‘I remember tears, arguments, confrontations, extraordinary moments of revelation, and a resulting shift of perception that has never left me.’
The ways in which human beings learn are complex. We can be trained, like animals, by brutality, programmed and brainwashed into obedience, learning in effect through fear. We can learn by following examples, by being mentored and coached, by having things that are difficult explained to us. Remembering how we were taught, some of us recall inspirational teachers, some recall a passion for a particular subject, others shudder at the memory of joy in learning cut off by tyranny or negativity. Our memories often go back a very long way, to our first encounters with formal education. By the time students reach university, their patterns of learning are firmly fixed, for better or worse. My earliest memory is of being dragged into a circle of small children, all mocking me and singing, with an earnest teacher anxious for the strange foreign child ‘to join in the fun’. That sense of being an outsider has never left me, though fifty years have passed.
I was able to start remembering my own learning journey when I first joined the DUET team on a workshop in Norwich many years ago. After that there were other workshops, including one in Poland and another, not so long ago, at Emory in Atlanta. What made DUET special was its unique combination of the scholarly and the personal: alongside rigorously prepared academic sessions, all participants were assigned to a creative writing group and, most controversially, to a group run on Tavistock principles, close to the old idea of encounter groups that had come into prominence in the 970s and early 980s. This combination led to a three–layered journey: all of us were able to explore new ideas in literary studies and to engage with new pedagogical methods, we were all compelled to face up to the centrality of writing in the discipline and we were able, in a group setting, to engage with difficult areas within ourselves. I remember tears, arguments, confrontations, extraordinary moments of revelation, and a resulting shift of perception that has never left me. Through DUET I began to do what I have done ever since- to combine the scholarly with the personal, and not to be afraid to do so. The child who was dragged into the circle learned to understand both why she had been so frightened and humiliated, and how to avoid inflicting similar pain on her own students.
Trawling through memory, certain moments from DUET meetings stand out: a story–telling exercise, whereby working in pairs, we told one another a version of a myth and then each told the other’s tale back, like an echo. As a revelation of the gap between what is said and what is heard, this exercise is marvellous. You tell someone something, then you hear what they heard from you, so that the process of inner translation is made manifest. I remember inventing an exercise once, based on the Star Trek idea of going to a planet where no man has gone before. In this exercise, one person leaves the room, the others stay inside and have 5 minutes to work out a communication system, to decide how, if at all, they can be killed, and what their intentions are towards the incomer. The person outside similarly has to decide what his or her intentions are going to be: to enter the room as a coloniser, or as a potential friend. The first person to arrive on the planet, I remember, killed everyone by embracing them. When I walked in, I was filled with dread because everyone was so kind and yet so sinister – they had decided I was food and I could not quite decode the signs. As a way of making people think about insiders and outsiders, about what it means to join a society when you come from a completely different culture, this simple and highly entertaining exercise works brilliantly. And my third great DUET memory is of dancing up and down corridors in a shabby student residence in Katowice, at our last night party, where music was provided by all of us opening our doors and turning on our radios. My colleague these days at Warwick, Piotr Kuhiwczak, was one of the dancers on the Polish side. Friendships were made at DUETs, working relationships formed, lives changed.
The historical moment when DUET came into being is important. DUET was born at the height of the Great Theory Wars, the crisis point in literary studies, before the advent of post-colonial thinking, when we were trying to come to terms with wave after wave of new ideas – feminism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, post-modernism, to name but four. Those of us trained in the Leavisite mode, or like myself in the more philological methods of close reading deriving from Empson and the Russian Formalists were literally at the epicentre of the critical revolution. We were teaching courses that belonged to one era, reading late into the night books and essays that were changing our view of the subject and of the world. Moreover, we were part of a university system that was changing rapidly, as numbers expanded, as student groups internationalised, as new subjects like film and television and theatre studies took off. DUET provided a space for exploring change and for enabling those of us keen to move forward to become less afraid of change.
Was DUET important? I believe it was enormously significant. Even those who remained hostile to the experience – and there were some – did not deny that the time spent in the workshops was unique. I believe the workshops transformed the thinking and the practice of a lot of people, and over the years, as I have met former DUET participants, now often elevated to professorial and even Vice-Chancellorial rank, I am struck by the significance that many scholars and writers attach to those DUET meetings. At the present time, perhaps we need more DUETs to help us move on to another stage.
