the government, I mentioned that — as someone in possession of a PhD — I was one of the highly-qualified individuals that the government was saying it wished to attract into the profession. I referenced the amount of blood, sweat and tears that it had taken from me, all for the dubious honour of being able to title myself as “Doctor”, and made a joke about the fact that I was now choosing to enter a profession in which the generic title for women was — and always would be — “Miss.” They quoted this. They then jumped to the very end of my letter and took another quote, in which I summed up my rage at the fact that the government had forgotten about our year group and were happy to leave us in debt, whilst banging on about how important the next generation of teachers was to them. What therefore ended up being printed in the paper was something along the lines of this (although I cannot remember the precise wording): “I’ve worked really hard to gain the right to call myself “Doctor”, only to enter into a profession in which I will always be referred to as “Miss” … and I’m really angry about it.” This, my friends, is what it means to be quoted out of context. They made it sound like I was narked that my title would not be used in the classroom. Not only was this untrue, it was completely irrelevant to the purpose of my letter, which was to point out the fact that our cohort had been unfairly overlooked.

I complained. The TES acknowledged my complaint but said that they “didn’t agree that it made me look bad” and that I had after all “given my permission” for them to use my words, which is exactly what they had done. Of course, nobody actually reads the TES anyway, its sole purpose and use being the main medium for schools to advertise vacant positions, and within minutes of its production it was no doubt the next day’s proverbial chip-paper, but it gave me a small insight into what it feels like to be misrepresented in the press.

When someone speaks — in an interview, a lecture, a letter or a speech — the meaning behind their words depends on the full set of ideas they express longform. A quotation extracted from the larger discourse can lose the clarifying details, caveats, or reasoning that surrounded it. This practice is called contextual omission. For example, imagine someone says the following: “It would be terrible if people stopped participating in elections but, hypothetically, if no one voted, the law provides that the system would choose a winner.” A selective excerpt quoting them as saying “If no one voted, the system would choose a winner” removes the warning that voting is important and could even imply that the speaker is advocating for a system other than democracy. The quote remains “factual” but loses the speaker’s intended meaning entirely.

Equally powerful, in my opinion, is splicing. It’s what happened to me and what the BBC appear to have done with the speech made by Donald Trump after his election defeat in 2020. Splicing refers to the process of editing together separate audio, video or textual remarks into a single statement so that it appears continuous. This can create the impression that the speaker said something that they never actually said (or perhaps, in Trump’s case, didn’t quite go so far as to say). Such manipulation is particularly powerful because viewers tend to trust the evidence of their eyes and ears — most especially if that evidence is presented on the BBC, that most trusted of British institutions, one which supposedly prides itself on its impartiality.

Whilst I often wonder the extent to which we suffer from this problem when looking at fragmentary quotations in our possession from the ancient world, it must be said that digital technology makes splicing easier than it’s ever been. Scholars can ponder the fact that fragmentary evidence of one philosopher’s beliefs will give us a frustratingly narrow and possibly misleading glimpse of his thinking, but audio and video editing software in the modern world can rearrange sentences, soften transitions and hide cuts completely: none of this was possible to do so seamlessly until recently. Thus, even when individual words and phrases are genuine, connecting them out of order can create an entirely new meaning. Despite all of this, I do wonder whether those at the BBC were even aware of what they were doing. People — hardened journalists very much included — tend to believe information that confirms their existing views: this is called confirmation bias. If a journalist already dislikes a politician or a public figure, they will read everything they want to read into whatever that that person says. For most of those working at the BBC, Trump is frankly beyond the pale and was unequestionably stirring up resentment among his followers after his election defeat: so they took what he said and magnified it, since they believed it’s what he meant. This, I submit, is not okay.

In an era in which both the reality of “fake news” and the chilling effect of accusing anyone we disagree with as peddling “fake news” are a genuine threat, I find it absolutely inexcusable that someone at the BBC made this decision and I believe that they have serious questions to answer. I am no supporter of Trump, indeed I find his rise to power bewildering in the extreme, but I resent being misled and manipulated by an institution that wears its own claim to impartiality like a badge of honour. In my opinion, there are numerous other issues that the BBC report on (or choose not to report on), on which I also believe that their bias is palpable, but those issues are far too contentious for me to address on this blog. All I will say is that people genuinely believe in the BBC and therefore if something is reported or indeed not reported by them, that has a tangible impact on what people will accept as the truth.

As our global world grows ever more complex and mass-communication continues to become even more fast-moving, it is essential for all of us to question what we are told, even (or perhaps especially) when we are being told it by an institution that we trust and hold dear. Things, as the saying goes, are not always what they seem.

Unpredictable penmanship

I’ve just finished a novel about a superhero. I’ve never been a connoisseur of comics and haven’t bought one since around 1983, when as a small child I did indeed partake of the occasional copy of The Beano, but I never found myself particularly drawn to comic-based superheroes and their universe.

My brief foray into the world of Marvel came as a result of the fact that Lisa Jewell, a well-established contemporary novelist and one of my personal favourites, has been commissioned to write the first book in what has been billed the “brand-new Marvel crime series for adults, introducing fans to a grittier, street-level side of the Marvel Universe.” Whilst characters with superpowers are not my usual bag, I frankly didn’t care: if it’s written by Jewell, I’m definitely in. I placed the book on reserve immediately.

Responses to the novel have been predictably varied and it’s been a great deal of fun to watch people flailing with panic as the classifications by which they like their world to be defined take a superpowered punch to the gut. POW! BAM! BOOM! Comics and superhero stories seem to divide the world like nothing else can, inspiring cult-like loyalty and adoration from their fans, matched in intensity by the sneering contempt from non-fans, who consider the genre to be nothing more than commercialised tat, a world which has nothing to do with literature. As with all divisive topics, the truth no doubt lies somewhere in the middle. All in all, Jewell’s authorship of Breaking the Dark, a Jessica Jones Marvel Crime Novel seems to have annoyed absolutely everybody: an excellent reason to read it.

For me, there is something genuinely remarkable about a novelist who can turn their hand to a variety of writing styles. Jewell is pleasingly unpredictable as an author, and has penned stories in a variety of different genres, from poignant kitchen-sink dramas through coming-of-age novels up to dark, psychological thrillers. You never know what she’s going to write next and I absolutely love that about her. I punched the air with a BIFF when I discovered that Marvel had selected her as the wordsmith for their radical experiment with the genre of the adult novel, and I sincerely hope that she was renumerated to the extent that one might expect from such a potentially lucrative commission. Even if everyone hates it, the book will no doubt sell in the millions. KER-CHING as well as KER-POW.

Novelists that can turn their hand to a variety of genres make people a little uncomfortable, I think. Unless they are spectacularly successful, I suspect they make publishers uncomfortable too. When a writer has a success, most publishers want them to produce more of the same, and it can be a leap of faith for them to back a change of direction. Sometimes, authors write under more than one name, to indicate that change of direction. JK Rowling writes her Cormoran Strike novels under the name of Robert Galbraith, and indeed she approached the publisher under this pseudonym in a quest for genuine feedback. Ruth Rendell wrote psychological thrillers and crime fiction, whilst also writing more introspective, character-driven mysteries under the pseudonym of Barabara Vine. Some novelists, however, write with enormous range under their own name, leaving their fans guessing as to where their imagination will take them next: John Fowles, Kazuo Ishiguro and Lisa Jewell are three authors that exemplify this remarkable talent. While there is security in picking up the novel of someone predictable, there is real joy and adventure in entrusting yourself to an unpredictable penmaster. Jewell is one of those rare authors who writes so well in such a range of styles that I will try anything she produces: hence, this week I found myself immersed in the world of Jessica Jones, superhero, friend of The Avengers, who has superhuman strength, enhanced durability, rapid healing and the ability to fly (although she doesn’t like it). WHOOSH!

Not being in any way familiar with the Marvel universe, I read Jewell’s novel as a standalone and the character of Jessica Jones — a household name to die-hard Marvel fans — was new to me. A large number of those fans are infuriated by the imposition of Jewell’s writing upon their familiar world and an equally large number of Jewell fans seem to be incensed by the novel’s easy prose and youthful characterisation. “It reads like a YA novel!” wails one critic on GoodReads, as if the very notion of writing for a younger audience is an insult.

Is it a literary classic? Of course not. Was Jewell setting out to write one? One presumes that wasn’t the brief. What she has done is to produce a highly entertaining read, one which this relative newcomer to the world of the superhero enjoyed immensely. And let’s be honest: there’s nothing quite so pleasing as a successful book that infuriates almost everyone.

Photo entitled *Comic Books From The Past in My Private Own Comic Shop Basement* by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash

The trouble with finding good reads on GoodReads

As an avid reader of fiction, I have a problem. It’s a wonderful problem to have, and illustrates the many and various ways in which the modern world can be truly wonderful. My problem is keeping track of what I’ve read.

Were I not to do so, I’d be in an infinite loop of doubt: “Have I read this?” The feeling can begin at any time: when I look at the cover of a book, read the blurb, hear the name of the author or – perhaps most discombobulating of all – when I’m part way through the book. You might think it shouldn’t matter, but there is a tiny part of me that is undeniably anxious about the number of books that there are in the world and the ever- diminishing time I have available to read them. Accidentally repeating the exercise with one of them sets off the same kind of first-world anxiety that lots of people experience when they realise that they’re not wearing their FitBit when they’re half way through their daily run. That voice in your head that says, this doesn’t count towards my target!

Before I discuss the thorny solution to my problem, I would just like to pause and celebrate the sheer joy that this “problem” exists. When I was a child, and perhaps even more of a booklover than I am now, I used to have a fantasy that I could close my eyes, open my palms and the perfect book for that moment would appear. Since the advent of digital technology exploded into the publishing world, this fantasy is now a concrete, daily reality. I can order a book and – milliseconds later – I can be reading it. The advent of the Kindle and similar devices, followed rapidly by the spectacular surge in the audiobook industry, has made books and their contents more accessible than ever. It enables reading on the go, reading while you’re working on mindless chores that would otherwise be soul-destroying and reading in an instant. It is not only accessible but increasingly affordable. As well as the remarkably affordable global phenomenon that is Amazon that shook the market to its core, there are millions of electronic books and audiobooks available through the library for free and I absolutely love it. I cannot stress enough how utterly glorious this literary digital revolution has been for me, especially as someone with ropey eyesight.

Right – back to whingeing.

To solve the problem I have, which – if you recall – is keeping track of what I’ve read, for many years I have turned to recording what I’ve read on a site called GoodReads. It is by far the biggest and most successful platform of its kind, and like all social media platforms it began as a wonderful idea. A community of booklovers, coming together online, on a platform that exploits all the modern benefits of social media but focuses entirely on books – recommendations, reviews, suggestions and comments. Sounds wonderful doesn’t it? What’s not to like? Well, like most social media platforms, there is unfortunately quite a lot not to like.

Since its launch in 2006, GoodReads has become increasingly dominated by a certain kind of reader. I hesitate to label them as belonging to a particular generation, as I’m not sure it’s that simple, but these readers are the ones who see everything that has ever been written as “problematic”. Ever in search of reasons to be offended, they trawl the corpus of modern and classic fiction, hunting for dissent from their tribal causes of righteousness and sniffing out any indication of a worldview that may jar with their own, even if that worldview is expressed by a fictional character.

It must be a truly exhausting existence, especially if you want to read anything written prior to the 21^st century, which can be a challenge for all of us who have been steeped in modern liberalism. A few years ago, I read Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell and found myself positively wincing at his choice of language. Similarly, it’s been an education to dip into some Agatha Christie and discover the casual classicism and a truly profound contempt for her own sex. This all jars with modern values and if you’re normally a reader of contemporary fiction it can come as quite a surprise. I would happily support a review of such books which said something like, “remember, this book was written around 80 years ago, so the attitudes and views expressed will not reflect 21^st century values”. That is all that needs to be said, a trigger warning for the ineluctably stupid who need it pointing out to them that people in the past didn’t necessarily think the same as we do. If you really want to blow their minds, try asking them what 22^nd century humans will think of their own prejudices; they won’t be able to think of any, because that’s how prejudice works: it’s only obvious when you look back at it.

You’re probably thinking I should give you a couple of examples of the GoodReads phenomenon. Okay. According to the good folk of GoodReads, a Young Adult novel that I enjoyed as a teenager is officially racist because it’s a fantasy novel about astral projection, which is the ability to remove your soul from your own body, and this is (apparently) cultural appropriation from the native Americans. Honest to God, there are people losing their minds over whether the supposed ability to teleport your soul around the world is racist. Some readers lay into the same novel being “sizeist” as well, and I have to say I have absolutely zero recollection of that in the novel. Similarly, there are hundreds of people claiming that Lionel Shriver (she of We Need to Talk About Kevin fame) can’t write, because her recent novel about tone-policing in society is just a little too close to the bone for them. “I feel like if you’re going to try and do Orwell in 2024, you have to try and write at least as well as Orwell” snipes one, whilst in the next beat admitting “I’m not much of a fan of Orwell.” That one genuinely made me hoot. Less so the one filled with expletives that describes Shriver as nothing more than “a well-off, educated white woman” – the ultimate modern-day insult.

I have searched for a better option and there does not appear to be one, so GoodReads is where I’m stuck. The algorithms are useful, in a way that they are not when it comes to other products available for purchase. If I’ve just bought a new dishwasher, then I’m not interested in suggestions for other dishwashers. However, if I’ve just enjoyed a rip-roaring thriller about zombies, I am more than open to suggestions for similar rip-roaring thrillers about zombies, so GoodReads has some value through its automated suggestions. As for the humans that populate the site, I shall endeavour to do my best to avoid their opinions and their tone-policing. I hate to say it, but for once I’d rather listen to the computer.

The role of the translator?

The festive season would not be complete without an EduTwitter bust up, and this year there was more than one. Pleasingly, the one that’s rumbled on the longest is a controversy surrounding Homer’s Odyssey, striking a rare burst of attention for Classics in the broader world of education. The debate started with some people arguing about whether school-teachers have or should have read or taught this text in schools. Quite why anybody cares remains a puzzle. After a few days, however, the row spread amongst a much wider audience and mutated into reactions to a recent translation from the original Greek by Emily Wilson, who in 2018 became the first woman to publish a full English translation of the Odyssey, to much fanfare.

Predictably, people’s reactions to Wilson’s translation fall into clear political camps. The Guardian hailed it as “groundbreaking” and a feminist interpretation which will “change our understanding of it forever” while critics more right of centre breathed anxiously in and out of a paper bag and muttered dire warnings about the decline of the West. It’s all very silly, but in amongst all the hysteria has been some unintentionally thoughtful commentary: sometimes, people don’t even realise that they’ve said something interesting while they are trying to score a political point. “The job of a translator is not to attribute postmodern ideas of sex oppression to a writer who has been dead for 3000 years” raged Charlie Bentley-Astor. Broadly, I don’t disagree with her, but I found myself pondering: what is the role of the translator, exactly?

Those who have not studied languages, particularly ancient languages, might find this question bizarre. The role of the translator, surely, is to reproduce the text as faithfully as possible in a different language? Well, yes. But you see, it depends what your priorities are and it depends what aspects of the text you believe are most important to remain faithful to. The spirit and mores of the times? The lyrical qualities of the original? Its readability? And what is the purpose of your translation? To support the study of the text in the original language? Or to open up the text to a wider audience, who will never have the chance to study it in the original Greek? These are just a handful of the questions that a translator must ask themselves. The translations that I produce for students who are studying a text in the original Latin are clunky and unsuitable for publication. This is because their sole purpose is to facilitate the students’ understanding of the Latin text in front of them, on which they will be questioned in an examination: I do not produce my work for the pleasure of a general audience, so I am not aiming at fluidity, readability or beauty, all of which are potentially important when publishing a translation for a wider readership, for people who want to enjoy reading a text for pleasure.

The power of the translator is immense, and those who are exercised by Wilson’s approach are upset by the fact that she has been credited with approaching the text from a more feminist standpoint, potentially imbuing it with a set of values that could not have been imagined by Homer himself. Yet I simply do not understand the hysterical reaction by some conservatives, who seem completely oblivious to the fact that this interpretative dance has gone on since the dawn of time. Every translator inculcates a text with his or her own priorities, and every translator knows that. If you are picking up a translation of an ancient text and you honestly believe that it will be giving you a faithful, full and accurate rendering of the original author’s meaning and intention then you are deeply naïve, for this is impossible. It is for this reason that I have never understood those who claim to understand the “word of God” when they have not studied their own religious texts in the original language in which it was written. So, Christians, off you go to learn Hebrew and New Testament Greek!

Let’s just take one very simple example of the problem. Imagine that I were producing a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. How would I render the phrase “imperium sine fine”, which is what Jupiter states that he will grant to the Romans? The word imperium has multiple meanings and can be translated as “power”, “command” or “empire”. It had some quite specific and technical meanings in relation to the command that a general had over a region but was also tied up with the Roman belief that the expansion of their dominion was a fundamentally good and noble thing: this included the exercising of power over other nations and the geographical expansion of their borders. The phrase sine fine could be rendered “without end” or “without borders” – it refers both to the physical extent of the Roman empire and to their belief that their domination was not only unlimited in terms of their relationship with the world, but that it would be unlimited in time. The phrase is therefore deeply resonant in the Roman mindset – that their empire, their military might, their control over the world was divinely-granted: it had no borders and it would last forever.

I would argue further that it is not only the layered meanings that such a phrase had for the Romans that have to be considered when translating this phrase now. As readers from a modern perspective, in the full knowledge of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, the phrase imperium sine fine has a poignancy for us that Virgil could not have imagined. This does not mean that its meaning to a modern audience does not have value – quite the opposite. There would be little point in the survival of ancient texts if they were not to strike resonances within us as a result of the changes that have taken place since they were written.

The importance of capturing the spirit of a text over and above remaining faithful to its construction is a challenge faced by those who convert a classic novel into a film or a drama. The 1992 film version of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, directed and produced by Gary Sinise and starring John Malkovich is – in my opinion – an absolute masterpiece of this spiritual capture. The opening scenes are entirely invented by the film-makers: a terrified woman in a torn red dress runs across farmland, then we see men on horseback who appear to be in pursuit of the woman’s assailant. Those of you who know the novel will understand exactly the background to George and Lennie’s situation that this represents and in my view it was a brilliant leap of imagination to transfer the information to film in this way.

Conservatives who fear “incorrect” interpretations of a text fail to understand that the enduring appeal of a text lies in its interpretation. Believe you me, Aristophanes did not have a feminist slant in mind when he wrote Lysistrata, a comic play poking fun at the incompetence of the Athenian political intelligentsia, who were doing such a God-awful job that even the women could probably do it better! That was the joke, for the Athenian audience. Yet Lysistrata is – inevitably – read and performed as a feminist play in the modern setting, and I have enjoyed productions that have rendered it thus. Thus, I do find myself chuckling at the rising hysteria expressed by many who seem so terrified by the fact that Homer has now been translated by a woman. I do wish they could understand that Homer will survive: he’s big enough and man enough to take it.

Call that a PhD?

You could be forgiven for thinking that Gregg Wallace’s video was the most explosive thing to happen on social media this week, but you would be wrong.

Picture the scene: a young, female academic at Cambridge shares a happy picture of herself, smiling and clutching her freshly-acknowledged PhD thesis in English literature. Ally Louks, now Dr Ally Louks, probably thought that her message of celebration that she was “PhDone” would be liked by a few and ignored by the majority. Yet her post at the time of writing has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people and Ally has received torrents of abuse, some of which beggars belief. The whole storm has sparked outraged discussion on all sides – most of it thoroughly ignorant – about what a PhD is or should be.

Here’s the thing, for those of you that haven’t been there. A PhD is like going potholing: you wriggle down into some difficult spaces and explore the subterrain. Nobody will ever know those particular underground passages better than you, because nobody else is ever likely to go there or, indeed, even want to go there. The reason you’re awarded the PhD is because you have traversed new terrain and – in the judgement of the potholing community – you are the first to do so, or you have uncovered a sufficient number of nooks and crannies that previous potholers did not comment upon. Most of the time, you don’t find an underground palace, a glistening river of stalactites or a dazzling crystal chamber: you simply wriggle your way back up to the surface and get on with your life. Your thesis will sit on the shelf of whichever institution recognised it and – if you’re lucky – it will be consulted by a tiny handful of niche-hole specialists over the next few decades, the number of which you could count on one hand.

Personally, I blame Stephen Hawking. During his doctorate, he hit upon a leap of understanding so brilliant that it changed the direction of theoretical physics forever. Most of us don’t manage that. This does not mean that our PhDs are not worthy of the title: it simply means that most of us are – demonstrably – not a genius like Hawking. There is a reason why Hawking has been laid to rest between Newton and Dawin: he is right up there with those two when it comes to the significance of his contribution to his field. Yet many people seem to assume that Hawking is an example of what is expected of a PhD candidate – a particularly famous example, perhaps, but an example nonetheless. In reality, most research is utterly banal and unimportant: it’s not going to shake up our understanding of the fabric of the universe.

Louks’ PhD sounds – to me – rather fun. Okay, I’m one of those wish-washy artsy types that got a PhD in Classics, not theoretical physics, but I reckon her thesis “Olfactory ethics: the politics of smell in modern and contemporary prose” sounds like a more stimulating read than a huge number of PhDs that have passed under my nose over the years (pun intended). In response to the unexpected interest in her work, Louks shared her abstract, which only further made my nostrils twitch. Her thesis explores “how literature registers the importance of olfactory discourse – the language of smell and the olfactory imagination it creates – in structuring our social world.” Her work looks at various authors and explores how smell is used in description to delineate class, social status and other social strata. I mean … fine? No? Quite why a certain type of Science Lad on the internet decided that this was a completely unacceptable thesis baffles me. Apparently, there is a certain type of aggressively practical chap, who believes that exploring how things are represented in literature and how that literature has in turn helped to shape our world is utterly unworthy. Well, more fool them. They should read some literature. I suggest they start with Perfume by Patrick Suskind, a modern classic that is quite literally a novel about smell.

I’ll confess that the whole thing has left me feeling quite jumpy about my own thesis, which in 1999 was welcomed as an acceptable contribution to my very narrow, very obscure corner of the underground caves. Once I had seen the reaction to Louks’ abstract I decided to re-read my own. Having done so, I concluded not only that it would sound utterly barking to the rest of the world, it sounded utterly barking to me! This was a field in which I was immersed at the time but have read nothing about since I walked out of the room in which my viva took place.

The viva itself is something that most people do not really understand and is difficult to explain. It is not an examination. Short for viva voce, which is Latin for “with the living voice”, the viva is there in principle for the PhD candidate to demonstrate that they are the author of their own work. In practice, it is also an opportunity for the examiners to quiz the candidate and explore their hypothesis further. The examiners may have questions and it is common for them to advise corrections and amendments; often, the examiners make the passing of the thesis conditional on these amendments. Best case scenario (and one enjoyed by Ally Louks), the examiners pass your thesis with nothing more than a few pencil annotations, none of which require attention for the thesis to be accepted. Worst case scenario, they say that your thesis is a load of old hooey and that you should not – under any circumstances – re-submit it, corrected or otherwise.

While the worst-case scenario is rare and indicates a profound failure on the part of the candidate’s supervisor, who never should have allowed the submission, it does happen on rare occasions. The last time I saw one of my old lecturers from my university days, he reported being fresh from a viva on which he had acted as an external examiner and had failed the thesis. This happens so rarely that I was agog. Having been so long out of the world of academia, it is impossible for me to express in simple terms the intellectual complexities that he explained were the reasons behind his decision, so I shall have to quote him directly: apologies if the language is too academic for you to follow. “Basically, it was b*****ks,” he said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was kind of brilliant b*****ks: but it was b*****ks nevertheless.” That poor candidate. I ached for him. I also found myself recalling the gut-wrenching moment during which Naomi Wolf’s PhD thesis was exposed as fundamentally flawed by Matthew Sweet, live on Radio 3. If you’ve never listened to the relevant part of the interview, I highly recommend it: it is – especially for those of us who have submitted a thesis for judgement in the past – the most toe-curling listen imaginable. Wolf’s entire thesis appears to have been based on a misunderstanding of a legal term, which Sweet discovered simply by looking it up on The Old Bailey’s website. Wolf’s thesis had been passed at Trinity College, Cambridge, an institution that would be hard to beat in terms of intellectual clout and reputation, so quite how this happened is mind-boggling and shameful.

The reaction to Souks’ thesis does, I suspect, have a great deal to do with the increasing suspicion with which academia is viewed, and in many ways I am not unsympathetic to people’s disquiet. There is, without question, a good deal of nonsense (or b*****ks, to use the technical term) talked in a lot of fields, particularly in the arts and social sciences. Yet the vitriol with which Souks was criticised has nothing to do with this. Her abstract, to anyone with even a grudging respect for the field of English literature, makes intellectual sense. No, the roasting of Souks and her work betrays a profound and depressing ignorance as well as a nasty dose of good old-fashioned cruelty. Before people decide that an entire field of study is unworthy of merit, they should maybe ask themselves whether there is even the tiniest possibility that they perhaps don’t know enough about it before they pounce. One can but hope that these people who value their rationality so much will next time run a more scientific test, rather than dunking the witch to see whether she floats.

Beginners’ luck

How fortunate today’s new teachers are. This might seem like an extraordinary thing to say, given the recruitment and retention crisis and all that, but I mean every word of it. New teachers entering the profession today have a wealth of materials available to them that should make their transition from novice to expert far smoother than it was back when I trained and few books illustrate this better than a book called What Do New Teachers Need to Know? by Peter Foster.

I purchased this book as a gift for the newly-trained teacher who has taken over my previous job in my local comprehensive. Not only is it superbly informative, it is beautifully written and easy to read. From the very first line, “I didn’t enjoy teaching to start with,” the humility and frankness of the author shine through. He talks of the Monday morning dread, the reality of teaching That Class and how it all “stemmed from this feeling that teaching was something you just had to figure out, a blisteringly frustrating game of Snakes and Ladders where every triumph was followed by a setback.” This was so achingly familiar that what had started out as a cursory glance over my purchase turned into me settling down to give the whole book my full attention.

One of the most radical things about Foster’s book is it values domain-specific knowledge over skills and argues that teachers themselves require an ever-increasing bank of concrete knowledge to draw upon. This does not mean that the book is fanciful or theoretical, rather that it questions the assumption that teaching is dark art, which only the most experienced wizard can practice, rather than a bank of shared knowledge that can be tapped into. Of course, teaching requires practice and nothing can beat a number of hours at the chalkface in the same way that a pilot’s flying hours are relevant to his or her assumed level of skill; but observation, imitation and repetition of good practice allows processes to become automated and innate, freeing up one’s working memory to cope with a greater number of variables. I will never forget having to write down every word I said and every single thing I had to do the first time I stood in front of a class. As time passed, I no longer had to think deeply about certain basic processes because they had become automated. Foster likens the start of a lesson to the opening of a chess game – not because it requires great strategy, but because it is the knowledge of opening gambits that empower the player to make the right moves.

One of the most frustrating things about teaching as a profession is how little focus is given to knowledge at INSET. For a profession focused on imparting knowledge, we do ourselves no justice by neglecting it in ourselves. Foster explores the different areas of knowledge that an effective teacher should be working on at the beginning of and throughout their career, from curriculum through pedagogy and behaviour. His chapter on behaviour focuses on the need for clarity and gives explicit examples of the language that should be used when issuing instructions, expectations, warnings and sanctions. He even gives examples of the questions that a new or inexperienced teacher could ask of their colleagues, something which I have rarely if ever seen suggested: my recollection of training was being told to ask questions, but nobody had any suggestions or examples of what it was I should be asking. For some teachers new to the profession, the whole process can be so overwhelming that they do not know where to begin, so to encounter books such as this which demystify the process is an absolute wonder.

Foster addresses what it means to “know your students” with a level of specificity I have also not encountered before. He explores the limits of our knowledge and looks into how a knowledge of individuals as well as how children learn in general can be of use in the classroom. He counsels against the assumptions we can make that lead to biases in the classroom, something which has always concerned me as a professional. “By paying lip-service to groups of students and gaps between them, teachers and schools can entrench biases rather than topple them,” he warns. It was not so long ago that I was being explicitly told to do things such as mark Pupil Premium students’ books first and indeed to sit them at the front of the classroom. Foster makes the case for equitable treatment and an avoidance of assumption.

Peter Foster has generously shared much of his knowledge for free on his own website, but I would highly recommend any new teacher or indeed any experienced teacher investing in this book. You can buy it here.

Is it original?

One of my most recent fiction reads is Yellowface by FR Kuang. I was absolutely blown away by this fierce and darkly hilarious examination of the publication industry and its acolytes.

It is not giving anything away to explain the basic premise, for that is played out right at the start of the novel: contemporary young American authors June Hayward and Athena Liu are both supposed to be rising stars. But while the fabulous Asian-American Athena finds instant fame and recognition, June is a literary nobody and her first novel is a resounding flop. When June happens to be present at Athena’s death as a result of a freak accident, she acts on impulse and steals Athena’s latest novel, an experimental masterpiece exploring the unacknowledged contributions of Chinese workers to World War I. June decides to edit Athena’s novel and “make it her own”, immersing herself so deeply in the process of refining its prose that on some level she becomes convinced that the novel actually is indeed her own. She sends it to her agent as her own work and – at the eager publisher’s suggestion – rebrands herself with the culturally ambiguous author name of Juniper Song. The rest of the novel charts her rise and fall.

Yellowface explores the ethics of plagiarism and forces us to confront the question of originality: if an original work is heavily edited, does it remain the authentic work of the primary author, or can it be considered a collaboration? June/Junpier certainly convinces herself that it can. The novel also explores issues of friendship, race and diversity, painting the protagonist as a jealous and overlooked author with nothing fashionable to say, frustrated by the lack of interest in her “white stories” and then thwarted by an audience that questions her right to explore a history outside of her own cultural milieu. Hilariously, June/Juniper becomes aggressively and eloquently defensive of her right to such authorship, to be a white author writing about a forgotten part of Chinese history, at times seeming to forget completely that she did not – in fact – author the novel in the first place. At other times she is quite literally haunted by Athena and the truth of what she has done. There are heated debates played out in real time at book fairs and accounts of reviews on Goodreads, many of which had me laughing out loud at their accuracy. Yellowface is simply brilliant and one of the many reasons I know it’s brilliant is that it has seriously upset a lot of the chattering reviewers on Goodreads: nobody likes how it feels when a mirror is held up in front of them.

Like any good novel, Yellowface has stayed in my mind and got me thinking about some of the issues it explores. I have written before about the dangers that teachers and private tutors face when seeking to monetise their resources (as we are all encouraged to do), due to what I believe is their naivety when it comes to what truly constitutes original work. I am grateful for my background in academia here, a period during which an extreme fastidiousness about the risk of plagiarism was drummed into me. There have been numerous cases of teachers monetising resources that have turned out to be based on the work of others and – quite unbelievably – this is supported and facilitated by the Times Educational Supplement, which allows people to upload and sell resources on its own website without a single check as to their originality. Only this week I saw someone online who was able to prove categorically that monetised resources available on the site were cut and pasted from his own work.

Such flagrant stealing aside, I honestly believe that a great deal of plagiarism occurs through nescience rather than through deliberate action. The way that teachers traditionally work means that it can be genuinely difficult to remember where your work ends and that of another begins. Teachers are the curators of an ever-evolving bank of resources that many others will have influenced in different ways over the years. Thanks to an academic background and some experience in publishing, I am acutely aware of the fact that pretty much everything I produce as a working resource for my students started its life somewhere else – as a passage in an old text book, from a bank of files kindly shared by a colleague, on a dim and distant exam paper from days gone by. Virtually nothing that I produce, therefore, can be claimed as fully original and monetised. This is true of most teachers, but I’m not sure how many of them fully understand the implications when it comes to publishing their work.

Every time I read or hear the exhortation from the ever-growing chorus of business coaches that tutors should be monetising their resources to create a passive income, my blood runs cold for those who heed this advice. How sure can such tutors be that their work is 100% and exclusively their own? If they’re sure of it, then they’ve been working in a vacuum, which seems a pretty strange way to go about things: reworking other people’s ideas is how we teachers get by in the job and doing so for our own use is absolutely allowed. But packaging these things up and selling them on as if they are entirely our own work is not. We live in an age where “publishing” is something that everyone can do – I have “published” this blog post myself – no editor, no publisher, no agent. The ease with which it is possible to release our work into the world can cause those inexperienced in the realities of professional publishing to think that they can do whatever they like, without recompense. I genuinely worry for them. If you’re still not convinced that there is anything for us to be concerned about, then take a look at what happened on The Classics Library website, where resources being shared entirely for free fell foul of copyright law and had to be taken down when the site was challenged by Cambridge University Press. Published resources using the ideas, the stories, the images or even just the names of the characters contained in the Cambridge Latin Course were deemed an infringement and the CUP demanded that they be taken down. In summary, any resource that uses even just an abstract concept created by others is breaking copyright law: if you publish an entirely “original” Latin story but that story contains the characters of Caecilius, Metella and Quintus, you’re potentially in trouble. These characters and their images are the intellectual property of the CUP.

Originality was not valued in the ancient world in anything like the way it is now. The modern world is obsessed with originality and authenticity, a tendency which has spilled over into society’s prioritisation of the individual over the community. The ancient Greeks had no interest in original stories, rather they liked to hear traditional or familiar stories told well. The Greek concept of story-writing arose out of the oral tradition, where stories were shared by word of mouth and were told and re-told a thousand times. Each teller would embellish the story and “make it their own” but none would claim (or indeed even wish to claim) that the story was original to them. For this and other reasons it is sometimes impossible to discern who was the original author of ideas in the ancient world and Homer, the oldest story-teller whose works we have in our possession, is considered by many to be an amalgamation of multiple authors over time, rather than one individual.

The Romans took the art of mimicry to a whole new level and due to the rapid and spectacular expansion of their empire had the opportunity to steal ideas from across much of the globe. They relished doing so. Their own art and literature were a kaleidoscope of colour from the regions they dominated and they certainly didn’t fret about cultural appropriation; quite frankly, they’d have been left with precious little culture without it. Furthermore, the Romans did not have the artistic prissiness we now harbour about owning the “original work”. Copies of Greek originals abounded and to be in possession of a good copy was considered not only acceptable but desirable. And it’s just as well. A multitude of Greek bronze originals are only known to us as a direct result of their Roman marble copy. (Bronzes don’t tend to survive – they get melted down and turned into more useful stuff!)

To return to the novel, I would highly recommend it. Few novels I have read this year have stayed with me as much as this one has and I loved its acerbic swipe at an industry and indeed an audience which can be cruel, unforgiving and hyprocrital. I wonder how the agent felt about this when they first picked up the manuscript. Now that I would like to have seen.