From Hero To Zero

4th National Conference: From hero to zero, or Why perfection is a bad thing
AGT in Independent Prep Schools Dr Heather Martin
Critical Reading
Jorge Luis Borges
1899‐1986
c. Heather Martin 2014
Your pupils will have the opportunity to think about:
 what makes a good story
 the difference between story and discourse
 the undiscovered territory of the English language
 the visualisation of abstract ideas through imagery and symbolism
 the nature of thought
 the nature of perception
 the problem of representation
 the human
among many other things…
©2015 Dr Heather Martin

Web: www.learning‐works.org.uk T. +44 (0) 1672 512914 Email: info@learning‐works.org.uk
RULE 1 (perhaps the only one):
BREAK THE RULES
 Do NOT tell pupils what you are going to do.
Let them discover for themselves as you go along.
 Do NOT tell pupils what they are going to learn.
Let them reflect on this for themselves as the project evolves.
 Do NOT tell pupils why you are doing what you are doing.
Let them wonder and let them think.
1. Reading and Listening
Leer y escuchar
2. Discussion and Analysis
Hablar, responder y analisar
3. Vocabulary Extension
Vocabulario

4. Mind map
Mapa conceptual
5. Create Something New
Inventar
6. Perception and Representation
Creative writing
Escribir
THE INFRAORDINARY
not the extraordinary

GEORGES PEREC
1936‐1982
Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien
Tom et Oliver font du Perec
Je vois des essuie-glaces.

Je vois une voiture.
Je vois un autobus.
Je vois un bâtiment.
Je vois une biciclette.
PROPRIÉTÉ PRIVÉ
Je vois un penseur: beaucoup de penseurs.

Je vois un arbre.
J’entends de la musique.
Dans le métro je vois:
Le Figaro,
Glacière, Charles de Gaulle Étoile, Bir Hakeim,
(des lunettes, des cheveux longs,
un pul, des vêtements),

Sortie
correspondance,
une poubelle.
J’ai un sac à dos.

Je vois des noms: Grenelle, Jussieu, rue de la
Fédération, rue Jean Rey.
Sur une poubelle verte les mots: vigilance, propreté.
Je vois la Mairie, la Place de la Concorde, le Trocadéro,
tout Paris, les monuments.
Voilà la Tour Eiffel!
Je lis des mots espagnols: moda, accesorios, juegos para niños,

historia, cultura, calles de Paris, tienda de la torre.
Je lis des mots français: photos, souvenirs, escalier, pilier,
premier étage.
Au sommet, je vois une montgolfière.

Je vois une statue et aussi un petit garçon.
Il y a 1662 marches.
Il y a les boutiques de la tour.
Un peu d’histoire (une plaque au sommet de la Tour):
un phare tricolore, logé dans le campanile,

envoie sur Paris trois signaux de lumière bleu,
blanc et rouge à raison d’une rotation toutes
les 90 secondes.
La Samaritaine, le dictionnaire:
Santé, magasin principal, gaine éléctrique, nouvel espace maison, ascenseurs, toilettes,
accès à la terrasse, arrêt momentané, jeux vidéo, jeux de société, Lancôme, miroirs,
figurines, jouets, Porte Seine, Kiosque Presse, Pont Neuf, Conforama, en vente cette
semaine, nocturne Jeudi, horaire d’ouverture, loisirs et création, bonbons.

J’ai chaud.
Le ciel est bleu.
Il n’y a pas de nuages.
Il y a un grand café.
Il y a une mouche.
Je vois une glace.
J’entends du bruit.
Je vois de l’art.
Je mange du pain.
J’ai 60 euros.
Rue de Rivoli. Pyramides.
Je vois Mr Mitchell (très grand).
Je prends beaucoup de photos.
Bienvenue, Mini Boutique, Paris Ile-de-France,
l’eau, les ponts:
Ac c u e i l d e P a r i s
(Paris Lundi le dix-sept mars)
Link the writing task to a trip or outing – it doesn’t
matter where to, it doesn’t matter how banal.
 what they see, including the language
 what they hear, including the language
 what they smell, taste, and feel, and the words to
describe it

Jorge Luis Borges

The Andalusia Challenge
The Aleph is just two or three centimetres in diameter, but the entire
cosmos is contained within it...
El diámetro del
Aleph
sería de dos o
tres centímetros,
pero el espacio
cósmico estaba
ahí, sin
disminución de
tamaño.
Hundred Thousand Billion Poems
Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems or One
hundred million million poems (Cent mille milliards de poèmes),
published in 1961, is a set of ten sonnets.
The sonnets are printed on card with each line on a separated strip,
like a classic heads‐bodies‐and‐legs book for children. All ten have not
just the same rhyme scheme but the same rhyme sounds, so any lines
from any sonnet can be combined with any lines from any of the nine
others – adding up to 1014 (= 100,000,000,000,000) different poems.
It has been calculated that it would take some 200,000,000 years to
read them all, even reading twenty‐four hours a day. For this project
Queneau recruited the help of a mathematician, and together they
founded the experimental group Oulipo.

OULIPO
Ouvroir de littérature potentielle
Workshop of potential literature
A group of mainly French‐speaking writers and mathematicians who
seek to create works using constrained writing techniques.
The group defines the term littérature potentielle as (approximate

translation): ‘the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be
used by writers in any way they enjoy’.
Constraints are used as a means of triggering ideas and inspiration.
Examples of key texts include Perec’s Life A User's Manual, which he
‘constructed’ using a ‘story‐making machine’, and Raymond Queneau’s
Exercices de style. As well as established techniques, such as lipograms
and palindromes, the group devises new methods, often based on
mathematical problems, such as the knight's move on the chess‐board
and its permutations.
Exercices de style
© Editions Gallimard 1947
Le narrateur rencontre, dans un bus, un jeune homme au long cou, coiffé d’un
chapeau orné d’une tresse au lieu d’un ruban. Le jeune homme change quelques
mots assez vifs avec un autre voyageur, puis va s’asseoir à une place devenue
libre. Un peu plus tard, le narrateur rencontre le même jeune homme en grande
conversation avec un ami qui lui conseille de faire remonter le bouton supérieur
de son pardessus.
Cette brève histoire est racontée 99 fois, de 99 manières différentes. Exercices
de style est un des livres les plus populaires de Queneau.

7. Translation
Traducción
THE PROBLEM OF TRANSLATION
• comparing alternative translations
• translating one sentence
• translating jokes
The simple answer is: Translation is impossible.
THE PROBLEM OF TRANSLATION
You can never know everything.
The skills of detection:
• examine the clues
• apply grammatical logic
• apply common sense:
 what makes sense in terms of context?
 what makes sense in terms of your own experience?
 how can you infer meaning from what you do know?
USE THE CLUES!
Eliminate the senseless – don’t write something that clearly has no meaning.
First rule of translation:
 to respect the nature of the language you’re translating into – ‘natural
language’
Second first rule of translation:
 to capture the flavour of the original – the odd touch of the ‘unnatural’

8. Reading and Thinking
Leer y pensar
9. Art and Observation
Arte y observación
THE DREAM OF MIMESIS
From the Greek to imitate/imitator/actor
stemming from the Platonic concept of ideal forms and the moral
imperative to copy ‘the true’, ‘the beautiful’ and ‘the good’
‘Mimesis’ refers to a form of literary realism as examined by Erich
Auerbach in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,
which opens with a comparison between the way the world is
represented in Homer's Odyssey and the way it appears in the Bible. From
this analytical comparison, Auerbach goes on to articulate a unified
theory of representation that spans the entire history of Western
literature.
The aspiration towards perfect mimesis is the driving force of realism and
naturalism, and the preoccupation with the accurate or illusionistic
representation of the visual appearance of things.

Tales of three wishes
I wish I had a good meal before me, I wish I had a bigger, better house…
Why not practise
the discipline of constraint or the principle of omission?
1. À la Borges… Write a short story in 100 words.
2. À la Perec… Write a short story without using the letter ‘e’.
3. Combine the two tasks.
4. Tell the same story in three different ways.
5. Tell the same story in poetic form.
6. Tell the story in three words, or in a palindrome.
7. Write the story entirely in code.
8. Write a mnemonic to summarise your learning about Borges.
9. Write a short biography of Borges.
10. Write an exhaustive description of everything in the room you are
writing in/you can see straight ahead of you/ you can remember of a
particular (dated) day.

Creative writing ideas for Borges project
Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges and Georges Perec
1. The architectural approach: a group of children work together. Each is
given a designated and strictly circumscribed area to describe as minutely
as possible in a finite space of time: for example,
 six pupils describe the four walls, ceiling and floor of a room – writings to
be visually presented in 3D form
 one wall is divided into equal parts each to be described by a different
pupil
Writings to be visually presented as a mosaic.
2. The Monet approach: select a place or object to be described as minutely
as possible in a finite space of time: for example,
 at three different points in the day
 from three or four different angles
 from three or more different distances
Visual presentation to reflect changes in mood/point of view/perspective.
Creative writing ideas for Borges project
Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges and Georges Perec
3. The room of the mind: public space/private space (in English and/or
Spanish/French etc)
Each sentence begins with:
 I remember… / I saw…
 Recuerdo… / Vi…
Memories are specific and peculiar to the individual but not personal: rather
they are drawn from the public domain. Gathered together, they might be
said to paint the wallpaper of a) the mind, and b) contemporary culture.


Jorge Luis Borges

Contemporáneo
Los libros […] invariablemente contienen la tesis y la antítesis, el riguroso pro y el

contra de una doctrina. Un libro que no encierra su contralibro es considerado
incompleto.
Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899. He lived in Switzerland during the
First World War and moved to Spain in 1919, where he began to publish
poetry. In 1921 he returned to Argentina and founded a literary magazine.
He published essays and short stories and in 1938 took a job as a librarian.
In the same year he suffered an accident which impaired his sight and made
him reliant on an amanuensis for reading and writing. He went on to
become director of the National Library in the 1950s, developing an interest
in Old Germanic and Anglo-Saxon literature. In the 1960s he shared the
Fomentor Prize with Samuel Beckett and his fame spread throughout the
English-speaking world. He gave courses at Harvard and lectures at
Cambridge and in his 80s began to learn Japanese. (As a postgraduate at St
John’s College I was once able to supply him with a Japanese word he could
not quite bring to mind.) He died in 1986.
Borges was as familiar with English as with Spanish language and literature;
he wrote essays in English and translated Oscar Wilde as a child. He learnt
to speak and write in French before the age of 20. He had an insatiable
appetite for Classical, Western and Oriental philosophy and his self-
referential short stories accommodate both spurious and authentic
bibliographical detail.
Borges is a sceptic, questioning our assumptions about and explanations of

the world: the concept of individuality, the nature of time, the reliability of
empirical knowledge. He sets out to unsettle our sense of the real and
dramatize how difficult it is to be sure of anything we know. It is enough,
he suggests, for a man once to repeat the same experience for both his
individuality and the apparent sequence of time to be revealed as illusory.
‘Todos los hombres que repiten una línea de Shakespeare, son William
Shakespeare.’ (Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius) In a Borges story the writer
cannot exist independently of other writers. Funes el memorioso, for
example, is presented as a contribution to a collection of essays and the
narrator discusses questions of style and rhetoric. For Borges, every text is
just an episode in the to-be-continued dialogue between readers and
writers.

10. Present and Publish
Presentar y publicar
FIN
THE END
…the AND?


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4th National Conference: From hero to zero, or Why perfection is a bad thing

©2015 Dr Heather Martin

©2015 Dr Heather Martin

©2015 Dr Heather Martin

Tom et Oliver font du Perec

Je vois des essuie-glaces.

Je vois un penseur: beaucoup de penseurs.

©2015 Dr Heather Martin

J’ai un sac à dos.

Je lis des mots espagnols: moda, accesorios, juegos para niños,

Au sommet, je vois une montgolfière.

Un peu d’histoire (une plaque au sommet de la Tour):

un phare tricolore, logé dans le campanile,

©2015 Dr Heather Martin

(Paris Lundi le dix-sept mars)

©2015 Dr Heather Martin

Jorge Luis Borges

©2015 Dr Heather Martin

The group defines the term littérature potentielle as (approximate

©2015 Dr Heather Martin

©2015 Dr Heather Martin

©2015 Dr Heather Martin

©2015 Dr Heather Martin

©2015 Dr Heather Martin

©2015 Dr Heather Martin

Jorge Luis Borges

Los libros […] invariablemente contienen la tesis y la antítesis, el riguroso pro y el

Borges is a sceptic, questioning our assumptions about and explanations of

©2015 Dr Heather Martin

©2015 Dr Heather Martin

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