Interrogating education through fiction
![Illustration featuring a skeleton in the centre with two opposing groups of skeletons reading from books, one side showing fire element, the other water.](http://cdn.sheffield.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/mobile_single_column_1x/public/2022-12/Jacobello_alberegno%2C_polittico_dell%27apocalisse%2C_1360-90_ca._04%20copy%202MB.jpg?h=007355ed&itok=0QrechfS)
This is an ongoing project in which educational ideas are encountered and explored in the contexts of theoretically driven literary fiction. The object of critique is typically at the intersection of pedagogy (the teaching of dependent personalities) and andragogy (the self-cultivation of adults in educated society).
These fictions include a foray into the darker side of educational relations in The Sick List (2021, Boiler House Press), pursuit of the idea that education might function as an intoxicant in The Wake and the Manuscript (2022, Anti-Oedipus Press), an exploration of the continued influence of priestly ideas in secular contexts in Black Vellum (2023, Schism2), and interrogation of some of the institutions that anchor educated culture, such as museums in Plague Theatre (2022, Equus Press), and the institution of the library in The Sick List. Other texts include a re-enactment of the destruction of humanist culture in Burton's Anatomy (2022, Schism Neuronics), a satire in part of the promise of liberation by reading in The Reading Room (2021, Schism Neuronics), and an exploration of the limits of research in the dystopian novella Wretch (2020, Schism Neuronics).