2009 sees the centenary of one of the most important works in the history of Modernism, Filippo Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto." In celebration, the Tate Modern recently held a major exhibition on Futurism which I heard and read much about, but sadly missed. This year, however, is certainly a good one on which to teach a course on Modern Literature, which I am currently doing for the first time.

I prepared my first tutorial for the course around the theme of "Manifestos for Modernism." Whilst many of the literary and artistic legacies of modernism can be traced back to the Victorian period, making the periodisation implied by the term "Modernism" somewhat problematic, there is no doubt that Modernism made itself known as a break with the past through a whole raft of self-conscious essays, statements and editorials explaining and justifying the new aesthetic and rebelling against the Victorian tenets of realism. Not only do we have Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto," but also the "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting," the editorial manifesto in Wyndham Lewis's Vorticist magazine Blast, Ezra Pound's "Imagist Manifesto," and Virginia Woolf's essays such as "Modern Fiction," to name but a few that spring immediately to mind. Tangentially, and somewhat earlier than these, we also have arguably the most important manifesto of them all, Marx's Communist Manifesto.



All of these manifestos shout, rebel against the establishment, stake a claim for the new and the youthful and the energetic. Just read the rhythms and bold, urban metaphors of the opening two paragraphs of Marinetti's piece:

We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.

Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls.

Marinetti goes on (naively, with the hindsight of World War One) to celebrate the anarchic power of technology, especially the automobile as a symbol of liberation:

We went up to the three snorting machines to caress their breasts. I lay along mine like a corpse on its bier, but I suddenly revived again beneath the steering wheel - a guillotine knife - which threatened my stomach. A great sweep of madness brought us sharply back to ourselves and drove us through the streets, steep and deep, like dried up torrents. Here and there unhappy lamps in the windows taught us to despise our mathematical eyes. `Smell,' I exclaimed, `smell is good enough for wild beasts!'

And we hunted, like young lions, death with its black fur dappled with pale crosses, who ran before us in the vast violet sky, palpable and living.

It is startling to read a work like this. It is also, to my mind, vitally important that we look at the manifestos for modernism, as well as the literary and visual aesthetics that resulted. This is because, in the present moment, we are able to accommodate modernist art and literature fairly smoothly, blunting the radical edge it once had. What our postmodern age lacks is a sense of the really reactionary art work, the truly rebellious, and as a consequence modernist works from the pre-war period can seem conservative rather than stimulating.

Consider the case of contemporary or "modern" art (that is to say, work produced over the last half century or so). Modern art galleries today are generally happy places, integrated into cities (such as my local, the Baltic). They have cafés and baby changing facilities and are places to take granny visiting on a Sunday afternoon. The accessibility of art in the UK is something to be celebrated. However, integrated into public life in this way, art rarely disturbs or shocks; it does not occupy a place in the avant garde of culture in the truest sense of that term. With the possible exception of images of naked children - such as Tierney Gearon's I Am the Camera, which led to a police raid on the Saatchi gallery - rarely does art raise the hackles, or seem to break with a tradition that can be traced back to the dawn of Marinetti and his fellow modernists.

Contemporary art draws on the full spectrum of horror, sex and violence in a vain attempt to cause outrage in a culture that is used to seeing all laid bare on the daily news, or in cinema; responses to images neatly and safely confined in a gallery are, therefore, typically liberal and mild. One knows that the visionary or rebellious artist has been incorporated by society when Samuel Taylor Wood struts down a red carpet hand-in-hand with a 19 year old hunk, wearing a ball gown that would not look out of place on a Hollywood actress. Now Wood is a brilliant artist who probably knows full well the irony that she is part of celebrity culture. Her video of David Beckham sleeping is one of the most haunting installations I have seen at the Baltic. But that is precisely the irony: how can one offer a critique or observation of contemporary celebrity society, which Wood seemed to want to do in this piece which cast Beckham as a kind of sleeping beauty, when the artist is a celebrity themselves? Marinetti and other modernists put themselves against the mainstream of society, which they saw as bourgeois and decadent, and producing art which was smugly realist rather than subversive. In the postmodern period, rather than artists and writers being reactionary, rebellious, or strongly analytical of a society from which they separate themselves, the artist and their works have become folded in with society.

Back to modernism, then. And the trouble with studying modernist aesthetics is that it seems - well - less than modern, in the sense that the manifesto writers proclaimed it to be. In a modern art gallery, one may grumble of a Damien Hirst that "It's not art." But rarely, if ever, would that viewer say the same of Picasso's Guernica. T.S. Eliot was recently voted the Nation's Favourite Poet. Unless people were voting purely on the basis of having read the Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, this must be a striking indication that The Waste Land, in its day so groundbreaking and visionary, now seems fundamentally normal, accessible. The same goes for Ulysses, regularly voted the most important novel of the twentieth century, and recently claimed as a being a work for "ordinary blokes." In a postmodern artistic culture that expresses itself to excess in a vain attempt to differentiate itself from the "noise" of a mass media, the modernist poem, painting or novel may even seem quiet and controlled.



In one of the most important essays about postmodernism, Frederic Jameson's "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Jameson talks about the way modernism was passionately repudiated

by an older Victorian and post-Victorian bourgeoisie for whom its forms and ethos are received as being variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive, and generally "antisocial."

Jameson goes on to argue, however, that in the postmodern era - with the folding of subversive art into wider culture that I have mentioned above - such attitudes have become archaic:

Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly, they now strike us, on the whole, as rather "realistic," and this is the result of a canonisation and academic institutionalisation of the modern movement generally that can be to the late 1950s.

Whilst modernist writings were once seen as radical, today the radical is the canonical mainstream. Thus the single most important thing about teaching and learning modernism is, it seems to me, to recapture the sense of energy, verve, and sheer guts that drove many of the modernist writers and artists.

When teaching my topic on manifestos, I asked a question to illustrate this point. Although modernism is often associated with the avant-garde elite, the Bloomsbury group rather than the common reader, Marinetti's "Futurist Manfisto" appeared not in some niche literary periodical, but on the front page of Le Figaro. Just consider that for a moment.

Le Figaro is and was a respected, fairly conservative newspaper. In 1909, it was arguably the most prominent daily paper in France. To publish a "Futurist Manifesto," with all its anarchic sentiment and glorious rebellion on the front page is something the word "chutzpah" was invented for (the Hebrew word appropriately acknowledges that unlike other modernists such as Pound, Marinetti campaigned against anti-Semitism). Just imagine the Frenchman, chocalat au lait in hand, spluttering croissant crumbs across the broadsheet, as he scans from reading about the King's activities in the Elysses Palace and the Caillaux conspiracy, to the sweeping, assertive, bold and brash statements of the Futurist.

An indication of how far we are from the possibility of such a shocking juxtaposition today comes when we try to hypothesise a modern parallel. Thinking of our newspaper is easy: the equivalent of Le Figaro of 1909 must be the Daily Telegraph.

But who is to appear on the front page, dominating that left hand column, incongruous alongside the picture of a soldier returning from Afghanistan, or David Cameron wafting his hands? Where is our modern Marinetti? Who would be his parallel today?

In my recent tutorial, someone sensibly suggested Nick Griffin. But the bumbling leader of the BNP, though certainly anarchic, would also utterly lack any of Marinetti's imagination. As already mentioned, Samuel Taylor Wood has already graced the front pages in her ball dress, so she is too well-known to qualify. Damien Hirst would be a bit predictable, and might just be trying to raise the value of his works. Turning to the literary arts, one might think of the fiery Norman Mailer, or the quirky Thomas Pynchon. But the former has now passed away, and the latter's more recent fiction like Inherent Vice seems almost, dare one say it, accessible. All these examples are also past their 50s. Marinetti was just 33 when he published the "Futurist Manifesto," and there is a definite sentiment across the modernist manifestos that to be physically old is also to be tied to the ideas of the past, whereas it is the young who must carry the flag of modernity.

My lack of examples is not intended to bemoan that we no longer have a new generation of truly reactionary, truly modern artists. It is, rather, to highlight - - within a postmodern context whereby the modern seems fairly traditional and conventional - just how radical and thrilling that early 1900s moment was. It was a true paradigm shift in the arts, ranking alongside the advent of perspectivism in painting, or the rise of the novel. Where our next paradigm is coming from, that will take us beyond the post-modern, I for one do not know. Any ideas?

Labels: English Literature, Marinetti, modern art, modernism, Photography and Art, postmodernism

Over the summer, I was (more by luck than skill, I suspect) appointed as an Associate Lecturer for the Open University. This is the first of two posts contrasting the OU with the more conventional university at which I have taught part-time for several years. This post gives my impressions of the OU as an institution; the second will look at the differences between OU and conventional students.

I have long felt that the Open University does things differently. When I was younger, I remember our kitchen table continually covered with papers, and colourful textbooks; DVDs and software CDs would randomly drop through the letterbox; and, in the middle of the night, the video player would suddenly start whirring, recording some OU broadcast. This was because my dad took an OU course every year, finally earning his second BSc after twelve years hard slog.

Today, I stand on the other side of the OU fence. I recently got a post as an Associate Lecturer on one of the OU's English Literature courses. Having seen the way the OU worms its way into the home life and domestic environments of students sitting courses, suddenly the OU has infiltrated my own kitchen table and scattered its papers on the floor of my bedroom, as I grapple with the demands of teaching a new course, and integrating myself into the rules and procedures of this organisation.

Whilst I always knew the OU was unique among universities, I never realised until now quite how remarkable an institution it is. Over 200 000 students enrol to study with the OU each year. Of these, around 20 000 students are studying an OU course outside the UK; many are ex-pats, or members of the armed forces, but many too are foreign students who welcome the opportunity to make contact with a world-recognised institution. Over two thirds of students will be working whilst studying. 15% of students come from disadvantaged communities.

Even for those not studying formally, the OU makes itself felt. Each week, there are around 50 000 downloads of OU podcasts from iTunes. Two million people access the freely available teaching and learning materials from the Open Learn website. Millions more watch OU supported television programmes, such as the BBC's Coast.

The sheer scale of the organisation is mind-boggling, and utterly unlike any other, mainstream Higher Education institution. And yet what strikes me most as an Associate Lecturer is that at its heart lies an intimate relationship between teachers and students. The idea of an OU course is that the actual teaching is done through the carefully-prepared study materials, such as course books and audio-visual materials. The tutor is not a lecturer in the conventional sense, delivering information and setting tests. The role of a tutor is simply to be on hand to offer some pointers and clarification when a student becomes stuck, to deliver tutorials which again help to draw out some of the issues on the course, and to mark assignments with detailed feedback.

With this theoretically proscribed remit, it would be easy for the OU to offer tutor support for courses en masse. In the digital age, students could post queries on message boards, and a central team of tutors could moderate and respond to them. Largely, the student community could be self-supporting, with students offering each other advice. This does happen to a degree, with students setting up lively Facebook groups, for example. However, although the OU might be run as a purely distance learning organisation, with staff too kept at arm's length, core to student support in the OU remains the allocation of a single tutor, to one small group of students (around 20 in my case).

Students may never get to see me in person (since my students are based in Europe), but they will always know that I am at the end of an email or phone line. In that respect, the student-teacher relationship encouraged by the OU is even more intimate than in a traditional university, where a tutor might lecture to 200 students, or have dozens of small tutorial groups to supervise. Already this year I have had more "contact" with my OU students than with my students at my other, conventional university.

It is quite clear that the OU is a student-centred organisation. It has to be. Its whole raison d'etre when founded forty years ago was to widen the availability of Higher Education to students. At the same time, though, the OU has had continually to attract students in order to sustain itself. Albeit often with generous financial support available for those who could not otherwise afford it, students have always paid fees and the OU is conscious that without students, it would cease to exist. It was, in this sense, forty years ahead of the game of tuition fees, which turned students into consumers.

As I have been complaining recently on this blog, conventional universities have no room to provide more contact hours or support for students who are now paying fees, because it is still the research which brings in most money. As an OU lecturer, though, I am told that I am expected to support my students based on their needs. If a student needs additional help, there is a mechanism to reimburse me, as I can request overtime payments. By contrast at my mainstream university, if any student needs more than the basic tuition, or additional pastoral care, I have to support them at my own time and expense.

On the flip side, the OU also seems genuinely to care about its Associate Lecturers, all of whom teach purely on a part time basis, often alongside other jobs. It would be easy to pass the buck of professional development on to other organisations, or expect lecturers (who may already be established academics) to fend for themselves. Instead, from the moment I received my training pack it was clear that the OU will invest and support me, in a way that sets a good example for my own relationship with students.

For example, the OU offers a course fee waiver for Associate Lecturers, and runs a range of courses that might be relevant to teaching within and beyond the OU. Part of my salary is stipulated as professional development time, and although it is left on trust whether I will actually do any, the fact that it is highlighted as a separate payment speaks volumes. I am allocated a mentor who I can approach with the picky concerns that are not worth raising with a line manager. A sample of my essays will be double marked, and I will get to see the moderator's comments; in my other university job, by contrast, I have never been told about external examiners' reports, despite me marking half the year group for one module last year, and have had specifically to ask whether my marks had to be pushed up, down, or were just right.

But. I would not be an academic if I did not judiciously balance the positives with negatives. And although my view of the OU has been very positive thus far, and I am proud to be associated with an organisation that does so much to support those who would otherwise be disenfranchised from Higher Educations, already there are some things that gripe.

There is - what else? - that old issue of pay. The OU at least has the decency to state that I should be working for 6 hours a week, which puts to shame my other university which assumes that it takes 1 hour to prepare for a 1 hour tutorial. Joke. Even so, the 6 hours very easily vanishes. I am probably working twice that each week at the moment, because I have to learn the course for the first time, as well as to teach it. Given that students on my course should be studying for 15 hours a week...well, you do the maths. Having said that, I expect that next year, with more experience behind me, the 6 hours should become a fairer representation.

The issue which has surprised and frustrated me most, though, is the awful and incoherent IT infrastructure behind the OU enterprise. There are several different websites all doing comparable things within interfaces that all look different and un-integrated (Open Learn, Student Home, Tutor Home, Platform First Class, Intranet Home). The email and forum software belongs in a museum of early 1990s bulletin boards: there is no threading, 100 MB of storage, no search function, poor attachment support, an awful address book, no mobile or push email support. A project is underway to replace this old system with something that may live up to the vain name First Class. But we have had richly interactive websites and communication tools for the last decade, and given that part of the OU's remit is to drive forward educational technologies, it is shockingly behind the times with its own virtual learning environment (VLE).

Similarly, the way my tutorials work is ridiculously quirky. Because my students are scattered across Europe, we hold tutorials via a telephone conferencing system. This involves an operator phoning round each participant in turn, which occupies 5 to 10 minutes of a 45 minute tutorial; we then hold a conversation across a time-delayed, echoing line. I must not overrun my tutorials, since the international operator-assisted calling charges are significant. Neither must the calls go through to students' mobiles.

But there is another way of running conferencing cheaply and easily, with me in full control. You may have heard of it. It is called VoIP. It would be easy for me to install software on my own PC that would allow me to conference call students, either to their phones or computers or mobiles, for nothing more than the cost of a local rate phone call. Like all large institutions, I guess the OU must be slow to turn on to new technological opportunities. But as the one at the sharp end of a rubbish and costly phone line, who could run a VoIP conference with the click of a mouse, the rigidity of the old system is frustrating and, again, surprising given the OU's remit to promote virtual and distance learning.

To be fair to the OU, it is not alone in being a Higher Education institution that struggles with the internet age. My other university uses the god-awful, snail-slow, user-unfriendly Blackboard. However, whilst in mainstream universities such VLEs are an addendum to conventional teaching methods (lectures and tutorials), the VLE is increasingly the main face of the OU for students and, for that matter, for Associate Lecturers.

Even so, a gripe about technology should be set in the context of the fact that the OU works, and works brilliantly for a large and diverse body of students who would otherwise not have access to study. In my second blog post, I will look at how these students seem to differ from "conventional" ones who have slipped directly from college into university.

Labels: Open University, teaching, University Life, virtual learning

A.C. Grayling has just written a comment piece in The Guardian complaining that more "contact hours" do not equate to a better education. This is the belief apparently held by Peter Mandelson, who in calling for universities to become more commercially responsive to their consumers (i.e. students), has focused on contact time as a prime way in which universities should compete to attract students.

Grayling remarks that Mandelson has misunderstood the nature of a university, especially in Arts and Humanities subjects:

University is emphatically not about spoon-feeding and hand-holding through courses, but the very opposite. It is not about maximising contact hours, but about autonomy in thinking, researching and writing.

This is fundamentally true. The job of a university teacher is not just to deliver the maximum amount of information in the most efficient way (one can imagine this idea might appeal to Mandelson, though) but to encourage students to learn independently. This is why the single most popular career destination for English Literature graduates is business and consultancy. It does not matter to an accountancy or financial firm that a student can recite twelve Keats poems, or tell you the plot of Pride and Prejudice. What matters is that in discussing texts in tutorials, in reading critical material, and in writing essays about literary works, the English student becomes able to summarise information, write accurately, and present confidently. They have also proved that they can study independently in a library, without needing a teacher to look over them and crack a whip.

Giving an arts and humanities student the equivalent number of contact hours as a science student - where the delivery of raw information, which can be applied to a relevant vocation such as engineering, does matter - would entirely negate a key benefit of having a pool of graduates emerging from non-skills based courses. Again, one suspects Mandelson will rather miss this point.

The hard core of Grayling's argument, then, is difficult to dispute, for all that he whimsically recites soft Aristotelian ideals: "We educate ourselves so that we can make a noble use of our leisure." However, as I have commented recently on this blog, the leaders of universities - who did not have to pay tuition fees themselves - grossly underestimate the financial hardship of current students, and consistently take the attitude that students are a problem to be minimised, rather than fee-paying consumers. When staff are torn between giving more contact time to students, or researching more, the former invariably gives way.

Whilst universities, especially in the Arts and Humanities, should be concerned with allowing students to learn independently, and contact hours are not the be all and end all of a good education, this does not mean that universities currently give value for money. Indeed, the lifetime earnings of arts and humanities graduates may not beat those of people who leave school aged 16, and so if students are to take a hefty loan burden long into their lifetimes, universities need to ensure that they offer value for money in the broadest possible sense of "value," which may mean providing more teaching for the crucial three years.

Students on a typical Arts and Humanities course may have only around 10 contact hours a week. With current tuition fee levels, that works out at around £40 per student per hour, and considerably more (into three figures) for a body of students in a seminar or lecture. Surely students have the right to feel aggrieved when lecturers remain uncontactable, or unable to offer any more than the minimum, or when other resources do not come up to scratch?

How does it help a student to learn independently when it can take two months for them to get an essay back from a tutor? How does it help students to learn independently when the only comment at the bottom of an essay is "well done"? How does it help students to learn independently when course books are not accessible or even stocked in a university's over-stretched library? How does it help a student to learn independently when a tutor does not have time to offer pastoral support if a student is encountering domestic, personal or financial difficulties beyond their control?

All of these examples are things I have encountered first hand as a student and university tutor. All of these examples speak not of staff who do not care, or of students who expect too much, but of universities and staff stretched on the rack of teaching and research, with the latter currently dominating.

I also teach for the Open University, and the quality of contact and support students have from tutors is astonishing in comparison to traditional universities. Yet the OU is also one of the best institutions educating through independent learning. Universities ought not to aim to maximise contact hours in any quantitative sense; but they have a long way to go before they offer value for money through quality of contact, in the way the OU has done since its inception as a student-centred organisation.

Maximising contact hours would not automatically give students a better education; indeed, for Arts and Humanities graduates who prove their ability to work without supervision, it might even be counter-productive. However, that badge of "contact hours" offers a very useful focal point around which to have the necessary debate about whether fee paying students are really getting the quality of experience they deserve. It should also focus the minds of deans and vice chancellors into realising that you cannot squeeze more out of overworked staff if they must do both teaching and research. If teaching needs to be improved, then more staff need to be employed. This is the simple equation that will, almost certainly, become the outcome of higher tuition fees.

It may not be good for the idea of the university, where those doing the cutting edge research are, currently, also those who provide inspirational teaching; it will almost certainly lead us to follow the American model where graduate teaching assistants do as their name suggests, whilst a few faculty Professors do research full time. However, these consequences are only to be expected when students have become consumers. For student-consumers as they exist now, the quality (and perhaps quantity) of teaching matters, and it is a good thing that Mandelson has raised that "contact hours" spectra, to give students a hook on which to hang their demands, and to give them hard figures to force their universities to respond to their current imbalance in favour of research.

Labels: contact hours, student loans, tuition fees, University Life