Bob Eaglestone is a raconteur par excellence. He can weave a narrative, offer an opinion and keep you laughing with the skill and daring of a master juggler plying his trade – not a ball dropped, not a fingertip singed. Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, at Royal Holloway, University of London, Eaglestone easily conveys his enthusiasm for the multi faceted life of an academic. Over the course of our interview, I gained a sense of drive, not untouched by ambition, which has propelled his career thus far. A prolific scholar, he is the author ofThe Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford University Press, 2004), Postmodernism and Holocaust Denial (Icon Books, 2001), Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (Edinburgh University Press, 1997) and is the co-editor of many others, including, with Simon Glendinning, Legacies of Derrida: Literature and Philosophy (Routledge, 2008), not to mention a very long list of articles, book chapters and various projects in press and forthcoming.
Scholarship and teaching, and how we – lecturers and students – ‘do’ English are inseparable for Eaglestone. As such, he is also the editor of the Routledge Critical Thinkers series, which is now 36 volumes strong, and his textbook, Doing English: A Guide for Literature Students (Routledge, 1999) is going into its third edition this year. Last year, with Barry Langford, he co-edited Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film (Palgrave, 2008) which is part of the English Subject Centre’s Teaching the New English series. Barely 40 with two small children and as one-half of a dual-career household, my sense after our interview was that Eaglestone literally derives joy from doing his work – it sustains him, although, as I discover, sometimes he does push himself too far.
I met him on a very rainy day in January, at his home in south London. It was a Monday, and that afternoon he would be returning to Brussels, his current home-from-home, where he is a Visiting Fellow at the Flemish Academy of Arts and Sciences for two months, commuting each week. He is part of a research cluster on Trauma and Literature, and the communal work there he describes as ‘a really nice, nice thing. Last week I absolutely got tons and tons of work done. I read so much it was like being a graduate student again. It was uncanny‘. He admits, sheepishly, that time expands in a profound way when you eliminate the school run, cooking and tidying up. I concur, with a hint of envy.
Starting out
I asked him how he got started as a lecturer. His answer, as is so often the case, began with his English undergraduate studies. ‘I had a lovely time as a student in Manchester in the late 1980s, and I did lots of other things. With my friends, I was very involved in theatre-in-education projects with some local schools and I was very involved in the student union and politics. And then, in the November or December of my final year, the theory part of the course just completely ignited me. And I thought, my god, this is just really, really, really interesting, and it was all about deconstruction.’ He went on to describe how, when he realised he didn’t want to stop academic work, he sought guidance from Professor Richard Hogg, who immediately told him to apply to do a Masters at either Southampton, or Sussex, since Eaglestone was so interested in theory. He chose Southampton and then ‘I applied for a British Academy grant and, amazingly, I got one – I was the last person in the world with a 2.1 to get a British Academy grant! And the course was amazing and I never looked back. It was like being lit up inside. I was so excited by it'.
From ‘being lit up’ in his final year, he worked incredibly hard for his finals (but only got that 2:1) and then carried on pushing himself through the summer and his first semester of the MA degree, after which he slowed down considerably, from tiredness. Masters completed, he returned home and worked for a year. I asked what his parents made of his next decision to go on and do a PhD and become a lecturer. He took a deep breath and chose his words carefully:
‘In the end it was all lovely, but they didn’t think I would do it. They were quite pleased that I was interested and so on, but I found school very hard: I’m dyslexic and my mother said that they would write on my gravestone “good ideas, bad presentation“. We both laugh at this. ‘And my three sisters and my brother are all extremely clever and they all went off to Oxford and they all found schooling quite easy and did really well, and I found it terribly, terribly hard. And I think my family thought that I would try and then, you know …’ He trails off, thinking about his family with palpable affection and bemusement, ‘… but of course that’s one of the reasons you do it, to show you can,’ he says, referring to his PhD. ‘But not just that, of course. The thing about being lit up on the inside was that it was all just so interesting. I was addicted.’ So, while working for a library, he saw a postgraduate teaching assistantship advertised at Lampeter, applied, received and accepted it. ‘There is very little for a graduate student to do in Lampeter except work, so I worked and worked really hard and had a fantastic supervisor, Lawrence Normand. With some friends, I set up an interdisciplinary seminar group that met every two weeks and read things. I spent lots of time in the Philosophy department. I did a course on Heidegger with a philosopher called David Walford. We read Being and Time, often page by page, sometimes paragraph by paragraph and occasionally line by line. And sometimes just word by word. It was life-changing.’
Lonely and miserable
But Eaglestone did not get a job on finishing, so he stayed on and taught part-time in the English and Philosophy departments, recalling that it was ‘a bit lonely and miserable’, because many of his friends had left. By his second year out, he did what so many have to do, which is eke out a living wage by doing temporary contract teaching at several universities: ‘I moved to London and I taught at Middlesex, Royal Holloway, Westminster and then, in the second term of that year, I had a three-month contract in Hull and I carried on teaching at Royal Holloway. I’d teach at Royal Holloway on Monday and then go to Hull on Tuesday on the very earliest train.’
Perhaps not surprisingly, by the time the summer came, Eaglestone was again suffering from exhaustion, but this time it was much worse. ‘I went to the doctor in the end. And I think back and see that’s when I went, as it were, physically from being in my twenties to being in my thirties. It was really quite frightening, as all I could do for about six weeks was sleep, and it was just because I’d been working so hard: over that year, I’d also written my book.’ Before his post at Royal Holloway, he had doggedly applied for well over a hundred jobs: ‘I didn’t get any of them. And every time I didn’t get a job it felt worse and worse. I remember not getting a job at one particular university after what I thought had been a good interview and I just ended up lying in a meadow near my parent’s house looking at the sky for ages. I remember feeling “this is just awful, simply awful”.
I asked whether, at those moments, he ever thought about doing something else?
‘What I said to myself was, if I hadn’t got a job by the end of the calendar year (it was 1997), I would give up and do something else. I was still living like a student and my future wife was supporting us and it was just really, really tough. Then I got the interview at Royal Holloway and there were nine candidates, including me, all really able people. But when the panel asked, “what are your research plans?” I was able to say, “my book is coming out in September”, because I had made certain I had written it, and I’m sure that was the clinching thing. And that’s why I say to people just coming out that, in this really competitive job market, you have to have your PhD and have your book or, at least, your book contract.’
Loving the academic life
It sounds like, I remark, that even in the ‘dark years’ and through all the struggle that the idea of the research and doing the research remained energising.
‘Oh I loved the research. I meet people who say “oh, I hated my PhD”, and I understand that, because it can be a terrible process, but I still loved it and still love the research and still love the life of it, because that’s the heart of what we do. My three awful years taught me to be cynical about universities and not to trust anything until it’s there on a bit of paper in front of you. And it taught me to be very keen to meet lots of people and to try and work out what the secret rules are, to work out what’s expected of you. And then to try to achieve what’s expected of you. One of the things that makes me quite cross is that at the end-of-PhD stage, people aren’t often told how actually to do things. You’re told get a book contract but no one says, for example, this is how you actually write a book proposal. So one of the things I really enjoy doing is talking to graduate students or people who have just finished and saying “look this is how you do a book proposal, here’s the process, bang, bang, bang”. I love doing that, I think it’s important and we don’t do it enough. I think some people have no idea about the enormous stress and difficulty around getting an academic job. Indeed, some colleagues see not getting a job as a sign that you are not quite clever enough, and that’s just not true.’
Having gained a sense of Eaglestone’s scholarly beginnings, I steered our conversation onto the topic of his teaching. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to see him teach, which he executed with the same ebullience and conviction with which we were now discussing his days as a student. So I asked him when he became excited about teaching.
‘One part of the answer, which is going to sound awful, is that my mother was a wonderful, wonderful teacher. So I find that bit of teaching, being in the classroom, being enthusiastic and listening to people, I find that very easy.’ Worried that this indeed sounds bad, he explains that both of his parents were educators: his mother taught general studies at a comprehensive and his father taught modern history and international relations. He learned a lot from watching his mother teach, which he often observed when he went along to her night classes and hearing her talk about teaching. One can understand why it feels like teaching is in his blood. ‘Occasionally I get nervous, because I have to lecture to 200 nineteen year olds, and they’re looking at the style of your shoes or whatever. But, in general, I love doing seminars and watching them think and talk and argue with each other.’
Slow reading
Regarding the specifics of Eaglestone’s pedagogical approach, he told me about the slow reading he practices with both undergraduates and postgraduates. ‘One has quite a lot of different tools in your toolbox, obviously, and one of the things I am a great fan of doing is reading something closely – often with a bit of theory, which works well. You go through it and try and disentangle the knot of meaning with a paragraph. If you can go through it with a group, you can untangle the whole thing, or at least begin to untangle the whole thing, or at least start to teach them how they might do it. So one thing I do – that I learned from David Walford – is to literally number each paragraph and try and work out, slowly, what’s going on in each paragraph – particularly in a theory or philosophy text – and then you can, as it were, break down the argument. In a lecture on Gender Trouble, I’ll say, “there are 33 paragraphs in this section and we are going to go through and see what each paragraph is saying. That way you will get a sense of the argument and also what bits say something and what bits don’t”; you can go through and see in which paragraphs the argument is being done and which paragraphs are just colouring it in or nuancing it.’
Does the technique of slow reading have a knock-on effect in terms of student writing and their ability to construct an argument, I ask.
‘Well, the thing that I try to do with students one-on-one (we have individual essay feedback sessions at Royal Holloway), is to concentrate on the structure of their essays. So when you have a student who has written a poor essay, I walk them through what they did – the five basic steps of thinking about the question, researching, planning, writing, editing – and, through conversation, find out at which stage it went wrong. Sometimes they have gone about the work in the wrong way, or don’t know how to do the researching bit. But it’s often the link between the researching and the planning. They haven’t sat down and thought it through, they haven’t structured it … it is always about structuring the essay, because I think that’s where English – and other subjects too – do what they do. You go from this mass of information, feelings and complex things all buzzing about in your head and you have to turn it into a clear bit of thought or a clear bit of writing. That’s the trick, isn’t it?’ Learning how to coax out a clear bit of writing, accessible to A-Level students and first-year university students is something Eaglestone learned when he wrote his textbook Doing English, which is now recommended by an A-Level exam board for advanced students.
Advice for early career lecturers
Since that seems like a crucial skill to have, I ask if he recommends that early career lecturers balance writing their monograph books and writing textbooks? ‘No, no, my advice would be to get your PhD monograph out as soon as possible. That’s your calling card. After that, well, I think the discipline of writing a textbook is really good. I found it really clarifying both for my mind and for my prose style. But if you don’t want to do that, you shouldn’t. Some people like working in research groups, some people like working by themselves, some people like going to archives, some people like to go to conferences, some people like to write for newspapers, there’s lots of different ways to be an academic. But I would advise graduate students to get out and meet and talk to as many people as possible. The more people you meet the better.’
In fact, Eaglestone attributes his current Fellowship, in part, to academic networking. He explains that when you do things, such as review books for presses, or meet people at panels at conferences or simply follow-up on contacts given to you by your supervisor, you meet people. If you are a jolly and pragmatic soul, as Eaglestone is, you keep in touch with these people, not for the sake of it, but because, together, you have forged some sort of an intellectual connection. Then, when opportunities come up, one has a pool of candidates to suggest, and, likewise, they might suggest your name when an opportunity arises in their part of the world. A ‘networky friend’, as Eaglestone termed it, did just that with the Flemish Academy Fellowship: they put Eaglestone’s name forward and he was subsequently invited to apply.
The next big thing
There are other lessons, as well, and not just for those at the start of their career. ‘I appreciate that many people feel grim about universities, but I’m actually very chipper about working in higher education, although I do wish someone had taught me how not to tread on toes. It is important to learn how to strike a balance between the world of ideas and the hierarchies of higher education. In the republic of letters, our ideas will be all that matters, but, for now, gender, class and status still come into play.’ When asked what lies ahead for English studies, Eaglestone declared that one never knows what’s coming next, because English is always evolving as a discipline. ‘The glorious amazing thing about English is its unpredictability. Ten years ago, if we had said Creative Writing is the next big thing no one would have believed us.’ But, he, warned, ‘I think English should work to preserve its openness to new ideas.’
Eaglestone seems genuinely energised by the scholars he surrounds himself with, whether in Egham or Brussels, or running international seminars at the British Council headquarters in London. Despite the mass of books, articles and edited volumes to his name, he hopes he has, in his words, what might be ‘a really clever book’ gestating. The book he is looking forward to writing is ‘a book which says what I think. And, every now and again, I can just see what the shape of it might be, over the horizon. I might not reach it, but that’s what I’d really like to do'.
Despite Eaglestone’s acknowledged enthusiasm and energy in the classroom, and despite his palpable love of a well-told tale, I imagine his students most value his sensitivity and humbleness as a teacher. The best class he ever taught, he tells me, was on Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. He took attendance and said no more. He told me how he felt something in that classroom – the electricity of argument and posturing, the topic of authenticity reflected from the book onto the class – and realised the best thing to do, the absolute best thing, would be to let his students do the talking, all of it.
