Abstract
Sebald’s musing on the ruins of Orford Ness provide the starting place for a discussion of English in Adult Continuing Education in the Cold War context of the 1980s. Drawing on a rich group relations tradition, the chapter probes a dialectic between a search for wholeness (in text or in learning group) and fragmentation. Brokenness, junk, and refuse in the text are then connected through the study of children’s fiction to textual parables of the search for cultural reconstruction – the task of the learning group seen as a kind of rescue archaeology. The dynamics of this process are explored through a reading of Russell Hoban’s post-apocalypse novel Riddley Walker (1980). Riddley’s quest and the atavistic Punch show are examined as allegories of the conflicted pedagogic role. Through cross-reference to Doris Lessing’s Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980), that role is also seen as potentially subverting or at least questioning conventional gendering patterns associated with nurture and the maintenance of cultural memory.
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- 1.
The National Trust website: ‘Orford Ness is not what you might expect from the National Trust. It’s remote and can be bleak and unforgiving. It remains littered with debris and is uncompromising about its past and in protecting its future.’ https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/orford-ness-national-nature-reserve. See also Patrick Barkham in The Guardian, 21 October 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2015/oct/20/50-years-british-coast-line-then-and-now. ‘The shingle spit of Orford Ness, Suffolk, was classified as “beyond redemption” by the surveyors of 1965, when it was a top-secret atomic weapons research site. Although the peninsula is still riddled with ruined laboratories and unexploded bombs, it is now an unusually atmospheric nature reserve’. And finally, Robert Macfarlane on his libretto ‘Untrue Island’, http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/jul/08/untrue-island-orford-ness-macfarlane.
- 2.
A history summarised by Stefan Collini: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cambridgeauthors/the-tragedy-paper-continuity-and-change/. And compare Mary Jacobus’ summary of Wilfred Bion on the aesthetics of psychoanalysis: ‘catastrophe haunts the scene of representation’ (Jacobus 2005: 225).
- 3.
For the ongoing debate on political and social relevance within the 1950s Oxford Extra-Mural Delegacy, see Dai Smith’s biography of Raymond Williams, A Warrior’s Tale. Cardigan: Parthian, 2008: 229–237, 301–317.
- 4.
Richard Hoggart, A Sort of Clowning: Life and Times 1940–1959. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1991: 91–92. See also Hoggart’s essays in the two volumes of Speaking to Each Other. London: Chatto and Windus, 1970; Fred Inglis, Richard Hoggart: Virtue and Reward. Cambridge: Polity, 2014, especially chapter 5; Hilliard on ‘left Leavisism’ in postwar adult education (Hilliard 2012, chapter 5); and Stefan Collini’s essay on ‘Literary Criticism and Cultural Decline’ in (ed.) Sue Owen, Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. A more teaching-based snapshot of adult education in literature in the early 1990s can be found in (ed.) Peter Preston, Literature in Adult Education: Reflections on Practice. University of Nottingham, Department of Adult Education, 1995.
- 5.
Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. London: Verso, 1979, chapter 6; Williams’ papers in (eds) John McIlroy and Sallie Westwood, Border Country: Raymond Williams in Adult Education. Leicester: National Institute of Adult Education, 1993; Steele 1997.
- 6.
Routledge 1992: xvii. See Davis’s moving analysis of a moment from an evening class (1992: 52–56). A recent account of adult education study is Adrian Barlow, Extra-Mural: Literature and Lifelong Learning. Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2012. See especially 1.2 ‘On Course: Teaching Literature in Lifelong Learning’.
- 7.
Hartley 2001; Sarah Whiteley ‘Talking about “An Accommodation”: The Implications of Discussion Group Data for Community Engagement and Pedagogy’, Language and Literature, 20(3): 236–256 (2011); David Peplow, Talk About Books: A Study of Reading Groups. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. For very different approaches, compare the outstanding work of the Liverpool-based Reader Organisation (http://www.thereader.org.uk/) or, in yet another vein, Sam Duncan, Reading Circles, Novels and Adult Reading Development. London: Bloomsbury, 2012.
- 8.
L.C. Knights, referring to WEA teaching in the late 1930s in Middleman: A Partial Autobiography, unpublished, 187–188.
- 9.
Quoted by Ghislaine Kenyon, Quentin Blake in the Theatre of the Imagination: An Artist at Work. London: Bloomsbury 2016: 70.
- 10.
- 11.
Graham Swift, Waterland, Picador/Heinemann, 1983, chapter 40 (256), ‘About Contemporary Nightmares’, for conversation between Crick and Price, the founder of the school ‘Holocaust Club’. ‘And people are all getting into their cars, sir, and taking to the streets. They think they’re going to get away somewhere safe. They think that, even though they’ve been told it’s pointless. My parents push me and my sister into the car. They don’t think about food or clothes or nothing. Then as soon as we get to the main road it’s blocked with cars. People are honking their horns and screaming and wailing. And I think, this is how it’s going to end – we’re all going to die in a great big traffic jam.…’
- 12.
Although in its early years the DUET project was committed to experiential research and decried the production of academic articles, several members of the project subsequently attempted to develop insights inspired by its intense and unsettling residential workshops. See Evans 1995; Knights 1992: 41–45 and chapter two generally; Colin Evans and Barry Palmer, ‘Inter-Group Encounters of a Different Kind: The Experiential Research Model’, Studies in Higher Education, 14(3) 1989: 297–307; Ben Knights, ‘Hearing Yourself Teach: Group Processes for Adult Educators’, Studies in the Education of Adults, 25(2), 1993: 184–198. Compare Isca Salzberger-Wittenberg, Gianna Henry, and Elsie Osborne, The Emotional Experience of Teaching and Learning. London: Routledge, 1983, and, more recently, Britzman 2009, and Tamara Bibby, Education – an ‘Impossible Profession’?: Psychoanalytical Explorations of Learning and Classrooms. London: Routledge 2010.
- 13.
John Jones, Dostoevsky. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983: 240.
- 14.
I would like to acknowledge – however inadequately here – how much I owed then and since to conversations with my brilliant and generous Durham colleague Raman (Ray) Selden. His Practising Theory and Reading Literature: An Introduction (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) gives a sense of his dialogic style, and anticipated many of the theory guides which have followed since.
- 15.
The Mouse and His Child (1967), Harmsworth: Puffin Books, 1976: 25–26.
- 16.
Sara Hudston, Times Literary Supplement, 19 January 2001.
- 17.
Since I first read Riddley Walker, the novel has become the subject of considerable commentary, much of it on the web. See, for example http://www.ocelotfactory.com/hoban/riddley.html.
- 18.
Significantly, the other female figure is the personification of death as ‘Aunty’. For a reading of Riddley Walker in terms of narratives of masculinity, see Knights (1999): 116–120.
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Knights, B. (2017). Fragments and Ruins: Teaching in the Shadow of Catastrophe. In: Pedagogic Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-27813-5_7
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