tag:theconversation.com,2011:/nz/topics/writing-3143/articles
Writing – The Conversation
2024-03-20T19:25:08Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/224486
2024-03-20T19:25:08Z
2024-03-20T19:25:08Z
How a first-year university writing course for Indigenous students fostered skills and belonging
<p>Academic writing courses have historically served as a kind of <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/gatekeepers-or-greeters-we-must-demystify-university-firstgen-students">gate-keeping measure</a>. In North America and other settler colonial societies, such courses have traditionally imparted skills and knowledge for succeeding in university as an <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-universities-relate-with-students-changed-in-the-past-century-but-a-duty-of-care-remains-211255">institution that has privileged Eurocentric forms of knowledge and served elite members of society</a>. </p>
<p>As anti-racist educators like George Sefa Dei and colleagues explain, settler colonialism “imposed colonial theories of knowledge that privileged and superiorized Eurocentric knowledges <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84201-7_3">and denied, denigrated and invalidated Indigenous knowledges …</a>.” Eurocentric educational ideology “continues to inform what is considered formal education in Canada.”</p>
<p>Since fall 2021, the University of Victoria (UVic) has offered a section of a foundational <a href="https://www.uvic.ca/humanities/atwp/index.php">introduction to writing course</a> specifically for Indigenous students. The general foundational writing course meets UVic’s <a href="https://www.uvic.ca/humanities/atwp/program/academic-writing-requirement/index.php">academic writing requirement</a>, so most students will take it in their first or second year.</p>
<p>We designed a specific academic writing course that introduces Indigenous students to the conventions of academic writing and the <a href="https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/iipj/article/view/7418">skills they need to navigate the institution</a>. When we identified <a href="https://teachanywhere.uvic.ca/teach-a-course/intended-learning-outcomes">“learning outcomes” for this course</a> — what we wanted the outcome of students having taken the course to be — among these, we envisioned that at the end of the course, students would feel a sense <a href="https://diversity.cornell.edu/belonging/sense-belonging#:%7E:text=Belonging%20is%20the%20feeling%20of,their%20authentic%20self%20to%20work">of belonging</a> at the university. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/its-taken-thousands-of-years-but-western-science-is-finally-catching-up-to-traditional-knowledge-90291">It's taken thousands of years, but Western science is finally catching up to Traditional Knowledge</a>
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<h2>Why a writing course?</h2>
<p>Loren Gaudet, the lead author of this story, is a rhetoric and writing studies white settler scholar who teaches first-year students writing. She focuses on teaching students to understand academic writing as a <a href="https://universityaffairs.ca/opinion/in-my-opinion/from-combat-to-conversation-and-community-reimagining-university-writing/">scholarly conversation</a> they’re entering. </p>
<p>First-year writing courses provide a <a href="https://theconversation.com/writing-is-a-technology-that-restructures-thought-and-in-an-ai-age-universities-need-to-teach-it-more-219482">necessary introduction into the world of academic communication</a>. They equip students with the skills and confidence to add their voices to scholarly discourse.</p>
<p>By leveraging an existing academic writing course that meets the academic writing requirement, the writing course for Indigenous students provided a space to cultivate belonging for Indigenous students who have historically been and continue to be systematically <a href="https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/the_residential_school_system/">excluded from post-secondary education</a>.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/national-day-for-truth-and-reconciliation-universities-and-schools-must-acknowledge-how-colonial-education-has-reproduced-anti-indigenous-racism-123315">National Day for Truth & Reconciliation: Universities and schools must acknowledge how colonial education has reproduced anti-Indigenous racism</a>
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<h2>Creating the course</h2>
<p>Lydia Toorenburgh, the co-author of this story, worked with many Indigenous students through their studies and staff roles at UVic. Toorenburgh is a mixed settler and Bungi-Metis Two-Spirit person who has served as an Indigenous Resurgence Coordinator at UVic and is a PhD student in anthropology and Indigenous governance. </p>
<p>Toorenburgh learned many Indigenous students struggle to navigate post-secondary education because these institutions require skills, knowledge and ways of knowing that are not intuitive, not readily taught <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jamerindieduc.54.1.0154">and stem from a colonial orientation</a>. </p>
<p>Toorenburgh wondered how to deliver to Indigenous students:</p>
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<li><p>the <a href="https://www.sciedupress.com/journal/index.php/jnep/article/view/17306">knowledge of campus supports and confidence to access these supports</a>;</p></li>
<li><p>the skills needed to meet the academic and administrative demands of university;</p></li>
<li><p>the feeling that they belong on campus and are valued members of the community. </p></li>
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<p>All of these factors <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jamerindieduc.54.1.0154">support Indigenous student success</a>. </p>
<p>Toorenburgh recognized the potential of the first-year writing course to deliver these learning outcomes because it is a requirement and a foundational skills course.</p>
<h2>‘Belonging’ as learning outcome</h2>
<p>By including belonging as a learning outcome, we signalled to ourselves and our students that building community was a valued part of our class time together — and an intentional and deliberate undertaking. We intentionally fostered belonging and community-building in varying ways. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/first-voices-new-grade-11-english-courses-can-support-reconciliation-and-resurgence-by-centring-indigenous-literature-199292">First Voices: New Grade 11 English courses can support reconciliation and resurgence by centring Indigenous literature</a>
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<p>We began every class with a “round”: we sat in a circle together and each person had a chance to share how they were feeling. In an institution that can often be unfriendly and is full of overt and covert <a href="https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/indigenous-students-systemic-barriers-higher-education">barriers for Indigenous students</a>, it is radical to create a class environment built on personal connection and belonging.</p>
<p>We brought representatives for Indigenous-specific supports into the classroom to meet the students and talk with them, rather than just offering links to resources <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0098628320959979">in the syllabus</a> or course. In other words, we prioritized proximity and access to supports and relationships as essential factors in cultivating a sense of belonging for our students. </p>
<p>We also <a href="https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/labor/">adopted an anti-oppressive grading practice</a>. For us, this meant that student grades were <a href="https://journals.sfu.ca/dwr/index.php/dwr/article/view/975/873">determined by how many assignments the students completed over the term</a>. Students earned an “A” by <a href="https://www.uvic.ca/humanities/atwp/current-students/grading/index.php">exceeding expectations</a> and proposing their own additional projects. For example, two of our students created a podcast, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/5L3Ux6InOxmYS9f0TzwQWs">“The Power of Indigenous Kinship</a>.” </p>
<h2>Student responses</h2>
<p>To measure the impact of this course, we surveyed the students at the end of each term. Ninety-one per cent of students strongly agreed or agreed that being in this course section with other Indigenous students made them feel more comfortable in the classroom. Ninety-three per cent strongly agreed or agreed that this made them more comfortable at UVic. </p>
<p>In response to the question: “What worked?” one student wrote:</p>
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<p>“I loved having the community that was created in our classroom. I felt a lot of support and love, a very safe space for me.” </p>
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<p>These results show that making time and space for belonging has had a direct impact on these Indigenous students.</p>
<h2>Dedicated spaces</h2>
<p>Spaces that are dedicated to <a href="https://www.univcan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/enhancing-indigenous-student-access-at-canadian-universities-june-2016accessible-1.pdf">Indigenous students enhance their learning and success</a>. <a href="https://www.sfu.ca/aboriginalpeoples/events/sfu-news--aboriginal-editions-/2022-aboriginal-peoples-supplement/new-burnaby-and-surrey-spaces-enhance-student-experience-work.html">Many institutions</a> are creating dedicated spaces like <a href="https://www.uvic.ca/services/indigenous/house/index.php">UVic’s First Peoples House</a>, where the writing course serving Indigenous students has been held, but we argue that we can extend this work beyond resource centres. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/want-to-decolonize-education-where-classes-are-held-matters-165937">Want to decolonize education? Where classes are held matters</a>
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<p>A writing course for Indigenous students, as both a first-year and requirement-satisfying course, provides the opportunity <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-universities-need-homerooms-106299">for a homeroom-style class</a>. </p>
<p>Here, instructors can deliver essential curriculum (including practices to foster belonging), introduce students to key resources — and identify and intervene in student struggles. </p>
<p>Finally, we encourage collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous staff, instructors and administrators to be innovative. In so doing, it’s possible to work with present (and often restricted) resources to design and implement creative initiatives for decolonization.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/224486/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
It’s possible to work with restricted resources to design and implement creative initiatives to serve the particular needs of Indigenous students at university.
Loren Gaudet, Assistant Teaching Professor, Academic and Technical Writing Program, University of Victoria
Lydia A. I. Toorenburgh, PhD Student, Anthropology, University of Victoria
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/225509
2024-03-18T12:28:06Z
2024-03-18T12:28:06Z
Amid growth in AI writing tools, this course teaches future lawyers and other professionals to become better editors
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581594/original/file-20240313-18-ljzu6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=20%2C93%2C6852%2C4260&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Even the best paragraphs may have room for improvement.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/cyber-law-or-internet-law-concept-with-ai-robot-royalty-free-image/1350320510?phrase=law+students+writing+ai+&adppopup=true">PhonlamaiPhoto via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Text saying: Uncommon Courses, from The Conversation" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/uncommon-courses-130908">Uncommon Courses</a> is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.</em> </p>
<h2>Title of Course:</h2>
<p>“Editing and Advocacy”</p>
<h2>What prompted the idea for the course?</h2>
<p>In part, I wanted to improve the career prospects of the law students, business students and other aspiring professionals I teach. People who can consistently improve the sentences and paragraphs that come across their desk each day have the opportunity to improve the way ideas and messages are communicated. Who wouldn’t want to add someone like that to their company, government agency or nonprofit organization?</p>
<p>Mostly, though, I designed the course so that my students can experience the empowering magic that comes with being able to take a string of words — whether drafted by themselves or somebody else — and transform them into a revised version that is undeniably better than the original. </p>
<h2>What does the course explore?</h2>
<p>Students edit emails. They edit contracts. They edit memos, articles, speeches, proposals, text messages, blog posts — pretty much anything that lawyers and other professionals compose. Sometimes they edit alone. Other times they edit as part of a team. But the goal is always the same: learn and practice a skill that is fundamental to becoming an excellent advocate.</p>
<h2>Why is this course relevant now?</h2>
<p>I first starting teaching “Editing and Advocacy” a few years before the launch of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. But now that those tools have significantly reduced the cost of producing drafts, the course’s focus on revising drafts — for accuracy, for clarity, for persuasive power — has taken on a newfound relevance.</p>
<p>For instance, when asked how AI might affect what he and other members of the knowledge economy do, tech journalist <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2023/3/21/23649894/the-ai-revolution-could-be%2520-bigger-and-weirder-than-we-can-imagine.">Charlie Warzel suggested</a> that “the greatest skill that we can all have now is to be ‘editors.’” We may, he noted, start to spend an increasing amount of time correcting and refining AI-produced material.</p>
<p>Ilona Logvinova, associate general counsel and head of innovation for the legal department at consulting giant McKinsey, <a href="https://wsjcustomevents.com/lexisnexis2024">made a similar point</a>, telling attendees at a recent conference on the use of AI in law: “I really believe that we’re at a moment where we, as lawyers, can transition from being ‘drafters’ to being ‘editors.’”</p>
<h2>What’s a critical lesson from the course?</h2>
<p>One of the most critical lessons is something I put front and center on the syllabus: “Good editors don’t just see the sentence that was written. They see the sentence that might have been written. They know how to spot words that shouldn’t be included and summon up ones that haven’t yet appeared. Their value comes not just from preventing mistakes but also from discovering new ways to improve a piece’s style, structure, and overall impact.”</p>
<p>The current generation of AI tools is really good at proofreading. But so far, I haven’t encountered any large language model that has the vision, empathy and deep understanding of both context and nuance — not to mention of personal voice —required of a truly exceptional editor.</p>
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<img alt="A woman peers into a book while seated at her desk, which has both a desktop and a laptop computer." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582048/original/file-20240314-21-w762u1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582048/original/file-20240314-21-w762u1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582048/original/file-20240314-21-w762u1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582048/original/file-20240314-21-w762u1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582048/original/file-20240314-21-w762u1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582048/original/file-20240314-21-w762u1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582048/original/file-20240314-21-w762u1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Experts say editing will take on greater importance in the age of artificial intelligence.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Laurence Dutton via Getty Images</span></span>
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<p>That doesn’t mean that a technology with those capacities won’t eventually develop, nor that the technology we already have can’t provide enormously useful editing assistance. In fact, more and more of my assignments in “Editing and Advocacy” give students a chance to play around with ChatGPT-like tools. I have also created an entirely separate course called “Digital Lawyering: Advocacy in the Age of AI” that explores the possibilities – and pitfalls – of using artificial intelligence as a kind of co-counsel.</p>
<p>But as I often remind students in both classes, editing is as much about imagination, emotional intelligence and restraint as it is about syntax, semicolons and subject-and-verb agreement. A good way to become better at it is to cultivate the parts of you that are most human. </p>
<h2>What materials does the course feature?</h2>
<p>Hoping to save my students some money — and wanting to make the materials of the course easily available online — I worked with the <a href="https://www.publishing.umich.edu/our-mission">publishing team</a> at the University of Michigan to create a set of open-access books that anyone with an internet connection can read for free. These include “<a href="https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/hq37vr12w">Editing and Advocacy</a>,” “<a href="https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/dv13zw31v">Notes on Nuance</a>,” “<a href="https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/f1881p37d">Punctuation and Persuasion</a>” and “<a href="https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/8623j145m">Feedback Loops: How to Give and Receive High-Quality Feedback</a>.”</p>
<h2>What will the course prepare students to do?</h2>
<p>Editing involves reliably making informed, value-creating decisions. You need to know what to add. You need to know what to delete. You need to know what to separate, combine and rearrange. Students in the course study, evaluate and regularly participate in those types of decisions. In the process, they develop an extremely important and highly transferable skill: good judgment.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/225509/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Patrick Barry does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Learning how to produce polished prose can greatly enhance your value on the job.
Patrick Barry, Clinical Assistant Professor and Director of Digital Academic Initiatives (University of Michigan Law School) | Visiting Lecturer (University of Chicago Law School) | Visiting Lecturer (UCLA School of Law), University of Michigan
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/223506
2024-03-08T13:35:33Z
2024-03-08T13:35:33Z
Centuries after Christine de Pizan wrote a book railing against misogyny, Taylor Swift is building her own ‘City of Ladies’
<p>In her work, Taylor Swift has taken inspiration from women of the past, including actress <a href="https://www.billboard.com/music/lyrics/taylor-swift-tortured-poets-department-clara-bow-family-reacts-1235607902/">Clara Bow</a>, socialite <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/the-outrageous-life-of-rebekah-harkness-taylor-swifts-high-society-muse">Rebekah Harkness</a> and her grandmother <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/taylor-swift-marjorie-song-video-evermore-album-sheffield-1103100/">Marjorie Finlay</a>, who was an opera singer. </p>
<p>But sometimes I wonder what the 34-year-old pop star would think of the life and work of Italian-born French writer <a href="https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/place_settings/christine_de_pisan">Christine de Pizan</a>. </p>
<p>Back in the 15th century, Christine – who scholars customarily refer to using her first name, because “de Pizan” simply reflects her place of birth, and she may not have had a last name – dealt with her share of “<a href="https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article282745283.html">dads, Brads and Chads</a>,” just as Swift has in the 21st century. </p>
<p>Thought to be the first French woman to make a living as a writer, Christine compiled “<a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/2021667679/">The Book of the City of Ladies</a>” in 1405 to challenge the negative stereotypes of women in the Middle Ages. In it, she offers dozens of examples of accomplished women found throughout history, including queens, saints, warriors and poets. </p>
<p>Christine’s writings continue to resonate – especially with women – and are used widely in college courses on women and gender. I recently used excerpts from “The Book of the City of Ladies” in my course on women and gender in early modern Europe.</p>
<p>In reflecting on Christine’s writings from over 600 years ago, I am struck by how she recognized the pernicious effects of attacks on women’s intellect and accomplishments – the ways in which they could be internalized and accepted if women did not challenge the stereotypes. </p>
<h2>Building the ‘City of Ladies’</h2>
<p>Christine de Pizan was born in Italy but spent much of her life in the royal court of France during the rule of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Valois-dynasty">the House of Valois</a>. </p>
<p>Her father, a court physician and astrologer, encouraged her education alongside her brothers. She had three children with her husband, a French royal secretary named Etienne de Castel, who died when Christine was just 25 years old.</p>
<p>Widowed and facing the prospect of raising and financially supporting children on her own, she turned to composing works that appealed to elites, resulting in commissions from patrons. She wrote on a variety of topics, including <a href="https://roseandchess.lib.uchicago.edu/rose.html">a poem celebrating Joan of Arc’s success on the battlefield</a>.</p>
<p>But her most ambitious and enduring work is “The Book of the City of Ladies.” </p>
<p>Discouraged by all the misogyny she had read, Christine whimsically claimed that she had received a vision from three ladies: Reason, Rectitude and Justice, who tasked her with the project.</p>
<p>By gathering stories about the accomplishments of women, Christine set out to build an allegorical city where women and their achievements would be safe from the insults and slander of men. </p>
<p>In “The City,” she specifically referenced “<a href="http://www.theabsolute.net/misogyny/matheol.html">The Lamentations of Matheolus</a>,” from 1295, a lengthy essay written in Latin by a cleric from Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. Its French translation from the late 1300s would have been the version Christine read. </p>
<p>It is full of hateful views of women, but Matheolus saves most of his ire for wives.</p>
<p>“Anyone who wishes to immolate himself on the altar of marriage will have a lot to put up with,” he writes, adding that the torture of marriage “is worse than the torments of hell.” He derides women as “always quarrelsome … cruel, and shrewish” – “terribly perverse” individuals who have “deceived all the greatest men in the world.”</p>
<p>Matheolus was not alone in his low views of women. Other popular writings of the time included Jean de Meun’s “<a href="https://roseandchess.lib.uchicago.edu/rose.html">The Romance of the Rose</a>,” which portrayed women as untrustworthy and jealous, and an anonymous treatise, “<a href="https://pius.slu.edu/special-collections/?p=4037">On the Secrets of Women</a>,” which offered misinformation about the biology of women. </p>
<p>With so much misogyny coming from so many sources, Christine acknowledged how easy it was for women to believe what was said about them: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“It’s no wonder that women have been the losers in the war against them since the envious slanderers and vicious traitors who criticize them have been allowed to aim all manner of weapons at their defenseless targets.” </p>
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<p>Christine recognized the reasons behind this widespread misogyny: Women who were smarter and kinder than men were seen as a threat and a challenge to <a href="https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/women-in-medieval-literature-and-society/">the established patriarchy</a> of Western society. </p>
<h2>Taylor Swift’s ‘big ole city’</h2>
<p>Like Christine, Swift is a gifted writer who began making a living with her pen when she was a teenager. </p>
<p>She has built her own city of sorts to protect her reputation, her music and her self-esteem.</p>
<p>In her 2020 documentary “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11388580/">Miss Americana</a>,” Swift opens up about her struggles with media scrutiny, which contributed to an eating disorder. In it, she describes herself as “trying to deprogram the misogyny in my own brain.”</p>
<p>She <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/arts/music/taylor-swift-trial-jury-verdict.html">sued a DJ that groped her and won</a>, leading to her being featured as one of the “silence breakers” <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/12/6/16742166/taylor-swift-time-magazine-person-year-2017-silence-breaker-me-too">on the cover</a> of Time magazine in 2017 at the dawn of the #MeToo movement. And in 2021, she began reclaiming her words and music <a href="https://www.today.com/popculture/music/taylors-version-meaning-swift-rerecording-albums-rcna98513">by re-recording her older albums</a> as “Taylor’s Versions” after the original masters were sold by her first record label without her consent. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Tattooed arms peruse vinyl records featuring a young woman on the cover." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580547/original/file-20240307-18-oq6pk5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580547/original/file-20240307-18-oq6pk5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580547/original/file-20240307-18-oq6pk5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580547/original/file-20240307-18-oq6pk5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580547/original/file-20240307-18-oq6pk5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580547/original/file-20240307-18-oq6pk5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580547/original/file-20240307-18-oq6pk5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An employee of an Ohio record store stocks a shelf with copies of ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’ in 2023.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/OhioDailyLife/23ee9d50617546c092a62ec7a51c301f/photo?Query=taylor%27s%20version&mediaType=photo&sortBy=creationdatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=138&currentItemNo=5">AP Photo/Aaron Doster</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In her songs, Swift also repeatedly confronts the men who have discounted her talent and intellect. Her song “<a href="https://genius.com/Taylor-swift-mean-lyrics">Mean</a>” is widely believed to be about the critics who questioned her talent, such as <a href="https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2010/02/01/grammys/">Bob Lefsetz</a>, who wrote that Swift clearly couldn’t sing and had possibly destroyed her career after <a href="https://www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/news/taylor-swifts-out-of-tune-grammy-performance-defended-by-label-201042/">a shaky performance</a> at the 2010 Grammys.</p>
<p>“Someday, I’ll be livin’ in a big, ole city,” Swift retorts in the track, “And all you’re ever gonna be is mean.”</p>
<p>At the conclusion of “The Book of the City of Ladies,” her mission to record the achievements of women accomplished, Christine de Pizan invites her female readers to join her: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“All of you who love virtue, glory and a fine reputation can now be lodged in great splendour inside its walls, not just women of the past but also those of the present and the future, for this has been founded and built to accommodate all deserving women.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Though the City of Ladies was built centuries ago, I have a feeling that Taylor Swift would be right at home in that big, ole city.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/223506/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jill R. Fehleison does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
By compiling stories about the accomplishments of women, Christine set out to build an allegorical city where women and their achievements would be safe from sexist insults and slander.
Jill R. Fehleison, Professor of History and Interdisciplinary Studies, Quinnipiac University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/219482
2024-02-26T17:04:00Z
2024-02-26T17:04:00Z
Writing is a technology that restructures thought — and in an AI age, universities need to teach it more
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577645/original/file-20240223-30-anxfss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=170%2C166%2C2824%2C1724&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Today's undergraduates are plunged into a sea of texts, information and technology they have immense difficulty navigating, and artificial intelligence tools for writing aren't the solution. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.piqsels.com/en/public-domain-photo-frrbx">(Piqsels)</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In an age <a href="https://theconversation.com/artificial-intelligence-is-getting-better-at-writing-and-universities-should-worry-about-plagiarism-160481">of AI-assisted writing</a>, is it important for university students to learn how to write? </p>
<p>We believe it is now more than ever. </p>
<p>In the writing classroom, students get the time and help they need to understand writing as not only a skill, but what the language scholar Walter J. Ong called a “<a href="https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027277183-tsl.21.22ong">technology that restructures thought</a>.”</p>
<p>“Technology” is not simply iPhones or spreadsheets — it is about <a href="https://blog.oup.com/2014/04/writing-as-technology/">mediating our relationship with the world through the creation of tools</a>, and writing itself is arguably the most important tool for thinking that university students need to master.</p>
<p>Perhaps not surprisingly, not everyone agrees.</p>
<h2>Role of university writing courses</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/11/14/eliminate-required-first-year-writing-course-opinion">“Eliminate the Required First-Year Writing Course” </a> was the headline of a provocative article published in <em>Inside Higher Ed</em> in November.</p>
<p>In this article, a professor of writing studies, Melissa Nicolas of Washington State University, writes that while she has seen reason to question how efficient first-year composition courses are before now, “the advent of generative artificial intelligence is the final nail in the coffin.”</p>
<p>In her estimation, “learning to write and writing to learn are two distinct things.” First-year writing courses are “largely about learning to write, but AI can now do this for us. Writing to learn is much more complicated and is something that can only be done by the human mind.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A person seen writing." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577650/original/file-20240223-15016-9si2a3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577650/original/file-20240223-15016-9si2a3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=254&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577650/original/file-20240223-15016-9si2a3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=254&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577650/original/file-20240223-15016-9si2a3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=254&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577650/original/file-20240223-15016-9si2a3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=319&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577650/original/file-20240223-15016-9si2a3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=319&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577650/original/file-20240223-15016-9si2a3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=319&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Good writing’ reflects intellectual engagement.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We take issue with this distinction. From the perspective of human learning and development, the grammatically correct prose produced by generative AI like ChatGPT is not “good writing” — even <a href="https://theconversation.com/chatgpts-greatest-achievement-might-just-be-its-ability-to-trick-us-into-thinking-that-its-honest-202694">if it is or seems factually correct</a> — if it does not reflect intellectual engagement with its subject matter. This is not to mention serious questions <a href="https://theconversation.com/unlike-with-academics-and-reporters-you-cant-check-when-chatgpts-telling-the-truth-198463">about the meaning of gaining insight</a> from digital data, issues surrounding data biases, and so on. </p>
<p>First-year composition and other writing courses are a <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1179517">crucial part of the way university students are socialized into ways of communicating</a> that will benefit them far beyond their undergraduate years.</p>
<h2>Canadian versus American universities</h2>
<p>We propose another solution to the problem Nicolas raises of first-year composition courses being formulaic and outdated. Universities need to devote resources to expanding and improving writing programs, including first-year composition. </p>
<p>We especially need this in Canada, where, as <a href="https://summit.sfu.ca/item/36113">doctoral research carried out by one of the authors of this piece (Taylor Morphett) has shown,</a> first-year composition has traditionally been under-emphasized, and writing has only been taught in a piecemeal way.</p>
<p>When first-year composition courses began to develop at the end of the 19th century in the United States, <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/377982">in Canada the focus was on the fine-tuning of literary taste and the reading of canonical British literature</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Students seen sitting at a round table." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577658/original/file-20240223-16-anxfss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577658/original/file-20240223-16-anxfss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577658/original/file-20240223-16-anxfss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577658/original/file-20240223-16-anxfss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577658/original/file-20240223-16-anxfss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577658/original/file-20240223-16-anxfss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577658/original/file-20240223-16-anxfss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Writing education is often seen by universities as a remedial skill, something students should already know how to do.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The philosophies of education and approaches to teaching that developed from this early time are still present today in Canada. Writing education is often seen by universities as a remedial skill, something students should already know how to do.</p>
<p>In reality, much more writing instruction is needed. Today’s undergraduates are plunged into a sea of <a href="https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2018.12.1.2">texts, information and technology they have immense difficulty navigating</a>, and ChatGPT has made it harder, not easier, for students to discern the credibility of sources.</p>
<h2>Writing programs in Canada</h2>
<p>In writing courses, students can begin to see the critical variety and power of one of our best technologies: the human act of writing, a system of finite resources but infinite combinations. They learn to think, synthesize, judge the credibility of sources and information and interact with an audience — none of which can be done by AI.</p>
<p>Thankfully, some universities have taken the lead in making writing a cornerstone of undergraduate education. For example, the University of Victoria has a <a href="https://www.uvic.ca/humanities/student-resources/writing-requirement/index.php">robust academic writing requirement</a> for all students, regardless of their field of study. At the University of Toronto Mississauga, <a href="https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/isup/our-courses/isp100-writing-university-and-beyond#takeisp100">first-year students take an innovative for-credit writing course</a> that takes a “<a href="https://writingaboutwriting.net/about/history-and-mission/">writing-about-writing</a>” approach. In this program, undergraduates study writing as an academic subject itself, not just a skill. They learn about the importance, complexity and socially situated nature of academic writing. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A person seen writing with laptop open and pencil in hand." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577621/original/file-20240223-22-8ottxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577621/original/file-20240223-22-8ottxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577621/original/file-20240223-22-8ottxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577621/original/file-20240223-22-8ottxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577621/original/file-20240223-22-8ottxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577621/original/file-20240223-22-8ottxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577621/original/file-20240223-22-8ottxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In writing courses, students can begin to see the critical variety and power of one of our best technologies: the human act of writing.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-shot-of-a-girl-studying-in-the-library-9489766/">(Yaroslav Shuraev)</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Needed at all universities</h2>
<p>All Canadian universities should make a beginning academic writing or communication course required for all undergraduates, along with discipline-specific upper-division writing courses focused on scholarly and professional genres in their fields. </p>
<p>Academic and professional writing is a second language for everyone: no one is born knowing how to properly cite sources or craft airtight business proposals. </p>
<p>We need dedicated writing programs to help students <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-intelligence-for-millennia-western-literature-has-suggested-it-may-be-a-liability-205913">understand and communicate complex concepts to a specific audience for a specific purpose</a> in rhetorically flexible ways, with an awareness of their responsibilities to a human community of readers.</p>
<h2>Skills and knowledge to make a difference</h2>
<p>Generative AI like ChatGPT cannot do this, because <a href="https://theconversation.com/gpt-3-new-ai-can-write-like-a-human-but-dont-mistake-that-for-thinking-neuroscientist-146082">it cannot know or “understand” anything</a>. Its <em>raison d'être</em> is to produce plausible strings of symbols in response to human prompts, based on data it has been trained upon.</p>
<p>We have knowledgeable and talented PhDs graduating in communication, applied linguistics, English, rhetoric and related fields whose expertise in these areas is sorely needed at institutions across the country. </p>
<p>If Canada wants to graduate domestic and international students with the skills and knowledge to make a difference in the world, we need to be training them in writing.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219482/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joel Heng Hartse receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is also president of the Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing/Association Canadienne de Rédactologie.
</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Taylor Morphett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Undergraduate writing courses are about learning to think, synthesize and judge the credibility of sources — and interact with an audience.
Joel Heng Hartse, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University
Taylor Morphett, Instructor, English, Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/223159
2024-02-16T13:19:19Z
2024-02-16T13:19:19Z
What’s behind the astonishing rise in LGBTQ+ romance literature?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575427/original/file-20240213-24-vujzz2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C9%2C6000%2C3991&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">America's biggest book publishers originally viewed LGBTQ+ romance as a niche market.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/lesbian-couple-relaxing-and-reading-in-couch-royalty-free-image/857306488?phrase=gay+couple+reading&adppopup=true">Klaus Vedfelt/DigitalVision via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Graphic reading 'Significant Figures: 40% - Sales growth of LGBTQ+ romance books from 2022 to 2023 – the largest increase in any genre.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576001/original/file-20240215-26-fctqzr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576001/original/file-20240215-26-fctqzr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576001/original/file-20240215-26-fctqzr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576001/original/file-20240215-26-fctqzr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576001/original/file-20240215-26-fctqzr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=321&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576001/original/file-20240215-26-fctqzr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=321&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576001/original/file-20240215-26-fctqzr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=321&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A major transformation is underway in Romancelandia. </p>
<p>Once upon a time, romance novels from major U.S. publishers featured only heterosexual couples. Today, the five biggest publishers regularly release same-sex love stories.</p>
<p>From May 2022 to May 2023, <a href="https://www.circana.com/intelligence/press-releases/2023/soaring-sales-of-lgbtq-fiction-defy-book-bans-and-showcase-diversity-in-storytelling">sales of LGBTQ+ romance grew by 40%</a>, with the next biggest jump in this period occurring for general adult fiction, which grew just 17%.</p>
<p>The data from 2023 extends a boom that began in 2016: In the five years from May 2016 to May 2021, sales of LGBTQ+ romance grew <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/30/books/lgbtq-romance-novels.html">by a jaw-dropping 740%</a>.</p>
<p>It’s tempting to see this trend as a sign of the times. </p>
<p>After all, same-sex couples now populate TV shows, commercials and even <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/opinion/hallmark-lgbtq-christmas-movies-gay-lesbian-couples-rcna130407">Hallmark Christmas movies</a>. </p>
<p>Surely it was only natural for books such as Casey McQuiston’s “<a href="https://www.caseymcquiston.com/red-white-royal-blue">Red, White & Royal Blue</a>,” Lana Harper’s “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672445/paybacks-a-witch-by-lana-harper/">Payback’s a Witch</a>” and Cat Sebastian’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15171247.Cat_Sebastian">sparkling same-sex historical romance novels</a> to eventually find their way onto bestseller lists. </p>
<p>But it turns out that this rise in LGBTQ+ romance was far from inevitable.</p>
<p>Our <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231218991">recent paper</a>, based on interviews with romance editors and authors, shows that America’s biggest book publishers originally viewed LGBTQ+ romance as a niche market, tweaking their approach only after witnessing the huge success of independently published LGBTQ+ e-books. </p>
<h2>The business of romance</h2>
<p>Book publishing, like most of the entertainment industry, has traditionally operated under what <a href="https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2013/12/the-way-of-the-blockbuster">Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse</a> calls the blockbuster strategy: Publishers invest huge sums into acquiring and promoting surefire bestsellers, such as Prince Harry’s “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/books/prince-harry-spare-review.html#:%7E:text=The%20prince%20claims%20to%20have,who's%20leaking%20what%20and%20why.">Spare</a>,” which earned <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9805467/A-book-Harry-written-Meghan-Royals-brace-20m-Megxit-memoir.html">a US$20 million advance</a>. </p>
<p>It’s simply more efficient for publishers to pursue a “one-to-many” business model – that is, to sell one book to a mass audience – than a “many-to-many” business model, selling a wider variety of books to many more small markets. </p>
<p>Historically, publishers assumed that same-sex romance would draw relatively small niche audiences, making them a riskier investment. As a result, for decades, LGBTQ+ love stories were left to small gay or lesbian presses.</p>
<p>Starting around 2010, however, digital romance publishing – both from self-published authors and small digital-only publishers like <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/57460-patty-marks-sex-romance-and-erotic-bestsellers.html">Ellora’s Cave</a> and <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content-and-e-books/article/69517-samhain-publishing-to-shut-down-operations.html">Samhain</a> – revealed a vast, untapped appetite for more varied romance. The “<a href="https://bookscouter.com/blog/big-five-publishing-houses/">Big Five</a>” publishers – Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster – realized their go-to strategy was leaving money on the table.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Crowds of people browse the HarperCollins exhibition at a book fair." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575437/original/file-20240213-28-hkrvur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575437/original/file-20240213-28-hkrvur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575437/original/file-20240213-28-hkrvur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575437/original/file-20240213-28-hkrvur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575437/original/file-20240213-28-hkrvur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575437/original/file-20240213-28-hkrvur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575437/original/file-20240213-28-hkrvur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">HarperCollins is one of the ‘Big Five’ publishing houses.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-harper-collins-stand-during-the-first-day-of-the-london-news-photo/1251977849?adppopup=true">Richard Baker/In Pictures via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Initially, big publishers tried to shoehorn digital romance authors into the blockbuster model by acquiring their books and issuing them in print. </p>
<p>That worked for E.L James’ “<a href="https://www.eljamesauthor.com/books/fifty-shades-of-grey/">Fifty Shades of Grey</a>,” which started out as fan fiction, was later released by a tiny online publisher and was eventually published by Penguin.</p>
<p>But for LGBTQ+ romance authors, the economics of high overhead, big print runs and a yearlong production schedule simply didn’t work for books geared for presumably smaller audience segments. </p>
<p>As romance readers abandoned mass-market paperbacks for a wider, fresher range of stories, romance editors at large and medium-sized publishers realized they needed to become more like digital presses.</p>
<h2>Making love pay</h2>
<p>How did they do this? </p>
<p>First, they hired new editors who had cut their teeth at tiny digital publishers with a history of releasing same-sex romance. For our paper, we interviewed several of these editors, including <a href="https://read.sourcebooks.com/editorial-mary-altman.html">Sourcebooks’ Mary Altman</a> and <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/22629-james-tabbed-to-run-harlequin-s-e-book-only-carina-press.html">Angela James</a>, founder of Harlequin’s Carina Press. Harlequin has been owned by HarperCollins since 2014.</p>
<p>James, formerly at Samhain, broke sacred publishing rules when she launched Carina, the first digital-only imprint at a traditional publisher. Carina lowered production and distribution costs by publishing only e-books and by offering authors higher royalties but no advances.</p>
<p>The lower-overhead strategy worked so well that in 2020 the imprint created <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/82161-harlequin-s-carina-press-to-launch-queer-romance-line.html">Carina Adores</a>, an e-book and print line dedicated to LGBTQ+ romance. </p>
<p>Altman, who had been accustomed to acquiring same-sex romance during her tenure at Ellora’s Cave, continued to do so at Sourcebooks, a mid-sized publisher partly owned by Penguin Random House. In 2020, she released the breakout LGBTQ+ bestseller “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Boyfriend-Material-Alexis-Hall/dp/1728206146">Boyfriend Material</a>” by Alexis Hall. Sourcebooks also launched a new imprint, <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/91686-dominique-raccah-does-it-her-way.html">Bloom Books</a>, in 2021, which sped up publishing schedules to meet the demands of self-published and other entrepreneurial authors.</p>
<p>These structural changes made romance imprints at large publishers nimbler, more innovative and more open to all kinds of couples.</p>
<p>Ironically, many of these more inclusive stories ended up appealing to mass audiences after all. </p>
<p>“<a href="https://read.sourcebooks.com/fiction/9781728206141-boyfriend-material-tp.html">Boyfriend Material</a>” dominated Best Romance of the Year lists in 2020. Adriana Herrera, Alyssa Cole, K.J. Charles and dozens of other authors of LGBTQ+ romance now regularly appear on such lists. “Red White and Royal Blue” is now an Amazon Original movie. </p>
<p>It’s important to note that LGBTQ+ romances still represent <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/30/books/lgbtq-romance-novels.html">only 4% of the print book romance market</a>. Meanwhile, other diverse voices, including Black authors, <a href="https://www.therippedbodicela.com/state-racial-diversity-romance-publishing-report">are still underrepresented</a>. As a whole, the Big Five publishing houses are still adhering to the blockbuster strategy. Nonetheless, the structural changes they’ve made in romance imprints have fostered an outpouring of more diverse love stories. </p>
<p>At a time when other institutions, including universities and businesses, are <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/12/27/dei-affirmative-action-legal-challenges-corporate-america/">dismantling programs that support diversity, equity and inclusion</a>, the LGBTQ+ romance boom serves as a reminder that inclusion doesn’t “just happen.” </p>
<p>Ongoing social and cultural change requires new systems, processes and structures. Without institutional support, many people won’t get their happy ending.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/223159/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
It’s tempting to see this trend as a sign of the times. But the biggest book publishers started changing their approach only once they realized they were leaving money on the table.
Christine Larson, Assistant Professor of Journalism, University of Colorado Boulder
Ashley Carter, PhD Student in Journalism, University of Colorado Boulder
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/217185
2024-01-29T13:34:21Z
2024-01-29T13:34:21Z
Who created the alphabet? A historian describes the millennia-long story of the ABCs
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560517/original/file-20231120-20-pxbkgm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4928%2C3260&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Creating the alphabet took thousands of years.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/english-alphabet-royalty-free-image/498549449?phrase=alphabet">kovalchuk/iStock via Getty Images Plus</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/curious-kids-us-74795">Curious Kids</a> is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to <a href="mailto:curiouskidsus@theconversation.com">curiouskidsus@theconversation.com</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Who created the alphabet and decided its order? – Priti C., age 12, Mumbai, India</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>A, B, C, D, E, F, G – makes you want to hum <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75p-N9YKqNo">the alphabet song</a>. But there’s no real reason why people should learn these letters in this order. There are plenty of ways we could structure the alphabet; the computer keyboard in front of me provides one alternative. Plenty of other alphabets exist too, as well as languages that don’t use alphabets at all. </p>
<p>So why did we end up with this one – and who’s responsible for it? </p>
<p><a href="https://www.uml.edu/fahss/history/faculty/sancinito-jane.aspx">As a historian</a>, I love “why” questions. I often like them a lot more than “who” questions, because it’s actually really rare for a single person to change the world. Instead, most of history’s biggest innovations come from teamwork, collaboration and groups figuring out how to make life better, easier and more fun. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZBiuJ40t4rk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A fascinating story on the origins of writing.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What is a letter?</h2>
<p>The alphabet is a perfect example of this process. Our ABCs, known as <a href="https://kids.kiddle.co/Latin_alphabet">the Latin alphabet</a>, are the result of millions of people over thousands of years slowly working together and ultimately agreeing on which letters to use and under what circumstances. </p>
<p>To figure out why they settled on the version we have today, you first need to understand what a letter is and what an alphabet is. Then, you can trace your way back to the very first examples of both. </p>
<p>Letters are symbols, just like emojis or crosswalk signs. Letters are shapes that we – the users – associate with a sound in a particular language. </p>
<p>But many letters change sound completely when they appear in a different language. The English “H,” for example, makes a “ha” sound, but the same symbol “H” is pronounced as “en” in Russian; in the Cyrillic alphabet, “H” makes a “n” sound. </p>
<p>Even when the shape and sound of a letter stay the same within a single language, the letters themselves can have different names. In America, “Z” is called “zee,” while in Canada, the United Kingdom and pretty much every other English-speaking country, it is called “zed.” </p>
<p>All this variety is possible because letters, <a href="https://www.pearson.com/languages/community/blogs/2020/06/how-the-english-language-has-changed-over-the-decades.html">like languages, evolve and change over time</a> based on what local people do out of habit or trend or just for the fun of it. </p>
<h2>What is an alphabet?</h2>
<p>An alphabet is a collection of letter-symbols that have been more or less standardized, and which often – though not always – reflect all of the sounds made in a particular language. </p>
<p>Some languages, <a href="https://goeastmandarin.com/chinese-characters-for-kids/">like Chinese</a>, don’t have alphabets at all, using symbols to represent whole words. Others, <a href="https://www.native-languages.org/cherokee_alphabet.htm">like Cherokee</a>, use symbols that represent syllables. </p>
<p>The first alphabet was <a href="https://www.historyforkids.net/ancient-egyptian-alphabet.html">invented in ancient Egypt</a>, more than 5,000 years ago, and was developed to record religious texts. That’s where its name “hieroglyphs,” or “sacred carvings,” comes from. </p>
<p>Hieroglyphs are beautiful and they do a good job recording prayers, but they are difficult to write quickly, because they are so detailed and often take the form of <a href="https://discoveringegypt.com/egyptian-hieroglyphic-writing/egyptian-hieroglyphic-alphabet/">animals, people or day-to-day objects</a>. Over time, people developed simplified forms of each glyph so they could take notes and write informally. </p>
<p>While hieroglyphs were mostly used by priests and elites, common people, including travelers and traders from other places, <a href="https://magazine.krieger.jhu.edu/2021/10/learning-to-write-in-ancient-cultures/#:">learned informal writing</a>. These visitors realized the Egyptians had developed something useful – a way to record sales or send letters that would be clear to those who could read it but mysterious to everyone else. Many people never learned to read at all, because they did not need to or because they were denied access to education.</p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Once visitors learned hieroglyphs, the world took a major step toward the creation of our alphabet.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Vowels, consonants and the letter ‘J’</h2>
<p>The most important traders in this period <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/phoenicia/">were from Phoenicia</a> – known today as Syria, Lebanon and Israel – and they spread the alphabet to the towns and villages that surrounded the Mediterranean Sea. </p>
<p>The Phoenicians <a href="https://phoenician.org/alphabet/">established alphabetical order</a> to make it easier to learn and share with others. But the Phoenicians and Egyptians used only consonants; eventually, as people began to write more and more, and more words needed to be created to describe different things, <a href="https://teachphonics.blog/2019/10/10/what-are-vowels-and-consonants/">the Greeks adopted vowels</a>. </p>
<p>The Greek alphabet looks a lot like ours, but our letters took their final form in Italy. First the Etruscan people, and then the Romans, adapted Greek letters to fit their language. The Romans spread their language, Latin, and its alphabet all over modern Europe, the Near East and North Africa. The earliest example of the Latin alphabet in use is called <a href="https://kids.kiddle.co/Duenos_inscription">the duenos inscription</a> and comes from the sixth century BCE, 2,500 years ago. </p>
<p>Even then, the alphabet was still incomplete, because Latin didn’t have all the sounds that are common today. The most obvious is the letter “J”; even though the first month of the Roman calendar was January, it was written with an “I,” “ianuarius,” and pronounced with a “ya” sound. The “J” <a href="https://www.dictionary.com/e/j/">came into use during the Renaissance</a> – during the 1500s in Europe – two or three centuries after the “W” was added, during the Middle Ages.</p>
<p>And there’s no reason to think the alphabet might not change again. English, especially, has a habit of borrowing words from other languages, like karaoke from Japanese, cookie from Dutch and avatar from Sanskrit. Maybe, because of this borrowing, we might eventually need to add new symbols to our alphabet. In short, as the world grows more connected, the alphabet may have to adapt. It won’t be the first time.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to <a href="mailto:curiouskidsus@theconversation.com">CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com</a>. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.</em></p>
<p><em>And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/217185/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jane Sancinito does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Turns out ‘A’ didn’t have to be the first letter in the alphabet, nor ‘Z’ the last.
Jane Sancinito, Assistant Professor of History, UMass Lowell
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/218801
2024-01-08T19:16:18Z
2024-01-08T19:16:18Z
‘Cli-fi’ might not save the world, but writing it could help with your eco-anxiety
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564752/original/file-20231211-17-uxgzy8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C0%2C5961%2C3097&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Morpheus Szeto/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The consequences of climate change weigh on all of us, especially as we face an El Niño summer, with floods and fires already making themselves felt in the Australian environment.</p>
<p>But even outside of being directly affected, there is evidence that mere awareness of climate change can be <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/19/7836">detrimental to your mental health and wellbeing</a>. Terms such as “<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266727822300010X">climate change anxiety</a>”, “<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667278221000444">eco-anxiety</a>” and “<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18027145/">solastalgia</a>” are regularly used to describe the negative emotional states created by thinking and worrying about climate change and environmental destruction.</p>
<p>If just knowing about climate change is emotionally difficult, what is it like spending years focusing on and writing about the topic? Research has looked at the emotional impact close engagement with climate change can have on groups such as <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1755458617301251">climate scientists</a> <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-11741-2_12">and</a> <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1103308818817603">climate activists</a>. </p>
<p>But little time has been given to writers of climate fiction, or “cli-fi” – a relatively new genre of fiction focused on climate change.</p>
<h2>What can a genre do?</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/36205.Cli_Fi_Climate_Change_Fiction">Cli-fi</a> has been touted as one of the ways to help save the world, with an emphasis on how imagining our future might make us reconsider our relationship to the natural world. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566213/original/file-20231218-29-4u09q7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Fictions in this genre have primarily imagined <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/we-don-t-need-more-dystopian-stories-despair-is-stopping-us-from-acting-20220905-p5bfjg.html">dystopian worlds</a> where the very worst has happened and humanity is (often barely) surviving in flooded or desolate wastelands. These apocalyptic visions are meant to serve as warnings, to galvanise us to action, making sure this bleak future doesn’t happen.</p>
<p>This seems a good idea in theory, but do dystopian fictions help us engage with the climate crisis? An empirical study of the <a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/10/2/473/136689/The-Influence-of-Climate-FictionAn-Empirical">effects of climate fiction on readers’ attitudes or actions</a> found little evidence that those who read cli-fi have a stronger engagement with environmental concerns.</p>
<p>There has been some discussion of the <a href="https://www.energyhumanities.ca/news/why-read-fiction-while-the-planet-is-in-crisis-reflections-on-cli-fi-book-clubs">influence of these books on readers</a>. But perhaps the value is not in the reading, but in the writing? Might writing provide emotionally supportive strategies for all of us? Can the act of writing itself counter “eco-anxiety”?</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/can-cli-fi-actually-make-a-difference-a-climate-scientists-perspective-83033">Can 'cli-fi' actually make a difference? A climate scientist's perspective</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Waking in the night</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566212/original/file-20231218-21-axyuut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566212/original/file-20231218-21-axyuut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566212/original/file-20231218-21-axyuut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566212/original/file-20231218-21-axyuut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566212/original/file-20231218-21-axyuut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566212/original/file-20231218-21-axyuut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566212/original/file-20231218-21-axyuut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566212/original/file-20231218-21-axyuut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>We talked to <a href="https://textjournal.scholasticahq.com/article/90091">16 Australian and New Zealand authors of “cli-fi”</a> , including <a href="https://cityoftongues.com/">James Bradley</a>, <a href="http://www.mireillejuchau.com/">Mireille Juchau</a> and <a href="https://jennifermills.net.au/">Jennifer Mills</a>. Their responses made it clear that writing about a climate-changed future does more than bring up the anticipated negative emotions.</p>
<p>Of course, sitting with the climate crisis is challenging. It demands we wrestle with guilt, shame, responsibility, rage and despair. Writers of climate fiction are often drawn to the genre because they are already thinking about the climate and feeling anxious.</p>
<p>Clare Moleta said her climate anxiety was “a bit more concentrated” while writing her novel <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/Unsheltered/Clare-Moleta/9781761104886">Unsheltered</a>, but also that the manifestations of this anxiety were familiar to her: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I had waking patches in the night over that time, where I’d be very intensely imagining something and grieving it […] But to be fair, I do that anyway.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But many of the writers spoke of the writing process as helping, not exacerbating, their anxiety. For some, writing about climate change gave them a sense of purpose. Jennifer Mills, whose cli-fi novel <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781760558604/">Dyschronia</a> was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2019, stated that “having a book to write gives you something to do. [It] makes you feel like you have some power over the events that are happening around you.”</p>
<p>Climate fiction can be a method of transforming anxiety into something useful. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Allinson">Miles Allinson</a> says that “writing about my own fear put that fear to use, in a way that was, if not comforting, then at least energising”. He argues for the therapeutic aspect of imagining and writing one’s worst fears: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sometimes when you turn towards something and start to live it, with all its difficulties and mystery, then something changes […] It’s actually not as hard as you sometimes think it will be. It’s sometimes more terrifying to close your eyes, I have found.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>James Bradley, author of several works of speculative fiction, including <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/clade-9781926428659">Clade</a> and <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/ghost-species-9781926428666">Ghost Species</a>, observed that the</p>
<blockquote>
<p>process of imagining demands you to think about what happens next […] To imagine the complexity of the lived experience of what lies ahead, and to insist that life will go on and history will keep happening.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>While peering into our climate-changed future can be emotionally difficult, <a href="https://katemildenhall.com/">Kate Mildenhall</a> said it can help prepare us for what is to come: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have to imagine ten years in the future and we have to imagine 50 years in the future. And if we do that, we are forearmed and we also begin to make small changes immediately, we don’t even know we’re making them, just to move towards or away from that future.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Imagining our future lives can offer a sense of hope. We are currently living with bushfires, floods, pandemics and the extreme challenges of the climate crisis; the future is our present and the ways we think about it will dictate the ways we act and cope.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566215/original/file-20231218-19-ezhufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bushfires near Stacks Bluff, Tasmania.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Matt Palmer/Unsplash</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/writing-can-improve-mental-health-heres-how-162205">Writing can improve mental health – here's how</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Theraputic benefits</h2>
<p>Approaching writing about climate change as a process, rather than thinking about writing as a product produced by professional authors, is a new method for alleviating climate anxiety.</p>
<p>The mental health and wellbeing benefits of creative writing have been established. Studies have explored how writing can <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212420919313172">reduce anxiety in those affected by natural disasters</a>. Much of the research in this area focuses on expressive writing or other similar therapeutic-focused techniques that produce quickly written and usually insular work, not intended for an audience. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566211/original/file-20231218-31-a398jx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is different from the experiences of the writers interviewed here. Yet, as the writers quoted here have shown, the imaginative process of crafting fictional narratives about difficult topics comes with its own benefits.</p>
<p>In discussing their findings from one of the few studies to focus on the <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/capr.12435">wellbeing effect of writing fictional narratives</a>, Catherine Deveney and Patrick Lawson state: “it is in the craft of writing, the combination of technique and emotional catharsis, that some of the therapeutic benefits of writing can be found”.</p>
<p>We tend to think of writing as a professional activity, but it is an art form practised by amateurs as well as professionals. The 2022 <a href="https://creative.gov.au/advocacy-and-research/creating-value/">National Arts Participation Survey</a> found that one in seven Australians engage in creative writing. The value of such writing is more than its end product.</p>
<p>We need to shift from worrying about the effects of cli-fi texts to thinking about the <a href="https://textjournal.scholasticahq.com/article/35289-creating-new-climate-stories-posthuman-collaborative-hope-and-optimism">benefits of writing creatively as we imagine our possible futures</a>. As Mireille Juchau observes, the sense of control when writing on a difficult topic </p>
<blockquote>
<p>helps to manage anxiety […] Whether it’s climate change, or something else, when I’m preoccupied, writing helps put some order into the chaos.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218801/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>This research receives funding from Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alex Cothren and Amy T Matthews do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Research suggests the act of creative writing can have therapeutic benefits.
Rachel Hennessy, Lecturer in Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne
Alex Cothren, Associate Lecturer, Creative Writing, Flinders University
Amy T Matthews, Senior Lecturer, Creative Writing, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/219289
2024-01-04T16:21:58Z
2024-01-04T16:21:58Z
I research the therapeutic qualities of writing about art – here are three steps for trying it yourself
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565166/original/file-20231212-23-dggg63.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C32%2C5503%2C3839&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/young-person-photo-frame-write-digital-2218186707">Sorapop Udomsri/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>What do we learn about ourselves when we write creatively about an artwork? I asked myself this question during my creative writing PhD, where my focus was on writing a collection of poems in response to modern and contemporary art.</p>
<p>While the early phase of my research involved sitting in galleries and museums, viewing images and objects in the flesh, during the pandemic I had to retreat home and recalibrate how I could access these visual prompts. I made use of books and postcard reproductions of artworks and also looked online, using resources such as Google Images and virtual gallery tours. </p>
<p>Lockdown had an impact on my mental health, and the poems I produced during this time went beyond straightforward descriptions of the artworks. They explored my thoughts and feelings – with the artwork aiding in uncovering parts of myself I was not aware of, or helping to warp or disguise personal content that would have left me feeling exposed if written about directly.</p>
<p>The idea of using images as a therapeutic tool has been a long-term interest of mine. When I ran creative writing workshops at the Whitworth Art Gallery and Manchester Museum, I asked participants to select an image or object and write something in response, incorporating aspects of their own identity or sense of place.</p>
<p>During lockdown, however, I was led to reflect not only on how art galleries and museums are often inaccessible (due to illness or disability, for example), but also how environments like this can feel intimidating or exclusionary for some people. And I reflected on how it’s possible to nurture a love of art and creativity despite such feelings of marginalisation.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Woman writing in notebook" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565169/original/file-20231212-24-5wjpjt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565169/original/file-20231212-24-5wjpjt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565169/original/file-20231212-24-5wjpjt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565169/original/file-20231212-24-5wjpjt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565169/original/file-20231212-24-5wjpjt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565169/original/file-20231212-24-5wjpjt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565169/original/file-20231212-24-5wjpjt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Artwork can aid in uncovering parts of yourself.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/thoughtful-young-woman-eyeglasses-writing-do-749819029">GaudiLab/Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>Having also observed a shortfall in provision for mental health conditions, I wanted to develop techniques that would enable people who don’t have prior knowledge of art history or a particular artist’s intentions to write about issues that affect them, through the prism of an artwork. </p>
<p>What might we see in a late Rothko, for instance? Or in J.M.W. Turner’s final and often considered “unfinished” seascapes? Is there something in the obscurity or formlessness that chimes with something buried in our psyche? Perhaps trauma and depression require (at least at first) an image to serve as a metaphor between that which is unspeakable and more direct language?</p>
<p>Maybe creative writing – and particularly writing that makes use of artworks – can perform this function, and even work as a precursor or complement to psychotherapy. This is a process whereby things we can’t name are brought to light and find expression. Often when this occurs, it’s healing.</p>
<p>So, here are three steps I have found to be effective when using an artwork as a prompt to “write therapeutically”. </p>
<h2>1. Choose your artwork</h2>
<p>The first decision to make is your choice of prompt. People often say a piece of art “resonates” or “speaks” to them. See if you can allow an image to find you in this way. It doesn’t need to be an artwork in a museum or gallery – any image you feel a connection with is a good choice.</p>
<p>Then, ask yourself why it resonates with you. Does the image evoke something that you associate with? Is it a distorted portrait of yourself? Or is it a surface on which to project your own reality?</p>
<h2>2. Embrace ‘slow looking’</h2>
<p>Next, I suggest trying the exercise of “slow looking”, where your attention is deliberately focused on the image for an extended period of time (say, a few minutes). As you do so, analyse the image and try to notice as much as possible.</p>
<p>This may contrast with most of our more accustomed way of looking, where we glance at an image for a few seconds and make a snap judgment about it – often deciding that we like it or we don’t. What do you see? Or what do you think you see? </p>
<p>It can be useful to test out a kind of “naive looking”, making the most of your subjective and idiosyncratic perceptions (those we have conjured up ourselves but which others struggle to relate to). This kind of attention involves looking around the entire artwork, without assuming that some parts are more important than others. Instead, try to treat everything as though it’s of equal significance (at least initially). </p>
<h2>3. Try uninhibited writing</h2>
<p>Follow your slow looking exercise with some uninhibited and uncensored writing. This can either be done while still looking, or you may choose to work from your memory. As you work, consider adopting a particular mode of writing in response to the image.</p>
<p>One option is to just describe what’s there. Another is to imagine what you think you see, or what could be occurring out of your vision in the blind field beyond the frame. And another option: how about writing from the position of one of the figures in the picture? There are many alternatives – you could even try writing poems about the artwork.</p>
<p>Whatever your approach, have patience and experiment with different ways of seeing and writing – especially those that run counter to our fast-paced visual culture, and might provide fresh insights into ourselves and the world. </p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219289/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Patrick Wright received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. </span></em></p>
I want to help people without prior knowledge of art history write about issues that affect them – through the prism of an artwork.
Patrick Wright, Associate Lecturer in Arts and Humanities, Open University, The Open University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/219739
2023-12-19T13:58:18Z
2023-12-19T13:58:18Z
How writing ‘made us human’ – an ‘emotional history’ from ancient Iraq to the present day
<p>Evidence suggests that writing was invented in southern Iraq sometime <a href="https://iris.unive.it/retrieve/e4239dde-83dd-7180-e053-3705fe0a3322/Maiocchi%20M.%202019%2c%20Writing%20in%20Early%20Mesopotamia%20--%20Beyond%20the%20Meme.pdf">before 3000BC</a>. But what happened next? Anyone interested in this question will find <a href="https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12940/how-writing-made-us-human-3000-bce-now">How Writing Made Us Human</a> by Walter Stephens both an enjoyable and stimulating read. It offers what it calls an “emotional history” of writing, chiefly referencing academics and writers in the western tradition.</p>
<p>The most detailed sections of the book are those on the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, where the author’s expertise and wide engagement with the sources is palpable. Topics that range beyond his expertise are served by well-chosen case studies.</p>
<p>Lots of interesting things – such as <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/graffiti-and-the-literary-landscape-in-roman-pompeii-9780199684618?cc=us&lang=en&">ancient</a> and <a href="https://jisr.ut.ac.ir/article_53144.html?lang=en">modern</a> graffiti, or ancient scholars’ <a href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_K-8520">efforts</a> to reconstruct even older forms of writing – fall outside of the book’s scope. But its range, from Uruk (modern day Warka, Iraq) in the 4th millennium BC to the present day, is enormous. </p>
<p>Stephens has produced a fascinating story of twists and turns. One of the big debates which lasted up to the Renaissance was about who invented writing. With both archaeology and chronology all but unknown, what thinkers had to go on was largely the Hebrew Bible and Graeco-Roman writers. </p>
<p>Here, the Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus (AD37 to AD100) looms large: Josephus offered an <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0146%3Abook%3D1%3Awhiston%20chapter%3D2">account</a> of the invention of writing before the great Biblical flood. Whether later discussants believed, disbelieved, parodied, refuted, or (due to antisemitism) deliberately ignored him, Josephus’ account turns up impressively often in studies of language across the centuries. </p>
<h2>Does writing make us human?</h2>
<p>The title, How Writing Made Us Human, is inspired by the role that learning to read and write played in the emancipation of enslaved people in 19th-century north America. Here, the American public’s acquisition of literacy skills truly promoted the advancement of humanism. It enabled enslaved people who achieved freedom to share their experiences of appalling cruelty with the reading public. The literate public were also to read the arguments for abolition, and to become advocates for it.</p>
<p>Slavery is one of the few places in the book where the effects of and attitudes to writing are discussed in relation to illiterate people. The irony is, of course, that throughout human <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674033818">history</a>, the vast majority of humans couldn’t read or write. Hopefully, nobody would describe the <a href="https://uis.unesco.org/en/topic/literacy">millions</a> of illiterate people around the world today as bad or failed humans. In this regard, the “us” in the title only works in a restricted sense.</p>
<p>On the other hand, writing has certainly played an <a href="https://www.google.it/books/edition/The_Logic_of_Writing_and_the_Organizatio/9Kn8dVDrF50C?hl=en&gbpv=0">important role</a> in shaping and structuring most human societies. In this way, it has far-reaching effects on illiterate people, too. </p>
<p>At various times writing has been a <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230339330_9">tool of resistance</a>, but also a means of <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Language-Bureaucracy-and-Social-Control/Sarangi-Slembrouck/p/book/9780582086227">social control</a>. These aspects, where writing really does impact (almost) all humans, are not much explored in the book, whose concern is historical rather than anthropological. This means that current ethnographic <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/anthropology-of-writing-9781441108852/">investigations</a> of writing and literacy likewise fall out of scope. </p>
<p>The book largely operates by collecting and analysing an imposing number of statements that scholars and literati through the ages made about writing. A complementary approach would be to work by inference, such as looking at <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/spelling-and-society/1044F189F08F6538ED52FE8A443C88CB">spelling</a> choices and traditions. And it would have been useful to see more on the practice of transmission through dictation and <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/666645">memorisation</a>, where writing and oral traditions merged into one.</p>
<p>Even if the book’s focus is, in principle, somewhat narrow compared with the history of writing at large, Stephens develops it in a generous way. He offers ample background information, a highly readable (and often enjoyable) tone and any number of gems – such as the Library of Constantinople reportedly including “the intestine of a dragon twenty feet long on which the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer had been written in letters of gold”.</p>
<p>As well as for the many things it has to say about attitudes to writing, the book can be enjoyed as a microcosmic study of the “western tradition”. The book demonstrates that learned attitudes to, and ideas about, writing are a fascinating vantage point from which to view that long and complicated story.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219739/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martin Worthington does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Evidence suggests that writing was probably invented in southern Iraq sometime before 3000BC. But what happened next?
Martin Worthington, Associate Professor, Near & Middle Eastern Studies, Trinity College Dublin
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/217628
2023-12-07T13:28:49Z
2023-12-07T13:28:49Z
How I identified a probable pen name of Louisa May Alcott
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563019/original/file-20231201-23-1y1dby.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=20%2C46%2C3406%2C2692&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Louisa May Alcott took part in a 19th-century literary culture of anonymity and guessing games.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/louisa-may-alcott-american-novelist-portrait-1870s-news-photo/929104084?adppopup=true">Universal Images Group/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Before Louisa May Alcott published the bestselling “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/514/514-h/514-h.htm">Little Women</a>” in two volumes – the first in 1868, the second in 1869 – she wrote melodramatic thrillers, selling these short stories to magazines to bring in cash for her impoverished family.</p>
<p>On a cold November day in 2021, I was rereading Madeleine B. Stern’s introduction to her 780-page edition of “<a href="https://search.worldcat.org/title/louisa-may-alcott-unmasked-collected-thrillers/oclc/31971792">Louisa May Alcott’s Collected Thrillers</a>.” </p>
<p>In the 1940s, Stern, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=fueoOloYKugC&dq">with her research partner Leona Rostenberg</a>, helped reveal that Alcott had written many of these sensational tales <a href="https://doi.org/10.1086/pbsa.37.2.24293383">under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard</a>.</p>
<p>But Stern wondered if any other stories written by Alcott were still out there.</p>
<p>For example, in “Little Women,” Jo March – the character who most closely resembles Alcott – also writes short stories to support her struggling family. </p>
<p>“‘A Phantom Hand’ put down a new carpet,” Alcott writes, “and the ‘Curse of the Coventrys’ proved the blessing … in the way of groceries and gowns.”</p>
<p>Stern points out that there’s a related reference in Alcott’s journals – “not to ‘A Phantom Hand’ but to ‘A Phantom Face,’ for which she earned $10 in 1859.”</p>
<p>“But,” Stern adds, “neither the ‘Phantom Hand’ nor the ‘Phantom Face’ has been tracked down.” </p>
<p>At the time, I was a graduate student working on my dissertation. I was on the hunt for pseudoscientific short stories, so the mention of Alcott’s missing tales piqued my interest.</p>
<p>Where was this phantom “Phantom” story? Could I find it?</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Scan of old story titled 'The Phantom' in a periodical." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563478/original/file-20231204-25-104oz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘The Phantom’ appeared in an 1860 issue of the Olive Branch.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Max Chapnick</span></span>
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<p>After searching digital databases, I came across one such story, called simply “The Phantom,” with the subtitle, “Or, The Miser’s Dream, &c.” It had been published in the Olive Branch in early 1860, months after Alcott listed having written “The Phantom” in her journals. But the byline under the story read E. or I. – I couldn’t quite make out the first initial – Gould, which wasn’t a known pseudonym of Alcott’s.</p>
<p>So I went to sleep. Sometime later I awoke with the thought that Gould might be Alcott. What if, along with her several known pseudonyms – A. M. Barnard, Tribulation Periwinkle and Flora Fairfield, among others – Alcott had yet another that simply hadn’t been identified yet? </p>
<p>I cannot say for certain that Gould is Alcott. But I’ve encountered enough circumstantial evidence to consider it likely Alcott wrote seven stories, five poems and one piece of nonfiction under that name.</p>
<h2>More clues emerge</h2>
<p>The publication dates of Gould’s stories – and the outlets where they appeared – certainly suggest Alcott’s authorship.</p>
<p>From the mid-1850s onward, Alcott regularly churned out stories, and yet the record leaves a noticeable gap between spring 1857 and late 1858. In one of Alcott’s letters from the period, she wrote to a friend asking if the magazine Olive Branch would be interested in more of her work. Years earlier, in 1852, Alcott had published “The Rival Painters” in that magazine. Until now, <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Louisa_May_Alcott_Encyclopedia/FTtaAAAAMAAJ">all scholars assumed</a> it was her only story published in the Olive Branch.</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2023.a909300">In the course of my sleuthing</a>, I found several other pieces that were written by Alcott or had likely been written by her, including a 1856 Saturday Evening Gazette piece called “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2023.a909300">The Painter’s Dream</a>” and an anonymous Olive Branch story from 1857, “The Rival Painters: A Tale of Florence.” </p>
<p>The latter “Painters” was published in the exact period – and in the same magazine – as many of the Gould pieces. Several other outlets that published Gould also have connections to Alcott. For example, one of the Gould stories appears in the magazine Flag of Our Union, where Alcott later published under the Barnard pseudonym. </p>
<p>But to me, the clearest evidence connecting Gould to Alcott comes from the stories themselves. The name Alcott serves as the last name of the protagonists in two of Gould’s stories. Additionally, “The Wayside” – the name of one of Alcott’s homes – is the title of a nostalgic piece of nonfiction authored by Gould.</p>
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<img alt="Large, old yellow house with big windows and a thick, tall chimney, flanked by trees." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=378&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=378&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=378&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563469/original/file-20231204-17-pdcyhj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The Wayside, where Alcott lived with her family in Concord, Mass., was also the title of a piece of nonfiction by E.H. Gould.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-wayside-is-a-national-historic-landmark-lived-in-by-news-photo/545147518?adppopup=true">Joanne Rathe/The Boston Globe via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>The stories also resemble Alcott’s early fiction in important ways. As I argue in one of my dissertation chapters, Alcott pioneered the “sensation” genre. These stories combined elements of sentimental tales with melodramatic thrillers. Instead of taking place in European castles and British landed estates, they were set in the types of places that would have been familiar to the emerging American middle class, such as doctors’ offices and insane asylums. Alcott’s stories show how tensions of gender and class can make those mundane spaces fraught with danger and possibility.</p>
<p>At the same time, there are signs that Gould might not be Alcott. Gould was a common name, especially around Boston. Alcott also kept lists of her stories, and only one of the Gould pieces – “The Phantom” – shows up on those long lists.</p>
<p>However, evidence suggests that the lists aren’t exhaustive – some stories appear on one list but not another – and Alcott refers to stories in her diaries that don’t appear on any lists.</p>
<h2>Pseudonyms and guessing games</h2>
<p>Why would an author like Alcott use pseudonyms anyway? </p>
<p>For one, <a href="https://public.wsu.edu/%7Ecampbelld/engl368/transoats.pdf">Alcott was poor</a>. So early in her career she wrote and published for money, and she might not have been particularly proud of everything she wrote. By disguising her name, Alcott could publish in less prestigious venues for a quick buck without worrying about tarnishing her literary reputation.</p>
<p>Even though she was poor, Alcott’s family had wealthy and cultured connections. Among them was Henry David Thoreau who, in “Walden,” <a href="http://thepersonalnavigator.blogspot.com/2012/02/thoreau-and-olive-branch.html">disparaged the Olive Branch</a> as one of the papers spreading “the gossip of Boston.” And while Alcott’s own mother often praised her writing, she did so only when the Alcott name was printed in more highly regarded venues, like The Atlantic.</p>
<p>Pseudonyms also allowed Alcott to write about topics she might not have felt comfortable attaching her name to. <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Alternative_Alcott/PfOjRvcWHrQC">Many stories written under the Barnard pseudonym</a> depict drug use, reverse gender roles and discuss class conflict in ways that were radical for the late 1850s.</p>
<h2>A culture awash in authorial ambiguity</h2>
<p>Are there any other Alcott stories that remain unidentified? I would say there almost certainly are. As to whether Alcott used any pseudonyms in addition to the ones that have been identified, that’s less likely but possible.</p>
<p>However, I also hope that the identification of Gould restarts a conversation about authorship, especially for literary figures of the past.</p>
<p>Alcott found herself awash in authorial ambiguity. Her first Olive Branch story, “The Rival Painters,” appeared next to a short essay by the wildly famous and pseudonymous <a href="https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1049&context=englishfacpubs">Fanny Fern</a>, who was a master at manipulating public perceptions.</p>
<p>After the blockbuster success of “Little Women,” Alcott published a novel, “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Modern_Mephistopheles/_9oBAAAAQAAJ">A Modern Mephistopheles</a>,” as part of the “No Name Series.” Released by the publishing house Roberts Brothers, the collection featured books written anonymously by famous writers. Readers would try to guess the real authors, but Alcott didn’t reveal she wrote the novel until a few months before her death. </p>
<p>Alcott was deeply embedded in a culture of unknown, and yet guessable, authorship. Anonymity liberated Alcott, Fern and other writers – particularly women – by allowing them to tackle risky topics. But anonymity and pseudonyms didn’t stop people from sleuthing, now or then. Readers delighted in trying to figure out an author’s possible masks, just like I’m doing now with Gould. And it wasn’t just readers: Editors and writers withheld information while at the same time leaving clues. Everyone got in on the fun of hidden identities.</p>
<p>I’ll keep gathering evidence that may either prove or disprove Alcott’s authorship of Gould’s stories. But if I never know, that’s fine with me. </p>
<p>Alcott herself loved acting, and she loved wearing masks, both literally on the stage and figuratively in print. In the spirit of the masquerade, the Gould pseudonym adds to the allure of mystery – and the joy of discovery.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/217628/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Max Chapnick first presented this research at the American Literature Association Conference in 2022, where he recieved funding from the Louisa May Alcott Society of which he is also a member. </span></em></p>
By disguising her name, Alcott could publish in less prestigious venues without worrying about tarnishing her literary reputation.
Max Chapnick, Postdoctoral Teaching Associate in English, Northeastern University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/218400
2023-12-04T12:29:33Z
2023-12-04T12:29:33Z
How A.S. Byatt’s northern identity and anger over climate change informed her fiction
<p>A.S. Byatt’s highbrow fiction has a vast, international appeal. The writer, who died <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/17/as-byatt-author-and-critic-dies-aged-87">in November</a>, was known for her voracious appetite for knowledge and her insatiable <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/25/as-byatt-interview">curiosity</a>. </p>
<p>Inspiration for her work draws from as diverse sources as <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230248595_9">Elizabeth I</a>, <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-10-2684-3_9">Norse mythology</a>, <a href="http://www.connotations.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/sturrock01201.pdf">Amazonian butterflies</a> and <a href="https://intellectdiscover-com.ezphost.dur.ac.uk/content/journals/10.1386/fict.3.2.221_1">Matisse’s paintings</a>. And she turned her hand to many different styles, from <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40002513">Victorian poetry</a> to <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iZpyDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=byatt+dragon%27s+breath&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjKmevD7dOCAxUFS0EAHW8JCCQQ6AF6BAgLEAI#v=onepage&q=byatt%20dragon's%20breath&f=false">fairy tales</a>.</p>
<p>In their statement about Byatt’s death, her publisher, Penguin, called her “<a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2023/11/a-s-byatt-statement">a girl from Sheffield with a strong European sensibility</a>”. That European sensibility is evident in her writing and <a href="https://lithub.com/a-s-byatt-i-have-not-yet-written-enough/">interviews</a>, including on the topic of Brexit. </p>
<p>There are several distinctly northern images in her writing. Possession features <a href="https://www.bejeweledmag.com/possession-props-supporting-role-whitby-jet-film-collectible-current-jewel/">jet brooches</a> bought in Whitby. There are recollections of Sheffield in her work of auto-fiction, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/22386/sugar-and-other-stories-by-a-s-byatt/">Sugar</a> (1987). She explores memories of a traumatic childhood in a mining town in <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/405473/the-childrens-book-by-a-s-byatt/9780099535454">The Children’s Book</a> (2018). These examples suggest how pivotal and constant the northern presence is across Byatt’s early and more recent work alike. </p>
<p>In her writing, the north of England became a space where the relation between humans, nature and culture could be put to the test. More than simply recurrent themes, in her <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0950236X.2022.2030119">later fiction</a> especially, northern locations become emblems of the climate crisis and of how human actions have detrimental effects on the whole planet.</p>
<h2>Climate change in Byatt’s writing</h2>
<p>Filey Beach in Yorkshire is one such landmark. In <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/357513/the-virgin-in-the-garden-by-byatt-a-s/9780099478010">The Virgin in the Garden</a> (1978), a vicar named Daniel Orton courts Stephanie Potter on this very beach. Here, they share their first kiss and decide to get married, but, in the midst of the salty, freezing northern wind sweeping “six miles of sand”, they are reminded of how small and impotent humans are when confronted with the formidable forces of nature. </p>
<p>Daniel and Stephanie’s romance is forged by natural elements and (spoiler alert) is later interrupted at the end of the sequel, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/354149/still-life-by-byatt-a-s/9780099479918">Still Life</a> (1985). Stephanie is electrocuted by her fridge after trying to save a sparrow who has entered the kitchen, therefore bringing nature quite literally where it does not, or cannot belong: the 1950s family home.</p>
<p>The same beach reappears in a much later tale, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/15/as-byatt-short-story-sea">Sea Story</a> (2013). This story shows how, in times of climate emergencies, a romance as hopeful as Stephanie and Daniel’s is no longer possible. </p>
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<img alt="Black and white photo of a beach" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562717/original/file-20231130-25-wfe13m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562717/original/file-20231130-25-wfe13m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562717/original/file-20231130-25-wfe13m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562717/original/file-20231130-25-wfe13m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562717/original/file-20231130-25-wfe13m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562717/original/file-20231130-25-wfe13m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562717/original/file-20231130-25-wfe13m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/seashore-in-grayscale-photo-2l9BhKOvSNI">Connor Dugan on Unsplash</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>Young Harold, an ecopoet and sea lover, and marine biologist Laura seem destined for one another. But before their romance can properly blossom, Laura leaves for fieldwork in the Caribbean. </p>
<p>Byatt twists the proverbial message in a bottle trope into tragedy: Harold sends her a plastic bottle of Perrier which ends up in the Caribbean Trash Vortex, causing the deaths of birds and fish, and, ultimately, of Laura herself. </p>
<p>Harold, who, as in most cases of “<a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674072343&content=toc">slow violence</a>”, never finds out what happened to Laura, marries a local woman and engages in small campaigns to clean the beach of plastic refuse. The beach becomes not just the counterpoint to the home where love grows and ends, but a place where an act as simple as throwing a bottle into the sea causes death and destruction on the other side of the planet. </p>
<p>The story does not end on a hopeful note, but underlines instead how plastics in the ocean live for far longer than humans: <a href="https://rc.library.uta.edu/uta-ir/bitstream/handle/10106/26234/02_Alaimo_Thinking+as+Stuff_OZone_Vol1.pdf?sequence=1">polluting for eternity</a>. </p>
<p>Similarly, <a href="https://canongate.co.uk/books/526-ragnarok-the-end-of-the-gods/">Ragnarok: The End of the Gods</a> (2011) closes with the end of the second world war, but gestures towards the <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/729485">impending climate catastrophe</a> that post-war normality, industrial farming and consumer culture would accelerate. The flowers Byatt’s alter ego passes as a child are “made extinct”, and peace for humans is an empty word if it cannot guarantee that there is a thriving planet to live on.</p>
<p>For a writer best known for her postmodern pastiches, Byatt’s eco-fictions read as pessimistic, as they lose the joyful aspect of storytelling that her earlier work displays. Yet, it is precisely this lucid exposure of the irreversible damages that humans cause to the planet that makes of Byatt a powerful and relevant voice in understanding the world we inhabit.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218400/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barbara Franchi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
In Byatt’s fiction, northern locations become emblems of the climate crisis and of how human actions have detrimental effects on the whole planet.
Barbara Franchi, Teaching Fellow in Postcolonial and World Literature, Durham University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/207202
2023-11-28T13:41:49Z
2023-11-28T13:41:49Z
Writing instructors are less afraid of students cheating with ChatGPT than you might think
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560814/original/file-20231121-15-b8y2le.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=31%2C0%2C6895%2C4296&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Many educators say they are worried about being unable to keep up with advances in AI.
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/robotic-hand-pressing-a-keyboard-on-a-laptop-3d-royalty-free-image/1479076594?phrase=AI%2Bwriting">Guillaume via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When ChatGPT launched a year ago, headlines flooded the internet about fears of student cheating. A pair of essays in The Atlantic decried “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/openai-chatgpt-writing-high-school-english-essay/672412/">the end of high-school English</a>” and the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatgpt-ai-writing-college-student-essays/672371/">death of the college essay</a>.“ NPR informed readers that ”<a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/01/26/1151499213/chatgpt-ai-education-cheating-classroom-wharton-school">everybody is cheating</a>.“</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Teen Vogue ventured that the moral panic ”<a href="https://www.teenvogue.com/story/chatgpt-plagiarism-cheating-students">may be overblown</a>.“</p>
<p>The more measured tone in Teen Vogue tracks better with preliminary findings from our 2023 survey that examined attitudes and feelings about artificial intelligence among college faculty who teach writing. Survey responses revealed that AI-related anxieties among educators around the country are more complex and nuanced than claims insisting that <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-end-of-the-take-home-essay">AI is outright and always bad</a>. </p>
<p>While some educators do worry about students cheating, they also have another fear in common: AI’s potential to take over human jobs. And as far as teaching, many educators also see the bright side. They say they actually enjoy using the revolutionary technology to enhance what they do.</p>
<h2>The survey</h2>
<p>Our 64-item survey included a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2019.1674887">scale of AI anxiety</a> and was conducted March 2-31, 2023. The 99 survey respondents included faculty, writing program administrators and others interested in the teaching of writing. More than 71% worked in the disciplines of English, writing or rhetoric, and the sample represented all types of institutions, from small liberal arts colleges to large research universities and everything in between. </p>
<h2>A complex picture of cheating concerns</h2>
<p>AI anxiety among writing instructors is complicated. While 89% of survey participants feared "misuse” by students, misuse means different things to different people. Specifically, less than half of respondents – 44% – were “concerned” or “very concerned” about students turning to AI to compose entire essays. Only 22% were “very concerned” about students relying on such technologies to “co-write” their essays without providing appropriate attribution.</p>
<p>Additionally, less than half – 42% – reported they were “concerned” or “very concerned” about the need to revise university honor codes and plagiarism policies in light of AI. And only 25% said their institutions should enforce increased plagiarism detection through apps and websites such as <a href="https://www.turnitin.com/">Turnitin</a>.</p>
<p>Regardless of whether respondents had deep worries or mild concerns, only 13% favored any ban on AI entirely in college courses and classrooms. Instead, instructors reported varying levels of anxieties about a range of issues, including learning how to use AI tools and job security.</p>
<p>As one participant wrote, “While I want students to compose original works in my writing courses, I see no reason to ban them from using AI tools at their disposal during the writing process.” </p>
<p><iframe id="pJqk9" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/pJqk9/2/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<h2>Fears beyond cheating</h2>
<p>Survey participants had wide-ranging reactions to the prospects of AI replacing their jobs as writing instructors. At times, their feelings seemed conflicted, depending on the circumstances and conditions described in our survey questions.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://qz.com/1065818/ai-university">some critics have already suggested</a>, there is genuine fear about colleges using AI not as a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/sep/06/will-ai-replace-university-lecturers-not-if-we-make-it-clear-why-humans-matter">means to enhance the work of instructors</a>, but instead to replace them. </p>
<p>For instance, more than 54% of respondents “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that the prospect of AI technology replacing human jobs scared them. And 43% “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that they were anxious over the possibility of becoming unable to keep up with advances in AI techniques and products.</p>
<p>The anxiety among tenured and tenure-track faculty was significantly lower than that of adjunct instructors, graduate teaching assistants, instructors and administrative faculty and staff. This implies that college writing instructors who are most likely to fear losing their jobs because of AI are those who are most vulnerable anyway. </p>
<h2>The potential for using AI in writing instruction</h2>
<p>Despite their worries, many respondents reported being eager to use AI writing tools with their students. About 47% said they would “very likely” teach their students how to use AI in brainstorming and idea generation. In fact, some respondents fully embraced the technology as a teaching tool.</p>
<p>“I’m not anxious about AI,” wrote one respondent. “When the computer first entered the writing classroom, there was a fear that it would change writing instruction, which it did. We needed to figure out how to help students use the affordances computers offered. Now, few people would suggest teaching writing without a computer.”</p>
<p>Our survey results suggest that writing instructors see the potential for AI to do much more than write a paper for a student. Sixty-one percent said they were “likely” or “very likely” to use AI in drafting and revision, and 63% were “likely” or “very likely” to use AI to show students how to alter genre, style or tone in their writing.</p>
<p><iframe id="DqHL1" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/DqHL1/3/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>To be sure, 46% “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that teachers and students could grow dependent on AI. But only 20% “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that their own use of AI as a teaching tool would make students become dependent and cause their reasoning skills to deteriorate. </p>
<p>Now that ChatGPT has been available to students for a year, even the headlines in the news are beginning to reflect the opportunities it can offer in the classroom, in addition to the risks. The Washington Post highlighted “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/06/01/students-chatgpt-ai-tools/">all the unexpected ways ChatGPT is infiltrating students’ lives</a>” – including checking for grammar mistakes. The Wall Street Journal spoke to teachers who said they should <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/teachers-ai-classroom-schools-678d7d84">encourage students to learn how to use the tool</a> for its potential in their future jobs. And Time magazine reported on the <a href="https://time.com/6300950/ai-schools-chatgpt-teachers/">extra hand that ChatGPT gives to busy teachers</a> who are continuously making lesson plans. Clearly, students – and teachers – are using AI. The question now is how, why and for what purposes?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207202/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Troy Hicks is affiliated as an occasional consultant with Writable, a web-based platform to support writers and the teaching of writing which also includes an AI-enhanced revision assistant. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel Ernst does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A survey about college writing instructors’ fears and anxieties about AI demonstrates that student cheating isn’t their only concern. And in fact, many have embraced it as a teaching tool.
Daniel Ernst, Assistant Professor of English, Texas Woman's University
Troy Hicks, Professor of English and Education, Central Michigan University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/216873
2023-11-08T13:58:09Z
2023-11-08T13:58:09Z
With Slut! Taylor Swift joins a long history of women fighting slut-shaming in their writing
<p>One track stands out on the <a href="https://taylor.lnk.to/1989taylorsversion">rereleased edition</a> of Taylor Swift’s iconic album, 1989. In Slut!, Swift addresses her encounters with <a href="https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-slut-shaming-5271893">slut-shaming</a> – behaviour that shames women who are judged to be promiscuous. “But if I’m all dressed up,” the singer muses, “they might as well be looking at us. And if they call me a slut, you know it might be worth it for once”. </p>
<p>“Slut-shaming” is a <a href="https://www.oed.com/dictionary/slut-shame_v?tl=true#:%7E:text=The%20earliest%20known%20use%20of,is%20from%202007%2C%20in%20alt.">relatively modern phrase</a> – but the behaviour itself has scarcely evolved since the 1700s. Back then, the popular vernacular was rife with terms and phrases aimed at degrading women for their supposed sexual indiscretions, painting them as inherently untrustworthy beings ruled by carnal desires. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Taylor Swift’s Slut! from 1989 (Taylor’s Version).</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Dictionaries of the age marked women who accidentally exposed their breasts in public (“<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Lexicon_Balatronicum/iDsJAAAAQAAJ?q=pudenda&gbpv=1#f=false">sported blubber</a>”) as well sexually experienced women (<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Lexicon_Balatronicum/iDsJAAAAQAAJ?q=pudenda&gbpv=1#f=false">“mort wap-apaces”</a>) and “beastly, sluttish women” (“<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/A_Dictionary_of_Buckish_Slang_University/gx9TAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1">fusty luggs</a>”). </p>
<p>The role of the popular press in slut-shaming is also long-standing. Newspapers in the 1700s gladly printed letters judging women’s behaviour and fashion choices. Men often wrote under crude pseudonyms like “Bumfiddle”, which are not too dissimilar to those chosen by today’s internet trolls. They penned vehement letters about the way women dressed, slut-shaming them as “cork-rumped devils”. </p>
<h2>The scandalous Lady W</h2>
<p>Stories detailing the supposedly scandalous behaviour of women were regularly featured in newspapers across both urban and rural areas, catering to a societal appetite for salacious content. “Wanton” Lady Seymour Worsley – who was the subject of the 2015 BBC drama <a href="https://www.hallierubenhold.com/books/the-scandalous-lady-w-reprint-of-lady-worsleys-whim-to-accompany-the-bbc2-drama/">The Scandalous Lady W</a> – was a prime target. </p>
<p>In 1782, she drew outrage for her supposedly brazen sexuality. She was shamed for having multiple sexual partners and became the subject of smutty cartoons. James Gillray’s famous <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw63181/Sir-Richard-Worse-than-sly-exposing-his-wifes-bottom---o-fye">caricatures</a> are among of dozens of shaming images <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw63186/Seymour-Dorothy-Lady-Worsley-A-peep-into-Lady-Wys-seraglio">that sought to “expose” Lady Worsley</a>. They accompanied a vicious attempt by her husband to destroy her reputation in court.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Cartoon mocking Lady W's supposed many lovers" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557143/original/file-20231101-28-xb0et6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557143/original/file-20231101-28-xb0et6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557143/original/file-20231101-28-xb0et6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557143/original/file-20231101-28-xb0et6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557143/original/file-20231101-28-xb0et6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557143/original/file-20231101-28-xb0et6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557143/original/file-20231101-28-xb0et6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Peep Into Lady W!!!!!y’s Seraglio by James Gillray (1782).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Trustees of the British Museum</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>Lady Worsley’s story shows the long history of slut-shaming. But it also showcases the long history of women fighting back. Instead of bowing to societal shame, Lady Worsley boldly boasted about her reputation in verse. </p>
<p><a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=IQ0nCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT130&lpg=PT130&dq=%22An+Epistle+from+Lady+Worsley%22&source=bl&ots=Y4U_mf9KpQ&sig=ACfU3U0HNZwD_r26VjfxztK1KLjKXF_qqw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj1lojNwrGCAxWmVkEAHc_-DYQQ6AF6BAgiEAM#v=onepage&q=%22An%20Epistle%20from%20Lady%20Worsley%22&f=false">Her witty poem</a>, An Epistle from L–y W——y to S-r R—–d W—–y (1782), showed that she was unaffected by the public scrutiny and those who tried to slut-shame her. She confirmed she was not “chaste” and didn’t care what the world said about it. She proudly claimed her right to sexual freedom and autonomy – a significant act of defiance in an era that placed immense value on a woman’s chastity and reputation.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aSRboeGLvx8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Taylor Swift discussing slut shaming in an interview with Zane Lowe.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During the same period, playwright Sophia Lee electrified audiences with her “licentious” comedy <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Chapter_of_Accidents_A_comedy_in_fiv/iNdZAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=the+chapter+of+accidents+as+immoral&pg=PA29&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=the%20chapter%20of%20accidents%20as%20immoral&f=false">The Chapter of Accidents</a> (1780). It used the word “slut”, but had powerful strategies to support its women characters. Their personal and intimate lives were discussed and criticised by others, but in her story, they weren’t ostracised by society or made to become nuns.</p>
<p>Lee objected to the double standards of the day that allowed men to sleep around while bad-mouthing women for the same actions. As a result, her confident characters may get called “slut” for sleeping with their suitors before marriage, but they’re still granted a happy ever after when they reinvent themselves as eligible virgins at the end of the play.</p>
<p>With the release of Slut!, Swift is mirroring these acts of defiance. Like these women who went before her, Swift, too, has successfully rewritten her public persona by openly challenging sexist social attitudes in her work.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/216873/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lucy Thompson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Men in the 1700s penned vehement letters about the way women dressed, slut-shaming them as “cork-rumped devils”.
Lucy Thompson, Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/211669
2023-10-12T19:03:09Z
2023-10-12T19:03:09Z
Friday essay: a poet, a disciplinarian, an illiterate grandfather – writers reflect on the teachers who shaped them
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551636/original/file-20231003-29-zqq5eo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=27%2C0%2C4214%2C2835&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">We see the teacher lay out the tightrope ... as the young writer clenches their toes and steps out above the air.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Danilo Batista/unsplash</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>What does a writer’s education look like? Is it access to books, regular letter-writing, difficulty in childhood (war, illness, a brutal boarding school)? What talent or disposition primes the young writer for their training? In the push and pull of nature versus nurture, a key element is the right teacher, at the right time: the encouraging, goading or resistant pressure that nudges along the curious mind.</p>
<p>The essays in a new book edited by Dale Salwak, <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/writers-and-their-teachers-9781350272262/">Writers and their Teachers</a>, lead you to reflect on your own teachers, but one of the themes is that the writing teacher, in retrospect, takes many forms. </p>
<p>I recall Mrs Wagstaff, a dinner lady at my English primary school with dyed red curls and long fingernails, who occasionally read us stories on rainy lunchtimes. “See it in your mind’s eye,” she said to us, as we sat cross-legged on the carpet, 40-odd years ago. I did see it in my mind’s eye, and still do.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551657/original/file-20231003-19-odr3p8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551657/original/file-20231003-19-odr3p8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551657/original/file-20231003-19-odr3p8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551657/original/file-20231003-19-odr3p8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551657/original/file-20231003-19-odr3p8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551657/original/file-20231003-19-odr3p8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1159&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551657/original/file-20231003-19-odr3p8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1159&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551657/original/file-20231003-19-odr3p8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1159&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>We all pick over stories of personal transformation in adulthood, the scenes and <em>dramatis personae</em> vivid across the years. Who was it who made the difference, and how? Writers and their Teachers reads as a collective <em>bildungsroman</em>, in which we come to understand the forces that shaped the adult writer. In this genre, the teacher or mentor is central, guiding the apprentice towards mastery.</p>
<p>Such transformations call for belief on the part of the teacher, and a spark of interest in the student. Salwak, in his introduction, quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The whole secret of the teacher’s force lies in the conviction that men [and women] are convertible, and they are.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here we witness 20 such conversions, from a young person with a desire, or perhaps only its flicker, to a life ablaze with language, ideas, images and story.</p>
<h2>Unlikely teachers</h2>
<p>Kenyan literary giant Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o names his illiterate maternal grandfather as his first writing teacher. </p>
<p>Ngũgĩ became his child scribe, reading aloud his grandfather’s letters until they represented perfectly what he wanted to say. This process not only taught him “the value of the written word and the revision necessary to make it read smoothly”, but crucially “the beauty of written Gĩkũyũ”, his mother tongue. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551629/original/file-20231003-25-nzpkdv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551629/original/file-20231003-25-nzpkdv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551629/original/file-20231003-25-nzpkdv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551629/original/file-20231003-25-nzpkdv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551629/original/file-20231003-25-nzpkdv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551629/original/file-20231003-25-nzpkdv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551629/original/file-20231003-25-nzpkdv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551629/original/file-20231003-25-nzpkdv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2136347/ngugi-wa-thiongo/#:~:text=Ngugi%20wa%20Thiong%27o%20%7C%20Penguin%20Random%20House">© Daniel Anderson/Penguin Random House</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ngũgĩ thrived at school, speaking, reading and writing in his first language, but in 1952, the colonial government banned African-run schools, and use of local languages became dangerous.</p>
<p>Ngũgĩ’s first books, including his classic of the Mau Mau rebellion, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/a-grain-of-wheat-9780141186993">A Grain of Wheat</a>, were written in English, the language of the coloniser. In 1977, Ngũgĩ helped to write and stage a politically outspoken play with Gĩkũyũ speakers. </p>
<p>Imprisoned for over a year as a result, and surrounded by Gĩkũyũ “teachers” in the form of his guards, he wrote his first novel <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/314614/devil-on-the-cross-by-ngugi-wa-thiongo-introduction-by-namwali-serpell/">Devil on the Cross</a> (on toilet paper) in his first language. Ngũgĩ writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So, it was a maximum security prison in Kenya which made me return to my roots, under the literary tutelage of my grandfather, Ngũgĩ wa Gĩkonyo, to whom I am eternally grateful. He was indeed my first literary teacher.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Few lessons in these essays are learned at such great personal risk, but many of the writers also credit unlikely teachers. The British detective novelist Catherine Aird moved as a child to a village in which she knew no one, and was struck down by that not unusual formative event in the biographies of writers, a long childhood illness. She worked her way through the contents of the village library, plunging into the Golden Age of detective fiction. Her family was also training her to appreciate a puzzle: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I lived in a household daily engaged in solving crosswords and with a keen (and wily) bridge player for a mother and a medical father who likened diagnosis to simple detection.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Aird paints a cosily macabre picture of the breakfast table, with her doctor father sharing his enthusiasm for forensics, recounting a gruesome local murder-suicide case in which he was advising the coroner. She even played assistant to his detective work, on one occasion sent upstairs in a house in which a man was </p>
<blockquote>
<p>found unconscious at the foot of his stairs to feel whether the bed was still warm and thus help establish when he had fallen. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sometimes what the young writer needs to learn is how to navigate the wider world glimpsed through reading and writing. Michael Scammell, biographer of Solzhenitsyn and Koestler, spent two years as a copy boy at the Southern Daily Echo in Southampton, the first in his family to be educated to 16.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551335/original/file-20231002-15-jtqvk8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551335/original/file-20231002-15-jtqvk8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551335/original/file-20231002-15-jtqvk8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551335/original/file-20231002-15-jtqvk8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551335/original/file-20231002-15-jtqvk8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551335/original/file-20231002-15-jtqvk8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551335/original/file-20231002-15-jtqvk8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551335/original/file-20231002-15-jtqvk8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/438990.Solzhenitsyn?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=jOp7YlRQXq&rank=3">Goodreads</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/education-34538222">grammar school</a> boy in the English selective system, he had left his own world behind without a guide for the journey. The older journalist Anthony Brode, “giant of the newsroom”, a bohemian francophone, relaxed, cultured, product of a privileged education “taught me how to write – and live – in an unfamiliar environment”. </p>
<p>A book about education (particularly when the writer is British) is also a picture of class and a navigation of its boundaries. Tony’s home was a revelation: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Unlike my family’s small living room, where four of us huddled over a coal fire on wintry nights with the radio blasting, making it hard to read, Tony and Sylvia’s comfortable lounge was spacious and warm, and I had free run of their bookcases (there was no television, of course).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In these shelves, Scammell discovered the fiction of Orwell, Wodehouse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Books, of course, are our other teachers. Later, Tony provided the connection via his publisher for Scammell to begin publishing translations, and he was on his way. </p>
<p>The friendships that emerge from such unequal beginnings are often long and distinguished by the generosity of the mentor. A gentle awe infuses several of the essays, that so much can be given with nothing asked for in return. As poet-critic William Logan writes on his unconventional professor David Milch (creator of NYPD Blue and Deadwood):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>there are debts that cannot be repaid because you do not possess the currency in which they were tendered.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Sir Vidia’s gifts</h2>
<p>The gift bestowed by V.S. Naipaul, Nobel laureate, on the younger writer Paul Theroux, was great, but ambiguous. Theroux writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>More than fifty years of writing about Naipaul and reflecting on his influence! Yet it is only in the last few years, the dust having settled, that I have re-examined our relationship and seen how complex it was, how important – how crucial – it was to my becoming a writer.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is the final essay of the collection. Arranged as the pieces are in a journey through “School”, “College” and “Graduate School and after”, a growing sense becomes evident, as the writers recall themselves as adult mentees rather than as children, of their teachers as flawed human beings. This is perhaps difficult to avoid in Naipaul’s case, but for Theroux, Naipaul’s snobberies and imperiousness – and a 15-year break in their friendship – do nothing to undermine his significance. </p>
<p>When Theroux met Naipaul in Kampala in 1966, he knew no novelists and sought guidance. As Naipaul’s driver, escort and interpreter, he was able to observe at close quarters his utter seriousness about writing, and to receive its lessons in a terror-induced atmosphere of total concentration. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Mine was an animal alertness: no creature is more wired than an animal in unfamiliar surroundings – every faculty is twitchingly alight, every synapse engaged. I was fully awake in his presence and fearful of making a blunder.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551649/original/file-20231003-19-dx0b7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551649/original/file-20231003-19-dx0b7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551649/original/file-20231003-19-dx0b7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551649/original/file-20231003-19-dx0b7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551649/original/file-20231003-19-dx0b7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551649/original/file-20231003-19-dx0b7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1108&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551649/original/file-20231003-19-dx0b7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1108&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551649/original/file-20231003-19-dx0b7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1108&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2972706-sir-vidia-s-shadow">Goodreads</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When this 30-year apprenticeship ended in rejection born of one of Vidia’s “foul moods”, Theroux saw it as liberation: “promotion to a higher rank”. He was now free to write his controversial memoir of their friendship, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1998/10/04/pen-pals-no-more/8abc5dd8-cb46-4b0a-bf7d-f97ca7277a6b/">Sir Vidia’s Shadow</a>. In the end, Theroux has no regrets. What “every aspiring person” needs, he tells us, is encouragement and belief.
“Naipaul did that for me: he alone told me what I was capable of doing.”</p>
<h2>House calls</h2>
<p>The form the mentor most usually takes in these pages is the school or university teacher, and it is often in the glimpse of them as something more than a teacher that they take shape. </p>
<p>J.M. Coetzee recalls Gerrit Gouws, a cane-bearing disciplinarian who taught the final stage of Worcester Boys’ Primary. One day Mr Gouws broke role to invite the young John to tea, who was amazed to learn that his teacher lived on the same housing estate as he did.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As far as I was concerned, outside the classroom [teachers] might as well have had no lives. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here and in other essays a teacher opens up the mysteries and possibilities of other people by revealing an existence beyond the borders of school. Historian and biographer Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina writes of her kind and imaginative teacher Mabel Morrill: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>we had no notion that she could even have a personal life that would interest us.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551652/original/file-20231003-29-586dxa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551652/original/file-20231003-29-586dxa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551652/original/file-20231003-29-586dxa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551652/original/file-20231003-29-586dxa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551652/original/file-20231003-29-586dxa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551652/original/file-20231003-29-586dxa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=888&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551652/original/file-20231003-29-586dxa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=888&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551652/original/file-20231003-29-586dxa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=888&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://gretchengerzina.com/about-gretchen-gerzina.html">Photo by Michael Benabib Slideshow</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Like Coetzee’s Mr Gouws, Mrs Morrill stepped out of the classroom and into her pupil’s life, calling at her house. She had noticed that Gretchen made her own clothes (the teacher taking the trouble to notice is a potent force in this book), and asked to be measured up for a dress, setting off a chain of connections which brought Mrs Morrill vividly into three dimensions. </p>
<p>When the young Coetzee visited his teacher for tea, he made his own discoveries, most improbably, that Mr Gouws had, “of all things,” a wife. What could all this be about? he wondered at the time, but sees now what such a moment always tends to mean: that the teacher views the pupil as an individual, worthy of interest, deserving of encouragement.</p>
<p>The memory also allows Coetzee to access, 70 years on, the significance of his being taught in English, and paid a small extra attention, by an Afrikaner. This teacher, across a social and cultural divide, taught students with more natural facility than himself “the ability to take sentences of the English language to pieces and put the pieces together again”.</p>
<p>Mr Gouws would have operated according to the teacherly hope that some of the children you meet in your years in the classroom will make the fullest use of what is offered. How well this gamble paid off in the case of the future Nobel prize winner who came to tea.</p>
<h2>Learning to read</h2>
<p>The exhilaration offered up by paying meticulously close attention to language is one of the gifts enumerated in Writers and their Teachers. Former British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion learned close reading from his poet-teacher Mr Way, who had been immersed in New Criticism at Oxford. This mainstay of mid-century literary studies, as Motion writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>concentrated rigorously on the text and paid little or no attention to biographical facts or historical context.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Motion grew in time to appreciate the connections between the poem and its world, but like many other writers who passed through an education system in thrall to this rigorous separation, the experience of encountering poetry in a “pure form” remained a foundational lesson.</p>
<p>Mr Way and his methods arrived in Motion’s life as balm after the brutalities of an English prep school. The pupil learned in his classes that the distilled nature of poetic language demands a focus approaching that which produced the work. </p>
<p>This discovery was joined by another: that language relies for meaning on sound as well as sense. Poetry became </p>
<blockquote>
<p>a forest of cadences and associations in which no interpretation can be “wrong” […] provided I’m able to explain and justify it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The drama of education is that its transformations occur amid the difficulties of childhood and young adulthood. In this context, knowledge can feel like rescue.</p>
<h2>Words that change everything</h2>
<p>Biographer Carl Rollyson structures his essay around the life-changing comments his teachers made. Like others here, he suffered great difficulty in his young life, in this instance the loss of his father to cancer. </p>
<p>His chapter begins with the words of his English teacher James Allen Jones: “You read beautifully,” after he had recited a speech by Cassius in Julius Caesar. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>He put his hand on my arm when he said the words, and it was as if I had been reborn. Some teachers have that power: to move you with a voice that liberates you to be yourself. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This liberating power is the true subject of this book. Again and again, we see the teacher lay out the tightrope and hold it taut, as the young writer clenches their toes and steps out above the air.</p>
<p>I paused reading to write to an old school friend about our English teachers at secondary school. When we were 16, our beloved English teacher Miss Quinn, wearer of bright silk suits tailored on her annual trips to Thailand, was replaced by a new teacher who was more austere, less of a friend to us. She had been a missionary, and seemed otherworldly, but it was she who wrote on a piece I wrote about early childhood, “You are a <em>real</em> writer.” </p>
<p>What do you do with that? Remember it in moments of uncertainty, and try to honour it.</p>
<h2>Full circle</h2>
<p>Students who liked learning often become teachers themselves. Novelist and poet Jay Parini recalls his college advisor Ed Brown, how impressed he was by him, how he came to imitate his clothes and manner. Even now, when he walks into a classroom, he thinks: “I’m Ed Brown today, reborn.” </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551631/original/file-20231003-15-n2lo07.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551631/original/file-20231003-15-n2lo07.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551631/original/file-20231003-15-n2lo07.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551631/original/file-20231003-15-n2lo07.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551631/original/file-20231003-15-n2lo07.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551631/original/file-20231003-15-n2lo07.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551631/original/file-20231003-15-n2lo07.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551631/original/file-20231003-15-n2lo07.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Margaret Drabble.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/60750.Margaret_Drabble">Goodreads</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The novelist Margaret Drabble, a graduate of Newnham College at Cambridge, found herself teaching in a very different institution, Morley College in Lambeth, established for the purposes of educating the working classes in a slum area. By 1969, when Drabble arrived, her classes were filled with young mothers, taking advantage of the creche facility and flexibility of curriculum:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the majority of the group were young women like me, and together we explored the world of literature, making up our own syllabus and our own lives as we went along. I was my own student. We taught ourselves.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These women of the 1970s were living out change, and Drabble was learning and teaching at the same time, as is the way of things. At the end of her essay, Drabble states simply: “We learn much from those we teach.” </p>
<p>The step into teaching is an important developmental stage in many writers’ journeys, as well, perhaps, as a partial repayment of one’s debt. </p>
<p>How in the end are writers made? The answers in this book are – to a degree – specific to certain contexts. For example, only four of the writers are women. As well, contributors tend to be of a certain age. If younger writers were asked about their education, perhaps we would see some essays on the teaching and mentorship taking place in writing centres and community organisations, that can lead to the airing of new voices.</p>
<p>Still, the deep experience of the contributors offers a long view, and makes for rich storytelling, textured by living histories of education, class and literature. What we learn is that it is a dual gift their guides bestow: demonstrating what is possible, offering the courage to reach for it. </p>
<h2>Work to do, but worth doing</h2>
<p>I recognise some of the paths these writers have walked, and yet there is no map to the writing life. Who were my teachers? At first, before school, someone taught me to read. Was it my parents? My recollection is that I taught myself, but no doubt there was more to it. </p>
<p>At school I was allowed to read ahead, wandering through the corridors in the quiet of lesson time – free and trusted – to access shelves outside the other classrooms.</p>
<p>In third year, lovely Mrs Rudra, who allowed the girls to wear her saris as a treat (how cool the silk felt on my skin), organised for me to exchange letters with a children’s author, Rosemary Manning. I had a terrifying teacher in fifth year but she had no problem with my nerdy habit of putting on plays for the other children. </p>
<p>My grandmother, throughout my childhood, insisted I was going to be a writer. This was my education. Strong nudges, provision of resources, a long leash. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551646/original/file-20231003-25-xdrm8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551646/original/file-20231003-25-xdrm8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551646/original/file-20231003-25-xdrm8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551646/original/file-20231003-25-xdrm8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551646/original/file-20231003-25-xdrm8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551646/original/file-20231003-25-xdrm8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551646/original/file-20231003-25-xdrm8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551646/original/file-20231003-25-xdrm8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lovely Mrs Rudra, who allowed the girls to wear her saris as a treat, organised for me to exchange letters with a children’s author.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/search/a-sari?page=3">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At the end of secondary school I encountered close reading in the form of the Practical Criticism exam (here is a poem: knowing nothing of its contexts, analyse it), but also in the forensic discussion of a single, two-word line – “Kill Claudio” – from Much Ado About Nothing. Our English group of five, plus Miss Yates, planting careful provocations, spent a whole class arguing delightedly about it. </p>
<p>Later, at Nottingham University, I stood marvelling with my friends outside the military-looking huts of the American Studies department, having spent an hour picking through William Stafford’s poem <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42775/traveling-through-the-dark">Traveling through the Dark</a> with our lecturer, the gentle, patient, unpretentious Dave Murray, feeling the same exhilaration as after the Kill Claudio class. So few words, so much meaning, if someone showed you how to pay a special kind of attention. </p>
<p>I spent a summer on exchange in the States. At American universities, unlike in England, you could take creative writing classes. My teacher was the poet Susan Firer, who modelled the life of a person who lived in writing. </p>
<p>She told us about waking early to write and walk, about going to see other writers read when she was young. She was serious and kind, and left “nice"s dotted through my journal: small, sweet gifts. The desire to write was latent before this, a flicker; explicit from then on.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551648/original/file-20231003-15-rh8wt4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551648/original/file-20231003-15-rh8wt4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551648/original/file-20231003-15-rh8wt4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=689&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551648/original/file-20231003-15-rh8wt4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=689&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551648/original/file-20231003-15-rh8wt4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=689&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551648/original/file-20231003-15-rh8wt4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=866&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551648/original/file-20231003-15-rh8wt4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=866&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551648/original/file-20231003-15-rh8wt4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=866&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gail Jones.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/121139.Gail_Jones">Goodreads</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Much later, I studied for a creative doctorate in Sydney, writing a novel, <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/the-archeology-of-memory-hannah-and-emil/">a fictionalised account of the lives of my grandparents</a>, for my thesis. I submitted a section for workshopping. "Your grandmother is important to you,” the workshop leader said, “but why is she interesting to us?” </p>
<p>A fair question, which I found devastating, until I had tea with my supervisor, the novelist Gail Jones, to discuss the work in question. She paid this far from finished work a patient, brilliantly focused attention that was instantly cheering. “There is work to do,” I felt her saying to me, “but it is worth doing, and you are the person to do it.” </p>
<p>I teach writing now at university. You see a glint in students, as they transform uncertainly into whoever it is they are becoming. Some way into semester, one of them will peel off from the crowd to ask you about a future in writing. You have to tell them there is no money. You have to say there is no path.</p>
<p>You hope what you are also saying, in this moment, and when you stand in front of the class, week after week, talking about their writing and other people’s, is that it is worth it. If you love what words can do, why wouldn’t you want to live a life shaped by their potential?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211669/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Belinda Castles does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
What makes a great writer? A key element is the right teacher. Belinda Castles reflects on her own guides, as do authors such as Margaret Drabble, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Paul Theroux in a new book.
Belinda Castles, Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/214052
2023-10-06T12:31:25Z
2023-10-06T12:31:25Z
20 years after the publication of ‘Purple Hibiscus,’ a generation of African writers have followed in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s footsteps
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552193/original/file-20231004-23-3cpw1n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=143%2C229%2C2943%2C1890&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in 2004, shortly after the publication of 'Purple Hibiscus.'</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/nigerian-author-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-poses-while-in-news-photo/56522066?adppopup=true">Ulf Andersen/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Twenty years ago, in October 2003, 26-year-old Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the North American publishing scene with her debut novel,“ <a href="https://www.chimamanda.com/purple-hibiscus/">Purple Hibiscus</a>.” </p>
<p>Since then, Adichie’s literary fame has only grown: She’s published two more novels and a collection of short stories, while <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg3umXU_qWc">two of her</a> <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en">TED talks</a> have garnered tens of millions of views. In September 2023, she published her first children’s book – a joyful celebration of mother-daughter love – under the nom de plume <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/742306/mamas-sleeping-scarf-by-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-writing-as-nwa-grace-james-illustrated-by-joelle-avelino/9781774882696">Nwa Grace-James</a>.</p>
<p>But the October 2003 publication of “Purple Hibiscus” didn’t just signal the start of a single author’s brilliant career. It also forged a path for a whole new generation of African novelists who had come to America as immigrants or students and who have been mining that experience in their writing. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Black and white portrait of African man wearing a tweed coat sitting at a table." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552194/original/file-20231004-19-uk36ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552194/original/file-20231004-19-uk36ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552194/original/file-20231004-19-uk36ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552194/original/file-20231004-19-uk36ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552194/original/file-20231004-19-uk36ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1018&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552194/original/file-20231004-19-uk36ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1018&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552194/original/file-20231004-19-uk36ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1018&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel ‘Things Fall Apart’ came perilously close to never seeing a printing press.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/portrait-of-chinua-achebe-nigerian-novelist-poet-and-critic-news-photo/681121124?adppopup=true">Michel Delsol/Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The struggles to get published by prior generations of African authors are almost legendary. Thirty years apart, Chinua Achebe and Tsitsi Dangarembga have both described how close their manuscripts of “<a href="https://slate.com/culture/2013/03/things-fall-apart-by-chinua-achebe-was-almost-lost-by-london-typists-the-amazing-story-of-the-handwritten-manuscript.html">Things Fall Apart</a>” (1958) and “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/books/tsitsi-dangarembga-this-mournable-body.html">Nervous Conditions</a>” (1988) came to being lost. Achebe’s only copy of the manuscript was a handwritten draft. He sent it to a typing agency in London that nearly dismissed it as a joke. Dangarembga’s manuscript sat unread in the basement of a British publishing house for years. Only when the writer stopped by the offices during a work trip to London did the editors agree to read it.</p>
<p>Through attending American MFA programs, however, Adichie and her contemporaries were able to tap into the networks of agents and found their work snapped up by American publishers.</p>
<p>Writers born in Africa who studied at American universities – Teju Cole, Yaa Gyasi, Uzodinma Iweala, NoViolet Bulawayo and Akwaeke Emezi, to name just a few – have followed in Adichie’s footsteps. </p>
<p>“Purple Hibiscus” has been to these writers what Gabriel García Márquez’s “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/05/one-hundred-years-of-solitude-50-years-later/527118/">One Hundred Years of Solitude</a>” (1967) was to aspiring Latin American writers during the <a href="https://libguides.bc.edu/virtual-book-display/latin-american-literature">Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s</a>, and what Salman Rushdie’s “<a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/rushdie-children.html">Midnight’s Children</a>” (1981) was to the proliferation of Indian writers in English from the 1980s on.</p>
<p>While it would be reassuring to think that the current surge of African novelists represents a wider American interest in all things African, the success of these novels may also have to do with the fact that so many are actually set in the U.S. </p>
<p>The recurrent theme of immigration to the U.S. gives many of these works direct – and instructive – relevance to U.S. readers. As Black outsiders in the U.S., African immigrants have a particularly acute insight into the way race and racism affect daily life in this country. One of the common features of these novels is the way in which they explore the tension of racial solidarity and mutual misunderstanding between African immigrants and Black Americans.</p>
<p>When I first started teaching African literature, I often had difficulty finding books in print. Now my problem is deciding who to leave out of my syllabus. Here is a very brief list of some of the books that I would consider must-reads.</p>
<h2>1. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Americanah” (2013)</h2>
<p>As its title suggests, Adichie’s fourth novel, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/878/americanah-by-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie/">Americanah</a>,” is arguably the definitive novel of contemporary African immigration to America.</p>
<p>It tells the story of Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman overstaying her student visa, and how she negotiates the new Black identity forced on her by the blunt instrument of American race-construction. </p>
<p>In a brilliant metafictional move, Adichie has Ifemelu achieve internet fame by writing a blog dedicated to non-American Blacks: “Dear Non-American Black,” Ifemelu writes, “when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t ‘black’ in your country? You’re in America now.”</p>
<p>Ifemelu’s experience of racism is simultaneously hurtful and baffling to her. On the one hand, her illegal status makes her both psychologically and physically vulnerable. But at times American racism is almost comical; Ifemelu doesn’t understand why an innocent reference to eating watermelon might be misconstrued, for instance, and she is totally bewildered by a shop assistant’s attempt to avoid distinguishing between two shoppers by reference to their skin color. </p>
<h2>2. Yaa Gyasi, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/533857/homegoing-by-yaa-gyasi/">Homegoing</a>” (2016)</h2>
<p>Ghanaian-born Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel takes the form of a series of skillfully interwoven stories set on either side of the Atlantic. </p>
<p>Beginning with two half sisters, Effia and Esi, in the Gold Coast in the middle of the 18th century, the stories trace the two sets of the sisters’ descendants through six subsequent generations in West Africa and the U.S. In the final two stories we meet the young teenager Marjorie, who, as the American-born daughter of Ghanaian parents, struggles to come to terms with her identity as one of Ifemelu’s “Non-American Blacks.” She finds herself ostracized by her Black classmates for “acting white” but is unable to enjoy a normal relationship with a white classmate. One of the only Black teachers at her high school tells her, “You’re here now, and here black is black is black.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Portrait of young Black woman bathed in sunlight." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552195/original/file-20231004-19-k2bynk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552195/original/file-20231004-19-k2bynk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552195/original/file-20231004-19-k2bynk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552195/original/file-20231004-19-k2bynk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552195/original/file-20231004-19-k2bynk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552195/original/file-20231004-19-k2bynk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552195/original/file-20231004-19-k2bynk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Yaa Gyasi in 2017, a year after the publication of her debut novel, ‘Homegoing.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/yaa-gyasi-milano-italy-9th-september-2017-news-photo/1129549208?adppopup=true">Leonardo Cendamo/Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>3. NoViolet Bulawayo, “<a href="https://novioletbulawayo.com/books/we-need-new-names/">We Need New Names</a>” (2013)</h2>
<p>When “We Need New Names” appeared, Nigerian novelist Helon Habila accused NoViolet Bulawayo of peddling “poverty-porn” by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/20/need-new-names-bulawayo-review">pandering to American stereotypes of Africa</a>. </p>
<p>However, for Bulawayo’s teenage protagonist Darling, it’s American culture that is dangerously dysfunctional – and personally discombobulating. Darling finds American high school ridiculously easy, is horrified by the laxness of American parenting and is generally unimpressed by the urban blight she sees around her in the city she calls Destroyed, Michigan. </p>
<p>Late in the novel, her mentally ill countryman Tshaka Zulu is shot to death by police when off his meds and ranting in his home language. You might think that such a violent, tragic event would be a major plot driver. Sadly, it seems to exemplify just one more random peril – little different from being hit by a car or struck down by cancer – that many Africans coming to America have to endure.</p>
<h2>4. Uzodinma Iweala, “<a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/speak-no-evil-uzodinma-iweala?variant=32118044753954">Speak No Evil</a>” (2018)</h2>
<p>Even wealth and class status offer no protection from such perils. </p>
<p>In Uzodinma Iweala’s “Speak No Evil,” the main character, Niru, is the high-achieving son of high-achieving Nigerian parents in supposedly cosmopolitan Washington, D.C. The first three-quarters of the book appear to be exploring Niru’s dilemma: how to come out as gay to his conservative parents. </p>
<p>It turns out that Niru’s gayness – an invisible characteristic, after all – is not the problem; his Blackness is. When he gets in a row outside a bar with his best friend, Meredith – an equally well-off, well-connected, high-flying white female classmate – someone calls the cops. In the space of a paragraph the inevitable has happened: Shots are fired. “You’re safe,” someone says to Meredith. “He can’t hurt you.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Young Black man wearing a black turtleneck and eyeglasses posing in front of a sculpture with waterfalls." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552366/original/file-20231005-15-38rtnw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552366/original/file-20231005-15-38rtnw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552366/original/file-20231005-15-38rtnw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552366/original/file-20231005-15-38rtnw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552366/original/file-20231005-15-38rtnw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552366/original/file-20231005-15-38rtnw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552366/original/file-20231005-15-38rtnw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nigerian author Uzodinma Iweala.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/nigerian-author-uzodinma-iweala-author-of-the-fiction-novel-news-photo/539982735?adppopup=true">Fairfax Media/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By extraordinary coincidence, Adichie grew up in the very house that Chinua Achebe had lived in on the campus of the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. She, and the other writers of her generation, grew up in the house of fiction that Achebe and his generation established. The writers of that older generation were concerned with the material and cultural despoliation of colonialism. In Achebe’s words, their task was to let their African readers know “<a href="https://www3.dbu.edu/mitchell/achebequ.htm">where the rain began to beat</a>” them. </p>
<p>Today’s African writers demand readers’ attention by letting them know that for African and African-descended people in the U.S., although the winds may have shifted, the storm is far from over.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214052/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon Lewis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
African immigrant writers possess particularly acute insights into the way race and racism affect daily life in the US.
Simon Lewis, Professor of English, College of Charleston
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/212176
2023-09-04T12:15:54Z
2023-09-04T12:15:54Z
Should AI be permitted in college classrooms? 4 scholars weigh in
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/545645/original/file-20230830-40577-kz4de8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=29%2C35%2C3940%2C2299&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Does AI enhance or cripple a person's analytical skills? </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/learn-online-in-digital-futuristic-style-royalty-free-illustration/1414284061?phrase=artificial+intelligence+college&adppopup=true">Yevhen Lahunov/iStock via Getty Images Plus</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>One of the most intense discussions taking place among university faculty is whether to permit students to use artificial intelligence in the classroom. To gain perspective on the matter, The Conversation reached out to four scholars for their take on AI as a learning tool and the reasons why they will or won’t be making it a part of their classes.</em></p>
<h2>Nicholas Tampio, professor of political science: Learn to think for yourself</h2>
<p>As a professor, I believe the purpose of a college class is to <a href="https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/usd/teaching-political-theory-9781800373860.html">teach students to think</a>: to read scholarship, ask questions, formulate a thesis, collect and analyze data, draft an essay, take feedback from the instructor and other students, and write a final draft.</p>
<p>One problem with ChatGPT is that it allows students to produce a decent paper without thinking or writing for themselves.</p>
<p>In my American political thought class, I assign speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and ask students to compose an essay on what King and X might say about a current American political debate, such as the <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf">Supreme Court’s recent decision on affirmative action</a>.</p>
<p>Students could get fine grades if they used ChatGPT to “write” their papers. But they will have missed a chance to enter a dialogue with two profound thinkers about a topic that could reshape American higher education and society. </p>
<p>The point of learning to write is not simply intellectual self-discovery. My students go on to careers in journalism, law, science, academia and business. Their employers often ask them to research and write about a topic. </p>
<p>Few employers will likely hire someone to use large language models that rely on an algorithm scraping databases filled with errors and biases. Already, a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/nyregion/lawyer-chatgpt-sanctions.html">lawyer has gotten in trouble</a> for using ChatGPT to craft a motion filled with fabricated cases. Employees succeed when they can research a topic and write intelligently about it. </p>
<p>Artificial intelligence is a tool that defeats a purpose of a college education – to learn how to think, and write, for oneself. </p>
<h2>Patricia A. Young, professor of education: ChatGPT doesn’t promote advanced thinking</h2>
<p>College students who are operating from a convenience or entitlement mentality – one in which they think, “I am entitled to use whatever technology is available to me” – will naturally gravitate toward using ChatGPT with or without their professor’s permission. Using ChatGPT and submitting a course assignment as your own creation is called <a href="https://doi.org/10.1109/ITHET56107.2022.10031827">AI-assisted plagiarism</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A woman looks straightforward." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/545998/original/file-20230901-23-orbx53.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/545998/original/file-20230901-23-orbx53.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545998/original/file-20230901-23-orbx53.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545998/original/file-20230901-23-orbx53.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545998/original/file-20230901-23-orbx53.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545998/original/file-20230901-23-orbx53.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545998/original/file-20230901-23-orbx53.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Patricia A. Young.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Marlayna Demond for University of Maryland, Baltimore County</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some professors allow the use of ChatGPT as long as students cite ChatGPT as the source. As a researcher who <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=EUXhTIoAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">specializes in the use of technology in education</a>, I believe this practice needs to be thought through. Does this mean that ChatGPT would need to cite its sources, so that students could cite ChatGPT as a type of secondary source according to <a href="https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/paper-format">APA style</a>, a standard academic style of citing papers? What Pandora’s box are we opening? Some users report that ChatGPT never reveals its sources anyway.</p>
<p>The proliferation of free AI means students won’t have to think much while writing – just engage in a high level of copy and paste. We used to call that plagiarism. With AI-assisted plagiarism, this brings in the potential for a new era of academic misconduct.</p>
<p>The concern will come when students take higher-level courses or land a job and lack the literacy skills to perform on an exceptional level. We will have created a generation of functionally illiterate adults who lack the capacity to engage in advanced thinking – like critiquing, comparing or contrasting information. </p>
<p>Yes, students can and should use smart tools, but we need to hypothesize and measure the costs to human ingenuity and the future of the human race.</p>
<h2>Asim Ali, instructor of information systems management: AI is another teacher</h2>
<p>I teach information systems management, and in the spring of 2023, I had students use ChatGPT for an essay assignment and then record a video podcast discussing how AI will impact their careers. This semester I am being more intentional by providing guidance on the possibilities and limitations of AI tools for each assignment. For example, students learn that using generative AI on a self-reflection assignment may not help, but using AI to analyze a case study is potentially a great way to find insights they may have overlooked. This emulates their future jobs in which they may use AI tools to enhance the quality of their work product. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A man smiles. A brick wall is in the background." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/545995/original/file-20230901-15-zv2fts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/545995/original/file-20230901-15-zv2fts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545995/original/file-20230901-15-zv2fts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545995/original/file-20230901-15-zv2fts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545995/original/file-20230901-15-zv2fts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545995/original/file-20230901-15-zv2fts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545995/original/file-20230901-15-zv2fts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Asim Ali,</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.auburn.edu/academic/provost/bios/asim-ali.php">Auburn University</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>My experience with adapting to AI for my own course inspired me to create a resource for all my colleagues. As executive director of the Biggio Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, I oversee the instructional design and educational development teams at Auburn University. We created a self-paced, online course called <a href="https://aub.ie/teachwithai">Teaching With AI</a>.</p>
<p>Now there are over 600 faculty at Auburn and hundreds of faculty at almost 35 institutions engaging with the content and each other through discussion boards and practical exercises.</p>
<p>I receive messages from faculty sharing ways they are changing their assignments or discussing AI with their students. Some see AI as a threat to humans, but discussing AI with my students and with colleagues across the country has actually helped me develop human connections.</p>
<h2>Shital Thekdi, associate professor of analytics & operations: What can you do that AI can’t?</h2>
<p>This semester, I will ask students in my Statistics for Business and Economics course to discuss the question, “What is your value beyond the AI tools?” I want them to reframe the conversation beyond one of academic integrity and instead as a challenge. I believe students must recognize that the jobs they imagine will exist for them could be eliminated because of these new technologies. So the pressure is on students to understand not only how to use these tools but also how to be better than the tools. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A woman looks straightforward." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546209/original/file-20230904-29-f5iq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546209/original/file-20230904-29-f5iq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546209/original/file-20230904-29-f5iq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546209/original/file-20230904-29-f5iq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546209/original/file-20230904-29-f5iq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546209/original/file-20230904-29-f5iq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546209/original/file-20230904-29-f5iq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Shital Thekdi.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Richmond</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I hope my students will consider ethical reasoning and the role of human connections. While AI can be trained to make value-based decisions, individuals and groups have their own values that can differ considerably from those used by AI.
And AI tools do not have the capacity to form human connections and experiences.</p>
<p>Students will remain vital contributors to business and society as AI tools develop. I believe it’s our responsibility as educators to prepare our students for a rapidly evolving cultural and technological landscape.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/212176/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Patricia A. Young has received funding from the Maryland State Department of Education and Maryland Center for Computing Education/University of Maryland System.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Asim Ali, Nicholas Tampio, and Shital Thekdi do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Scholars differ over whether having students use AI in their assignments will help or hurt their careers after graduation.
Nicholas Tampio, Professor of Political Science, Fordham University
Asim Ali, Instructor of Information Systems Management, Auburn University
Patricia A. Young, Professor of Literacy, Culture and Instructional Design & Technology, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Shital Thekdi, Associate Professor of Analytics and Operations, University of Richmond
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/211598
2023-08-25T12:27:58Z
2023-08-25T12:27:58Z
AI scores in the top percentile of creative thinking
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544631/original/file-20230824-19-dofq41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C6%2C4071%2C2986&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Creativity involves generating something new -- a product or solution that didn't previously exist.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/red-apple-on-a-background-of-green-apples-royalty-free-image/536687143?phrase=repeated+objects+with+one+unique+object&adppopup=true">Maestria_diz/iStock via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Of all the forms of human intellect that one might expect artificial intelligence to emulate, few people would likely place creativity at the top of their list. Creativity is wonderfully mysterious – and frustratingly fleeting. It defines us as human beings – and seemingly defies the cold logic that lies behind the silicon curtain of machines. </p>
<p>Yet, the use of AI for creative endeavors is now growing. </p>
<p>New AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney are increasingly part of creative production, and some have started <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html">to win awards for their creative output</a>. The growing impact is both social and economic – as just one example, the potential of AI to generate new, creative content is a defining flashpoint behind the <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-are-hollywood-actors-and-writers-afraid-of-a-cinema-scholar-explains-how-ai-is-upending-the-movie-and-tv-business-210360">Hollywood writers strike</a>.</p>
<p>And if our recent study into the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yjoc.2023.100065">striking originality of AI</a> is any indication, the emergence of AI-based creativity – along with examples of both its promise and peril – is likely just beginning. </p>
<h2>A blend of novelty and utiliy</h2>
<p>When people are at their most creative, they’re responding to a need, goal or problem by generating something new – a product or solution that didn’t previously exist. </p>
<p>In this sense, creativity is an act of combining existing resources – ideas, materials, knowledge – in a novel way that’s useful or gratifying. Quite often, the result of creative thinking is also surprising, leading to something that the creator did not – and perhaps could not – foresee. </p>
<p>It might involve an invention, an unexpected punchline to a joke or a groundbreaking theory in physics. It might be a unique arrangement of notes, tempo, sounds and lyrics that results in a new song. </p>
<p>So, as a researcher of creative thinking, I immediately noticed something interesting about the content generated by the latest versions of AI, including GPT-4. </p>
<p>When prompted with tasks requiring creative thinking, the novelty and usefulness of GPT-4’s output reminded me of the creative types of ideas submitted by students and colleagues I had worked with as a teacher and entrepreneur. </p>
<p>The ideas were different and surprising, yet relevant and useful. And, when required, quite imaginative. </p>
<p>Consider the following prompt offered to GPT-4: “Suppose all children became giants for one day out of the week. What would happen?” The ideas generated by GPT-4 touched on culture, economics, psychology, politics, interpersonal communication, transportation, recreation and much more – many surprising and unique in terms of the novel connections generated. </p>
<p>This combination of novelty and utility is difficult to pull off, as most scientists, artists, writers, musicians, poets, chefs, founders, engineers and academics can attest. </p>
<p>Yet AI seemed to be doing it – and doing it well.</p>
<h2>Putting AI to the test</h2>
<p>With researchers in creativity and entrepreneurship <a href="https://www.vm.vu.lt/apie/destytojai/2-uncategorised/637-christian-byrge">Christian Byrge</a> and <a href="https://www.umwestern.edu/directory/christian-gilde/">Christian Gilde</a>, I decided to put AI’s creative abilities to the test by having it take the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/torrance-test">or TTCT</a>. </p>
<p>The TTCT prompts the test-taker to engage in <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-unlock-your-creativity-even-if-you-see-yourself-as-a-conventional-thinker-196198">the kinds of creativity required for real-life tasks</a>: asking questions, how to be more resourceful or efficient, guessing cause and effect or improving a product. It might ask a test-taker to suggest ways to improve a children’s toy or imagine the consequences of a hypothetical situation, as the above example demonstrates.</p>
<p>The tests are not designed to measure <a href="https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0099">historical creativity</a>, which is what some researchers use to describe the transformative brilliance of figures like Mozart and Einstein. Rather, it assesses the general creative abilities of individuals, often referred to as <a href="https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0099">psychological or personal creativity</a>. </p>
<p>In addition to running the TTCT through GPT-4 eight times, we also administered the test to 24 of our undergraduate students. </p>
<p>All of the results were evaluated by trained reviewers at Scholastic Testing Service, a private testing company that provides scoring for the TTCT. They didn’t know in advance that some of the tests they’d be scoring had been completed by AI. </p>
<p>Since Scholastic Testing Service is a private company, it does not share its prompts with the public. This ensured that GPT-4 would not have been able to scrape the internet for past prompts and their responses. In addition, the company has a database of thousands of tests completed by college students and adults, providing a large, additional control group with which to compare AI scores.</p>
<p>Our results? </p>
<p>GPT-4 scored in the top 1% of test-takers for the originality of its ideas. From our research, we believe this marks one of the first examples of AI meeting or exceeding the human ability for original thinking. </p>
<p>In short, we believe that AI models like GPT-4 are capable of producing ideas that people see as unexpected, novel and unique. Other researchers are arriving at similar conclusions in <a href="https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.12003">their research of AI and creativity</a>. </p>
<h2>Yes, creativity can be evaluated</h2>
<p>The emerging creative ability of AI is surprising for a number of reasons. </p>
<p>For one, many outside of the research community continue to believe that creativity <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/yoel_tawil_why_creativity_has_no_definition">cannot be defined</a>, let alone scored. Yet products of human novelty and ingenuity have been prized – and bought and sold – for thousands of years. And creative work has been defined and scored in fields like psychology since at least the 1950s. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.idsa.org/education-paper/exchanging-the-4ps-of-creativity/">The person, product, process, press model of creativity</a>, which researcher Mel Rhodes introduced in 1961, was an attempt to categorize the myriad ways in which creativity had been understood and evaluated until that point. Since then, the understanding of creativity has only grown. </p>
<p>Still others are surprised that the term “creativity” might be applied to nonhuman entities like computers. On this point, we tend to agree with cognitive scientist Margaret Boden, who has argued that the question of whether the term creativity should be applied to AI is a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1609/aimag.v30i3.2254">philosophical rather than scientific question</a>. </p>
<h2>AI’s founders foresaw its creative abilities</h2>
<p>It’s worth noting that we studied only the output of AI in our research. We didn’t study <a href="https://theconversation.com/chatgpt-dall-e-2-and-the-collapse-of-the-creative-process-196461">its creative process</a>, which is likely very different from human thinking processes, or the environment in which the ideas were generated. And had we defined creativity as requiring a human person, then we would have had to conclude, by definition, that AI cannot possibly be creative. </p>
<p>But regardless of the debate over definitions of creativity and the creative process, the products generated by the latest versions of AI are novel and useful. We believe this satisfies the definition of creativity that is now dominant in the fields of psychology and science.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the creative abilities of AI’s current iterations are not entirely unexpected. </p>
<p>In their now famous proposal for the <a href="https://home.dartmouth.edu/about/artificial-intelligence-ai-coined-dartmouth">1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence</a>, the founders of AI highlighted their desire to simulate “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence” – including creativity.</p>
<p>In this same proposal, computer scientist Nathaniel Rochester <a href="http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html">revealed his motivation</a>: “How can I make a machine which will exhibit originality in its solution of problems?” </p>
<p>Apparently, AI’s founders believed that creativity, including the originality of ideas, was among the specific forms of human intelligence that machines could emulate.</p>
<p>To me, the surprising creativity scores of GPT-4 and other AI models highlight a more pressing concern: Within U.S. schools, very few official programs and curricula have been implemented to date that specifically target human creativity and <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity?language=en">cultivate its development</a>. </p>
<p>In this sense, the creative abilities now realized by AI may provide a “<a href="https://www.space.com/10437-sputnik-moment.html">Sputnik moment</a>” for educators and others interested in furthering human creative abilities, including those who see creativity as an essential condition of individual, social and economic growth.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211598/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Erik Guzik does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Researchers had college students and AI take a standardized test in creative thinking, and all of them were scored by trained evaluators who didn’t know in advance that some had been completed by AI.
Erik Guzik, Assistant Clinical Professor of Management, University of Montana
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/209078
2023-07-11T21:39:41Z
2023-07-11T21:39:41Z
Cursive handwriting is back in Ontario schools. Its success depends on at least 5 things
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536924/original/file-20230711-23-8sett2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C143%2C5045%2C2922&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A student practises cursive handwriting at P.S. 166 in the Queens borough of New York in 2017. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)</span></span></figcaption></figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/cursive-handwriting-is-back-in-ontario-schools-its-success-depends-on-at-least-5-things" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>For many, the return of <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/cursive-writing-ontario-1.6885628">mandatory cursive handwriting instruction in the Ontario curriculum</a>, starting in Grade 3, is a welcome and long-overdue move on the part of the Ministry of Education. It is a re-emphasis on direct instruction in foundational skills. </p>
<p>Handwriting is a learned skill and it must be taught through <a href="https://www.griffinot.com/teaching-handwriting-to-children-what-every-teacher-must-know/">direct, explicit, programmatic, developmentally progressive, consistent and sustained instruction</a> — it will not simply be “caught” incidentally.</p>
<p>It is also not an end in and of itself, but a means to an end. It is not about presentation effects and looking pretty on the page. Rather, it is a powerful tool that affords a child a growing sense <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19899540">of confidence, pride and agency that their thoughts matter</a>. </p>
<p>Here are some considerations about the significance of this announcement, and what will be needed to effectively implement the curricular shift.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536913/original/file-20230711-19-vfn0ew.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C249%2C5309%2C2666&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536913/original/file-20230711-19-vfn0ew.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536913/original/file-20230711-19-vfn0ew.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536913/original/file-20230711-19-vfn0ew.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536913/original/file-20230711-19-vfn0ew.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536913/original/file-20230711-19-vfn0ew.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536913/original/file-20230711-19-vfn0ew.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Learning how to write fluently by hand affords a child a growing sense of confidence. A Grade 3 student practises cursive handwriting at P.S. 166 in the Queens borough of New York in 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>How one writes connected to what one can say</h2>
<p>Steve Graham, an expert in how writing can be used to support reading and learning, has spent decades of his scholarly life studying children’s handwriting. He finds that a <a href="https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/graham.pdf">legible, fluent/fast script contributes significantly to the quality of text generated</a>. </p>
<p>My own research findings accord with those reported by Graham: in a study of writing by 245 Grade 4 students, fewer then 50 per cent of those <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10573569.2018.1499160">students’ handwriting was under sufficient control to express their ideas on paper</a>. Research suggests this can <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1468798414522825">impede their academic success</a> as the demands for written literacy accelerate over time, beginning in Grade 4. </p>
<p>For young learners, handwriting is a complex, demanding skill that involves integrating and mobilizing a host of neuromotor, visuospatial and cognitive skills, all in working memory. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Children seen at a school." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536932/original/file-20230711-26-gym9fy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536932/original/file-20230711-26-gym9fy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536932/original/file-20230711-26-gym9fy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536932/original/file-20230711-26-gym9fy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536932/original/file-20230711-26-gym9fy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536932/original/file-20230711-26-gym9fy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536932/original/file-20230711-26-gym9fy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Literacy demands accelerate over time, beginning in Grade 4.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Research in neuro and cognitive sciences</h2>
<p>The resurgence of handwriting comes with evolving research in the neuro and cognitive sciences that underscore its importance in its connection to learning to read and as a cognitive tool. Researchers Daniel J. Plebanek and Karin H. James, experts in psychology and brain sciences, use functional magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activity. They <a href="https://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frym.2022.623953">report enhanced ability to recognize symbols when they are handwritten</a>.</p>
<p>Note-taking by hand <a href="https://theconversation.com/note-taking-by-hand-a-powerful-tool-to-support-memory-144049">improves students’ ability to remember and retrieve information</a> — and gives them a processing advantage. Handwriting lays down <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/191866/the-hand-by-frank-r-wilson">the neurocircuitry to the brain to make meaning, store and retrieve information</a>.</p>
<h2>Teaching handwriting has been marginalized</h2>
<p>Teaching handwriting has long been marginalized in school curriculum, often trivialized <a href="https://theconversation.com/teaching-cursive-handwriting-is-an-outdated-waste-of-time-35368">as just an outdated skill</a>. </p>
<p>Handwriting became crowded out by keyboarding and <a href="https://www.oecd.org/publications/21st-century-readers-a83d84cb-en.htm">digital literacies associated with “21st century”</a> learning goals and the shift <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/the-reading-wars/376990/">to teaching “whole-language pedagogy” that emphasized context and meaning making</a>, often at the expense of the underlying skills required to do so. Yet research reports young students write <a href="https://doi.org/10.1348/000709906x116768">faster and produce better quality text when written by hand in comparison to using a keyboard</a>. </p>
<p>It’s no surprise, then, that in a study from the United States, few teachers <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-007-9064-z">report feeling prepared to teach handwriting</a>. My own research with Grade 2 teachers found many were <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0162353217701201">unaware of how important direct and sustained instruction is</a> for children’s learning trajectories. </p>
<p>In response to the ministry’s announcement about adding cursive instruction, a spokesperson for Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario said the rollout was rushed and “<a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/cursive-writing-ontario-1.6885628">the province’s expectation that educators will be ready to teach the overhauled language curriculum</a> beginning this September is absurd.” </p>
<p>The success of introducing cursive back onto the Ontario curriculum is dependent on a number of key considerations.</p>
<p><strong>1) What script style will be taught?</strong></p>
<p>Various cursive scripts are available. Graham suggests a <a href="http://www.uobabylon.edu.iq/eprints/publication_12_8303_47.pdf">clean, uncluttered, utilitarian/functional script which he describes as mixed mostly manuscript</a>. </p>
<p>With some cursive styles, <a href="https://www.typolar.com/about/stories/index.php?story=alku-handwriting-system">like the Alku style</a>, an economy of effort and ease of execution is afforded by the continuous stroke and the connections between the letters (known as ligatures). These features make the Alku style less demanding on the musculature of little hands and on the shift from visual to motor memory. </p>
<p>Fewer lift-offs from the page, together with making connections, support fluency of hand. Making twists, turns and loops is onerous for young learners. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A hand seen writing connected letters." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536929/original/file-20230711-21-liflwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536929/original/file-20230711-21-liflwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536929/original/file-20230711-21-liflwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536929/original/file-20230711-21-liflwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536929/original/file-20230711-21-liflwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536929/original/file-20230711-21-liflwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536929/original/file-20230711-21-liflwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Some cursive styles are less demanding on the musculature of little hands.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>2) Professional development of kindergarten to Grade 3 teachers.</strong></p>
<p>Many early childhood education practitioners lack <a href="https://childrensliteracy.ca/cclf/media/PDFs/ECE-Survey.pdf">the insights, pedagogical knowledge and skill to teach early literacy skills to young learners</a>. Initial teacher preparation programs at colleges and universities may not place sufficient emphasis on teaching early literacy skills, leaving these to the professional development needs of teachers. </p>
<p><strong>3) Teachers need good learning resources.</strong></p>
<p>Sample scripts for both lower and upper case, and manuscript to cursive hand will be necessary. Tracing sheets that reinforce direction and stroke sequence, copying exercises and illustrative exemplars of progress that show students what to look for will also be helpful for teachers. Script strips to tape onto each student’s desk and a wall chart will be helpful as permanent external memory supports.</p>
<p><strong>4) Interventions in the preschool years.</strong></p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/nov2017/emergent-writing">foundations of cursive handwriting are optimally learned in early childhood</a>, with emergent writing that reflects their understanding of print as symbolic markings, and the beginnings of movement for drawing shapes. These understandings and skills are highly predictive of later success in written literacy development. </p>
<p><strong>5) Making the time!</strong></p>
<p>For teachers, it does not take a lot of time — 20 minutes of direct instruction daily, plus 40 minutes of extension and practice activities. This could involve a variety of printing and handwriting activities that are meaningful and purposeful for students. It could look like making cards and posters, partner and group activities that work on fine motor skills (like how many gummy bears can you pick up with a pair of chopsticks). Children need to automatize and create the muscle memory of how a letter is traced, and the direction and path of strokes. With worksheets, children can be asked to circle their best letter. </p>
<p>While cursive has been undervalued and misunderstood for many years, there <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-athletes-way/202010/why-cursive-handwriting-is-good-your-brain">is a compelling case for cursive handwriting on the curriculum</a>.</p>
<p>Can we get it right this time?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/209078/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hetty Roessingh receives funding from SSHRC</span></em></p>
Handwriting is a learned skill that must be taught through direct, developmentally progressive, consistent and sustained instruction. Teachers will need professional development and resources.
Hetty Roessingh, Professor, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/207480
2023-06-23T12:28:05Z
2023-06-23T12:28:05Z
The folly of making art with text-to-image generative AI
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/533577/original/file-20230622-5172-et0jx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=334%2C162%2C1369%2C838&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Obtaining a desired image can be a long exercise in trial and error.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://i0.wp.com/syncedreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/image-92.png?resize=1153%2C580&ssl=1">OpenAI</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Making art using artificial intelligence isn’t new. <a href="https://news.artnet.com/art-world/artificial-intelligence-art-history-2045520">It’s as old as AI itself</a>. </p>
<p>What’s new is that a wave of tools now let most people generate images by entering a text prompt. All you need to do is write “a landscape in the style of van Gogh” into a text box, and the AI can create a beautiful image as instructed. </p>
<p>The power of this technology lies in its capacity to use human language to control art generation. But do these systems accurately translate an artist’s vision? Can bringing language into art-making truly lead to artistic breakthroughs? </p>
<h2>Engineering outputs</h2>
<p>I’ve worked with generative AI <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=DxQiCiIAAAAJ&hl=en">as an artist and computer scientist</a> for years, and I would argue that this new type of tool constrains the creative process. </p>
<p>When you write a text prompt to generate an image with AI, there are infinite possibilities. If you’re a casual user, you might be happy with what AI generates for you. And startups and investors <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/08/generative-ai-silicon-valleys-next-trillion-dollar-companies.html">have poured billions</a> into this technology, seeing it as an easy way to generate graphics for articles, video game characters and advertisements.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Grid of many images of cartoon women in various costumes." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/533578/original/file-20230622-19-fg7z51.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/533578/original/file-20230622-19-fg7z51.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=285&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533578/original/file-20230622-19-fg7z51.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=285&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533578/original/file-20230622-19-fg7z51.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=285&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533578/original/file-20230622-19-fg7z51.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=358&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533578/original/file-20230622-19-fg7z51.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=358&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533578/original/file-20230622-19-fg7z51.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=358&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Generative AI is seen as a promising tool for coming up with video game characters.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/X-Y_plot_of_algorithmically-generated_AI_art_by_different_science-fiction_subgenres.png">Benlisquare/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In contrast, an artist might need to write an essaylike prompt to generate a high-quality image that reflects their vision – with the right composition, the right lighting and the correct shading. That long prompt is not necessarily descriptive of the image but typically uses lots of keywords to invoke the system of what’s in the artist’s mind. There’s a relatively new term for this: <a href="https://time.com/6272103/ai-prompt-engineer-job/">prompt engineering</a>.</p>
<p>Basically, the role of an artist using these tools is reduced to reverse-engineering the system to find the right keywords to compel the system to generate the desired output. It takes a lot of effort, and much trial and error, to find the right words.</p>
<h2>AI isn’t as intelligent as it seems</h2>
<p>To learn how to better control the outputs, it’s important to recognize that most of these systems <a href="https://theconversation.com/generative-ai-is-a-minefield-for-copyright-law-207473">are trained on images and captions from the internet</a>. </p>
<p>Think about what a typical image caption tells about an image. Captions are typically written to complement the visual experience in web browsing. </p>
<p>For example, the caption might describe the name of the photographer and the copyright holder. On some websites, like Flickr, a caption typically describes the type of camera and the lens used. On other sites, the caption describes the graphic engine and hardware used to render an image. </p>
<p>So to write a useful text prompt, users need to insert many nondescriptive keywords for the AI system to create a corresponding image.</p>
<p>Today’s AI systems are not as intelligent as they seem; they are essentially smart retrieval systems that have a huge memory and work by association.</p>
<h2>Artists frustrated by a lack of control</h2>
<p>Is this really the sort of tool that can help artists create great work? </p>
<p>At Playform AI, a generative AI art platform that I founded, we <a href="https://www.playform.io/editorial/survey">conducted a survey</a> to better understand artists’ experiences with generative AI. We collected responses from over 500 digital artists, traditional painters, photographers, illustrators and graphic designers who had used platforms such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, among others. </p>
<p>Only 46% of the respondents found such tools to be “very useful,” while 32% found them somewhat useful but couldn’t integrate them to their workflow. The rest of the users – 22% – didn’t find them useful at all. </p>
<p>The main limitation artists and designers highlighted was a lack of control. On a scale 0 to 10, with 10 being most control, respondents described their ability to control the outcome to be between 4 and 5. Half the respondents found the outputs interesting, but not of a high enough quality to be used in their practice. </p>
<p>When it came to beliefs about whether generative AI would influence their practice, 90% of the artists surveyed thought that it would; 46% believed that the effect would be a positive one, with 7% predicting that it would have a negative effect. And 37% thought their practice would be affected but weren’t sure in what way. </p>
<h2>The best visual art transcends language</h2>
<p>Are these limitations fundamental, or will they just go away as the technology improves? </p>
<p>Of course, newer versions of generative AI will give users more control over outputs, along with higher resolutions and better image quality. </p>
<p>But to me, the main limitation, as far as art is concerned, is foundational: it’s the process of using language as the main driver in generating the image. </p>
<p>Visual artists, by definition, are <a href="https://psmag.com/news/the-thinking-process-of-the-visual-artist">visual thinkers</a>. When they imagine their work, they usually draw from visual references, not words – a memory, a collection of photographs or other art they’ve encountered. </p>
<p>When language is in the driver’s seat of image generation, I see an extra barrier between the artist and the digital canvas. Pixels will be rendered only through the lens of language. Artists lose the freedom of manipulating pixels outside the boundaries of semantics.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/533559/original/file-20230622-5432-utxd4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Grid of different cartoon images of an animal with wings." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/533559/original/file-20230622-5432-utxd4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/533559/original/file-20230622-5432-utxd4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=721&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533559/original/file-20230622-5432-utxd4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=721&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533559/original/file-20230622-5432-utxd4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=721&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533559/original/file-20230622-5432-utxd4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533559/original/file-20230622-5432-utxd4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533559/original/file-20230622-5432-utxd4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The same input can lead to a range of random outputs.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/DALL-E_sample.png">OpenAI/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There’s another fundamental limitation in text-to-image technology.</p>
<p>If two artists enter the exact same prompt, it’s very unlikely that the system will generate the same image. That’s not due to anything the artist did; the different outcomes are simply due the AI’s <a href="https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2021-07-11-diffusion-models/">starting from different random initial images</a>. </p>
<p>In other words, the artist’s output is boiled down to chance.</p>
<p>Nearly two-thirds of the artists we surveyed had concerns that their AI generations might be similar to other artists’ works and that the technology does not reflect their identity – or even replaces it altogether.</p>
<p>The issue of artist identity is crucial when it comes to making and recognizing art. In the 19th century, when photography started to become popular, there was <a href="https://theconversation.com/generative-ai-is-a-minefield-for-copyright-law-207473">a debate about whether photography was a form of art</a>. It came down to a court case in France in 1861 to decide whether photography could be copyrighted as an art form. The decision hinged on whether an artist’s unique identity could be expressed through photographs. </p>
<p>Those same questions emerge when considering AI systems that are taught with the internet’s existing images. </p>
<p>Before the emergence of text-to-image prompting, <a href="https://theconversation.com/when-the-line-between-machine-and-artist-becomes-blurred-103149">creating art with AI was a more elaborate process</a>: Artists usually trained their own AI models based on their own images. That allowed them to use their own work as visual references and retain more control over the outputs, which better reflected their unique style.</p>
<p>Text-to-image tools might be useful for certain creators and casual everyday users who want to create graphics for a work presentation or a social media post. </p>
<p>But when it comes to art, I can’t see how text-to-image software can adequately reflect the artist’s true intentions or capture the beauty and emotional resonance or works that grip viewers and makes them see the world anew.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207480/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The author is the founder of Playform AI</span></em></p>
Visual artists draw from visual references, not words, as they imagine their work. So when language is in the driver’s seat of making art, it erects a barrier between the artist and the canvas.
Ahmed Elgammal, Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Art & AI Lab, Rutgers University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/206190
2023-06-22T20:07:05Z
2023-06-22T20:07:05Z
Friday essay: ‘the problem is that my success seems to get in his way’ – the fraught terrain of literary marriages
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/533324/original/file-20230622-17-5mqmny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1000%2C667&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Anna McGahan as Charmian Clift in the State Theatre Company's Hydra. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby/State Theatre Company</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“It’s true to say that writers are selfish people,” the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard once said. “But it’s not quite enough of an excuse.” </p>
<p>Howard was married to British author <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/1995/oct/23/fiction.kingsleyamis">Kingsley Amis</a>. Novelist <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-pre-eminent-novelist-critic-of-his-generation-martin-amiss-pyrotechnic-prose-captured-lifes-destructive-energies-206069">Martin Amis</a>, Kingsley’s son, credited his stepmother for encouraging his own writing career – not his father. But exhausted by the biggest child in the house – Kingsley – Howard often felt “too worn down by insecurity and fatigue to write”.
“He got up and wrote,” Howard recalled. “Then he ate lunch, had a walk or sleep, and then he wrote again.” </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532651/original/file-20230619-20-zgkszc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532651/original/file-20230619-20-zgkszc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532651/original/file-20230619-20-zgkszc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532651/original/file-20230619-20-zgkszc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532651/original/file-20230619-20-zgkszc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532651/original/file-20230619-20-zgkszc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532651/original/file-20230619-20-zgkszc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532651/original/file-20230619-20-zgkszc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Writes Carmela Ciuraru, in her book <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780062356918/lives-of-the-wives/">Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages</a>: “It was an idyllic existence – for him.” Howard, she notes, published three novels in the 18-year marriage; Amis published nearly 20.</p>
<p><a href="https://pushkinpress.com/our-authors/elsa-morante/">Elsa Morante</a>, the Italian author who inspired <a href="https://overland.org.au/2016/10/her-real-name-on-the-unmasking-of-elena-ferrante/">Elena Ferrante</a>, once wrote, “literary couples are a plague”. Married to novelist <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/27/obituaries/alberto-moravia-novelist-is-dead-at-82.html">Alberto Moravia</a>, her partnership (like that of Howard and Amis) is chronicled in Ciuraru’s book – along with <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-man-behind-matilda-what-roald-dahl-was-really-like-62810">Roald Dahl</a> and actor <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/06/patricia-neal-interview-roald-dahl-1971">Patricia Neal</a>, sculptor and translator <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Una_Vincenzo,_Lady_Troubridge">Una Troubridge</a> and author <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radclyffe_Hall">Radclyffe Hall</a>, and author <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/books/10dundy.html">Elaine Dundy</a>, married to British theatre critic <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/arts/critic/feature/0,,567652,00.html">Kenneth Tynan</a>. </p>
<p>When both people in a relationship are writers, creative space is a faultline. So are matters such as who looks after the kids, inspiration turf wars, and yes, jealousy about success. As Ciaruru shows, it’s often the wives who ultimately choose writing over wedded bliss.</p>
<h2>Rooms – or tables – of their own</h2>
<p>The tension starts with writing space. Virginia Woolf famously observed that money and time is required for <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-a-room-of-ones-own-virginia-woolfs-feminist-call-to-arms-145398">a room of one’s own</a>. At Monk House, Woolf built a new writing lodge after she was irritated by her publisher husband Leonard and their dog. “The little noise upsets me; I can’t think what I was going to say.” </p>
<p>Most writing couples don’t have Monk House and its grounds to divide, especially in the early years. Instead they scrap over who gets the dining room table, or share it – as <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-woman-ahead-of-her-time-remembering-the-australian-writer-charmian-clift-50-years-on-117322">Charmian Clift</a> and <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/johnston-george-2277">George Johnston</a> did while writing <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2760144-the-sponge-divers?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=NCm9r8O0XL&rank=1">The Sponge Divers</a> together on the Greek island of Kalymnos in the early 1950s. They later upgraded to a shared home studio on the island of Hydra. </p>
<p>Clift’s biographer, <a href="http://nadiawheatley.com/the-life-and-myth-of-charmian-clift">Nadia Wheatley</a>, writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The image of Charmian and George writing together is a potent one: two people bashing away at two typewriters on the one table. Stacks of typescript – his spilling over into hers; hers ending up in the middle of his – the air wreathed in cigarette smoke […]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Novelist <a href="https://kristinwilliamson.com.au/">Kristin Williamson</a> and her playwright husband David also started out table sharing, less harmoniously. In her biography of David, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21949734-david-williamson">Behind the Scenes</a>, she remembers that compared to David’s typing, she felt like a “slug on tranquilisers”. They since always ensured each has a room of their own in later houses. But as Kristin <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/under-the-covers-20040724-gdjen8.html">quips</a>, “David’s is larger. His rooms always have been.”</p>
<p>When Australian authors <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/04/ruth-park-brings-sydneys-past-to-life-more-than-any-other-writer">Ruth Park</a> (originally a New Zealander) and <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/niland-darcy-francis-11242">D’Arcy Niland</a> lived in a rented inner-city room in Sydney’s Surry Hills, the suburb that inspired her novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1855153.The_Harp_in_the_South?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=mnZ7pblm10&rank=1">The Harp in the South</a> (1948), they wrote story ideas on each other’s palms in bed. Park recalls that when they finally moved into a flat that had more room, Niland:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>made a beeline for the dining room table, excitedly opened the typewriter, and spread out his dictionaries, papers, and reference books. “Look!” he cried. “I’ve a proper place to work at last”. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Park tried to share the table. But “gradually his papers encroached, files ostentatiously fell to the floor; the carriage of my typewriter constantly hit things […]” She gave up. Park reflects in her second memoir, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2859274-fishing-in-the-styx">Fishing in the Styx</a>, that she should have fought harder for space to write, but “the ironing board was a minuscule price to pay for all the good things in his character and our relationship”. They eventually moved into a large but decaying house.</p>
<p>Kenneth Tynan, by contrast, made his wife plain uncomfortable when she turned from acting to writing after they married in 1951. Observes Ciuraru, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Whereas he had his study as a refuge […] Elaine (Dundy) wrote each day “slowly but steadily” on the living room sofa with a typewriter propped up on her knees. Her back hurt.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Space causes friction between established writers too. Murray Bail demanded total solitude while writing <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/319480.Eucalyptus?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=DQpHGaub4s&rank=1">Eucalyptus</a> (1998). Garner diarised her exile from their apartment that was his workspace in the third volume of her published diaries, <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/how-to-end-a-story-diaries-1995-1998">How to End a Story</a>. </p>
<p>Garner felt forced to rent a bland office. Even on weekends, or with the flu, she felt unwelcome at home:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>With a friend who is married to a painter, I compared notes about our respective husbands and their demands […] Like me she is expected to run the house, do the shopping and cooking, and keep the home fires burning, all this without being permitted on the premises during work hours. I saw in her face my unhappiness. We did not know whether, or how, we could go tolerating their regimes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She fears she will “wither away with loneliness”. After the office lease ends, Garner moves out to a new apartment of her own, and separation.</p>
<p>Separate spaces, however, kept the Morante-Moravia union together. Morante, who died in 1985, published four Italian novels, including the acclaimed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Liars">House of Liars</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27isola_di_Arturo">Arturo’s Island</a>, and volumes of essays, short stories and poetry. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=864&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=864&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=864&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Elsa Morante.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Her husband said: “Writing was her life”; she called her characters “my people”. Morante preferred cats, who did not criticise her work or interrupt her. </p>
<p>Moravia was an Italian literary lion after his 1929 debut, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/sk/book/show/67145">The Time of Indifference</a>. She and Morante hid in a one-room hut in the mountains for nine months during World War II (which later inspired Moravia’s 1957 novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67143.Two_Women">Two Women</a>.) </p>
<p>Ciaruru quotes Moravia as recalling this time together as “their greatest intimacy”. After the war, Moravia bought Morante a small apartment to use as a writing studio, largely funded by his bestselling novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12250543-the-woman-of-rome">The Woman of Rome</a> (1947).</p>
<p>“She says I am too noisy, too nervous, that she needs privacy,” he said. “I can write in a hotel lobby or with someone playing (the bass) in the chair near me.”</p>
<p>Morante admitted she was a “a little ashamed” about insisting on solitude. But, “if I had to write near Alberto I probably would not write at all. And I would be unhappy.” Moravia understood, and was happy and prolific amid his noise in their villa, publishing classics including <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67146.The_Conformist">The Conformist</a> (1951), <a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/movie-review-bernardo-bertoluccis-the-conformist-returns.html">adapted into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci</a> in 1970.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-sex-swimming-and-smudgy-louvres-watching-monkey-grip-40-years-on-187625">Friday essay: sex, swimming and smudgy louvres – watching Monkey Grip 40 years on</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Domestic tensions</h2>
<p>If kids come along, things get more fraught. Pregnant again in 1948, with her first child only seven months old, Clift was frustrated. She and Johnston had just won a Sydney Morning Herald novel prize for their collaboration, <a href="https://www.charmianclift.com.au/high-valley">High Valley</a>. Clift recalled: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>At this point I should have taken wings and started to fly but […] I was involved in having children […] I think those are terribly difficult years for any young woman and for a young woman who wants to write or paint or anything else, even more so. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>After they moved to Kalymnos in 1954, she gratefully paid a local woman to help. She did the same on Hydra, when their third child was born on the island. Later, back in Australia, Clift applied for a literary grant for “domestic help”. </p>
<p>Something has to give – and it’s the housework or childcare, not writing, if they can afford it.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1258&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1258&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1258&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">D'Arcy Niland and Ruth Park.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Others muddle through. A single mother, Garner grabbed precious school hours at a library to write her debut novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/634141.Monkey_Grip">Monkey Grip</a>. </p>
<p>It is telling that Ruth Park wrote Harp in the South while visiting her parents in New Zealand, so had family help. Soon after its release, back in Sydney, her husband left for a research trip for his novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/625198.The_Shiralee?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=9CeitNq8gc&rank=1">The Shiralee</a>, and she was left with the three children and no mother to help – Park couldn’t afford childcare, despite her success.</p>
<p>She then devised the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Muddle-Headed_Wombat">Muddle-Headed Wombat</a> series while her now five children had chicken pox and D’Arcy was on another research trip. Park recalls, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I again pondered bitterly the question of which one of us it was who carried the Shiralee, which I now understood meant burden. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Domestic tensions are not restricted to childcare. Elaine Dundy’s daughter, Tracy, had a nanny but Elaine still declined invitations to attend opening nights with her critic husband. Instead, she would stay home to write her novels. In response, Tynan was “embarrassed and angered” that his wife put her writing before appearances to support his work. </p>
<p>Garner writes that she was upset Bail did not welcome her now-adult daughter and fiancee at their home, seeing their presence as another imposition on his writing life. Nor did she feel free to “be messing around at home”.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532633/original/file-20230619-23-57piop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532633/original/file-20230619-23-57piop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532633/original/file-20230619-23-57piop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=729&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532633/original/file-20230619-23-57piop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=729&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532633/original/file-20230619-23-57piop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=729&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532633/original/file-20230619-23-57piop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532633/original/file-20230619-23-57piop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532633/original/file-20230619-23-57piop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Elizabeth Jane Howard.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikipedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Prior to meeting Kingsley Amis, Howard, an established novelist, had left her first husband and daughter, Nicola, as she was “selfishly determined to be a writer”. Nicola called her mother “a very beautiful stranger” in her childhood. </p>
<p>Ironically, Amis’s own selfishness overwhelmed Howard’s. She managed his moods and meals. She was his secretary and chauffeur and regularly catered dinner parties for up to 12 people where Amis could hold court, as well being a stepmother to her two stepsons, who lived with them.</p>
<p>Her complaints were met with Amis’s decree, “I’m older, heavier and earn more money”.</p>
<p>Morante did not have children, though Ciuraru suggests this was not by choice. While she adored children, Ciararu wonders if the reality would have been challenging given “daily life made her lose patience and become difficult”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-woman-ahead-of-her-time-remembering-the-australian-writer-charmian-clift-50-years-on-117322">'A woman ahead of her time': remembering the Australian writer Charmian Clift, 50 years on</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Literary ambition</h2>
<p>Fights over space and the kids set the scene for the most ferocious faultline: literary ambition. Ciaruru sums up the creative competition when describing Amis and Howard: “both were ambitious writers, only one could achieve success”. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1208&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1208&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1208&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Tynan’s toxic jealousy fully emerged after the successful release of Dundy’s debut novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1059856.The_Dud_Avocado">The Dud Avocado</a>, in 1958. “He confronted Elaine, warning if she ever dared to write another book, he would divorce her.” She began writing a new novel the next morning. They divorced four years later in 1964. </p>
<p>Some literary couples share success – to a point. Though possessive of the table, Niland encouraged Park to write Harp in the South. Wheatley notes of Clift-Johnston: “one of the common misconceptions about the relationship was that Charmian was perennially jealous of George’s output and success.” </p>
<p>Similarly, Wheatley recounts that Johnston “recognised [his wife] as a fellow writer, and indeed for many years he even publicly acknowledged that by literary standards she was a better writer than he was.”</p>
<p>According to Ciuraru, Moravia “spoke often and admiringly of Elsa’s genius, no matter the state of their marriage”, which he described as “a man and a woman in a very difficult, very personal relationship”. </p>
<p>But sharing in success has its limits. After the Sponge Divers collaboration, Clift carved creative space of her own:</p>
<p>“Actually of course, [The Sponge Divers] was a phoney [sic] collaboration because I was beyond the stage where I could collaborate any longer. I wanted to work in my own way. This was probably very egotistical, but most writers have this.”</p>
<p>As well as her Island memoirs and essays, Clift later published a novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4600900-honours-mimic">Honour’s Mimic</a>, under her own name.</p>
<p>Williamson, the author of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6936173-tanglewood">Tanglewood</a> and other novels, quotes David’s reaction to her turning to creative writing from journalism: “Hey, this is my patch. But after I saw the work she was doing I was very impressed.” She qualifies, “I was writing novels rather than plays – imagine If I had dared to write a play!”</p>
<p>But Kristin declares that she first thought of the idea for David’s play, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9789009-siren">Siren</a>, borne out of his affair: she planned to write it as a novel. The couple fought over the idea, arguing it was both their “lived experience”. Kristin capitulated, but “felt somewhat bitter about it for a while”. David later publicly gave her credit, and their marriage survived the literary explosion.</p>
<h2>Vacating the field</h2>
<p>Not so Garner and Bail. Her fifth work of fiction <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/cosmo-cosmolino">Cosmo Cosmolino</a>, was published the year she and Bail married (1992). But during the marriage she published her first book-length work of non-fiction, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2738022-the-first-stone">The First Stone</a>, and the anthology, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35576146">True Stories</a>. </p>
<p>As Bail wrote his novel, in her diary, Garner realises:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All this jabber I carry on with lately, about how I’m heading for non-fiction, leaving fiction behind […] suddenly it strikes me that what I’m doing is vacating the field. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Garner adds:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He is generous as he can possibly be about my book and its success, but if I had success like that with a novel there’d be serious trouble […] Maybe it is true then. A woman artist who wants to develop as far as she can needs to live alone […] The problem is that my success seems to get in his way. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The marriage ended in 1998, after <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/eucalyptus">Eucalyptus</a> was published. Garner returned to fiction in 2008 with <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20895311.The_Spare_Room">The Spare Room.</a>.</p>
<p>After divorcing Tynan, Dundy wrote two novels, as well as biographies of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63328055-elvis-and-gladys">Elvis Presley’s mother</a> and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/272578.Finch_Bloody_Finch">Peter Finch</a>. Howard’s literary output also rocketed after divorcing Amis in 1983. She was encouraged by her stepson, Martin Amis, to write <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/fiction/cazalet-chronicles-books-in-order">The Cazalet Chronicles</a>, a series of novels that drew on her family story,that were later adapted for television as The Cazalets.</p>
<p>With all these faultlines, it’s no wonder married authors keep their own names for continuous identity within and beyond a marriage. Morante “could not stand being called by her married name”, and could not fathom how other women “could tolerate this elision of their identity”.</p>
<p>Asked once in an interview if Moravia had influenced her work, Morante stiffened. “No,” she said. “He has an identity and I have an identity. <em>Basta</em>.” </p>
<p>She stopped the interview.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206190/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kerrie Davies does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
‘Literary couples are a plague,’ wrote Elsa Morante, married to Alberto Moravia. They’re one of the couples in this lively exploration of what happens when two writers share loves and lives.
Kerrie Davies, Lecturer, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/207709
2023-06-16T17:42:27Z
2023-06-16T17:42:27Z
Cormac McCarthy’s fearless approach to writing
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532288/original/file-20230615-27-es4rpl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C17%2C1930%2C1298&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">McCarthy attends the 2009 premiere of the film adaptation of his novel 'The Road.'</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/ObitCormacMcCarthy/e76e31de4fce44e5becba9a64b06a2f7/photo?Query=Cormac%20McCarthy&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=19&currentItemNo=0">Evan Agostini/AP Photo</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Cormac McCarthy, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/books/cormac-mccarthy-dead.html">who died on June 13, 2023</a>, at the age of 89, is often characterized rather narrowly <a href="https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/texas/articles/cormac-mccarthy-reinventing-the-southern-gothic/">as a Southern writer</a>, or perhaps <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/the-read-down/want-read-southern-gothic-heres-start/">a Southern Gothic writer</a>.</p>
<p>McCarthy did lean heavily on <a href="https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/local/2023/06/15/remembering-cormac-mccarthys-legacy-and-early-life-in-east-tennessee/70320788007/">his Tennessee upbringing</a> in his first four novels, and he set many others in the deserts of the Southwest U.S. However, as a writer, he saw himself as a part of an expansive literary community, one that stretched back to the classical and Elizabethan periods, and one that drew on a variety of genres, cultures and influences.</p>
<p>His unique and varying writing style has been compared with that of many of the greatest authors of American letters, with scholars highlighting connections to the writings of <a href="https://readingmccarthy.buzzsprout.com/1616140/8480163-episode-9-melville-and-mccarthy-with-steven-frye">Herman Melville</a>, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cormac-mccarthy-in-context/ernest-hemingway/D3D8FDEB9548A1D4786480EAA3B39714">Ernest Hemingway</a>, <a href="https://www.openculture.com/2023/06/the-three-punctuation-rules-of-cormac-mccarthy-rip.html">James Joyce</a>, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Hypermasculinities_in_the_Contemporary_N.html?id=WmnBoAEACAAJ">Toni Morrison</a>, <a href="https://lithub.com/harold-bloom-on-cormac-mccarthy-true-heir-to-melville-and-faulkner/">Thomas Pynchon</a>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2023/06/cormac-mccarthys-irrational-apocalypse/">Fyodor Dostoevsky</a>, <a href="https://themarginaliareview.com/how-flannery-oconnor-and-cormac-mccarthy-helped-to-invent-the-south/">Flannery O’Connor</a> and <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-orchard.html?scp=7&sq=The%2520Orchard&st=cse">William Faulkner</a>. </p>
<p>As such an unwieldy list of compatriots suggests, McCarthy is an author who experimented with language and literary technique. Each of his books typically departs radically in tone, structure and prose from the previous one.</p>
<p>I’m currently working on a book that’s tentatively titled “How Cormac Works: McCarthy, Language, and Style.” In it, I trace McCarthy’s career-long commitment to playing with style, particularly his approach to narration and his techniques for conveying a mood.</p>
<h2>Two radically different reading experiences</h2>
<p>Depending on the book – and even passages within certain books – McCarthy’s writing can be characterized as minimalistic, meandering, esoteric, humorous, terrifying, pretentious, sentimental or folksy. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Title page of book reading 'Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West,' followed by author's name." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The title page for the first edition of McCarthy’s 1985 novel ‘Blood Meridian.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Blood_Meridian_%281985_1st_ed_half_title_page%29.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some novels depend heavily on dense passages of narrative exposition and philosophizing, while others lean heavily on everyday dialogue. Some books celebrate regional voices and vernacular, and others adopt a neutral, removed and clinical tone.</p>
<p>It is possible to see McCarthy’s literary range and stylistic experimentation in two of his most famous novels, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110472/blood-meridian-by-cormac-mccarthy/">Blood Meridian</a>,” which came out in 1985, and “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110490/the-road-by-cormac-mccarthy/">The Road</a>,” which was published over two decades later, in 2006, and was turned <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0898367/">into a movie</a> in 2009.</p>
<p>In “Blood Meridian,” set in the desert of the Southwest U.S. and Mexico, McCarthy’s prose is dense, with details piling up one after another. </p>
<p>Take the famous scene in which a mercenary gang of American scalp hunters encounters a band of Comanche warriors:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador. … ”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The entire sentence is much too long to quote here. But you get the picture: There is very little punctuation and there are few places to even take a breath. </p>
<p>The narration in other moments of the novel catalogs the desert landscape of the U.S. West in similarly painstaking and tedious – if also beautiful – detail. The prose feels drawn out, slow and repetitive, like the subject of the novel: the United States’ western expansion in the 19th century, a campaign of escalating destruction that McCarthy characterizes in the novel as “some heliotropic plague.”</p>
<p>“The Road,” a later novel similarly committed to the idea of incessant movement, could not be more different in its style, pacing and rhythm. The prose in that novel, which won <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/cormac-mccarthy">the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction</a>, is concise and is marked by a linguistic restraint that’s entirely absent in “Blood Meridian.” </p>
<p>Rather than dense and overwhelming passages, this novel is constructed of short and distinct paragraphs that are separated by white space and often unrelated to what comes directly before or after:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was colder. Nothing moved in that night world. A rich smell of woodsmoke hung over the road. He pushed the cart on through the snow. … </p>
<p>In his dream she was sick and he cared for her. The dream bore the look of sacrifice but he thought differently. … </p>
<p>On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was? </p>
<p>Dark of invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. … </p>
<p>People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Each paragraph in this passage is different in tone, subject matter, place, and time from what comes before and appears after. </p>
<h2>A lasting legacy</h2>
<p>It might be tempting to see such difference as an evolution, as McCarthy honing and taming his narrative voice from his earlier work. But his final long novel, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110481/the-passenger-by-cormac-mccarthy/">The Passenger</a>,” which was published in 2022, returns again to the rambling prose reminiscent of McCarthy’s big novels in the middle of his career, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110485/suttree-by-cormac-mccarthy/">Suttree</a>” and “Blood Meridian.”</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Black and white photo of man with mustache folding his arms." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A portrait of McCarthy used for the first edition of his 1973 novel ‘Child of God.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Cormac_McCarthy_%28Child_of_God_author_portrait_-_high-res%29.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some readers find McCarthy’s stylistic flourishes and experimentation excessive – or, even worse, pretentious. But they always struck me as reflecting his love of words and the endless possibilities of language. </p>
<p>In a blurb that was originally written for McCarthy’s first novel, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110489/the-orchard-keeper-by-cormac-mccarthy/">The Orchard Keeper</a>,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/17/obituaries/ralph-ellison-author-of-invisible-man-is-dead-at-80.html">Ralph Ellison</a> <a href="https://www.fedpo.com/images/TheOrchardKeeper/04TheOrchardKeeper.jpg">wrote</a>, “McCarthy is a writer to be read, to be admired, and quite honestly – envied.” </p>
<p>As I learned of McCarthy’s death, I couldn’t help but think of this quote that marked the beginning of his career, and to think how right Ellison was to champion McCarthy’s craft – the careful use of language that sustained his work for six decades across 12 novels.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207709/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bill Hardwig does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author was always willing to experiment with his prose, pacing and narration, crafting an oeuvre that varied wildly in style and structure.
Bill Hardwig, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/207758
2023-06-16T15:01:46Z
2023-06-16T15:01:46Z
Cormac McCarthy: a powerful writer who wrote beautifully about apocalypse and extinction
<p>Endings, extinctions, last things preoccupied Cormac McCarthy from the start to the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/books/cormac-mccarthy-dead.html">recent close of his 60-year career</a> as a writer of fiction and, occasionally, drama for stage or screen. His first novel, <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-orchard.html">The Orchard Keeper</a> (1965), ends with the word “dust”. His final novel, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/cormac-mccarthy-the-passenger-stella-maris-book-review/672234/">Stella Maris</a> (2022), allows only the briefest interval before an equivalent termination, finishing with the central character saying she is “waiting for the end of something”. </p>
<p>It is not only in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/nov/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview4">The Road</a> (2006), where environmental devastation has followed “a shear of light and a series of long concussions”, that McCarthy’s reader finds apocalypse. All of his novels, from the early quartet in southern gothic style, through the mid-career westerns, to the last diptych of <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-best-fiction-of-2022-death-and-life-in-cormac-mccarthys-the-passenger-194944">The Passenger</a> (2022) and Stella Maris, show a drive towards the ruined and the depleted.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/07/journeys-in-literature-all-the-pretty-horses-by-cormac-mccarthy">All the Pretty Horses</a> (1992), for example, offers in generous measure the satisfactions of the western: laconic dialogue and male camaraderie, say, or feats of equestrian skill. Yet the novel imagines the US-Mexico borderlands as “cauterized terrain” or “tenantless waste”, inhabited by “the dead standing about in their bones”. </p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/the-unfilmable-blood-meridian-91719">Blood Meridian</a> (1985), McCarthy’s hallucinatory novel about violent American scalp-hunters in Mexico in the 1840s, speaks of “the awful darkness inside the world”. Still more bleakly, The Road proposes “darkness implacable”. </p>
<p>“Darkness implacable” is very adjacent to the “darkness visible” of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The textual echo is unsurprising, for two reasons. </p>
<p>First, though McCarthy was the most materially sensitive of writers (attending minutely to the gait of an injured dog or the splash of a boot in water), he was also one of the most bookish (travelling through the fiction of Herman Melville and William Faulkner, as well as through the landscapes he wrote about). And second, in McCarthy, as in Milton, paradise is lost.</p>
<h2><strong>McCarthy’s style</strong></h2>
<p>Why are some of us so drawn to McCarthy’s cartography of devastation? </p>
<p>An answer of sorts might begin by expanding on that last moment in Stella Maris, when the mentally unwell protagonist tells her therapist she wants him to hold her hand “because that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something”.</p>
<p>McCarthy’s fiction does not exactly hold out a comforting hand in the face of ruin. His fiction chafes against any expectation that it be consoling or therapeutic. But, nevertheless, reading his work can give an exhilarating sense of counter-forces to offset the deathly. (Like experiencing the fiction and drama of Samuel Beckett, perhaps – but with more horses.)</p>
<p>Always, with McCarthy, there are the sentences themselves. His style is not for everyone. Will Self told <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/feb/11/will-self-coen-brothers">The Guardian in 2011</a> that he found McCarthy “to be a writer easily parodied”. </p>
<p>And, yes, you can imagine getting drunk in a McCarthy drinking game that requires players to have a shot each time they encounter in the fiction a fragment of untranslated Spanish, or a comparison with pilgrims or mendicants, or an arcane word such as “cottered” or “cantle” or “sleavings”.</p>
<p>But for McCarthy’s enthusiasts, the prose is expressive of creativity and animation. Take just this sentence from All the Pretty Horses: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>He crossed a dry gypsum playa where the salt crust stove under the horse’s hooves like trodden isinglass.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We’ll come in a moment to the topographical precision, but first there is the acoustic payoff, the reward for our ears, of “salt crust stove” and “trodden isinglass”.</p>
<p>Care is needed here. In <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/literary-theory">Literary Theory, Terry Eagleton</a> has fun with the tradition in English literary criticism that wants words to be just as concrete as things: “the best poem, to caricature the case a little, was one which read aloud sounded rather like chewing an apple”. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, such caution should not deter us from the pleasure of hearing McCarthy’s sentences. And of seeing them, too, as they shift in the same novel from baroque accumulations to compressed formations.</p>
<h2><strong>Words and landscapes</strong></h2>
<p>The sentence from All the Pretty Horses may be crunchy, but it also displays McCarthy’s remarkable sensitivity across his fiction to the particularities of place. Here writer Robert Macfarlane’s book <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/08/landmarks-review-robert-macfarlane">Landmarks</a> is helpful. </p>
<p>“Words are grained into our landscapes,” he says, “and landscapes grained into our words.” And Macfarlane adds, with regard to authors he discusses: “All have written with committing intensity about their chosen territory.”</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q392M4msXwQ?wmode=transparent&start=2" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>McCarthy is thoroughly in this tradition: a writer passionately committed to his preferred landscapes. He brings descriptive abundance even to terrains that seem to the casual glance thin or empty. </p>
<p>Think, for example, of New Mexico’s high country in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/12/books/the-crossing.html">The Crossing</a> (1994), or Nebraska in The Passenger, where the Platte river is “threading the sandbars in the deep burgundy dusk”.</p>
<p>The politics of McCarthy’s fiction is legitimately open to question. For its <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/crossing-the-blood-meridian-cormac-mccarthy-and-american-history/">Anglocentric modelling of Mexico</a>, say, or its stubborn attachment to the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.12.69">white American male</a>. But it is a valuable resource in our current moment of ecocide, alerting us to topographical distinction and to species variation.</p>
<p>Near the end of The Crossing, a character reflects: “It sounds like death is the truth”. Undeniably, death was the truth, the profound subject, in McCarthy’s fiction. </p>
<p>Yet that never meant it had the last word. There was always a new McCarthy sentence, a new McCarthy novel to anticipate. That is no longer the case. Yet this means there is now much rereading for us to do.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207758/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Dix does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The late American writer was drawn towards death and apocalypse, tet to read his work is also to be exhilarated and enlightened.
Andrew Dix, Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Film, Loughborough University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/203597
2023-05-14T06:11:20Z
2023-05-14T06:11:20Z
Ghana school students talk about their social media addiction, and how it affects their use of English
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521818/original/file-20230419-18-6zjdof.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Education stakeholders should pay attention to students' use of social media.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Social media networks such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, YouTube and Instagram <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343971547_THE_IMPACT_OF_SOCIAL_MEDIA_IN_ENGLISH_LANGUAGE_LEARNING">have been shown to have</a> significantly transformed student behaviour. But the <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343971547_THE_IMPACT_OF_SOCIAL_MEDIA_IN_ENGLISH_LANGUAGE_LEARNING">focus</a> has been on students’ social behaviour. And on <a href="https://www.languageservicesdirect.co.uk/social-media-changing-english-language/">how</a> the English language is being spoken because of social media use.</p>
<p>The relationship between social media and students’ English language writing has been largely ignored.</p>
<p>Our team of four researchers who specialise in language studies set out to <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2331186X.2023.2189388">study</a> the relationship between social media use and English language performance. We studied one English as a Second Language class at Fiaseman Senior High School in Tarkwa, western Ghana.</p>
<p>English is Ghana’s official language and is the medium of instruction for all levels of education. </p>
<p>We learnt from the students that they spend significantly long periods of time on various social media platforms. Some even described their use as an “addiction”. We also found that their social media use had resulted in their adoption of shortened forms of English words in their writing, including in their English examinations. </p>
<p>We concluded from our findings that the significantly long periods of time spent on social media platforms was worrying, considering that most of the sites they visited are not pro-learning. This means that they are sites where most activities are not academically oriented.</p>
<p>In our view as language and communication experts, this situation could culminate in poor performances in the English language, as the valuable time students need to study to improve their proficiency is channelled into unproductive exploits on social media.</p>
<p>Our findings are important because in the West African Senior School Certificate Examination, English language is a core subject that students need to pass before gaining entry into institutions of higher learning like universities and training colleges. </p>
<h2>What the students told us</h2>
<p>In Ghana, the West African Senior School Certificate Examination is taken by students after completing their high school coursework. It is primarily a written examination.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2331186X.2023.2189388">Our research</a> targeted a Form 2 class (students who are a year away from writing their final high school exams), made up of 47 students aged 17 and 18 on average. They were one of the largest classes in the school, which offers English as a general subject and Literature-in-English as an elective subject. </p>
<p>All the students in the class volunteered to take part in our study. </p>
<p>We divided the students into seven groups. Our rationale was to obtain diverse in-depth knowledge from them. </p>
<p>The study found that the students were exposed to most social media platforms, especially WhatsApp and Facebook. We also found that participants paid regular visits to social networking sites and spent significantly long periods of time there. One respondent said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I visit social media twice in a day. Sir, I visit there every day. I can’t count. I’m always there.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In addition, participants had been active on social media platforms for significant periods, even before their enrolment into the school. Most participants admitted that they were addicted to social media. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Please, yes. That is very true. I am hundred percent addicted. I can see that I’m very addicted because it is very difficult to control my presence there.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Consequences</h2>
<p>Based on this experience we argue that there are two critical consequences here: the participants are likely not to give their studies the needed time and attention, and their English language performances will be negatively affected, culminating in poor academic progression. </p>
<p>Exacerbating this is the finding that the students frequently use short forms in their academic writings. </p>
<p>Short forms are the unacceptable written forms of English – such as “4” in place of “for”, “u” in place of “you” and “d” in place of “the” – that students transfer from their informal social media interactions into their formal English language examination writing. </p>
<p>Our research indicates that it is a frequent student practice. Interestingly, we found that the participants know that such deviant practices affect their English language performances.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For my side, I use short hands doing chats on social media, and I forget myself and use them in my compositions. I sometimes find myself using short hands in my notes and also in exams.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We concluded that the way in which English is being used in examinations by students is being undermined by their use of the English language on social media. This is a growing trend that will see students struggle to get ahead in the subject, as more formal English language writing is needed for examinations and for further studies.</p>
<h2>What should be done</h2>
<p>We recommend that those involved in education should consider integrating teaching practices that take advantage of social media to engage students. This would allow students to learn during their time on social media platforms. Online dictionaries with pronunciation buttons and websites that offer free educational materials to students, for instance, could come in handy.</p>
<p>Also, teachers should assist students in selecting appropriate social media sites. The academic counselling units of high schools should engage students to sensitise them on social media sites, their importance, dangers and how best to use social media, especially for academic purposes.</p>
<p>All those involved in education should be taking students’ use of social media seriously. Until innovative approaches are implemented, Ghana risks recording mass failures in the English language component of the West African Senior School Certificate Examination.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/203597/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ramos Asafo-Adjei does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Social media use has adversely affected students’ English language learning in Ghanaian schools.
Ramos Asafo-Adjei, Associate Professor, English and Communication Skills, Takoradi Technical University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/204984
2023-05-05T12:17:13Z
2023-05-05T12:17:13Z
The exploitation of Hollywood’s writers is just another symptom of digital feudalism
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524444/original/file-20230504-17-q7bqzi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=112%2C22%2C4865%2C3285&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Striking workers picket outside of Warner Bros. Studios on the second day of the Hollywood writers strike on May 3, 2023, in Burbank, Calif.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/people-picket-outside-of-warner-bros-studios-on-the-second-news-photo/1252595408?adppopup=true">David McNew/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The current Hollywood writers strike has drawn international attention to the plight of TV and film writers <a href="https://www.doi.org/10.1108/9781839827686">in the streaming era</a>. </p>
<p>Much has been made of television’s <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/welcome-to-tvs-second-golden-age/">golden age</a>, during which streaming platforms have offered audiences an abundance of well-written, highly produced television shows, often called “<a href="https://www.vulture.com/2017/03/prestige-tv-signs-youre-watching.html">prestige TV</a>.” </p>
<p>Whereas older television shows tended to be formulaic sitcoms or crime dramas, newer shows more closely mimic <a href="https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2021/10/serial-fiction-part-1/">the serialized novels of the 19th century</a>, with cliff-hangers that encourage <a href="https://theconversation.com/whats-behind-tv-bingeings-bad-rap-74399">binge-watching</a>. </p>
<p>But not everyone in the industry has equally reaped the rewards. While there are certainly more writing jobs to go around, these roles <a href="https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/wga-amptp-contract-strike-deadline-1235599161/">often pay less and place writers on short-order contracts</a>.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the unyielding demand for content, as more and more platforms compete for subscriptions, has trapped writers in what I call “<a href="https://books.emeraldinsight.com/book/detail/digital-feudalism/?k=9781804557693">digital feudalism</a>.” </p>
<h2>Echoes from medieval Europe</h2>
<p>I use the phrase digital feudalism because today’s version of capitalism increasingly mirrors the transition from feudalism to capitalism in 16th-century England.</p>
<p>Beginning in the 16th century, the English Parliament passed <a href="https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/the-enclosure-acts/">a number of enclosure acts</a>, which abolished common land and defined it as private property that the government reallocated to the elites.</p>
<p>These laws kicked peasants, <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/Serf/">known as serfs</a>, off the land where they had lived and worked for generations. Many of them ended up heading to cities in order to find work. The ensuing oversupply of workers drove down wages, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01c.htm">and many ex-serfs couldn’t find jobs or housing</a>, becoming vagabonds.</p>
<p>In other words, serfs lost stability in their everyday lives as they were thrust into a new economic system.</p>
<p>Precarity, debt and a lack of stability <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/the-age-of-the-crisis-of-work-quiet-quitting-great-resignation/">are again the dominant themes</a> in today’s digital economy. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/05/what-gig-economy-workers/">The gig economy</a>, in which people can juggle two or three part-time roles to make ends meet, is largely to blame. These jobs <a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-gargantuan-gig-swindle-albert">usually don’t offer</a> full-time benefits, livable wages or job security. The roles – whether they’re working as an Uber driver, delivering food for DoorDash or cleaning homes through Task Rabbit – are often managed through digital platforms owned by powerful corporations that give their workers a pittance in exchange for their labor.</p>
<h2>The serfs of Hollywood</h2>
<p>So, why are TV writers feeling the pinch of digital feudalism if this is the golden age of television? </p>
<p>Streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu and HBO Max brought about the golden age. <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2023/03/peak-tv-over-golden-age-hbo-streaming.html">But the gold prospecting has slowed</a>, as the number of <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2017/03/prestige-tv-signs-youre-watching.html">prestige TV shows</a> seems to have hit a saturation point. </p>
<p>Starting in the 2010s, streaming platforms began hiring more and more writers. To lure customers, platforms needed quality content – otherwise, viewers wouldn’t continue paying <a href="https://www.cnet.com/tech/home-entertainment/is-streaming-actually-cheaper-than-cable-we-do-the-math/">the US$8 to $15 monthly cost</a> of a subscription.</p>
<p>Platforms couldn’t market their content like network sitcoms, so they had to constantly develop new ideas for shows. Large stables of creative writers ended up forming the core of studio strategy.</p>
<p>Yet, as TV writers <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/notes-on-hollywood/why-are-tv-writers-so-miserable">flocked to Los Angeles</a> and New York City, entertainment companies took a page from the gig economy playbook in ways that worked against writers’ livelihoods.</p>
<p>The contracts were short and <a href="https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/wga-amptp-contract-strike-deadline-1235599161/">the pay lower</a>. The formats of streaming shows – more one-off miniseries rather than sitcoms that could run for as long as a decade – rarely guaranteed work for any lengthy period of time.</p>
<p>Furthermore, streaming shows tend to have fewer episodes per season, with larger gaps between seasons, known as “<a href="https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/wga-amptp-contract-strike-deadline-1235599161/">short order</a>.” An eight-episode season of a popular show that has a two-year gap between seasons leaves TV writers scrambling to figure out ways to pay the bills in between seasons.</p>
<p>Then came COVID-19. While people were stuck at home binge-watching TV, <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2021/03/10/how-pandemic-changed-tv-and-how-much-last/6826073002/">it became difficult to produce television</a>. There was a major backlog in TV production because of the difficulties shooting TV shows in studios while complying with COVID-19 health regulations. </p>
<p>This created <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2021/03/10/how-pandemic-changed-tv-and-how-much-last/6826073002/">a major slowdown in TV production</a>. At the height of the pandemic, TV studios closed to limit the number of people inside. With the slowdown of production, there wasn’t the demand for writers. As a result, many of the TV writers who had recently moved to Log Angeles and other big cities with high costs of living were faced with challenges finding jobs.</p>
<h2>Core demands</h2>
<p>Writers want to fix this by raising their minimum wage; they want writers for streaming platforms to receive the same royalties that theatrical film writers get; and they want to end <a href="https://variety.com/2021/tv/features/mini-rooms-writers-tv-pilot-series-orders-1235061733/">the practice of mini rooms</a>, where small groups of writers hash out scripts but often receive less compensation for a series that may not even get ordered.</p>
<p>Another key demand is to limit the use of artificial intelligence in television production. </p>
<p>Writers fear that studios will use AI to hire workers, select which shows to produce and, in the worst-case scenario, replace writers altogether. Interestingly, limits on AI have been the one point of contention that <a href="https://deadline.com/2023/05/wga-strike-chris-keyser-interview-failed-negotiations-amptp-ai-1235354566/">studios have been unwilling to even discuss</a>.</p>
<p>It will be interesting to see whether the writers will be able to claw back some of the financial security that’s vanished across many industries, or if the larger economic forces that have powered the gig economy will work in studio executives’ favor.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204984/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Arditi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The writers strike lays bare all the ills of working on one of the lowest rungs of the entertainment industry.
David Arditi, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Texas at Arlington
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/204347
2023-05-01T12:11:29Z
2023-05-01T12:11:29Z
Generative AI is forcing people to rethink what it means to be authentic
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523476/original/file-20230428-26-oalw72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C7500%2C4816&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Generative AI thrives on exploiting people's reflexive assumptions of authenticity by producing material that looks like 'the real thing.'</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/little-fish-dressed-as-a-shark-royalty-free-image/973766358?phrase=deception+concept+illustration&adppopup=true">artpartner-images/The Image Bank via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It turns out that pop stars <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/arts/music/ai-drake-the-weeknd-fake.html">Drake and The Weeknd</a> didn’t suddenly drop a new track that went viral on TikTok and YouTube in April 2023. The photograph that won an international photography competition that same month <a href="https://www.cnn.com/style/article/ai-photo-win-sony-scli-intl/index.html">wasn’t a real photograph</a>. And the image of <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2023/03/pope-coat-midjourney-puffer-jacket-balenciaga-explained.html">Pope Francis sporting a Balenciaga jacket</a> that appeared in March 2023? That was also a fake. </p>
<p>All were made with the help of generative AI, <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/1/5/23539055/generative-ai-chatgpt-stable-diffusion-lensa-dall-e">the new technology</a> that can generate humanlike text, audio and images on demand through programs such as ChatGPT, Midjourney and Bard, among others.</p>
<p>There’s certainly something unsettling about the ease with which people can be duped by these fakes, and I see it as a harbinger of an authenticity crisis that raises some difficult questions.</p>
<p>How will voters know whether a video of a political candidate saying something offensive was real or generated by AI? Will people be willing to pay artists for their work when AI can create something visually stunning? Why follow certain authors when stories in their writing style will be freely circulating on the internet?</p>
<p>I’ve been seeing the anxiety play out all around me at Stanford University, where I’m a professor and also lead a large <a href="https://acceleratelearning.stanford.edu/our-work/ai-in-education/">generative AI and education initiative</a>. </p>
<p>With text, image, audio and video all becoming easier for anyone to produce through new generative AI tools, I believe people are going to need to reexamine and recalibrate how authenticity is judged in the first place. </p>
<p>Fortunately, social science offers some guidance.</p>
<h2>The many faces of authenticity</h2>
<p>Long before generative AI and ChatGPT rose to the fore, people had been probing what makes something feel authentic. </p>
<p>When a real estate agent is gushing over a property they are trying to sell you, are they being authentic or just trying to close the deal? Is that stylish acquaintance wearing authentic designer fashion or a <a href="https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/zara-thiliko-knockoff-lawsuit/">mass-produced knock-off</a>? As you mature, <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-the-new-science-of-authenticity-says-about-discovering-your-true-self-175314">how do you discover your authentic self</a>? </p>
<p>These are not just philosophical exercises. <a href="https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2011.00134">Neuroscience research</a> has shown that believing a piece of art is authentic will activate the brain’s reward centers in ways that viewing something you’ve been told is a forgery won’t.</p>
<p>Authenticity also matters because it is a social glue that reinforces trust. Take the social media misinformation crisis, in which fake news has been inadvertently spread and authentic news decreed fake. </p>
<p>In short, authenticity matters, for both individuals and society as a whole.</p>
<p>But what actually makes something feel authentic? </p>
<p>Psychologist George Newman <a href="https://www.doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000158">has explored this question in a series of studies</a>. He found that there are three major dimensions of authenticity. </p>
<p>One of those is historical authenticity, or whether an object is truly from the time, place and person someone claims it to be. An actual painting made by Rembrandt would have historical authenticity; a modern forgery would not.</p>
<p>A second dimension of authenticity is the kind that plays out when, say, a restaurant in Japan offers exceptional and authentic Neapolitan pizza. Their pizza was not made in Naples or imported from Italy. The chef who prepared it may not have a drop of Italian blood in their veins. But the ingredients, appearance and taste may match really well with what tourists would expect to find at a great restaurant in Naples. Newman calls that categorical authenticity.</p>
<p>And finally, there is the authenticity that comes from our values and beliefs. This is the kind that many voters find wanting in politicians and elected leaders who say one thing but do another. It is what admissions officers look for in college essays.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://repository.isls.org/handle/1/7474">my own research</a>, I’ve also seen that authenticity can relate to our expectations about what tools and activities are involved in creating things.</p>
<p>For example, when you see a piece of custom furniture that claims to be handmade, you probably assume that it wasn’t literally made by hand – that all sorts of modern tools were nonetheless used to cut, shape and attach each piece. Similarly, if an architect uses computer software to help draw up building plans, you still probably think of the product as legitimate and original. This is because there’s a general understanding that those tools are part of what it takes to make those products.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Hands of woodworker using a turning lathe." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523472/original/file-20230428-20-ky2e2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523472/original/file-20230428-20-ky2e2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523472/original/file-20230428-20-ky2e2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523472/original/file-20230428-20-ky2e2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523472/original/file-20230428-20-ky2e2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523472/original/file-20230428-20-ky2e2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523472/original/file-20230428-20-ky2e2e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">When a piece of furniture is advertised as handmade, we assume that tools were still involved.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/woodworker-handling-gouge-while-working-on-wood-with-news-photo/584616682?adppopup=true">Arterra/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In most of your quick judgments of authenticity, you don’t think much about these dimensions. But with generative AI, you will need to. </p>
<p>That’s because back when it took a lot of time to produce original new content, there was a general assumption that it required skill to create – that it only could have been made by skilled individuals putting in a lot of effort and acting with the best of intentions. </p>
<p>These are not safe assumptions anymore.</p>
<h2>How to deal with the looming authenticity crisis</h2>
<p>Generative AI thrives on exploiting people’s reliance on categorical authenticity by producing material that looks like “the real thing.”</p>
<p>So it’ll be important to disentangle historical and categorical authenticity in your own thinking. Just because a recording sounds exactly like Drake – that is, it fits the category expectations for Drake’s music - it does not mean that Drake actually recorded it. The great essay that was turned in for a college writing class assignment may not actually be from a student laboring to craft sentences for hours on a word processor.</p>
<p>If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, everyone will need to consider that it may not have actually hatched from an egg.</p>
<p>Also, it’ll be important for everyone to get up to speed on what these new generative AI tools really can and can’t do. I think this will involve ensuring that people learn about AI in schools and in the workplace, and having open conversations about <a href="https://theconversation.com/chatgpt-dall-e-2-and-the-collapse-of-the-creative-process-196461">how creative processes will change</a> with AI being broadly available.</p>
<p>Writing papers for school in the future will not necessarily mean that students have to meticulously form each and every sentence; there are now tools that can help them think of ways to phrase their ideas. And creating an amazing picture won’t require exceptional hand-eye coordination or mastery of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. </p>
<p>Finally, in a world where AI operates as a tool, society is going to have to consider how to establish guardrails. These could take the form of regulations, or the creation of norms within certain fields for disclosing how and when AI has been used. </p>
<p>Does AI get credited as a co-author on writing? Is it disallowed on certain types of documents or for certain grade levels in school? Does entering a piece of art into a competition require a signed statement that the artist did not use AI to create their submission? Or does there need to be new, separate competitions that expressly invite AI-generated work?</p>
<p>These questions are tricky. It may be tempting to simply deem generative AI an unacceptable aid, in the same way that calculators are forbidden in some math classes.</p>
<p>However, sequestering new technology risks imposing arbitrary limits on human creative potential. Would the expressive power of images be what it is now <a href="https://aaronhertzmann.com/2022/08/29/photography-history.html">if photography had been deemed an unfair use of technology</a>? What if Pixar films were deemed ineligible for the Academy Awards because people thought computer animation tools undermined their authenticity?</p>
<p>The capabilities of generative AI have surprised many and will challenge everyone to think differently. But I believe humans can use AI to expand the boundaries of what is possible and create interesting, worthwhile – and, yes, authentic – works of art, writing and design.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204347/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Victor R. Lee receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the Wallace foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Marriner S. Eccles Foundation. He has done some advisory work for Google on wearable technology.</span></em></p>
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, people now need to pause and wonder whether it actually hatched from an egg.
Victor R. Lee, Associate Professor of Learning Sciences and Technology Design in Education, Stanford University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.