Enthusiasms

It's become a bit of an annual affair for me to do a workshop at the Gifted Education Branch's Literature Seminar, and in very recent years also feature as a 'literary critic' listening to various students present their research into texts and writers that have somehow come to their attention. Today one of the organisers remarked to me at the end of it all that I had had a long day and, yes, it was, but it really didn't feel too long, unlike days, all too frequent I'm afraid, filled with stuff that doesn't feel in the slightest bit educational - for me or anyone else. In fact, the time fairly flew by, fuelled by the intelligence and enthusiasm of the participants. There's something very exciting about seeing kids experiencing or recounting those moments of seeing that constitute real education.

Of course, generally students' presentations tread fairly familiar ground, and rightly so. After all, it's hardly familiar to them. Imagine discovering Orwell's 1984, for instance. I can recall the heady excitement of getting to the bit when Winston starts to read the account of Oceania's history and you find out how the nightmare works. My thirteen-year-old brain felt like it was exploding.

But today I was taken aback by one or two of the delightfully odd choices made of topics and writers. One young man, for example, was a Hart Crane fan and had some fascinating things to say about him which managed to be engaging despite being mediated through the dreaded net of Theory (and not just any theory but Bloom - Harold not Leopold - at his most obscure.) Funnily enough I'd been thinking half seriously about getting hold of the Hart Crane collection in the Library of America series, not so much as a fan, which I'm not, having very little acquaintance with the poet, but just to see whether he's any good. Going back in time to my callow years, I remember his name being fairly frequently mentioned among the accepted big or biggish ones of American letters but it seems to me, possibly incorrectly, that his reputation has been in something of a decline. On a simple level, he doesn't get name-checked that often these days and I was vaguely interested to see if we were all missing something.

If today's presentation is anything to go by, we are. And that seems to me to point towards something extraordinarily valuable in engaging in the critical pursuit - which is quite a concession coming from someone as cynical about the business of lit crit as I tend to be these days. Being made to really pay full attention to a writer who may otherwise be neglected is potentially a way of doing a kind of justice. Who knows, some years from now a Hart Crane vogue of major proportions might grow out of a single reader's perspicacity and insight.