![]() ![]() This caught me at an impressionable age and I’ve never really lost a somewhat subversive view of the world. We had to focus on the text, capture its meaning and then make fun of it. If you want an academic justification, I suppose he must have encountered Heidegger’s ideas as incorporated into French existentialism because he gave us an early introduction to the process, courtesy of Derrida, we might now consider deconstruction or, if you prefer, reconstruction. Looking back, this was building on our devout worship of the surrealism of the Goon Show and other potentially satirical radio programmes of the period. Suddenly, we were expected to parody and lampoon anything and everything supposedly serious. All continued serenely until, after we’d polished off O-Levels, our English teacher decided we should explore the range of literary forms. We ground through the grammar of both English and foreign languages so that, when we acquired vocabulary, we could speak and write with formal exactness. Later, we could build on this for a more sophisticated level of performance. Educationally, they believed we first needed order and structure. Various talking heads would appear in front of us, doing their best to interest us in basic information. ![]() When I was at school, the atmosphere was mostly serious. ![]()
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