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Leder Forsiden gir vel et hint: vi legger inn årene, pakker snippsekken og tar farvel. Fagbladet Magazine har eksistert siden år 2000, og det er allerede relativt mange år siden vi diskuterte om det var på tide å gå over til digital publisering av fagstoff for engelsklærere. Vi konkluderte den gang, og ﬂere ganger senere, med at en liten trykksak er et hyggelig og ganske praktisk produkt for den som vil bruke noen «faglige» minutter på lærerværelset eller på senga.

Årsaken til at vi nå legger ned bladet er først og fremst at vi ønsker å bruke mer tid og ressurser på å gjøre flere av nettstedene våre mer dynamiske og oppdaterte. Undersøkelser vi har gjort blant engelsklærere viser at noe av det viktigste for dere er at læreverkenes bøker og nettsteder oppleves som aktuelle. Vi ønsker å tilby læremidler som tar pulsen på den engelskspråklige verden på en bedre måte enn vi har hatt mulighet til tidligere, og derfor vil vi i løpet av 2014 lansere «updates» på flere av nettstedene. Dette vil være artikler og oppgaver spesialskrevet av våre forfattere, ment for å supplere og aktualisere innholdet i lærebøkene. Som et eksempel kan vi nevne avstemningen om skotsk uavhengighet. Denne vil finne sted neste høst, noen måneder etter at vi lanserer den nye utgaven av Access to English: Social Studies. Vi vil tilby en grundig og tilpasset dekning av avstemningen på læreverkets nettsted, basert på at elevene i boka har fått solid kjennskap til Skottlands historie og de politiske forholdene som ligger til grunn for selvstendighetsspørsmålet.

How to Find Stuff Online by Therese Holm, Sandefjord vgs

The Last of the Pink Bits by Richard Burgess

A Moment of Abandon: I.A. Richards and the Practical Criticism Experiment by Erika Kvistad

Det vil komme mer informasjon om «updates»-tjenesten i løpet av vinteren – vi gleder oss til å sette i gang. Å se tilbake på årene med Magazine gir også glede. Ikke minst er det morsomt å se at mange av forfatterne våre hadde sin spede begynnelse på skrivekarrieren i bladet. (Og hvor mange kjente til Bjørneboe-biografen Tore Rem da han skrev for oss i vårt aller første nummer?) At bladet blir borte, betyr ikke at behovet for gode skribenter opphører, så ta kontakt dersom du har ideer til temaer som kan egne seg for «updates» på nettstedene.

Everybody’s Reading John Green by Siri Hunstadbråten, Drammen vgs

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I vår «svanesang» kan du lese artikler av noen av våre mest ﬂittige bidragsytere, som Siri Hunstadbråten og Richard Burgess, og tekster fra nyere skribenter som Erika Kvistad og Therese Holm. En typisk «Magazineblanding» altså. Hvis du har lyst til å kikke på de gamle bladene, gå til www.cdu.no og søk på «Magazine».

Denne og alle tidligere utgaver av bladet er tilgjengelig i bla-i-bok-format på nettet. Se f. eks. lærersidene på passage. cappelendamm.no eller access.cappelendamm.no. Der ﬁnner du også en oversikt over innholdet i alle utgavene.

[ mæg@'zi:n] '

Ansvarlig redaktør:

CAPPELEN DAMM VIDEREGÅENDE

Birger Nicolaysen

Cappelen Damm

God lesning – og takk for oss!

Akersgata 47/49

Redaksjon:

0055 Oslo

Kirsten Aadahl

Telefon: 21 61 66 54 / 55 E-post: birger.nicolaysen@cappelendamm.no

Produksjon: AIT Oslo AS

Some people believe that all the answers to all the questions in all the world can be found on the internet. That may well be, but how do you ﬁnd all these answers? Is it possible that knowing more about how to use the different search engines can help you ﬁnd what you are looking for, faster?

by Therese Holm, Sandefjord vgs

When I ask students to look for information on a topic on the internet, most of them head over to Google, type in a few words and hit “search”. It is very likely that some of the ﬁrst results, among the millions that pop up, are the websites Wikipedia and YouTube. I have nothing against

probably heard of yahoo.com, msn.com and ask.com? A few others are also worth mentioning, and here are three good alternatives: 

Oolone gives you a preview of the entire webpage before you click through – which gives you a better overview of what type of website you’re heading towards. It offers a general search engine in addition

SweetSearch (sweetsearch. com) – and don’t let the name fool

e n i l n O f f u t S d n i F o t w Ho Wikipedia as such, but I often find that when students start reading an article on a topic on Wikipedia, they quickly give up, because of the length and depth of the article. Because the Google search engine always displays the most popular hits on a topic first, though, sites such as Wikipedia and YouTube will continue to come up as the top suggestions for practically any topic. But what if you don’t want to go to Wikipedia every time you are looking for information? What if you want your search to be so precise that you quickly find what you are really looking for? Then you need some basic knowledge on how to find stuff online. Otherwise you may soon find yourself spending hours on the internet staring at videos of laughing babies and cute kittens. Trust me, I’ve been there.



you, it is not all pink and sugary sweet. What it is, is a search engine for students that searches only sites approved of by a team of teachers, librarians and research experts. It currently searches 35,000 websites, and in addition to the general search engine, it also offers ﬁve niche search engines, for example biographies and social studies. Oolone (oolone.com) is a visual search engine which lets you preview the websites in a grid. Rather than just getting a brief summary and the link to a website,

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to an image search and a news search. RefSeek (refseek.com) is a search engine which is supposed to generate only search results that are academic, in other words eliminate the paid links and the advertising you often ﬁnd on Google, Yahoo and other commercial search engines. Even though this search engine only gives you a short summary and a link, it is easy to see that the results it generates often lead you to more “academic” webpages than a standard Google search will do.

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Choosing a search engine First of all, is Google the only search engine available? Not at all, you have

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If you are doing research for a paper or an essay, it may be an idea to start the search on one of these search engines. It can also be interesting to search for the same topic in all search engines, including Google, just to see what results the different search engines generate. 3) Basic search advice Regardless of which search engine you choose, you need some basic search knowledge. Here are a few things every internet user should know before starting a web search. 1) First of all, try to visualize what you are searching for, don’t just type in the first words you think of. Beware that some words have multiple meanings, so that if you are looking for information on the fish mullet and simply type [mullet], you will also get the results related to the hairstyle by the same name. Type [mullet fish] and the search will be limited to just that. The more specific words you can use in your search, the more likely you are to find what you want.

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2) You should know how to use a few shortcuts in a search, such as these: -, “”, OR, * and ~. If you are looking for information on the aforementioned mullet, but not the hairstyle, you can type [mullet -hair] and the search engine will disregard hits that have to do with hair. Quotation marks put around a search string glue the words together, so use them when searching for a phrase or a speciﬁc combination of words. Similarly, if you want to look for information on a topic but are unsure which is the best search word, add OR between two words to search for pages that contain one or the other word, for instance [sailing OR boating]. Using the asterisk between words in a search string lets you search for the words separated by one or

more words, like in [how now * cow]. Useful if you only remember some words in an expression or a citation. Finally, adding a tilde (~) without any space in front of a word looks up the word and synonyms of said word: [~allusion]. Word order matters in searches. Try searching for [blue sky] and [sky blue] to see the different results. Therefore, if your first search string does not find the information you’re after, try altering the word order. Also, the use of small words such as [a] and [the] can make a difference. Try searching for [cars] versus [the cars] to see the difference in search results. Try out synonyms if your original search words don’t come up with what you’re after. For example, try [cartoon] instead of [comic], [film] instead of [movie]. Sometimes British and American spelling will also yield different search results. Try out [sports centre] versus [sports center]. When you arrive at a website, see if you can find out when the page was last updated or edited, to make sure the information you find is still relevant. Also, ask yourself who wrote the information you find there, whether it is clear who the author or authors are. Make sure you know who provides the information on different websites, by looking at the domain name (the last part of the address). Here are some of the most frequently used:

Advanced search advice If you want to improve your search skills beyond the basics, and you want to use Google as your search engine, you may find it useful to visit the Google Search Education page1, which focuses on educating web-users in the art of searching. This page contains both lesson plans for teachers to use in classes, an online course and the A Google A Day challenges2, which are small, verbal “puzzles” that can be solved through efficient use of Google. Here is some more advice to help you become better at finding what you are looking for online, specifically targeted at Google users. 1) When you visit google.com and type in a search string, the standard format for the search is defined as “The internet”. Open the Advanced Search Menu to filter results better. To access the menu, click on the sprocket button on the right-hand side of the screen. The advanced search lets you narrow down your search by for example language, region in which the website is situated, when the website was last updated and type of file, to name a few. By being able to make the search a lot narrower, it is likely that the results you get are more relevant than if you simply search the entire internet. 1

http://www.google.com/insidesearch/ searcheducation/index.html

http://www.google.com/insidesearch/ searcheducation/lessons.html#challenges

.edu is almlost exclusively used by educational institutions in the US .gov is used by the US government, while .us is often used by local governments in the US .com is used by businesses, organizations and private individuals .info can be used by anyone .museum is only used by certificated museums .net can be used by anyone .org was originally intended for the use of non-profit organisations only and is still primarily used by these, but can also be used by a private individual or entity .ac.uk used by academic and learned societies in the UK - colleges and universities .co.uk can be used by anyone, and is usually commercial 1 http://www.google.com/ .gov.uk is used by the UK government,insidesearch/searcheducation/ while .parliament.uk is used specifically for the UK and the Scottish Parliament index.html .sch.uk is used by local education authorities in the UK: schools, primary 2 http://www.google.com/ and secondary education authorities, community education bodies insidesearch/searcheducation/ .org.uk is often used by UK non-profit organisations, and can also be used by private individuals lessons.html#challenges

2) In the advanced search menu, you can also choose to search only for a specific file format. If you know that you are looking for a PDF file, a Word Document or a PowerPoint file, you may have better luck finding it if you ask Google to only search for files in this format. 3) The standard search from Google looks for the search string words anywhere on the website. In advanced search, you can ask for the search engine to find only pages that have your search word in the website’s title or the website’s address (the URL). This is useful if you vaguely remember the title or the address of a website you would like to retrieve. 4) One way of sifting out the more commercial websites is to alter the settings in the advanced search to only search for information on a topic in a specific domain, such as .edu or .gov. If you know that you are looking for results within a specific domain, it will be time-saving to narrow down your search straight away. 5) Once you have found a website you are interested in, press the ctrl + F buttons to search within that page. This search engine will find the words you ask for in the text and highlight them. You can look through all results of your search word by pressing the arrow buttons in the search bar. This is useful when your page contains a lot of text and you want to avoid having to read the whole thing. 6) Say you are looking for a painting that you don’t remember the name of, but you think you remember the artist and that blue was the most dominant colour. To narrow down your search, try using the colour filtering within Google image search, located under Settings in the bar under the search box. Type in the name of the artist and choose a colour to help filter your results. 7) If you are looking for a book that is available to read online, or as an e-book, try searching for it in Google Books3. A lot of books, both fiction and non-fiction, are available here – some in full text version, others only as extracts. Using Google Books might save you that trip to the library to get a

paper copy. Also, there is no excuse for not reading that short story at home if you left your paper copy of it at school. 8) For larger research projects, or if you simply want to narrow down your search to only contain results of a more academic character, try using Google Scholar4. The Google Scholar page gives you the option of looking at pdf versions of articles (some, not all of them) and also to see where the different articles have been cited. This can, in turn, lead you to more articles related to the one you started out with, that may be even more relevant for your search. The page also offers the search option ‘related articles’. These are articles that are not necessarily linked to or cited by the article you started out looking at, but may be articles that are topically related. This is thus a way of expanding the topic you might want to explore. If you want to cite the article, click on “cite” and a pop-up frame gives you the correct way of citing it in three formats (MLA, APA, Chicago). The Google Scholar page also has an advanced search option, to help you specify exactly what you are looking for.

http://books.google.com/

Activities – basic search skills A) What happens if you put a minus sign in front of a word in a search, like in this search [beans -green]? B) Make a few quick searches with and without the small words [a] and [the]. Try, for example searching for [white house], [a white house] and [the white house]. What are the similarities and the differences between these three search strings? C) Try searching for [blue sky] and [sky blue]. Do many of the same websites come up as results? Why/ why not? D) If you are a visual learner, try the Oolone search engine and compare it to for example Google. Do you prefer to see a preview of the webpages before clicking through, or do you prefer just a 2-line summary? E) You want to ﬁnd out more about a speciﬁc type of bat that lives in a cave. Try to predict what results you may get if you search for [bat], then try to think of a good http://scholar.google.com/

search string that could get you closer to your goal. Then try out the search string you designed. Activities – advanced search skills A) In Google, find and open the advanced search page. Check that you are able to change the search settings for language, file format, date and domain. Try searching for the same topic a few times, but altering the search settings to get a feel for how the settings influence your search. B) Are you familiar with the crtl+F function? If not, try it out once you have found a document you are interested in, and search within the document for specific words. How can this function be helpful to you in your searches? C) Are you familiar with Google Books or Google Scholar? If not, pay them a visit and try searching for the same author or the same book title in both search engines. Are there any similarities in the results from the different search engines? How could you use one or the other search engine in your searches? Ready for a challenge? If you want to perfect your search skills, head over to Google’s A Google A Day-page, where you can practice solving challenges through clever use of Google. A summary of the search strategy and the correct answers are also provided. Try out the following web addresses: http://www.google.com/ insidesearch/searcheducation/lessons. html#challenges http://www.agoogleaday.com/

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The Last of the Pink Bits by Richard Burgess

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In British maps of the world from the colonial period, countries or territories under British rule were always coloured pink. (It should actually have been red, but printers discovered that a red background made it very difﬁcult to read the names printed over in black, so pink was chosen as a compromise.) At the height of the British Empire – and in terms of geographical size this was around 1920 – the pink bits covered

Richard Burgess is currently busy co-writing a new edition of Access to English: Social Studies. Nevertheless, he has found time to write a short piece for your students about the remnants of the once great British Empire. He also promised that some of these “pink bits” will be given further treatment in the new textbook.

a good portion of the globe: half of North America, all of Australasia, the whole Indian subcontinent and nearly half of Africa. Only South America and Asia north of India seemed relatively pink-free. The days of British Empire are over. Or are they? For one of the problems with dismantling an empire is what to do with the bits that, for one reason or another, don’t want to go. For most of

the former colonies, independence was something deeply wished for and, with some very notable exceptions (Ireland and India spring to mind), relatively gracefully given when the time came. But some parts of the far-ﬂung empire were so small and so isolated that independence was neither desired nor feasible. It is these territories, most of them tiny specks of land surrounded by vast tracts of ocean, that today have the status of BOTs – British

Gibraltar from above

Overseas Territories. With a total population of no more than 200 000, there are fourteen in all (although some consist of several islands thousands of miles apart), each one with a unique story to tell. Take, for example, the island of Pitcairn in the southern Pacific Ocean with a population of 48, some of whom are descended from mutineers from the HMS Bounty who arrived on the island in 1790 with women they had brought from Tahiti. Their story is immortalised in several films entitled Mutiny on the Bounty. Or there’s Tristan da Cunha, a volcanic rock that juts out of the Atlantic Ocean, halfway between South Africa and South America, its population of 264 sharing just eight surnames. And then there are the heavyweights, like the Turks and Caicos Islands, situated some 650 miles off the coast of Florida, inhabited by 46 400 people, mostly descended from slaves, who in elections and referendums consistently vote to remain under British rule. Most BOTs are isolated and insignificant enough to keep out of the news and not cause their colonial alma mater too much trouble. However, there are exceptions. Gibraltar, the only colony on mainland Europe, was acquired (i.e. captured) by Britain in 1704 because of its strategic position at the southernmost tip of Spain and at the entrance to the Mediterranean. Its importance as a naval base is long since past, and Spain has consistently complained that it is time the stolen colony was returned. But Gibraltar’s population of 30 000, most of them bilingual in Spanish and English, show no desire for change. In a referendum in 2002 over 98% voted against a proposal to give Britain and

Spain shared sovereignty over the colony. The most troublesome BOT to date has undoubtedly been the Falkland Islands. Before 1982 most British people had never heard of them, much less known where to find them on the map (in the South Atlantic, about 300 miles from the coast of Argentina). Populated by 3000 descendants of British settlers, as well as 488 000 sheep, these windswept islands seemed an unlikely setting for a major international conflict. However, Argentina had long claimed sovereignty over the islands, which they call Los Malvinas and which they claimed were illegally occupied by the British in 1833. When on the 2nd April 1982 Argentina’s ruling military junta invaded and occupied the islands, Britain responded by dispatching a naval task force to liberate them. Two months later they had achieved their objective, but at a heavy price. 907 lives were lost in 74 days of conflict. 649 of these losses were Argentine.

The conﬂict stunned the world because it was so unexpected – “gunboat diplomacy” about colonial possessions seemed absurdly out of place in the late 20th century. Since then, Britain has maintained a strong military presence on the islands at great expense, while Argentina has renewed its claim of sovereignty of the islands. The islanders themselves are in no doubt about where they stand. A recent referendum (2013) showed that they beat even the Gibraltarians for loyalty: just three of a total of 1,517 votes cast were against remaining a British territory.

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For anyone considering starting a global empire, the lesson is clear: Don’t.

Bill Poole, aged 85, Falkland Islander, stands beside posters calling to vote YES to remain British in the referendum held on the Falklands Islands in March 2013. (©NTB scanpix)

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A Moment of Abandon:

by Erika Kvistad

For students of English, starting to analyse literature usually means starting to use close reading. In my case this happened in high school, and it was, perhaps oddly, a shock to the system. We’d done summarising short stories, making notes on the traits and features of characters in novels, and even some basic theme and symbol extraction, but I hadn’t realised before that you could, or were allowed to, sit down with a single poem and go on about it at such length – longer than the text itself, even. It seemed ludicrous, more like a party trick than an element of education, though, obviously, not one you’d want to perform at an actual party. Close reading was something I had to learn to do for the IB exam, but it was also what made me realise that you could create something out of literature that wasn’t itself literature. (I imagined it as dismantling one Lego tower and building another one out of the bricks.) It was, as it turned out, a gateway to harder literary theory.

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But close reading isn’t just the inevitable starter kit of literary criticism – the building blocks of everything from, say, Eve Sedgwick’s beautifully complex elaborations on Shakespeare’s sonnets to early student work not unlike my own, wobbling with unsupported statements about the effects of rhythm and sibilance on the reader. It’s a speciﬁc, in some ways quite counterintuitive thing to do with a text, and it has a controversial history of its own. Close reading as we practise it today has its roots in an attempt to make the reading of literature more scientiﬁcally rigorous, back in the earliest days of English as an academic subject. This attempt, the Practical Criticism experiment, raises fundamental questions about how and why we read literature critically – what it means to practise literary criticism, and not least, what it means to teach people to do it. Ivor Armstrong Richards started teaching English at Magdalene College, Cambridge in the early 1920s, under fairly strange conditions. Firstly, he hadn’t studied literature himself; his degree was in philosophy. Secondly, the college

wasn’t actually paying him. English as a taught subject was still considered so experimental and untested that Magdalene didn’t want to risk giving him a salary. Instead, he collected a fee from each student as they came into the classroom: a guinea for the ‘Modern Novels’ course, and half a guinea for the ‘Theories of Criticism’ course. When Richards came up with the idea of the experiment that would become the start of a new way of thinking about literature, he was at the point of losing faith in the whole concept of teaching people to do literary criticism. While invigilating an exam for one of his own courses in 1923, he wrote an extraordinary letter to his fiancée, the mountaineer Dorothy Pilley. He clearly feels very sorry for his students, and even sorrier for himself: Beneath at the table are the victims. Beginning to show signs of desperation. Some of them horribly haggard. Some writing like nuisances, what a lot of rot. I shall have to read through this. Oh Alack! Woe’s me. I now am depressed [...] I couldn’t make up my mind about anything ever in this place or such a place. It smells of dead thoughts, a hellish stink. [...] I think I shall tell Magdalene that I won’t coach any people any more for the English Tripos. It’s iniquitous, profanation, to expect people to use literature for such purposes. It does more harm than good. [...] This is a dull stream of dry reflections, but this place is really filled with a numbing, dumbing devil. Oh poor people before me, you don’t know how I pity you! This is easy enough to identify with if you’ve ever invigilated an exam, particularly in a not inherently exam-friendly subject like English. (I’ve also taken that particular exam paper, several decades later and in even more depressing surroundings, and he was quite right about the students’ side of it, too.) But what is most interesting about it is that Richards is pulling the rug out from under the whole concept of reading literature critically. Looking out over his students, scribbling away in the gloomy Hall of Magdalene College, he starts to work through the most basic issues around how and why we learn and practise literary criticism. He asks: why are these students even here, doing this unlikely thing – reading and writing about

poems – in this ‘impossible’ place? He calls them ‘the victims’, who are there to ‘satisfy other people’s whims’, but keeps coming up against the fact that they are on some level there voluntarily, willingly producing ‘mountains and reams of crabbed writing to read over’. Richards takes a hard look at the academic subject he’s taken part in creating, being practised before his eyes, and is unable to answer a fundamental question: why are we doing literary criticism? Why are the students willing to do it, and why is he willing to teach it? As he points out in the letter, he isn’t even getting paid that much for it – which is important, because money, being its own motivation, can easily become a cause of not looking very closely at what you are doing and why. As the letter goes on, his inability to answer these questions becomes a moral issue. The close reading he’s teaching to his students starts to seem like an abuse of literature, a ‘profanation’. The idea of studying English literature academically has only just come into being, and apparently it’s already going wrong. The sort of critical reading he has taught these students how to do produces, he writes, ‘dead thoughts’: rote responses that don’t really engage with the text, or perhaps even understand its sense. There is a disturbing sense here that, for Richards, reading is something that we don’t really know how to do. We do it in the wrong places, for the wrong reasons, with the wrong (‘horribly haggard’) expressions on our faces. Our reading, he feared, is not good for us, and it’s not doing any good to the literature we read, either. Struck by the realisation that even people who have decided to devote themselves to reading books, like English undergraduates at Cambridge, are apparently not very good at it, Richards tried to solve the problem in the obvious way: by experimenting on them. He gave his students a printed set of thirteen poems – some by people like John Donne, Christina Rossetti and D.H. Lawrence, some by lesser-known names like G. A. Studdert Kennedy and Phillip James Bailey. Somewhere between the two categories was a poem by Edna St Vincent Millay, who had recently received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and who Richards seems to have had a particular problem with (though he made clear that ‘care was taken to refrain from inﬂuencing [the students] either for or against any poem’). He asked them to produce what he called ‘protocols’ on each poem – written records of the thoughts that arose from their reading. The trick, and what Richards felt was going to differentiate this experiment from any other essay assignment, was that they weren’t given any contextual information about the poems: not the publication date, not the title, and not, crucially, the name of the author. Today the students could easily have got around the no-context issue, but in the pre-

Google days of the early 20th century, faced with bits of text that might be Shakespeare and might be a no-name contemporary writer affecting a Shakespearean manner, they found themselves in an unusual and difficult position. ‘The precise conditions of this test are not duplicated in our everyday commerce with literature,’ Richards wrote, noting ‘the difficulty of judging verse without a hint as to its provenance.’ For most literary critics working today, it may seem obvious that knowing something about the authorship and period of a text is useful in interpreting it. For some, like the New Historicists, the way the text interacts with its contexts is the whole point of their reading. But Richards was on the brink of developing a very different form of reading, which would be taken up by critics across the Atlantic and become the basis for New Criticism. New Criticism requires the reader to focus on the text itself – basically, to rely on close reading – and largely ignore its historical period, its philosophical, political or moral slant, and the author’s intentions. With New Criticism, it’s just you and the text in a vacuum. But even readers more interested in context might feel unsettled at realising how important the author’s name is in shaping our views on, and even our ability to understand, a particular piece of writing. In a lecture giving instructions for the Practical Criticism experiment, Richards said: ‘Quite a few authors seem shockingly unlike what we think they are like when we come at them unawares from a new angle. The name tells us what to expect and so puts a twist on our response from the beginning ...We are judging all the time far too much with other people’s minds, not our own.’ For a book consisting mostly of the almost hundred-year-old literary opinions of university students, Practical Criticism is a weirdly compelling read. As a reader, you are invited to participate in the game: Richards reprints the poems and extracts from the protocols, laced with his own sarcastic commentary. In a touch that I find quite sweet in its earnestness, the names of the authors of each poem are only printed at the back of the book, in mirror writing, to make it harder for the casual reader to spoil the surprise. In this way, you find yourself in the same position as Richards’s students: looking at a few lines of English on a page, with no outside clues to draw on, and trying to work out what you think about it.

Richards describes the difficulties of this position in vivid terms: ‘Without some objective criteria, by which poetry can be tested, and the good distinguished from the bad, [the reader] feels like a friendless man deprived of weapons and left naked at the mercy of a treacherous beast.’ No wonder that, as he noted, ‘an overtone of despairing helplessness haunts the protocols.’ He doesn’t, though, seem to have considered the role that he himself might have played in inducing this sense of despair in his students. Reading Practical Criticism, you sometimes find yourself, in an unguarded moment, agreeing with one of the protocols, only to have Richards suddenly turn on it and attack the ‘paralysing influence from an anti-religious reaction’, the ‘lack of familiarity...with any but very simple verse movements’, or ‘the odd failure to recognise the sonnet form’. He analyses his students’ failures, noting of one that ‘the sharp and jerky way in which [the student] read these lines probably prevented him from taking in their sense’, imagining another ‘shivering on the brink of understanding [with] coy reluctance to plunge into the depths of ideas’, and diagnosing a whole clutch of them with ‘general or constitutional triviality and lack of enterprise’. In response to one negative review of a Donne sonnet, he states simply that ‘contempt is a well-recognised defensive reaction.’ If contempt is a defensive reaction, then the protocols must have made Richards feel extremely defensive. Perhaps it’s understandable: almost every poem elicited what Richards called a ‘potpourri of academic lucubrations’, with the same poem, even the same line or characteristic, receiving opposite responses from different readers. At one point Richards suggests that, as an exercise, you should try to enter in your imagination into the minds of the writers of totally different responses to one poem, ‘until each seems the only possible response’. One reader said of a love lyric that ‘[f]ew things are more disgusting than cheap emotion expressed in easy tears’, while another wrote that ‘[h]ere ordinary words and images are used to celebrate the most elemental passion - love’, and celebrated ‘that genius for expression which is one of the most important characteristics of a great poet.’ Yet another reader wrote that ‘[t]his to me is excellent’, while another could not and would not ‘give any more attention to this effeminate weakling.’ My favourite response to this particular poem is humble, straightforward, and presented in an orderly fashion: As 1) I am only 19. 2) I have never been in love. 3) I do not know what a dog-rose is. 4) I consider that spring has no rapture. 5) --- the alliteration is bad and unnecessary. 6) --- this symbolism utterly worthless. I will declare the whole poem to be sentimental rubbish.

As present-day readers, writers and teachers of English, it’s impossible to read Practical Criticism without noticing how limited its idea of reading is. And its limits, as much as anything else, can help us to consider what we think literary criticism is for – what we think we’re doing when we sit in an exam room having ideas about a poem, for instance. For one thing, the word ‘criticism’ in Practical Criticism is used in a surprisingly straightforward sense. The students’ job is to determine whether the poems are any good, and to give textual reasons for their opinions. This is something you don’t very often see explicitly in critical writing today, although of course critics are always making implicit value judgments about the texts they study. In the Practical Criticism protocols, the issue of determining whether a poem is good gets in the way of saying anything more interesting about it – not because the issue of goodness is uninteresting in itself, but because it is, essentially, a yes or no question. Being required to answer it stops the students from taking their reading further; it encourages them to drop the poem without further consideration if they think it’s bad, and to praise it uncritically if it seems good. Most importantly, even though the protocols display a wide range of opinions, the experiment seems to assume not only that it’s possible to be objectively right about a text – which may be true, for some values of ‘right’ – but that objective rightness is what literary theory should strive for. The book starts by overturning our sense of what we are doing when we read literature: ‘I feel the world tottering with so little solid ground’, as Dorothy Pilley said of Richards’s work. In the end, though, it seems to answer our questions in a way that may be too comfortingly simple – by telling us that the problem is that we’re not good enough at reading, rather than that we need to rethink what it means to read. But was this what Richards intended? Recent scholarly work suggests that he never meant for contextless reading to become a common critical practice, and certainly, he was as deeply interested in the experience of the reader (although that reader, for Richards, was usually a privileged 20th-century Cambridge student) as any present-day theorist. Perhaps the part of Practical Criticism that seems most relevant today is Richards’s sense of how unsettling, intimate and self-revealing the experience of reading can be. As he wrote in the introduction, perhaps as a sort of half-apology for his harshness throughout the rest of the experiment: ‘A few touches of the clinical manner will...not be out of place in these pages, if only to counteract the indecent tendencies of the scene. For here are our friends and neighbours – nay our very brothers and sisters – caught at a moment of abandon giving themselves and their literary reputations away with an unexampled freedom.’

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Everybody’s Reading

John Green by Siri Hunstadbråten, Drammen vgs

Have you noticed how John Green’s books seem to be everywhere? These good oldfashioned paperbacks are being read by young people, passed on to their peers and, not least, shared on social media. In fact, the extensive use of social media has made the process of diffusion considerably more potent than the spreading by word of mouth only. If it hadn’t been for social media, his novels would not have achieved the kind of success that they have, according to one of my students, a passionate Green fan. She told me that the reason why she decided to check out his novels was that at one point she had seen so many pictures of his books on Tumblr that she realised that she might be missing out on something. And once bitten, forever smitten. When I asked her about John Green’s novels, it seemed as if she might have gone on forever.

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Other popular sites for sharing pictures as well as quotations from Green’s books are Instagram and We Heart It. Green himself is an experienced communicator on the web as well, with 1.2 million followers on Twitter. Ever since 2007 he has been posting videos on YouTube with his brother Hank. They call themselves the vlogbrothers and have established a large community of followers, or Nerdfighters, all made of “awesome” and trying to make the world a better place, or in the words of the Nerdfighters themselves, “fighting against world suck”. For this reason, their community has a broad focus – from education to charity. Still, it is Green’s books, and not least their success, that is the issue here. So why exactly is it vital for so many young

people not just to read his books, but equally important, to share the fact that they have read them? Teenagers I have talked to soon put it down to Green’s characters. They say that there are many exciting YA books, but very few which evoke such an immense emotional response as Green’s do. (Admittedly, these are my words, not theirs.) Such strong feelings need to be shared. And what better way to do it than on social media? Furthermore, Green’s texts lend themselves so easily to quoting that I almost suspect him of designing them with this particular intention in mind. I will return to the quotability and the quotations later. So what exactly is Green’s universe like, and what are some of his basic storylines? His award-winning breakthrough novel Looking for Alaska (2005) tells the story of Miles, a boy whose life is changed forever by his experiences at boarding school. On the front page of my copy the publisher has helpfully summed up the main aspects of the novel: “First friend, ﬁrst girl, last words”. It is, in other words, an initiation story waiting to go awry. We meet Miles

as he is about to leave his miserable life in his hometown behind. He is so lonely that he considers his parents to be his best friends and only two people turn up at his going away party. At boarding school his life is turned upside down; he suddenly finds himself surrounded by a circle of cool friends, including his room-mate the Colonel. The Colonel’s closest friend, a girl called Alaska, is the character around whom the plot revolves, as reflected by the novel’s title. Even though she is not a protagonist in a traditional sense, she is the most important character, the prime mover of their gang. As readers we follow Miles, however, who adapts to his new life, and soon learns to distinguish between his friends and enemies and how to carry out pranks and violate the school rules without getting caught. He, who used to be so lonely that he would be spending his sparetime reading biographies of famous people and obsessing about the significance of their last words, now has a busy social life and even gets to kiss the unattainable Alaska, before it all falls apart.

The Fault in our Stars (2012), Green’s most recent novel, is in many ways more ambitious than Looking for Alaska. It is the story of Hazel and Augustus, two teenagers who meet at a support group for young cancer victims, and, rather predictably, fall in love. Even though it is a novel about cancer, this aspect constitutes the backdrop against which the action takes place. The plot itself is not so much structured around their illness, as how their relationship develops and, not least, their joint project of pursuing the writer of Hazel’s favourite novel. She has been terminally ill for many years and reading this particular book has become therapeutic. The only problem is that the novel has an open ending. She feels compelled to find out what becomes of “her” characters and confides in Augustus. Together they start a relentless pursuit of an answer. Their persistence in wringing this vitally important information from the writer finally takes them on a transatlantic journey, which, in my opinion, constitutes the least plausible part of the novel. In fact, I had to pinch my arm at this stage, as in my opinion, Green is moving uncomfortably close to magical realism here. Considering her physical condition, what Hazel does is completely unrealistic, to put it mildly. As she is moving closer to her all-important goal, she becomes physically as well as mentally invincible. Still, we are made to believe in her and her quest, simply because we want to believe. Green simply is a master of making us want to believe. We certainly do want to believe that his characters are true, too. To say that Hazel and Augustus, as well as Alaska, are larger than life is an understatement. They are not just extraordinary, but extra ordinary – charismatic, feisty, attractive, smart, well-read, funny and wise (particularly considering their age). Even though it is completely unlikely that we will ever encounter anybody even half as impressive as they are in real life, we do not really care. This goes not just for teenagers, as another student of mine observed. In her opinion, these novels are about teenagers but adults like them. I must admit that I did, too; in fact I secretly wanted to be like these heroic teenagers, even at the age of 47!

the great thing about Green’s writing is the pervading sense of humour that his characters display. The Fault in Our Stars is certainly a tear-jerker, but the black humour perfectly offsets the emotional overload. Hazel’s terse comment on attending a cancer support group is an example of how humour can be a life-saver: “Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.” In Looking for Alaska Miles refers to the complete failure of his going-away party in the following way: “The only thing worse than having a party that no one attends is having a party attended by two vastly, deeply uninteresting people.” In this way, terminal illness and social ostracism are treated elegantly as Green’s dry humour enables him to tiptoe around these taboos rather than address them head-on. Green’s skills as a master of YA ﬁction are as clever as they are simple. Like any successful YA writer, Green knows that his readership is diverse, ranging from highly inexperienced to well-read teenagers, as well as adults. Never does he forget that page-turner qualities and a clear structure are the key to winning over hesitant or poor readers and to keep the rest of us hooked. In Looking for Alaska the novel’s structure is made immediately apparent to the reader. The novel is divided into two parts, entitled “before” and “after”, starting 136 days before and ending 136 days after the central event. This hole in the middle works wonderfully as an incentive to read on, as we can’t wait to ﬁnd out what exactly happens in the middle of the novel. Once we have found out, we have become so attached to the fates of Miles and his friends that there is no stopping us before we reach day 136 after. As I have already pointed

out, the structuring device of The Fault in Our Stars is Hazel and Augustus’s quest to reveal the post-novel lives of the characters with which she is obsessed. This quest for closure is elegantly paralleled by their quest for meaning and emotional fulfilment in their extremely difficult life situation. Another reason why Green’s writing is so compelling is the fact that he insists that his stories are significant. In an effort to make sense of their lives, his characters habitually comment upon their experiences. In this way we are made to share the wisdom of the characters: it is as if we are fed little morsels of truth that we swallow avidly. After the central incident in Looking for Alaska, for example, Miles puts everything into perspective: “There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.” Such comments certainly make for perfect quotations! In terms of quotability, however, there are few phrases that can beat August’s maxim: “My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.” Poetic? Certainly. Pretentious? Possibly. To sum up, I think Green strikes a chord with young people simply because he takes them and their outlook on the world profoundly seriously. His ambition is not to teach but to make his readers reflect and feel. He says: “Fiction is an attempt to reveal the truth by ignoring facts. I am much more interested in the truth than in facts.”

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