Now I do not consider myself a vain person - he says, vainly - but indulge me just for a while in this post. After all, personal blogs are inherently narcissistic, so if I cannot talk about myself here, where can I?

The occasion for my smugness was my final day of teaching this year. Rather than running a tutorial on a single topic, I was holding an open office morning just before the exams, for students from any of my modules to drop in and to air their concerns.

I had begun by talking with one student about his view of post-Renaissance literature, and his argument that Robinson Crusoe exemplifies the collapse of metaphysics. I suggested that this was something of an over-simplification, and that a better view would be that during the Enlightenment science and religion coexisted, albeit somewhat uneasily, and in fact that the rise of capitalism, scientific method and mass literature in the seventeenth century perhaps took on a sort of metaphysical character, a belief in the power of rational thought to pull man up the ladder of faith.

Next up, I talked with another student about Puritanism in Nathanial Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. We chatted about the way in which, in this novel of the 1850s which looks back to the 1650s, Hawthorne tried to expose the historical fact that the old, singular, strident morality of Puritanism on which the New World was originally founded had been shown to be problematic as America become more multicultural. Recalling my MA dissertation, I suggested that he go an read one or two of Hawthorne's other, moralising short stories, such as "Egotism, or, The Bosom Serpent."

My third student was concerned about Literary Theory, and was wondering whether Ian McEwan might be a good author to approach from a feminist angle. We chatted about the Thatcherite figure in The Child in Time, and the emasculated male characters in later works like Saturday or On Chesil Beach. We then puzzled on how gender issues might inform McEwan's next "climate change" novel.

As the student left, and I drew breath, it was at this point that the whiff of my satisfaction hung in the office. In the space of an hour, I had gone from the seventeenth century to a novel (McEwan's next) that has not yet been published; I had discussed the history of science, then the history of feminism; from the putative Great American Novel of Fitzgerald, to the desert islands of Daniel Defoe. Even though, as these students evidenced, I would have been covering a similar range as an undergraduate, suddenly, and for the first time in my educational history, I felt at ease and confident in my subject. Like a well-fitted suit, literature and literary criticism seems to have slipped on me so that here I was, taking my mind for a wander, not noticing all the different areas of learning I was carrying with me.

As I commented on this blog, towards the start of my PhD four years ago I felt highly self-conscious, even nervous, at conferences and seminars, because other academics' questions always seemed much more informed and well-formed than my own. Following a seminar, my supervisor, for instance, who ostensibly works in postmodern theory and contemporary literature, would happily drop in references to Jonathan Swift, or James Boswell, or Plato. I had always wondered where that sort of breadth of knowledge could possibly come from. In my tutorial room, though, I realised that it is teaching that plays no small part in it. As I wrote earlier this year, teaching across multiple modules gives you a range and allows you to perceive interconnections between material that you can rarely perceive when doing a prosaic research project. And students like those I saw for the final time this year, who are engaged and interested and who bring their own ideas, demands and questions, force tutors to be light of their step through literary history. If I opened this post in a self-indulgent manner, I have to close by acknowledging that if I feel myself to have learnt a lot this year, and to have acquired a new confidence in my subject, it is only because my students have forced me to do so by their own abilities and searching questions. My students this year have, oddly, been among my best teachers in the whole of my university career.

Labels: students, teaching, University Life

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. With a President even more visionary than Roosevelt now through his first 100 days in the White House, a new optimism seems to be glimmering through the gloom of failed foreign policy and the credit crunch, reaching even that most pessimistic of fields: climate change. Talk from both Barack Obama and Gordon Brown of "greening the economy" has been primarily a rhetorical flourish intended to give bankers, politicians and economists a way of clawing back some new credibility in the public's eye.

Nevertheless, these green shoots point to a more deeply rooted belief that science and technology now at least offer the feasible tools which, if wielded by a coalition of the Western willing, can stem or even reverse the looming climate crisis. Arguably now, our greatest threat is not ignorance, but the belief that it is too late or not possible to do anything to halt climate change, whether as individuals or internationally. With that in mind, here are several good news stories that I have picked up on over the last week:

• New molten salt technology offers a way to store the sun's heat for use at night or during poor weather, overcoming the key obstacle with solar power.


• Household appliances that listen out for troughs in national energy use will mean fewer power stations need to be left on tickover just in case millions of kettles are turned on at once.


• Investors in the Thames London Array, which will be the world's largest offshore wind farm, have agreed £2 billion of funding. When complete, the project could power a quarter of the homes in Greater London.


• The cost of solar energy is expected to match that of conventional fuels within the next five years, a decade earlier than previously expected.


• In the last three years, the number of plastic bags used annually in Britain fell from 13.4bn in 2006 to 9.9bn. If the trend continues through the actions of the big retailers, a further 5 billion bags could be saved, equivalent to taking 41 000 cars off the road each year.


• Barack Obama's key climate change bill will not quite meet the European target for a 20% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020, but is at least a positive move to some sort of global consensus at Copenhagen, and reverses Bush's policy of ignorance.

Labels: climate change, Environment, green economy, renewables

Over at Grand Text Auto, Noah Wardrip-Fruin has reported that his book, Expressive Processing is almost ready for print publication. However, many people will already have read early versions of this book, because it was posted in sections on the website about a year ago. As well as submitting it to traditional, academic peer review via the publisher, Fruin had posted it online as a way of enabling blog-based peer review. Readers could comment on individual paragraphs, sections, chapters or the whole book.

Often, this led them to pick Fruin up on trivial points - and I myself did this, pointing out that the Eliza psychotherapist program had been produced only a year before the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, not "years before," as Fruin had it. More sophisticated commentators than myself, though, interrogated more fundamentally Fruin's interpretation of computer games and programs as new sorts of text.

Fruin has just posted a summary of how blog-based peer review has affected his work. Fruin has pioneered the use of the collaborative web for traditional academic scholarship, and so his comments are well worth a read. They appear in the same week as the Guardian Education discusses David Melville's recent report on "The Changing Learner Experience." Taking a more conservative line than Fruin's optimism, the Guardian notes that "There is a still a question over whether a well-respected blog is the same as having peer-reviewed research articles, for instance, and using new technologies is still 'bottom up' rather than forced on academics by their managers."

Labels: blog-based peer review, Expressive Processing, Technology

Arrogant it may be, but I suspect that when deep in the tunnel of research, a lot of PhD students look to a glimmer at the end of it that is about the size and shape of a playing card, and shines in the sun. I am talking about a credit or debit card, and that glorious day when you envisage walking into a bank, slapping it onto the counter, and being greeted with, "Good morning, Doctor."

As I blogged when I passed my viva, the process of completing is somewhat subdued. Because there are so many stages to go through, you are never actually sure when you have cleared the final hurdle into doctorship. But the moment that new bank card lands on your doormat, and you start using it in everyday life, is the moment you know you have finally done with the thing.

Which is why I have been frustrated about how hard it actually is to get a card with this new epithet on. When I applied to the Youth Hostel Association, I used the tag, but got back a card simply with my name on it. Likewise, I thought Waterstones ought to be impressed by having a doctor (of English literature, don't they know!) amongst their customers. But you would not have known it from the plain card which arrived after I had applied, which had nothing on save for a string of numbers. My bank, Smile, similarly did not have any easy way of changing my card, though having spoken to a somewhat bemused man on the phone, I am waiting for a new card to flutter onto the doormat any day now.

However, my vanity may well have got the better of me. In this new tax year, I applied for a new ISA, using my new tag (for, surely, they will invest my money more carefully, won't they?). A couple of days later, though, an unexpected letter arrives on the mat. "Dear Dr." it reads, "We have been unable to verify your identity through the usual records checks. Please supply three items of identification showing clearly your name and address." Naturally, my recent utility bills and passports have not been updated, so I am left to worry: will they trust there's a doctor in the house?

Labels: bank cards, Dr., Postgraduate Diary, University Life