literature

MY NEW UPCOMING COURSES ON ETHICS, CLOSE READING AND BECKETT

This spring and summer I will be teaching three new courses, available to everyone and delivered online.

The first two are starting in April and are being run through a brand-new venture: Keystone Inspires.

I’ll be teaching How to Live: An Introduction to Ethics. This eight-week course looks at four very different approaches to ethics: the character-based ethics of Aristotle, the moral phenomenology of the Buddha, the duty-based ethic of Immanuel Kant, and the consequent-based ethics of the Utilitarians. We will then look at challenges to morality and moral truth from Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and the rise of logical positivism in the early twentieth century.

I’m also teaching The Art of Reading Closely. This is another eight-week course focused on learning how to get more out of reading literature by close reading: paying attention to the choices that a writer makes on the page and how they affect us as readers. This practice is hugely rewarding not just in terms of what it unlocks in the text but also what it tells us about the process of reading and about ourselves as reader.

Finally, I’ll be teaching a course on The Plays of Samuel Beckett, running in July 2021 through the Insitute of Continuing Education at the University of Cambridge. Booking for this is not yet open.

All three courses are very close to my heart and have run in different iterations in previous years. I am delighted to be able to bring them to a wider audience.

Find out more on the courses page.

Online course: Moby-Dick: An introduction to a great American novel

I’m delighted to be teaching an online course on Herman Melville’s magisterial novel, Moby-Dick, this summer as part of a Virtual Summer Festival of Learning at the Institute for Continuing Education at the University of Cambridge. After our normal summer programmes were cancelled due to COVID-19, it didn’t look like we’d be able to do anything at all this summer. Luckily, the team have worked hard to bring students a new form of course that are open to everyone, anywhere in the world.

The course will run from 6 to 10 July 2020 and will consist of pre-recorded lectures - to be watched at your leisure over the week of the course - and an online discussion with students and with me. I’m really pleased with how the lectures have turned out and I hope they’ll be illuminating for even old aficionados of the novel. They cover:

  • Melville’s life and early career

  • Melville’s relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne and how it profoundly altered the shape of Moby-Dick

  • Captain Ahab’s dictatorial tendencies

  • Religious symbolism and mystical experiences in Moby-Dick

  • Melville’s treatment of race and slavery in the novel

More information about the course and instructions for how to register can be found here

B.S. Johnson's Albert Angelo

an article for London Fictions

I’m afraid I’ve told you a fib. I’ve led you here with the understanding that you’re going to read all about how B.S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo is a London fiction. As it turns out, that’s not really the case. You’ve been had. The truth is, Albert Angelo isn’t really a London fiction at all.

Perhaps you’d like to turn on your heels now, and leave, disgusted and betrayed. But before you go, I should perhaps say that I wasn’t fibbing about the London part.

Albert Angelo really is a book about this city and not any of the other ones. It even mentions the A to Z. Twice! How many novels can you say that about?

No, the fib was, appropriately enough, in the fiction part. This is because although Albert Angelo is a novel, it’s more than a little uneasy about being one. It certainly doesn’t want to be a mere story, at least in the usual sense of that word. It wants to be truth. We know this because after 163 pages of what seems like a novel, albeit a rather unconventional one, the narrator breaks down mid-sentence and cries ‘oh, fuck all this LYING!’.

The book doesn’t end there, of course. It enters a section called ‘Disintegration’ in which someone who sounds a lot like B.S. Johnson emerges from behind the curtain of fiction to tell us what he was trying to do. Johnson, who published seven novels between 1963 and 1973 and then killed himself at the age of forty, was a disciple of novelists who had pushed their medium to its very limit: writers like James Joyce, Laurence Sterne and Samuel Beckett. Johnson felt that most novelists of his generation hadn’t really come to terms with the discoveries that these writers had made, and continued to spin stories as if Ulysses or The Unnamable had never been written. Johnson wanted to do something different: ‘telling stories is telling lies’ opines the Johnson-like persona in the penultimate chapter of Albert Angelo. ‘Im [sic] trying to say something not tell a story’.