Literary Sizzlers

Literature as sizzle marks the spirit of this book. And handouts as pedagogic devices mark its form. In his life and work as a lecturer in English Literature at Hull University, John Hoyles used the handout as propaganda, student liberation, worker's control, against the formalism of Cleanth Brook's well-wrought urn, and against the managerialism of the questionnaire. John discovered the handout as a democratic tool with the arrival of a new English teacher at boarding school around 1953, with his dating and practical criticism classes, which he later found out were the products of a Leavisite mission to humanise the teaching of literature. This foundation was refined with the first actual lecture handouts issued by a Mr Broadbent on Milton in King's College Cambridge 1961. The sizzle lasted a lifetime, through John's first lectures on Dryden, through the Hull 1968 Sit In, through the Essex Marxist conferences, to the later development from teaching literature to teaching cinema. Let all the world in every corner sing - and sizzle.