This Is My Story (E-Book) E-Book

• Herausgeber: hep verlag
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 375

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

This e-book contains high-resolution graphics and tables that can only be read on e-readers capable of enlarging images. (Auto-)biographical storytelling is the ideal vehicle for English language teaching (ELT) because learners identify with individuals across cultures and media formats. Stories support language learning in a sustainable manner and contribute to intercultural understanding and cognitive development. This essay collection homes in on the intricacies and affordances of storytelling in ELT and encourages teachers and learners to engage with life stories across various forms of modal representations.

Leseprobe

Michael C. Prusse / Nikola Mayer (Eds.)

This Is My Story

Biographical and Autobiographical Narratives in English Language Teaching

ISBN Print: 978-3-0355-2646-2

ISBN E-Book: 978-3-0355-2647-9

First Edition printed in 2024

All rights reserved

© 2024 hep Verlag AG, Berne, Switzerland

hep-verlag.com

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Foreword

Introduction: “It’s Not Like Your Story, It’s My Story!”

Meeting the Bard: Shakespeare, Time Travel and the EFL Classroom

The Dark Horse: Exploring the Dimensions of Fictionality and Factuality in Biographical Films for the Development of Film Literacy

Reconceptualising Narrative Competences in English Language Education: Narrative Design and Digital Storytelling

Experiments in Self-Narration: Women’s Scientific Autobiographies for the ELT Classroom

Biographies of Migrants and Refugees: The Quandaries of Appropriation and Representation

“I Remember …” – Working with Graphic Memoirs in the Secondary EFL Classroom

Hidden in Plain Sight: The Search for Identity and Self in Graphic Novels

“Little People, Big Dreams” for Little People with Big Dreams

What the Snail Learned about Itself: Switching Perspectives with the Help of Picturebooks in the Primary EFL Classroom

Lies and Betrayal: A Report from the Field

Index

Contributors

Foreword

A title like “This Is My Story” suggests an act of wilful appropriation. But it is not as preposterous as it sounds. After all, we do believe in our own stories as much as we mistrust what others call their stories. “Why a story at all?” muses Doris Lessing’s main character in The Golden Notebook. “Why not, simply, the truth?”

Biographical and autobiographical narratives stem from this desire to stick to the facts, to capture what’s really there, aspiring to give a faithful account of how it felt when it happened. In all its manifestations, however, life writing cannot be a true print of reality. Life may provide the raw material for countless stories, but it certainly does not tell stories, as writer and filmmaker B.S. Johnson observed some fifty years ago in his introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?: “Life is chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily.”

How then are we to transform this immense material into truthful and captivating stories? There are many answers to this question, one of them being art, or more specifically, the craft of storytelling.

In the wake of media convergence and digitalisation, the spectrum of narrative forms and genres is wider today than ever before. Picturebooks, chapter books, children’s and young adult novels, audiobooks, comics and graphic novels, creative nonfiction, movies, television series along with other interactive and multimodal formats let readers and viewers engage in stories.

Powerful storytelling always exceeds real-life experience. It combines experientiality with tellability, using structure, perspective, voice, style, narrative techniques and, most of all, language, be it verbal, visual or audiovisual.

Personal experience may be at the root of all this. But finally, everything revolves around relevance – to the author/narrator as well as to the audience. With truth being a malleable term anyway, literature is basically boiling down to a narrative question underlying any enthralling tale. Whodunnit? What next? And above all: What if? We want to know how, why and to what effect things happened.

Whenever this works, there is no need to draw a clear line between fiction and nonfiction, between emotional truth and factual truth. Or, as Paul Auster’s eponymous hero in Baumgartner observes: “If the story turns out to be so astounding and so powerful that your jaw drops open and you feel that it has changed or enhanced or deepened your understanding of the world, does it matter if the story is true or not?”

Life writing is still in vogue and has not yet passed its zenith. Michael C. Prusse and Nikola Mayer realised this when they set out to host their second Storytelling Conference in 2021 and undertook to edit this volume.

Ten substantial contributions invite readers and teachers to further explore the realms of biographical and autobiographical narratives, encouraging them to discover the beauty and potentiality of literary writing, in their own right and for the benefit of their students.

Daniel Ammann

Daniel Ammann was a member of the judging panel of the Swiss Children’s and Young Adult Book Award 2020–2021 and one of the 177 books experts from 56 countries who contributed to the 2023 BBC poll on the 100 greatest children’s books of all time.

Introduction: “It’s Not Like Your Story, It’s My Story!”

Michael C. Prusse, Nikola Mayer

Storytelling is often considered as an innate faculty in humans, an aspect of the species that distinguishes it from the other creatures that subsist on planet Earth. Mankind’s evident compulsion to conceive both existence and experience through narrative cannot be confined – it surfaces as a persisting feature of any human society. In addition to its ubiquity, the notion of storytelling “existed long before people gave it a name and tried to figure out how it works” (Abbott 2008, xv). As a result of the prominence of stories in human evolution, some researchers have coined descriptive terms to account for the phenomenon: homo narrans (e.g. Stiles 1999; Brockmeier 2014, 333) would be one example, while another designates humans as the “storytelling animal” (Gottschall 2012, xvii). The pervasiveness of stories is remarkable and, inherently, the ability to tell and to listen to stories “is both universal and timeless” (Wajnryb 2002, 1). According to Abbott, it is not astonishing “that there are theorists who place it next to language itself as the distinctive human trait” (Abbott 2008, 1). This sweeping statement is not unfounded: There appears to be “no human collective that doesn’t have its stories – going back as far as the peoples of prehistory whose cave drawings are evidence of the earliest urge to communicate in story” (Wajnryb 2002, 1). In the 21st century, human beings still “navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web”, people must face this challenge and continue “to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading” (Gaiman 2013, n.p.) and viewing. Stories clearly facilitate the transmission and comprehension of messages. Whether one looks at journalism, advertising or politics – most human communicative activities are dominated by narrative frameworks.

Despite this universal prevalence of narrative, its significance has frequently been contested – particularly in its fictional dimension – and its relevance is regularly denied by those who perceive fiction, for instance, as a form of escapism that has no practical relevance for human existence. The latter stance can be beautifully illustrated by referring to Salman Rushdie, who vividly describes hostile attitudes towards storytelling in his children’s novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories(1990). There, it is not the wicked poisoner of the “Sea of Stories”, the evil schemer of the novel, Khattam-Shud, who poses the most potent threat to the power of narrative, but Mr Sengupta, the boring “clerk at the offices of the City Corporation” (1991, 19), who regularly maintains: “What are all these stories? Life is not a storybook or joke shop. All this fun will come to no good. What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true” (1991, 20). By means of Mr Sengupta, Rushdie identifies a utilitarian-minded audience that does not care for stories any longer as the most virulent problem, because it is people like this character who consider narrative simply as a useless distraction. Ignoring the power and influence of stories is rooted in the fact that their positive potential is not directly visible: in other words, unless somebody writes a bestseller, fiction does not put bread on anybody’s table, particularly not for those who only consume it. Rushdie, who composed the narrative of Haroun for his son in the shape of an allegory, used the fairy tale plot to explain his own story, the tale of what happened to the author after the publication of The Satanic Verses (1988). Several Muslim readers were offended by Rushdie’s book, because they deemed it blasphemous. Consequently, Iran’s political and religious leader, Ayatollah Khomeini (whose name, incidentally, fused with the expression “shut up”, is most likely the inspiration for the arch-villain in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Khattam-Shud), issued a proclamation which ordered Muslims across the world to kill the author, his translators and his publishers. Rushdie rightly perceived this not just as an attack on his person but also as a general attempt to silence storytellers. The writer, for whom it was and still is a matter of life and death, is, of course, not the only one to emphasise the influence that narrative can have on people. Neil Gaiman, for instance, in a conversation with the photographer Cambridge Jones for an exhibition at the Story Museum in Oxford, is keen on pointing out that those who “think that stories aren’t important – aren’t as important as breathing, aren’t as important as warmth, aren’t as important as life – are missing the point” (Gaiman 2014, n.p.). In the words of another novelist, Patrick Ness, who put them into the mouth of the eponymous character in A Monster Calls, Gaiman’s statement is affirmed but slightly modified: “Stories are important, the monster said. They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth” (Ness 2012, 151). The consumption of narratives may be perceived as a waste of time by Rushdie’s Mr Sengupta, but it is fiction that “allows our brains to practice reacting to the kinds of challenges that are, and always were, most crucial to our success as a species” (Gottschall 2012, 67).

The way humans face their daily lives, sometimes filled with confusing and irrational moments that in their propinquity make no sense, is resolved by narrative that reorganises these numerous occurrences into a logical sequence: “Stories give intelligible form to the lived immediacy of our interactions with the world, embodied experiences that are already meaningful but that we may not fully comprehend” (Armstrong 2020, 28). Karen Coats, Director of the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at the University of Cambridge, puts the same sentiment in plain language: “Every day, stuff happens. We eat, we sleep, we play, we work, we worship, we love, we hate, we complain, we cry, we laugh. And through it all, we use stories to make sense of the world we find and to shape it so that it becomes our world” (Coats 2017, 199). Rushdie’s example from above establishes a link between fiction and the theme of biography and autobiography that lies at the heart of this collection on storytelling in children’s and young adult narratives. This means that, in general, a biographical or autobiographical outlook on events seems to be the dominant aspect of narrative. Already the pillars of occidental literature, the Greek myths such as the Iliad or the Odyssey, essentially focus on the biographies of their protagonists, while their readers (or listeners in the original format) follow the fates of Helen of Troy, Hector, Achill and Ulysses and experience the impact of events and the involvement of the gods by partaking in the stories of their lives. Virgil resumed this tradition when composing the Aeneid. Hence, the history of Rome is also related by means of the mythical biographies of the relevant protagonists, such as Aeneas himself, Dido, Romulus and Remus, and the ensuing generations of leaders that founded an empire that, like the Greek one, had a lasting impact on European history and which, in combination, are still perceived as the cradles of Western civilisation. This tradition of narrating lives can be pursued like a red thread through the history of English literature, from the picaresque novels of Defoe and Fielding to the Victorian life narratives by Gaskell, Thackeray or Dickens and, even further, to the modernist experiments of Faulkner, Joyce and Woolf. It is in the light and context of such narrative conventions that Joseph Conrad could utter his famous statement: “Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing” (1924, 17).

And still, the question remains – why are we so fascinated with both telling our own stories and reading others’ life stories? The late Columbian author Gabriel García Márquez offers an answer to this when naming his memoir Living to Tell the Tales (a bit more powerful in the Spanish original – Vivir Para Contarla), linking his personal experiences and his purpose in life to his vocation as an author. Rebecca Solnit, on the other hand, retells and embeds her life stories in Recollections of My Non-Existence to draw attention to a female perspective which has much to do with being seen and holding one’s ground in a society that tends to overlook many existences other than the white male. Looking back at her beginnings and her formation as an author, she defines the more conventional memoirs as being “stories of overcoming, arcs of eventual triumph, personal problems to be taken care of by personal evolution and resolve” (Solnit 2020. 47). At the end of her book, after guiding us through an encouraging and disturbing selection of her memoir, she picks this idea up again, this time outlining her personal role and calling as a woman writer, philosopher, feminist, sociologist and above all a storyteller. Solnit writes:

[…] who I was meant to be was a breaker of some stories and a maker of others, a tracer of cracks and sometimes a repair-woman and sometimes a porter or even a vessel for the most precious cargo you can carry, the stories waiting to be told, and the stories that set us free. (Solnit 2020, 239)

The notion that our perspectives diversify when confronted with perceptions other than our own is one of the essential reasons why storytelling is so relevant for learning and, hence, also for the English Language Teaching (ELT) classroom: “The experience of reading or listening to a story may in turn prompt the recipient to refigure his or her understanding of the world” (Armstrong 2020: 2). Understanding history by means of stories, for example, has been a favourite instrument not just of the Greeks and Romans but also of authors who address the young. Thus, the title of this collection of essays on using biographical and autobiographical narratives in an ELT context has also partly been inspired by several well-known series of books, published by Scholastic in all the examples mentioned below, that exist in several English-speaking countries and that aim at making history accessible to young readers. While the series is called “Dear America” in the United States, it is distributed in the United Kingdom as the “My Story” series, in New Zealand as the “My New Zealand Story” series and last, but not least, in Australia the series is entitled “My (Australian) Story”. The latter imprint features such enthralling narratives as Libby Gleeson’s The Rum Rebellion: The Diary of David Bellamy (2001), which retells exciting events in the days when William Bligh – after the notorious mutiny on the Bounty – was Governor of New South Wales in the early nineteenth century or Who am I? The Diary of Mary Talence (2001) by Anita Heiss, set in the 1930s in Sydney. The latter retraces the biography of an Indigenous Australian girl, forcefully taken from her real family and given up for adoption to white Australians. Furthermore, these two examples show that the Australian series succeeded in attracting well-known authors to contribute appealing, well-researched and fictional diaries, which read almost like an autobiography of the protagonist depicted. Perusing these books permits young readers to immerse themselves in the history of their country and, as a result, provides them with an intimate insight into events and fates that influenced and marked the foundations of their respective contemporary society.

Ultimately, the title of this collection of essays, “This Is My Story”, is most closely linked to another Australian source of inspiration, namely Rolf de Heer’s movie Ten Canoes (2006), which portrays the lives of Indigenous Australians before the arrival of British convicts and squatters in Australia. In the trailer for this award-winning film, the Indigenous Australian narrator provides the narrative frame for the two stories that are related in the film and ends his voiceover with the following statement: “It’s not like your story. It’s my story. My story, you’ve never seen before” (Ten Canoes 2006). This affirmation of the personal experience relates back to the notion that readers (and viewers) broaden their horizon by learning about the lives of other people when they are “traversing cultural distance” and open their “own idioculture to possible alteration” (Attridge 2004, 52). Sometimes, as in the example of the Indigenous Australian protagonists in de Heer’s film, these lives are very far removed from the reader’s own reality but can be comprehended by accessing their biographies (or parts of their biographies) in a narrative media format.

All these examples show the potential of (auto)biographical storytelling. We all like to read, talk, view, watch and also write about the stories of our lives. Most people nowadays share private insights from selfies to smaller or longer tales orally or in writing in private settings or, more and more often so, in public spheres. The different ways of representing the self – oral stories, biographical novels, (graphic) memoirs, scientific autobiographies, biopics, YouTube videos, Twitter respectively X or Instagram feeds, etc. – can all be implemented in the ELT classroom and used for reading, viewing and writing, drawing and speaking experiences. A typical approach here might be to move from learning more about someone else’s story to giving insights into our own lives. Even the first steps in a foreign language usually start by forming small statements about oneself. Bringing (auto)biographical storytelling into the ELT classroom after all offers in-depth acts of communication: when we learn about the lives of others, we might find ourselves reflected in these stories and we can share what is meaningful to us. This enhances the narrative competences of our students and adds further perspectives on life into our foreign language classrooms.

The second storytelling conference organised by the English Department of the Zurich University of Teacher Education (PHZH) in 2021 focused on (auto)biographical narratives. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was held online and consisted of thought-provoking and moving keynotes and insightful personal stories about how to create (auto)biographical graphic stories, and the participants enjoyed inspiring presentations and workshops. It is with great pleasure that we present a selection thereof to a wider readership and hope that many of these ideas and approaches will trigger discussions among colleagues, students, teachers and teacher educators and find their way into ELT classrooms ranging from primary to upper secondary as well as university lecture halls.

The opening contribution touches upon the one household name that constitutes the hallmark of English literature. Teaching Shakespeare and his texts is a challenge, not just for English teachers in English-speaking countries, where he is mandatory reading in the canon, but particularly in an ELT classroom where some of the learners tend to struggle with the language acquisition process. Susanne Reichl’s analysis of Shakespeare’s “biomyth”, in other words the fact that there is so little knowledge about the famous author’s biography, results in referring to a range of texts across the media and in various guises that do not only address questions of the Shakespearean (bio)myth but also issues of how to approach this giant of Western literature with learners who are mostly confronted with contemporary English usage. While time travel at first glance might be a surprising genre in relation to Shakespeare, Reichl succeeds in demonstrating how numerous young adult novels as well as popular media franchises such as Doctor Who or Blackadder subscribe to this approach to the Bard by having their protagonist travel through time to bring this mysterious playwright closer to a contemporary audience and, by doing so, make his biography accessible.

The film industry has long discovered the potential of (auto)biographical film and coined the term biopic for this. Many of these films are advertised with the statement that they are based on a true story which might in fact lead the audience on. For the sake of interesting storytelling and commercial aspects, many biographical films are fictionalised. Britta Viebrock illustrates this through an in-depth analysis of James Napier Robertson’s The Dark Horse (2014), an award-winning film from New Zealand about a bipolar former speed-chess champion who towards the end of his life supported Māori children and teenagers from difficult backgrounds by teaching them how to play chess. Viebrock uncovers how certain representational choices were made on purpose, shaking the factuality of the original life story. She shows how important the ability of film literacy is for students in the EFL classroom in order for them to take a look behind the scenes and not just take everything at face value just because of the claim that this is “based on a true story”.

As our world is growing more complex, the need for multiliteracies in education has come up through The New London Group. This is the starting point for Daniel Becker and Frauke Matz who add a further dimension of autobiographical storytelling by incorporating the digital, multimedial and multimodal narrative format Storytime, which is big on YouTube, where people share their personal stories in front of a camera. In their theoretical contribution, Reconceptualising Narrative Competences in English Language Education: Narrative Design and Digital Storytelling, Becker and Matz show why digital storytelling should be included in the ELT curriculum and how this can be used to foster an extended understanding of narrative competence moving far beyond a more traditional way of storytelling. In the digital format, the concepts of single authorship and audience become more fluent and open the doors for new ways of meaning-making, which then shed new light on the ELT classroom.

Nicole Frey Büchel investigates three female scientific autobiographies which showcase surprising features like the authors metaphorically merging with their objects of observation and sharing specific features of their private life stories in their academic publications. Frey Büchel analyses the three chosen texts, investigates how female voices in science broke their silence and uses this amazing material to develop teaching ideas for the secondary and upper secondary ELT classroom to inspire all students to gain a new understanding of female scientists and their contributions to science as a whole.

Narratives that relate the fates of migrants and refugees have a close link to news items that appear on television screens across the Western hemisphere. After addressing the ever-recurrent dilemma about authenticity and the essential nature of fiction combined with the problematics of whose voice is heard, Michael C. Prusse analyses a corpus of young adult novels and graphic novels that portray different protagonists and the challenges they face before, during or after the journey. While all the authors and graphic artists investigated – in other words Eoin Colfer, Andrew Donkin, Giovanni Rigano, Morris Gleitzman, Alan Gratz, Victoria Jamieson, Omar Mohamed and Benjamin Zephaniah – attempt to evoke compassion by means of their fictional biographies or fictionalised autobiography, their choice of episodes diverge. Prusse ends on the note that while many of the questions raised in this contribution cannot ultimately be resolved, there remains the need to keep discussing them in ELT classrooms as well as in teacher education.

In her contribution, Nikola Mayer explores why so many authors/cartoonists choose this medium to tell their personal stories and what additional opportunities for telling one’s life story this holds. Furthermore, she highlights the effects graphic memoirs with their visual power can have on (teenage) readers who literally see themselves in these graphic narratives and thus derive the empowering feeling of being seen. The Graphic Memoir Toolkit presents an approach for combining the reading of graphic memoirs with creating one’s own short graphic story based on a memorable incident and offers hands-on ideas and strategies for implementing this into secondary or higher education English Language Teaching.

Graphic novels have made their way into bookstores, libraries and classrooms. Lynn Williams provides an insightful introduction into why they are such relevant and useful literary sources for the secondary ELT classroom. The focus of her article is on three graphic novels which each present another segment of biographical storytelling and the search of the protagonists for identity and the meaning of life. Through Houdini: The Handcuff King (Lutes and Bertozzi, 2008), the students are introduced to the exciting life story of the legendary escape artist, Harry Houdini, and learn to draw information from both the visual and the verbal level. Closely linked to the comics universe is the story of the three teenagers in The Escapists (Vaughan et al., 2009) who in the process of finding themselves are also involved in the co-creation of their own comic. Finally, the skilful graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass (Karasik and Mazzucchelli, 2004) presents with striking visual storytelling the complex record of the main character, who actually splits up into a “trio of selves”.

Working with biographies from the “Little People, Big Dreams” series (Frances Lincoln Children’s Books) in a Swiss primary classroom, Laura Loder Büchel describes the challenges and benefits of implementing social justice standards (Chiariello et al., 2022) and an anti-bias stance to education combined with helping the children gain an increased knowledge of the world. Her research project first identifies the linguistic situation in the classroom which is characterised by multilingual backgrounds of the students and by a relative solid knowledge of English as a Foreign Language. Loder Büchel proceeds by defining the cornerstones of an education for justice and, with the students, focusses by means of selected biographies of prominent and less prominent representatives in the book series on aspects of identity, diversity, justice and, to a lesser extent, action. The results of her project demonstrate that young students can profit from an alternative input to the customarily used coursebooks and instil in learners a sense of determination to overcome obstacles (in the vein of the biographies that portray people who gained prominence by persisting in the face of resistance).

Anecdotal evidence from primary classrooms in the Canton of Zurich indicates that picturebooks are rarely used by English teachers who mostly rely on the regular coursebooks. The project launched by Regula Fuchs and Kristel Ross introduces primary teachers to a range of attractive narratives in picturebook format and then has these teachers implement them in their school. The small group of teachers involved in the initiative were asked to initiate conversations with their learners about the picturebook with the aim of encouraging students to shift perspectives. Their contribution to this volume reports on how The Snail and the Whale (Donaldson and Scheffler 2003), a typical quest narrative in which the unlikely hero, the snail, must overcome its fear to save the day, succeeds in having the children learn from the animal’s biography.

Last but not least, this volume ends with an essayistic contribution by Erik Altorfer, himself a stage director and a (radio) playwright, who reflects on the nature of (auto)biographical writing. His deliberations are inspired by a 2015 playwriting workshop for young Syrian refugees that he taught together with Mudar Alhaggi in Beirut, Lebanon, where the participants suffered from the burden of dramatic personal experience. His discernment on the ensuing challenges of reality and fiction sparks an investigation into the nature of fiction, the differences between “lying” and telling the truth and the potential of empowerment when refugees can become owners of their narratives. His thoughts are corroborated by insights from a second workshop a year later in Graz that included refugees from Syria and Afghanistan as well as local youngsters. The autobiographical explorations of their lives lead Altorfer to contemplate the many ways in which fiction and autobiography overlap, mingle and depend on each other. Ultimately, he returns to home ground with migration to Switzerland and focuses on trauma and ways in which literary and (auto)biographical writing shapes both others and the self.

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Meeting the Bard: Shakespeare, Time Travel and the EFL Classroom

Susanne Reichl

Shakespeare is a historical enigma: hardly anything is known about his life, his character or even what he looked like. While this is an immense challenge for historians and biographers, who have to resort to biomythography, it is the perfect precondition for turning Shakespeare into a protagonist of time travel adventures in which characters travel through time, meet Shakespeare in his native timeline, get to fulfil a quest and return to their home time enlightened and matured. In this contribution, I will argue that these entertaining and usually light-hearted stories make excellent meeting points for learners in the EFL classroom. Their protagonists, usually relatable contemporary teenagers, allow learners to experience the Elizabethan world through their eyes and minds. Their protagonists’ teleological quests provide opportunities for the learners to reflect on their own biographies as well, while the humour that is often contained in these narratives allows them to demystify Shakespeare and thus own something of Shakespeare, even though their language level might not yet be adequate for reading his texts. I will argue that with plenty of learning opportunities for both efferent and aesthetic reading modes, these time travel texts make great reading material that honours the learners’ media practices and interests.

Consuming Shakespeare: Imagining the Bard

Doctor: “All the world’s a stage.”

Shakespeare: “Hm, I might use that.”

“[…] the futility of this fleeting existence – to be or not to be … Oh, that’s quite good!”

Doctor: “You should write that down.”

Shakespeare: “Hmmm. Maybe not. A bit pretentious?”

(“The Shakespeare Code”, Roberts 2007, 15:04–15:09; 24:12–24:23)

When Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet was published in 2020 to great acclaim, Stephanie Merritt in her Observer review called it “a work of profound understanding” and saw it as “evidence that there are always new stories to tell, even about the most well-known historical figures”. Hamnet has joined a legion of volumes that try to recreate the life of Britain’s best-loved Elizabethan playwright. Those volumes again are part of a vast transmedia, multimodal archive in which versions of Shakespeare’s life are constructed with varying degrees of historical accuracy for varying target groups, from veteran theatre buffs well read in the Shakespeare canon to young readers whose interest in Shakespeare needs to be encouraged and whose motivation could potentially be boosted by an element of adventure. In the context of the EFL classroom, I propose considering time travel adventures that feature Shakespeare as a gateway to Shakespeare, his time and his works.

Taking Michael Benton’s statement “Shakespeare is the invisible man” (2015, 53) as a starting point, I will analyse how the void around Shakespeare’s biography makes him a suitable protagonist in time travel adventures that involve children and teenagers. The scarcity of historical detail means that Shakespeare’s life must be conjectured from the imagination, and the resulting range of fictional Shakespeares offers plenty of meeting points for young readers to connect. Free of any constraints concerning faithful representation that authors often feel committed to, they can focus on crafting a compelling and suspenseful narrative that draws young readers in. What the range of Shakespeare conjectures do have in common, though, is their assertion of Shakespeare’s historical significance. We might not know much about the man, but we know this: he matters.

I will argue below that the historical imaginary, which is based on very little information but, in the case of Shakespeare, is very pervasive in popular culture, meets a need to make sense and construct a teleology of our own and other lives. On these grounds, EFL teachers who are not certain whether teaching Shakespeare is a struggle or a gift can resort to accessible texts that have a young target group in mind and might pave the road to an appreciation of the writer and his works.

Most time travel narratives involving Shakespeare feature a child or teenager from the late 20th or early 21st century who travels or slides back to Elizabethan England and meets Shakespeare in his native chronotope. The journey through time can be voluntary, even planned, or enforced. Teenagers travelling through time usually have to save Shakespeare’s life, one of his manuscripts or stage productions, so that the Shakespearean œuvre as we know it is not threatened or in danger of disappearing. In Pamela Mingle’s Kissing Shakespeare (2012), for instance, Miranda, a budding actress from contemporary America, travels back to the 16th century to meet the teenage Will Shakespeare. Miranda’s task is to seduce young Will to prevent him becoming a Catholic priest rather than the world’s most famous playwright. The story contains a great number of historical references to Elizabethan England, its family and household structures and Catholic persecution.

The reference text that provides the structural and thematic backbone to Kissing Shakespeare is The Taming of the Shrew. Just before she time travels to 1581, Miranda plays Katherine on stage, and it is only after meeting Shakespeare and falling in love with another dashing 16th century gentleman that she learns how to properly be (rather than act) Katherine on stage back home. This is a pattern in all the time travel stories involving Shakespeare and modern characters: apart from historical and literary learning opportunities and a great deal of adventures and hardships, the protagonists need to go through a process of growth and maturation which will be vital for them on their return to their own time.

The best-known novel of my selection, Susan Cooper’s King of Shadows (1999), has a male American teenager fall through time and space into the original London Globe, where he meets Shakespeare. Nat, an orphan, finds a father figure in the Bard, who at that point is still mourning the death of his son, Hamnet. On his return to the twentieth century, Nat finds out that he has slipped through time so he could save Shakespeare from catching the plague, and his adventures in the past provide some consolation for him in the process of working through his father’s suicide. There are two reference plays here, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest; and Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”) plays a significant role in the plot, too, and can be used for intertextual work in the EFL classroom.

Apart from the opportunities for intertextual and historical learning, one argument for using time travel texts is that many of them contain slapstick humour and language jokes, which are accessible and come with an irreverence, a refusal to be overawed by Shakespeare’s iconic position. In Asimov’s short story “The Immortal Bard” (1954), Shakespeare travels to the 21st century, only to fail miserably at a Shakespeare university exam. When Blackadder in the time travel comedy Blackadder: Back & Forth (1999) punches Colin Firth’s Shakespeare “for every schoolboy in England”, we can laugh heartily about Shakespeare, and not just with schadenfreude. Laughter is one way of gaining power over individuals we are afraid of or overawed by. Laughter can also be a way of “owning” Shakespeare.

Some of the humour in the time travel narratives derives from the incongruence of the modern teenage characters and the stiltedness and formality with which Elizabethan England is connotated. These protagonists typically follow the classic adventure story pattern of being very ‘normal’ adolescents who then transcend their humble origins when faced with a monumental task. They are usually a little clumsy, not too sure of themselves, often use deprecating humour and irony against themselves and employ youth language, something that EFL learners might be familiar with if they watch contemporary teenage series. Sometimes they can be seen to attempt to speak Early Modern English but get it wrong and end up embarrassing themselves: “‘Over hence yonder … thence.’ I felt my face color. Shut up, Miranda. ‘There, if you please’” (Mingle, 32). Again, this is a way of fa­mil­iaris­ing young learners with a text – and a chance to draw their attention to questions of register and style. Language differences are present in all these stories, so much so that the sociolinguistic explanations of Early Modern English might raise students’ sociolinguistic awareness and competences: the differences between “thee”, “thou” and “you” can easily be compared and contrasted to the differentiation of ‘du’ and ‘Sie’ in German.

A number of Shakespeare quotations circulate in these texts: they are highly intertextual and intermedial, referencing not just Shakespeare but also works of contemporary popular culture, such as Doctor Who and Back to the Future. Shakespeare is frequently portrayed picking up a phrase that he is credited with having introduced into the English language, as in the epigraph to this chapter, a sequence from a Doctor Who episode, or in the following passage from the Phyllis Wong novel series:

Phyllis said, ‘That’s swell. Having him in the play means a good chance for the Chief Inspector to be in the thick of it …’ Shakespeare wrote that down too, his feather quill quivering quickly […] ‘We have to catch her red-handed.’ Shakespeare’s quill was going ballistic now. ‘What means this red-handed?’ he asked as he scribbled. ‘In the act,’ Clement said. ‘With her hand in the honey pot. Up to her eyeballs.’ ‘Ye gods!’ Shakespeare exclaimed. ‘Such phrases! Tis like the heavens have opened!’ (McSkimming 2014, 345)

In a typical time travel paradox, these phrases have self-invented, looping back through the centuries so they can be introduced, and we can read them several hundred years later. They seem to testify to Shakespeare’s timelessness and invite learners to spot Shakespeare phrases and do some research on them.

Not knowing Shakespeare: Literary biography and composite impressions

All the strategies of bringing Shakespeare closer to the lifeworlds and the interests of teenage readers rely on what is a profound lack of biographical data about Shakespeare. In Shakespeare (2008, 15), Bill Bryson quotes an unnamed Shakespeare scholar as saying that probably “[e]very Shakespeare biography is 5 per cent fact and 95 per cent conjecture.” The most famous writer of all times is a historical enigma: we read, perform and adore his plays and poems, but we know next to nothing about the man himself. In his book for children, What’s So Special About Shakespeare?, Michael Rosen (2001, 38–39) stresses how very few facts about William Shakespeare’s life are known: even his date of birth is an approximation. Bryson (2008, 17–18) explains that this lack of knowledge about Shakespeare is not surprising at all, given how little we know about other playwrights of the time.

How then do literary biographers assemble their books with so little to go on? Michael Benton, in his seminal work on literary biography, suggests a combination of scarce historical evidence about the writers, on the one hand, and the biographers’ inferences from the literary texts, on the other, when trying to construct an image of a writer about whom so little is known. About the difficulty of proceeding like this with Shakespeare’s image, he writes:

both the paucity of the documentary record and the impersonality of the texts mean that the word ‘Shakespeare’ evokes a textual image of plays and poems, or a theatrical image of performance, rather than a substantive sense of an actual person. How do biographers deal with this problem? Shakespeare is the invisible man. (2015, 53)

Shakespeare has also been referred to as a ghost (Benton 2009, 67), or “the equivalent of a literary electron, forever there and not there” (Bryson 2008, 9).

Why do we want to know about Shakespeare in the first place? The problem, Bryson explains, is our emotional investment in Shakespeare: because we love his texts so much and have expended time in trying to understand them, we feel we should know more about him (2008, 17). For literary biographies more generally, Benton diagnoses “a deep psychological need to counteract the vagaries and gaps in our knowledge of the past with that sense of completeness and coherence that we associate with stories” (2015, 9). Like with Shakespeare’s plays and poems, we feel the desire for a coherent and complete story about the author, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Fictional time travel stories provide such a rationale, and even though Benton’s interest is in biographies, his arguments apply to fiction, too: “What does the biographer do when the subject is all but absent in the historical record and invisible in the works?” (2015, 52). What happens when we cannot construct a coherent schema of Shakespeare from the works or from the archives of history? Benton suggests that we puzzle together “composite impressions”, made up of a mixture of visuals, usually gleaned from popular culture, the little data that can be extracted from archives and the sense of an authorial subjectivity that emerges from the texts we know (2015, 50). Those composite impressions, I would argue, are based on our historical imaginary and, as I will show, they are largely recycled by writers and filmmakers in their versions of Shakespeare’s life.

Making sense of Shakespeare: The historical imaginary and biomythography

Caroline Guthrie, in an article on Quentin Tarantino’s counterfactual his­to­ries, refers to what Michael Benton calls “composite impressions” as “the historical imaginary” and defines it as “a socially constructed understanding of the past formed through public discourse and representation” (2019, 340). Expanding the historical imaginary to sources from education, politics and cultural memory, Guthrie sees our knowledge of the past as mainly shaped by popular culture. This composition is the starting point for learning about and through Shakespeare, and rather than being historically accurate, a collective imaginary builds on very basic knowledge: sometimes, all our learners will have heard is the name Shakespeare (without knowing for sure how to spell it). This, however, can be a starting point for more exploration. As Benton reminds us, we expect order and direction from biographies and connect them to our own lives:

Actual living is experienced as an unpredictable mixture of the known and the unforeseen, of planning and serendipity. Yet its biographical representation into holistic narrative patterns is more than the mere ordering of events; for biomythography acknowledges a sense of fate in this narrativising, recognising that the ‘Lives’ of those we mythologise assume a predetermined character as we look back retrospectively for the ‘red thread’ linking beginnings, middles and ends. This urge to create a unidirectional, teleological reading of a literary life reflects our profound human needs both to define a consistent sense of identity and to give shape and coherent meaning to the pattern of events that make up an individual’s life. (Benton 2009, 65)