Knowledge in English: Canon, Curriculum and Cultural Literacy

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Reading the World

A little while ago I read this blogpost by novelist and academic Adam Roberts listing his favourite novels from the countries around the world. Like him I realised rapidly that there were a lot more places I'd never read anything from than places I had. I also realised a lot of what I tended to think of as 'world fiction' when I read it was actually by American authors of African extraction, or British authors of Southeast and East Asian extraction. And I have read a ridiculous number of Spanish crime novels.

I have not attempted to have a 'favourite' novel; I just listed anything I could think of as being from that country. There's also a catch: many authors are mostly associated with one country but were actually born in another. I have used the country which seems to me to fit them most; hence Italo Calvino is not Cuban but Italian.


Afghanistan 
Albania  
Algeria
Andorra 
Angola
Antigua and Barbuda 
Argentina
Armenia 
Australia Jane Harper The Dry
Austria  
Azerbaijan 

Bahamas 
Bahrain 
Bangladesh 
Barbados 
Belarus 
Belgium – Hergé, Tintin 
Belize 
Benin 
Bhutan 
Bolivia 
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Botswana 
Brazil 
Brunei 
Bulgaria 
Burkina Faso 
Burundi 

Cambodia 
Cameroon 
Canada – Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Central African Republic 
Chad  
Chile  
China Jung Chang Wild Swans
Colombia 
Congo 
Costa Rica 
Côte d'Ivoire 
Croatia 
Cuba 
Cyprus 
Czech Republic – Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis and other stories

Denmark 
Djibouti 
Dominica 

Ecuador 
Egypt Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love
El Salvador 
England Diana Wynne Jones, Deep Secret
Equatorial Guinea 
Eritrea 
Estonia 
Ethiopia 

Fiji 
Finland Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief
France – Michel Bussi, Black Waterlilies

Gabon
Gambia, The 
Germany Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
Ghana 
Greece – Homer's Odyssey
Grenada
Guatemala
Guyana 

Haiti 
Honduras 
Hungary – Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel

Iceland 
India Vikram Seth, An Equal Music
Indonesia 
Iran 
Iraq 
Ireland – Catherine Ryan Howard, Distress Signals
Israel 
Italy Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveller

Jamaica 
Japan Haruki Marukami Norwegian Wood
Jordan 

Kazakhstan 
Kenya 
Korea 
Kuwait 
Kyrgyzstan 

Laos 
Latvia 
Lebanon 
Lesotho 
Liberia 
Libya 
Liechtenstein 
Lithuania 
Luxembourg 

Macedonia 
Malawi 
Malaysia Zen Cho Sorceror To The Crown
Maldives 
Malta
Mauritania 
Mauritius 
Mexico 
Micronesia 
Moldova 
Monaco 
Mongolia
Montenegro 
Morocco 
Mozambique 
Myanmar 

Namibia 
Nepal 
Netherlands 
New Zealand – Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries 
Nicaragua 
Niger
Nigeria 
Northern Ireland – Colin Bateman, Belfast Confidential
Norway – Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's Choice

Oman

Palestine 
Pakistan
Panama 
Papua New Guinea 
Paraguay 
Peru 
Philippines – David Ramirez, The Forever Watch
Poland
Portugal

Qatar 

Romania 
Russia Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Rwanda 

Saint Lucia 
Samoa 
Saudi Arabia 
Scotland John Buchan, The 39 Steps
Senegal
Serbia .
Seychelles 
Sierra Leone 
Singapore 
Slovakia
Slovenia 
Somalia 
South Africa – Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls
Spain – Jose Carlos Somoza, The Athenian Murders
Sudan 
Suriname 
Swaziland 
Sweden 
Switzerland – Johanna Spyri, Heidi
Syria 

Taiwan – Tash Aw, The Harmony Silk Factory 
Tajikistan
Tanzania 
Thailand 
Togo 
Tonga 
Trinidad 
Tunisia 
Turkey – Orhan Pamuk, The New Life

Uganda
Ukraine –Andrey Kurkov, Death and the Penguin
United Arab Emirates 
United States – Tamora Pierce, Alanna: the first adventure
Uruguay 
Uzbekistan 

Venezuela 
Vietnam

Wales 

Yemen 

Zambia 
Zimbabwe 


I have a reading list starting to form up, and that seems like it might be a project to me! 

DCI Shakespeare

Another occasional #LitCritForTeachers post.


Shakespearean Allusion in Crime Fiction: DCI Shakespeare by Lisa Hopkins, 2016 (Palgrave Macmillan)

Hopkins tells us:

‘Shakespeare is a pervasive presence in detective fiction’ (1)

She notes there are three main ways in which this can happen - 

• quotation
• merely touching on a detail
• called on as a detailed guide to human character

Shakespearean allusion in crime writing is a way of borrowing Shakespeare's status to assert that the detective novel (etc) is a literary form in its own right. 

‘Shakespearean allusion serves a variety of purposes. First and most obviously, Shakespeare is an unimpeachable source of cultural capital, but at the same time one perceived as popular enough to be free of any connotations of elitism or inaccessibility.’ (8)

Referring to details that you recognise also helps to balance out the fact that the text is trying to deceive you, the reader: 

‘Shakespearean allusion also has consequences for the reader and for the status of the text itself: it interpellates the reader and establishes the literary status of the text. G.K. Chesterton notes in ‘The Ideal Detective Story’ that ‘The detective story differs from every other story in this: the reader is only happy if he feels a fool,’ and yet feeling a fool is also a potentially unnerving and unsatisfying state. It can however be counteracted if one does not feel quite such a fool because one can at least recognise Shakespeare’ (10)

Hopkins also notes of crime writing that: 

‘It is a commonplace of the genre that a fine line divides the detective from the criminal’ (17)

which is a particularly useful thought when considering Hamlet as part of Elements of Crime Writing.

Hopkins notes the massive number of Shakespearean quotations and allusions in both the work of Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh, among others. One of the functions Shakespeare fulfils in these works is to demonstrate the status of the detective - to make him one of the 'good guys', because he is educated. She makes the argument that this is necessary because of the need to position readers on the same side as the detective: 

‘Detective fiction needs to position readers in this way for two main reasons. In the first place, it is generally nervous about the legitimacy of its own enterprise, because it can by no means be taken for granted that detection itself is a legitimate enterprise. Alongside a rather vaguely felt conviction that it is a citizen’s duty to help the police typically sits an often more powerful view hat doing so will almost certainly entail things that are literally, inherently and in absolute terms deplorable: reading other people’s correspondence, eavesdropping on conversations and generally prying into a sphere radically and inalienably constituted as private.' (11)

 ‘The only thing that can justify violation of this ethos of privacy being sacrosanct is if the policeman too is an insider, and allowing to quote Shakespeare is a foolproof way of constituting him as one; this is particularly marked in the case of Ngaio Marsh’s Alleyn, both the most intrinsically inquisitive and also the most sustainedly Shakespearean of detectives’ (11)

She refers to Golden Age detective fiction here, and it would be interesting to see if the same attitudes can be found in modern crime fiction.

Hopkins also notes that there are three plays which are more commonly alluded to in crime fiction than others: unsurprisingly Hamlet and Macbeth are two of the three. The final one is oddly, Midsummer Night's Dream: 

‘On the surface the least likely of plays to be connected to crime, Dream proves to have a surprising affinity with the genre because it speaks to so many of its key concerns: drug-taking, land ownership, violence against women, and the question of artisanship versus mass production, with attendant implications for the literary status of crime fiction itself.’ (184)

Finally, there's a link here to an open access article on Shakespearean allusion in the crime novels of Georgette Heyer: https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms201652

Learn to write like Benjamin Franklin

I was reading Talent is overrated by Geoff Colvin the other day and came across a snippet about how the great essayist Benjamin Franklin taught himself to be an extraordinary writer. He recognised that there were things he needed to improve to achieve his ambition, one of which was the range of his vocabulary. To build this he embarked on a programme of 'deliberate practice' in which he re-wrote essays by other people into verse, the metre and rhyme scheme of which demanded building a bank of synonyms for the original vocabulary.

I quite like the idea of using this as a method for expanding KS3 vocab - having to rewrite a section of a non-fiction text into nice regular ABAB quatrains each week, using a thesaurus to help.

Quick Quote: Barthes on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The reader will perhaps recall a novel by Agatha Christie in which all the invention consisted of concealing the murderer beneath the use of the first person of the narrative. The reader looked for him behind every 'he' in the plot: he was all the time hidden under the 'I.' Agatha Christie knew perfectly well that, in the novel, the 'I' is usually a spectator and that it is the 'he' who is the actor. 

Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, tr. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith [Boston: Beacon Press, 1970], pp. 34-5.

Bayard - Distraction and disguise in crime fiction

Aware that there is not much out there on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, I have been reading the book by Pierre Bayard, the French critic, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? with the intent of blogging about it to provide some resource. I have not finished yet – indeed I am yet to reach his actual dissection of the specific novel, but in his general justification for the approach of taking a novel where the solution has been given at the end, and then deciding that someone else actually did the murder, he makes some interesting points about detective fiction in general, which seem worth considering for Elements of Crime Writing, even if you are not reading TMoRA.

Distraction and disguise in crime fiction

Bayard is not in fact talking about false moustaches, but about more literary forms of disguise. He points out:

The advantage of distraction is that it highlights the aim of detective fiction, which makes it unique among literary forms: to prevent an idea from taking shape. Most literature tries to stimulate a certain idea or a certain group of images or sensations in the reader, but here we find ourselves in that original situation in which all the tension of the work is directed, through a detailed organization of invisibility, toward the prevention of thought. (Bayard, 2000, p. 25)

This is an interesting point in exploring crime writing – does it hold for all crime writing or only for those detective/ mystery novels which follow Van Dine’s rules about the solution being withheld to the end, but with enough clues that the reader could have solved it, or at least feels that they could have at the end? It is also interesting to debate the truth of the statement – surely to an extent anything with a ‘twist’ ending would fall into this category – or is that only part of what such a piece of fiction is doing? Is it attempting to provoke thought in its very twistiness?

The main items which I thought were of interest, however, were Bayard’s categorisation of the ways in which disguise and distraction can be achieved in relation to the identity of the murderer.  He exemplifies these and discusses them almost exclusively in reference to the works of Agatha Christie, but they are fruitful to explore in the light of other crime writing also.

1) the murderer’s ‘function’ in society: that is, certain professions seem to offer a degree of protection from suspicion. Bayard notes doctors, policemen, pharmacists and judges in this category.

2a) ‘literary function’, suggests Bayard, is an even better disguise. The murderer can be disguised as victim; either through being threatened with death or persecuted in some other way, or they can fake their own deaths.

2b) the other literary function which offers protection is that of investigator. Bayard points out this goes back to Oedipus Rex. ‘Since he is on the side of the law, the murderer reaps the natural benefits of a kind of presumption of innocence’ (Bayard, 2000, p. 23). This is a broad category including all those who help the investigator (so Dr Sheppard in TMoRA is included, and I think you could argue for Claudius in Hamlet also, if that is one of the texts you are studying).

N.B. In a later chapter Bayard mentions a third literary function that protects Sheppard: that of narrator. TMoRA is not unique in following this form (See this article from the Independent, but be warned, they do not all conceal their guilt ). The reader has to trust the narrator in a detective novel, and if they are unreliable narrators, that is usually concealed from the reader until the solution is unveiled. In the case of TMoRA, Dr Sheppard is doubly protected because not only is he the narrator (see post on Barthes) but also he is fulfilling the role we normally see Hastings in - dumb, reliable, innocent and 100% transparent Hastings - so we trust him by proxy. 

3) the final disguise which Bayard points out  is the traditional one, the alibi, the ‘disguise as absence’. There is an irony here as the usual intention behind the disguise as absence is often in order to return literally in disguise as someone else in order to commit the crime.

It might be worth considering in the context of Elements of Crime Writing whether these are distinctive characteristics of the detective genre or of crime writing, or somewhere in between - do murderers always conceal their involvement? Do writers always wish to conceal the truth from the reader? 

Reference:

Pierre Bayard Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? Published in French in 1998; published in English (trans. Carol Cosman) 2000, by the New Press (New York). 

Reading women

If you’ve read my article on representation of women authors and protagonists on the exam set texts lists in the UK at 16, you’ll know the picture isn’t that great, and students are likely to be mainly encountering a man’s eye view of the world in all contexts of literature. If not, read it, it’s open access!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the pros and cons of reading lists recently, but I loved a reading list as a teenager, and I was very pleased to find out that my tweeting of the Balliol college reading list for aspiring Oxford English students sent it semi-viral in 2016. (Have a look – it’s a surprising list.) So as an accompaniment to my article on set texts, I thought I’d make a list of six suggested reads by women for teens who want to balance up their school curriculum texts (or anyone else!).

1. Beloved by Toni Morrison. This Gothic modern classic is the story of an African-American woman who escapes slavery only to be taken back. Rather than allow her 2 year old daughter to return to slavery, she kills her, and this is the story of her haunting by Beloved, who may or may not be that daughter. A powerful novel which won many prizes.

2. The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor. A modern SFF novel (or ‘magical futurism’) which links the US and Africa, this is about the rise of a superhuman woman and also about our world and what we are doing to it and its peoples.

3. Anita and Me by Meera Syal. Now this technically is a GCSE set text but it doesn’t appear as widely as it used to and given that everyone has to study a 19th century novel, I suspect the vast majority will be doing a 20th/21st century play rather than another lengthy prose text. Anita and Me is a fabulous Bildungsroman set in Wolverhampton, an area of Britain that gets little attention in literature. Anita is the kind of friend everyone wants and fears.

4. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. This was one of my favourite reads of 2017. It’s a dual timeline story, of a diary written by a teen in Japan, and the woman reading that diary in the US after it is washed up on a nearby beach. It’s not for the faint of heart – and I would be careful recommending it to teens given it has sex and swearing in it in abundance, but perhaps the uncomfortable context of Japanese fetishism of schoolgirls has lessons for all of us. It’s beautifully written and another powerful read.

5. The Shadow of the Sun by A.S. Byatt. I debated what Byatt novel to include, and Posession came a close second – a novel I read and fell in love with at 17. The Shadow of the Sun came about a year later, and it is definitely a challenging read – perhaps of particular interest to those aiming at a high status university. It’s the story of what happens when a high flying young woman comes to pieces. I hope the ending would be different nowadays – but it’s a useful reminder that the choices young women have now were not always available to them.

6. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. Another Gothic mystery, this one centres on the dialogue between two women, one a famous novelist who is dying and the much younger woman to whom she has finally chosen to reveal the key to the mystery which has been at the heart of her life and work. It’s BRILLIANT. And much better than the television adaptation from a few years ago.

What would you recommend?