In a thinly disguised attempt to prepare the ground ahead of raising the cap on university tuition fees (which seems inevitable no matter whether Labour or the Conservatives win the next general election), the business secretary Peter Mandelson has said that students, as "consumers of the higher education experience," need to demand more from their universities to help them drive up standards and offer better value for money.

On the face of it, you might expect me to agree with him. As I blogged recently, as a university teacher who has a massive student debt himself, I feel that modern universities - led by a generation of deans, vice-chancellors and department heads who merrily strolled through with grants - fail to acknowledge just what a pressured position students find themselves in, and they consequently take student demands for extra or better contact hours as an affront rather than their right. Meanwhile, students do not fully recognise their own value as fee paying customers, and are still in awe of staff who are forced to focus on research rather than teaching, and so students fail to make additional legitimate demands both on their teachers and on universities, who should divert more of their fat fees into teaching resources rather than research.

There is also, admittedly, something of the bemoaned student apathy at work, and it was not surprising that Mandelson invoked the spirit of the radical 1960s to inspire student-consumer pressure:

As students who go into higher education pay more, they will expect more and are entitled to receive more in terms not just of the quality of courses, but the whole experience they receive during their time in the higher education system. If there is a degree of passivity, then I hope that without enjoining our student population to take to the barricades, I hope they will be more picky, demanding and choosy as consumers of the higher education experience.

Putting the onus on students to pull their universities up might, then, seem a positive thing. Yet it misses out one glaringly obvious, horrible trap that lies in wait should the fees be raised again.

At the moment, with lower top-up fees, most universities charge the full amount money, £3 145 in 2008-2009. There is, therefore, not much of a market in Higher Education, and students go where their grades take them, and accept the teaching they are given. But were the fee cap to be lifted, with some muttering about £5000 as a starting point, the marketplace would become more diverse, with some universities charging markedly less in an attempt to attract students. This is what New Labour and the Higher Education sector have clamoured for all along; it has just taken some time for them to incrementally legislate up the tuition fee ladder (or should that be down the slippery slope?).

In this new environment, rather than students pulling university teaching standards up, students would go to the university they can afford, with variable teaching standards attendant on that. It has already been seen that students from the poorest backgrounds are deterred from university, despite promises of substantial grants and bursaries. Charging higher fees would mean that even students who want to go to university in principle, will be more likely to choose those they can most afford. Meanwhile, students from affluent backgrounds, who will also more likely have received better secondary and tertiary educations, will go to universities (often the red bricks) that perhaps need to be less innovative and offer fewer contact hours in teaching, because of the higher standard of student they attract. Such students might well be more apathetic when it comes to making increased demands of their institutions. Meanwhile, students from less positive educational backgrounds, who are more likely to be forced to choose cheaper universities, may worry about the poor quality of the teaching, but will be confronted with that old capitalist equation between peanuts and monkeys. They will be told to shut up like well-behaved consumers, because they got what they paid for.

Whilst his motivating of students was a good thing, Mandelson was misguided in his reasons for doing so. With higher tuition fees looming, the starting point should not be to expect that students will drive standards in the Higher Education market, but to require universities to pull standards up from the top. Higher Education is not a consumer product like a car, or television, or computer. Unlike in the retail sector, a marketplace in Higher Education will not lead to students/consumers to demand more, for less, forcing institutions to compete on teaching quality and value for money. This is because of the massive costs involved, at the early stage of life, which mean that some consumers are automatically going to be forced to aim for a lower priced institution; meanwhile, those who can aim higher are also the least likely to feel that the quality of their education is poor, because they are most likely equipped with the parental support and educational backgrounds to compensate for it. What might at first seem to be Mandelson's concern for a student centred Higher Education, actually revolves round his love affair with the market, and the university's lust for higher tuition fees, whatever the cost to the young.

One of the pleasures of university life is the three months in summer when students depart, and rather than having to swim against a tide of preparation and marking, one actually gets to tread water, reflecting on what has gone before, and planning new strategies. For module conveners and heads of department, such planning usually means revising reading lists, syllabi, lectures, and exam papers in the wake of a burden of student feedback forms and external examiners' reports. But not being elevated to the position of a full-time academic, in my humble role as a part-time tutor, I get to reflect more modestly on my own teaching experience, and plan subtle but perhaps more exciting changes to my own teaching methods.

Over the summer, then, one plan I have implemented has been to build myself a personal website to showcase my research and CV and, rather less vainly, to support my teaching through technologies that are not offered by the university's central virtual learning environment. For example, having moved to an online calendar, I post my free/busy information so students can check when they can meet me if they need an appointment. I also offer anonymous teaching feedback questionnaires. However, the most exciting element of the website is my new Twitter account.

Long one of the Twitterati under the not-so-pseudonymic alibrown18, this coming academic year, I will be using another Twitter account purely in support of teaching (I will not give it out here, precisely because it is designed for my students, not the use of you, Joe Public). In this blog post, I explain my rationale behind using Twitter, and anticipate some of the problems and potential benefits as a technological aid to traditional teaching and email contact methods.

Rationale

One thing that surprises me as a teacher is how few emails I get asking intellectual-type questions, where a student is struggling to comprehend material and wants some help, or where a student is carrying out their own research for essays and would like some pointers. There are far fewer than one might have expect given that they have so little contact time with me over the year. Of course, just about once a minute I receive an email along the lines of "my printer has broken, can I have another month to write my essay?" but it is rare for a student to ask me something less practical, and more discursive. Whilst this might suggest that I am unapproachable, or that I give off the whiff of "I'm too busy doing research, now leave me alone," I would prefer to think that I give the impression to students that they are welcome to ask me any questions they would like, to discuss essays or other concerns. Why, then, do so few approach me with questions that indicate fresh engagement or problems with their course content?

One clue might lie in the style of the relatively few discursive emails that I do receive. We live in a culture in which, so we are told, students would write essays via text speak and emoticons if they could get away with it. Given this, I am always surprised that when I receive a email from a student, they are most often carefully-crafted, literate, and considered. Students are usually apologetic for having "bothered" me, even if the question being asked was worthy and interesting. Coupling this with the fact that I receive fewer dialectical emails than might be expected, my suspicion is that students are put off from asking intellectual questions for fear of sounding stupid. They do not want to seem to be asking that question that might be deemed too simple, and hence too much of a bother to a busy tutor. Thus students may get so bogged down in worrying about how they can express their question, that few of them actually do so, not being prepared to write through a careful email expressing their thoughts.

As a very different form of electronic exchange, with a 140 character limit the very nature of Twitter defies extended talk. It is, however, potentially very useful for precisely the reason that intrinsically no question or comment a student poses there can be a deep one, though it may nevertheless point towards hidden complexities and undercurrents of thought in the student's mind. The additional level of informality might encourage more hesitant, or less articulate, students to use this medium instead of email. I can at this stage imagine messages like, "Help. I really want 2 write about science in Conrad's Secret Agent. What should I read?" or "Is the passage in Pride and Prejudice on p.49 free indirect discourse?"

Naturally, such questions would require an extended, probably emailed, reply. But the important issue here is about opening a channel of communication between student and tutor, encouraging the student that the tutor is approachable and open to an exchange of ideas, thoughts, and recommendations.

A second motivation for using Twitter lies in the efficient way it can be used to share contemporary media stories, web links, or one's current reading. My thoughts on this benefit were sparked when in the middle of the last academic year I read Elaine Showalter's article in The Guardian review, showcasing her new book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. At the time, I was teaching an American fiction course, and it struck me as apt that Showalter had touched a nerve about the masculine bias in American literature. Almost certainly, some of my students will have picked up on the article, or on one of her radio and web features around the time. Yet most may not have done.

Using a quick, informal tweet to direct students to the article would have made clear that this was neither essential reading, nor necessarily my view on the state of American literature, but that it might be of interest nonetheless. Based on my serendipitous research experiences of happening upon books in Oxfam or articles in the London Review of Books that sent my writing off into new and fertile fields, I firmly believe that research in the arts is as much about luck and the unexpected discovery than the predictable approach through the established reading list. Because of its brevity, tweets containing links or recommendations have the sense of happenstance about them. For example, I could only have posted: "Article by Showalter on which women writers are important in American Lit. http://bit.ly/H9fC4" It is then up to the student to read and decide for themselves what their opinion on this new criticism is.

On that note, a more ephemeral epistemological possibility might be raised through the use of microblogging teaching aids. Literature departments have come a long way since Arnold, Leavis, Eliot and their like populated their "great tradition" with dead, white, European males. Whilst many bemoan the postmodern, postcolonial, postfeminist relativism that was - and still is - the reaction to this tradition, there is no doubt that today, English studies is in perpetual flux. The "canon," such as it is, shifts with the cultural climate and the intellectual tide. Just as Showalter's A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing shook up the notion of the male tradition by perceiving a female line of literary inheritance, a new work by a major critic like Showalter will get noticed, will shift the boundaries of the discipline, will break the silo of "American Literature."

Yet in spite of the undermining of the tradition, even the best lecture courses can be slow to turn with the tide, perhaps introducing one or two different books a year, and certainly not rewriting material to reflect issues currently in the news, blogosphere, or literary media. The lecture course, doing its job of teaching efficiently and reliably week by week, has its place. Indeed, arguably the key merit of literary studies is its comparative stability. By discussing a common body of the best texts of a culture or time, a literature course sends a community of readers, who become workers, thinkers, and leaders, out into the world with a common humanistic framework derived from those books. But the lecture course that is the bedrock of such an idealistic (perhaps, today, slightly naive) ambition does not necessarily impart to students the sense of their subject today as dynamic, with long-cherished authors up for critical grabs, with new authors just waiting to be explored.

Now I would not suggest that Twitter, for all of its powerful Streisand effects on the media, is by itself capable of carrying a new culture into English studies. Nor indeed would such a revolution be a good thing. The whole beauty of posting subject news to Twitter is that its informal nature means that any links or reading suggested there will not fundamentally contradict central reading lists carefully constructed by module conveners. It will be clear that these reading lists and lectures are the core of course content. Yet any contemporary tweets may also inspire students' independent learning, encourage them to explore the less well-known books on course lists, and invest in them the sense of literary studies as a discursive game, rather than a one-way process where they suck well worn information out of eminent academics. What I would hope using Twitter will do as a teaching aid is to convey in students the sense of their subject as being alive in wider critical and lay society, so that individually students feel free to imagine new ways of approaching established texts. Additionally, if I use it to post my own reading as I prepare for teaching, this might convey the excitement of independent research in a way that could enthuse students.

Why Twitter?

Twitter is, of course, just one of many web tools that might help to support learning. Why, then, is it potentially better than any alternative platform or content sharing facility?

As I have already said, Twitter's 140 character limit is ideal for encouraging students to open communication spontaneously, rather than worrying about contacting a tutor to ask a potentially (to them) silly question. It also makes it easy for me to share links to articles or books, without feeling that I have to write a long email or blog post justifying my suggestion, and without implying that my suggestions are certainly better than those on reading lists.

Besides brevity, another benefit of Twitter is its simplicity. I can easily use a browser plugin (such as Echofon) or my mobile phone to post links or responses to students, without having to log-in to any university email or content management system.

Further, students can also follow my Twitter feed passively. I have in the past considered using Facebook as a teaching support, because it is ubiquitous among the student community and has straightforward facilities for discussions, such as the wall and message boards; it also has an events system which could be used to remind students of deadlines or meetings. However, feedback from my students on their tutorial questionnaires strongly suggested that students would see my use of Facebook as a breach of private walls. Firstly, students use Facebook to escape work, not to do it. Secondly, in order to create a teaching group, I would first need to befriend students and vice versa, meaning that we might be tempted to snoop on each other's profiles.

Twitter, however, requires no such exchange of personal details in order to allow a feed to be followed. Indeed, anxious students can actually "block" me from following them, whilst still being able to see me. I can also use Twitter's API to post tweets to my static teaching website (and one would hope that existing virtual learning platforms, such as the dreaded Blackboard, will make use of this architecture in future) so students can check there even if they are not signed-up members of Twitter. Tweets can also be followed as individual RSS feeds corresponding to a hash tag. So, for example, I can assign #drama to one module, #modernism to another, and students can follow only those feeds relevant to their subject. That Twitter is by nature a public medium also means that other students not directly taught by me can pick up on my feeds, helping to offer "parity of provision" between students taught by different tutors.

Finally, the use of the "retweet" convention would allow students to use my Twitter feed to share their own discoveries with their peers, without those students having to log on to a discussion board or compose a justificatory email. Such retweets could also be anonymised, if students fear being tagged as the class "geek," whilst they can be moderated more easily than a discussion board, if I feel the content is unsuitable or irrelevant. Indeed, such moderation, which would require me to contact the student explaining why I have not passed their suggestion on, might also draw out that the student is not engaged with the course reading in the best possible way.

The Test

Of course, all the above are hypotheses conceived in the dreamy days of the summer vacation. It may well be that students do not use Twitter to contact me with sparks of doubt or questions. It may be that few make use of my feeds on current subject news. It may also be that my university comes down on me for daring to use a technology that does not come under its official virtual learning environment, and for doing something that goes beyond the normal expectation of a tutor.

But I feel that, being early in my career, and not having the burden of a full-time academic job and associated admin and research, if I do not try these things now, I may never; or, rather, if it does work, I will be able (quite selfishly) to promote my technological innovation as an aspect to my CV, rather than something expected of a university tutor as will increasingly be the case over the next decade. At the moment, Twitter is surfing the wave of the Web 2.0 era, the hottest new technology since, well, Facebook last year. It would seem a real missed opportunity not to test how microblogging can work as a teaching tool.

The final question, though, because it is so cutting edge, is what the test of its success can be. Despite the mass of publicity, not everyone is familiar with Twitter, and despite being tech-savvy, students might think my use of the medium is a bit alien and strange. Perhaps they will not use it just because it is not yet prominent in their consciousnesses, the way Facebook is, and I would be wrong to be deflated if uptake is slow. A key problem of testing how my Twitter posts are used is that, whilst being open so that students can follow feeds in a number of ways without having to "befriend" me, this makes it impossible to apply metrics. How do I know whether my students are following me, or just random strangers? How do I know how many students without Twitter accounts are visiting my static website and actually reading the feeds there? How do I know how many have subscribed to the RSS feeds with a reader?

Further, if students do not use it to contact me with their questions, or to share their reading with their peers, does this suggest something intrinsic to many students (that they do not really want to actively engage with their learning and the intellectual potential of their subject, but simply want to pass the course), or does it suggest that this technology too has failed to unlock their discursive sides? If a few students do actively use it to chase up my reading suggestions or to ask questions, will my efforts taken to reach these few have been worthwhile, or are those the same students who would have excelled as learners anyway?

There is, at this stage, only one thing to do. In a couple of days, I have my first meetings with my students, when I will introduce my new website, and direct them to my Twitter stream. I will, quite shamelessly, get their feedback and thoughts. And hope that I will also, in a year's time, be posting here that it has been a resounding success. Wtch this spc. x.

As a young, so-called literary critic, it is nice to know that my literary tastes and acumen are up there with the best. I had just written a review of A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, when I came across James Wood's essay on it in the London Review of Books. "James who?" you ask. Oh, you know, only the Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard.

Wood writes about Byatt's "teacherly, qualifying authorial judgment[s]." I said of the novel that its style shares much with her didactic, academic essays. Wood writes, in a lovely phrase, that "Whenever a detail could be selected at the expense of another one, Byatt will always prefer to buy both, and include the receipts." I wrote that "Byatt's cultural references dominate to its detriment." Both Wood and myself reached the same general conclusions: that this is in many ways a remarkable work, a faithful - perhaps too much so - recreation of the Edwardian period, which sacrifices psychologically realist characterisation on the alter of intellectual fascination. Or, as Wood puts it rather better, "Byatt's characters are themselves her dutiful puppets, always squeezed and shaped for available meaning."

Now as if I was not feeling smug enough at having framed a broadly similar response to Wood, although my view of the novel is perhaps slightly more positive in the end, along comes Adam Roberts, blogger at the esteemed literary organ, The Valve. Roberts notes in his review that "by its end this novel certainly builds a considerable degree of heft, which gives its soap-like family births-and-deaths actual emotional momentum. But density can very easily become stodge, and it often does so in this book." This is essentially the same judicious balance both myself, and Wood, appear to have reached.

Which makes it all the more surprising that The Children's Book was not only on the Man Booker Prize longlist (one might have well expected it to be there; it seems entry is almost automatically conferred on anyone who has previously won the prize, as Byatt did with Possession in 1991) but then jumped through to the shortlist of six. Though undoubtedly a work of great historical value, can this really have been one of the most readerly novels of 2009? Certainly, it would not have been a worthy winner, though it is, reservations aside, a worthy book.

I have just posted my full review to The Pequod, and with the two other reviews by Roberts and Wood, it should be clear why the book, though a feat of intellectual engineering, does not quite work as a novel: Review of A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book.

I went to see The Winter's Tale last weekend, but a strong production (see postscript) could not conceal the cracks in Shakespeare's original, and my prior impression of the play was confirmed: it is something of a mess.

The problem begins with Leontes, and his swift turn from love and hospitality towards Hermione and Polixenes, into deep jealousy, anger, and rejection. The whole reversal occurs so swiftly that it plunges the entire court, and audience, into bewilderment and fear. This production was particularly good in presenting advisers, suited like government spin doctors, who are left baffled, and torn between loyalty to their king and morality towards his wife and children. Shakespeare here seems more concerned with the effects of jealousy and false accusations on family and court, rather than with establishing any feasible or extended motivation for them in Leontes.

To rationalise his actions, we are supposed to perceive, embedded in Leontes' early lines, that he has long been harbouring suspicions about Hermione's and Polixenes' relationship, and so he instructs his wife to ask his brother to extend his stay to see if she can persuade him, whereas at Leontes' request he would not. This hidden strategy lends irony to Hermiones' bantering that she will make Polixenes stay as her prisoner, if not as her guest (for Hermione will subsequently end up imprisoned by Leontes). When she succeeds in her persuasion, there is also an irony in Leontes' noting that the only other time she spoke to such good purpose was when:

Three crabbed months had soured themselves to death
Ere I could make thee open thy white hand
And clap thyself my love. Then thou didst utter
"I am yours forever."

It is as if Hermione's entreaties towards Polixenes can be successful only if they are tinged with the love she formerly expressed to Leontes.

The problem is that these ironic connections are embedded deep in the language, and do not quite emerge in the moment of dramatic speech. Instead, Leontes becomes a sort of Iago figure, malign (or a "tyrant," as he is repeatedly called), but without just motive; yet unlike Iago, of course, Leontes actually develops as a character, from vindictive jealousy to repentance.

Such a reverse movement happens in the trial in Act Two, when Leontes is forced to admit his mistaken accusation of Hermione and the now exiled Polixenes. Having reiterated his indictment of Hermione, the oracle of Apollo announces that:

Hermione is chaste, Polixenes blameless,
Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant, his
innocent babe truly begotten, and the King shall live
without an heir if that which is lost be not found.

Duly, in rushes a servant to announce that the young prince has been found dead, Hermione swiftly follows (or appears to), and Leontes utterly repents. All this happens within the space twenty lines. The problem here is the explicit reliance on Fate as the motivational trigger. Whilst many of Shakespeare's tragedies involve the intervention of forces beyond human control (one thinks of the missed letter that condemns the "star crossed lovers" of Romeo and Juliet, or Hamlet's encounter with the pirates that finally turns him back to kill Claudius), fate seems somehow plausible, acting as it does through physical forces or other characters. In A Winter's Tale, however, Fate is presented in its purest form, delivering absolute judgement on Leontes and more or less despatching thunderbolts from the heavens to kill the young prince, and seemingly Hermione too.

The power of fate is clearest in Paulina, a kind of nurse-like figure to Hermione, and the one who fakes her death. Paulina is perhaps one of Shakespeare's most powerful female figures, maternally appealing to Leontes to "soften" at the sight of his new born, innocent child, whilst being possessed of the masculine boldness to confront him and his male courtiers. As she argues, she alone can defend Hermione and bring Leontes to see the truth:

The office
Becomes a woman best. I'll take't upon me.
If I prove honey-mouthed, let my tongue blister,
And never to my red-looked anger be
The trumpet any more.

Yet the influence of fate diminishes the striking (Elizabethan?) independence of this woman. At the trial scene, after the "death" of Hermione, Paulina confronts Leontes, telling him:

I say she's dead; I'll swear't. If word nor oath
Prevail not, go and see: if you can bring
Tincture or lustre in her lip, her eye,
Heat outwardly or breath within, I'll serve you
As I would do the gods. But, O thou tyrant!
Do not repent these things, for they are heavier
Than all thy woes can stir; therefore betake thee
To nothing but despair. A thousand knees
Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting,
Upon a barren mountain and still winter
In storm perpetual, could not move the gods
To look that way thou wert.

Of course, we are to believe here that Paulina, at the apex of her apparent anger at Leontes, is also plotting his redemption, for Hermione is not dead but merely appears so. Certainly, the opening four lines above are loudly echoed in the final scene, when the statuesque Hermione comes alive. Thus is Paulina's plan, hatched in the moment of Apollo's judgement of Leontes in Act 3, realised and completed in Act 5.

Yet as the final couple of lines above indicate, the plan is actually one exercised by the gods, with Paulina as their mere agent of action - a kind of daemonic intermediary - rather than the independent figure she appears at first to be.

In order that her plan can reach its climax at the end, with her famous request that "you do awake your faith," the wheels in the intervening acts must be turned by something larger, something metaphysical. Thus that other divine power, Time, sliding over sixteen years, moves us from Sicily to Bohemia, where Perdita coincidentally meets Florizel. Florizel blesses, "the time/When my good falcon made her flight/Across thy father's ground." The weaving of the web of hidden connections that link Perdita, the shepherd child who is actually Leontes' princess daughter, to Florizel, Polixenes' son, is of course typical of the comedies, and so The Winter's Tale switches out of its tragic mode, into the more festive one. It is this mode that allows Perdita to unveil Hermione to a reunited audience (Leontes and Polixenes, Florizel and Perdita), as the final mark of the forgiving of Leontes.

In Shakespeare's earlier comedies, fate or the fairies are given licence to act, because they entertain. Because they are agents of laughter, contemporary viewers can suspend their disbelief, allowing them to do their matrimonial work. However, in another late play, The Tempest, Shakespeare has Prospero admit that he, reduced to a mere human once again, lacks such "Spirits to enforce, art to enchant." Similarly, in The Winter's Tale the awakening of faith demanded at the end in order to have the wish-fulfilment of Hermione's resurrection seems to admit that in life, unlike in art, fate does not act to happy endings, and is instead beyond human control. Such an admission puts these two plays contrary to a modern, secularist mindset, for which such a submission before fate seems unreal, and contrary to the liberal humanist idea that people have the power to change themselves.

The central problem with A Winter's Tale, then, lies in Shakespeare's representation of Fate. On the one hand, the limited rationale behind Leontes' anger, and the way in which this focuses our attention less on the origins of jealousy than on its bewildering effects, seems to present a world in which things happen that cannot be rationalised or predicted. People behave strangely, erratically, turning their emotions on the head of a pin, quite as we would expect of people who live in a world ultimately controlled by the gods. The achievement of Shakespeare's tragedies, by contrast, is to show that actually humans behave in self-motivated ways, often opting to laugh in the face of providence, just as they may do against other characters who try to swerve them from their determined course of action. Macbeth's fate is predicted for him at the beginning, yet we do not feel that Macbeth is a mere puppet of providence, but that he alone has reached the end foretold, and therefore he merits his downfall.

The intervening movements of the The Winter's Tale - as it switches from the tragedy of Hermione's apparent death, to the comedy that will see her resurrection - seem to substantiate the view of the world as driven by higher powers, with even intelligent and independent women such as Paulina actually mere daemonic agents for providential whims. Such a view is enforced by the comedic trait where the right lovers, typically disguised, are brought together. However, in spite of its comic plot, The Winter's Tale seems to also suggest that humans, like Paulina, can act to judge human behaviour, even that of kings; judgement and reward are obtainable within this world, without recourse to prayer. The only problem is, the final reward of the reawakening of Hermione, whilst deeply moving, could only happen in a fatal world, or the world of the theatre controlled by the playwright, that is a metaphor for the world authored by the gods. The human reality that the theatre, especially the tragic theatre, should embody is kept at arm's length by the metadrama. Reconciliation can only happen in art, not in life, and especially not in one authored by higher powers.

As a member of the audience, such ambivalence seemed to me to be acutely problematic. I am sure that there are critical readings that might offer a more coherent account of Shakespeare's vision in The Winter's Tale. Indeed, noticing the ambiguity embedded in Leontes' language right at the beginning, which points to the existence of his jealousy even before the play begins, accounts for his sudden switch when I read the play, whereas it seemed unaccountable in performance. There is, surely, therefore much more that can be said about the play as a text, which points to Shakespeare's logical strategy. Nevertheless, as a theatre spectacle, the unevenness of the switch from tragedy to comedy, the ambivalence with which characters seem at once independent and then driven by powers above them, means that the whole does not quite hang together. Perhaps the ultimate problem is that this twenty-first century viewer, rationalist and atheist, simply cannot awake his faith to the overwhelming force of fate in the way Shakespeare originally intended.

Postscript: The production I went to see, which was a co-production between Headlong Theatre and the Nuffield Theatre, is on tour across the UK until 28th November. My intrinsic reservations about the play aside, this is a strong performance, fairly faithful to the original but updating the setting to a decadent, roaring '20s Sicily and Bohemia. Golda Rosheuvel as Paulina is particularly convincing as a decisive woman, which is perhaps why I noticed so critically the ambiguity about her also being the puppet of fate.

I have just posted a review of an interesting novel by Karen Joy Fowler, entitled The Case of the Imaginary Detective (also published as Wit's End in the United States). The novel - a sort of detective fiction, but really concerned about authorship and the nature of writing - was quite interesting in a postmodern vein. However, the review I wrote used the novel to think more generally about the way in which the postmodern has become subsumed into contemporary culture, so that it is no longer radical or strongly intellectual, but available to writers and readers in more mass-market fictions.

The review was first published in the new literary journal The Critical Flame 2.1 (2009). Since that journal has now gone into a new issue, I thought it acceptable to cross-post the review to The Pequod now. The first paragraph is below, or jump to the full-length review.

I was sent Karen Joy Fowler's The Case of the Imaginary Detective (published in America under the title Wit's End) by someone from Penguin, who had noticed from The Pequod that I was interested in postmodern literature. She promised that this novel was about author ownership, and whether a character belongs to readers or authors, ontological questions which seem prominent in postmodern literary fiction. But the novel has left me wondering whether, in fifty years time looking back to the present, literary critics will remark that postmodernism ended when nobody noticed it any more, because it had slipped into the mainstream. In many ways, the most interesting thing about this book is the fact that its postmodern elements are so unremarkable. I do not mean that Fowler is not capable of writing in an interesting way, but rather that the postmodern has lost any radical edge it once had, becoming essentially normative, so that Fowler, writing a mass-market novel, probably never even realised she was writing in line with its codes.

Continue with the full-length review.

Now although I regularly talk about my subject or teaching, I do not very often blog about policy at my university. I do not want to end up like Night Jack, the not-so-secret policeman blogger. But having already been made hot under the collar by the CBI's call for student tuition fees to be raised to £5000 and for the government's interest subsidy to be abolished, an experience at my university yesterday finally sent the steam hissing from my ears. I hope you can read this as anger bubbles out of this page. And you especially, student at the back of the class, should sit up and pay special attention, because this post is in your interests.

Yesterday, I was having my annual teaching induction in my department. One of the topics covered was marking - and returning - essays. That "returning" bit is important, because our university is pretty unique in that tutors have fifteen minute, one-on-one sessions with individual students, where we hand back the essay and talk through mistakes and positives with the student. It is the best moment of teaching we do all year, as it both allows tutors to get to know their students, and allows students to really understand how they can learn from their writing and mistakes.

But at the induction, it was let slip that the Dean of Arts has determined that the second of these two sessions is to be abolished. It is, apparently, too inefficient a use of staff time. There was no mention of what the students get out of it which is, if the annual feedback questionnaires are to be believed, a tremendous amount.

The second moment came later, as I sat with a literary theory module convenor. This particular module is content based: students have to learn and understand things, rather than simply being allowed to have opinions on texts. And literary theory being as obscure as it often is, students sometimes have problems with understanding its ideas. So I dared to suggest that, at the start of this year, I would stress to students that they must get in touch via email if there is anything they need additional help with. We could perhaps even arrange to meet one on one.

The phrase "parity of provision" came up in response. Since not all tutors will be so active, or too busy to respond to a plethora of emails, it is not fair of me to offer this to my students.

What makes me so angry is the failure to think of teaching time from the student point of view. Certainly, doing away with a handback session, or refusing to be on email call, will free up staff to do more research. This is the major aspect of universities that students do not often see. Yet what both the Dean and convenor seem to have forgotten is that students pay - yes, pay - to get taught.

This failure to think of the immense burden students are taking on, such that they not only have the need for education but the right to a good value one, is, it seems to me, a generational one. As a graduate of the class of 2003, I have £12 000 of debt at my back, and I am lucky - students leaving today can easily have twice that. Either way, with the inflation adjustment - correction, interest rate - on the loans, we could easily end up paying two or three times that over our lifetimes, something the CBI report seems to neglect in calling for a more commercial interest rate to be applied.

But the generation in charge of universities at the moment had an entirely free ride. At the well-paid level of lecturers and deans and vice-chancellors, the financial hardship students genuinely face both during their time at university, and long after it, must seem very distant. They simply cannot conceptualise the world that they have created, where from the student point of view, teaching is what they pay for at university, and is therefore its raison d'etre. Universities are certainly pulled in two directions - teaching and research - at once. But that is not the students' problem, when they find themselves at the fee-paying centre. What is their problem, though, is the sums; bear with me here - this matters.

At my university, students pay £3, 225 a year for tuition. In my department, they will have 21 hours of lectures times six modules (making 126 hours) plus 24 tutorials for those modules, plus (at the moment), 1.5 hours of essay handbacks across their 6 modules. That is 151.5 hours contact per year, which works out at around £21 per contact hour. That seems quite cheap, but remember that since each tutorial has 8 students, that means that the proportion of the tuition fee allocated to a tutorial contact hour is £168; for a lecture, which may have around 250 students, it is £5250. Of course, the university runs massive overheads to which tuition fees also contribute - such as a large library that students in English use extensively. But even so, in value terms, the university is getting a lot of money per tutorial or lecture, and given what little it pays me as tutor (I get paid £60 to do one hour's preparation plus hold the hour-long tutorial), there ought to be something of a surplus there.

Students today should be pretty upset, then, when tutors, or those in charge of university strategy, say that they should not expect any more contact with teachers. To my mind - the mind of someone who also paid for his education - students should feel very happy to make demands on lecturer's time, to ask questions about material they do not understand, or to have a lecturer go over their essay.

Instead, of course, the mythos surrounding the busy academic remains, making students terrified of approaching tutors. It is absolutely true that tutors or academic staff are extremely overworked because of the requirement to do research. But, to reiterate again, that ought not to be the student's problem. The problem instead lies with universities that will not provide sufficient staff to cover the needs of their - yes, that horrible but correct word - consumers.

It is striking to contrast the attitude of my university, which fails to see students in this light, with that of the Open University, at which I have recently started teaching as an Associate Lecturer (and about which I will blog more extensively later). As an organisation that charged its students from its inception in 1969, the OU has a different culture. For example, although I get paid a reasonable salary at the OU, if I find that I have a student who is making additional demands on my time - for example, they need me to telephone them once a week to help them towards their assignment - I can fill in a form and get paid for doing the extra hours. Clearly, the OU is different to a conventional university, and has fewer infrastructure overheads. Yet the OU sees supporting students as its primary role, understands that students have paid to be supported through their course, and make available the money to allow the tutor to do this. Further, by making that money available, this makes it clear to students that they can call on tutors, and to tutors that they should expect to be called on by students, since the workload of tutors can be expanded depending on the needs of students. This is not the attitude of my other university, despite the fact that students on the OU pay equivalent tuition fees to conventional university students. It is not surprising to find that the OU comes out at or near the top in student satisfaction surveys.

But if students at the OU are satisfied, one of the other problems at conventional universities is that students are not dissatisfied enough; or, rather, that they are not conscious of the gap between what they pay for, and what they actually get. If students are to become more determined in holding their universities to account, to get a fair return on their massive investment, they also need to be aware that they are investors in the first place (something quite evident to Open University students). At the moment, the application for a student loan is one more form a student will complete, along with choosing a halls of residence and ordering that new, branded hoodie. A prospective student - especially one from a privileged parental and educational background - will always aim to go to university, and the loan and tuition fees just seem like one more hoop to be jumped through to get there. Because of the nature of the loan, as one that silently accrues interest in the background but that will not bring the bailiffs knocking if not paid by a deadline, students rarely consider the effect it will have on them after university. Only realising the burden of the loan retrospectively, during their time as students they do not connect the education and contact hours they receive, with the fact that they are the ones who are paying for them. Lecturers, from the student point of view, may seem to be doing them a favour by teaching rather than researching, when in fact teaching is the core part of the "product" which students are buying.

My hope is that this will not last. When top-up fees come in, as is inevitable, or when commercial interest rates are charged on loans, as seems probable, students will really feel themselves consumers from the moment they step through that university door. And deans, or module convenors, will have to demand that more teaching staff are provided, to meet the needs of this new generation of students.