Less is more, inglouriously explored.

Less is much much more than I could ever give you

Less is much much more than I could ever give you

Less is more
Less is more

Less is More


I was doing a workshop yesterday at the Shetland UK Language School Budapest and was talking about “Less is More”, it’s something I’ve found myself talking about more and more lately. It was also a theme in the Culture and Literature Special Interest Group’s afternoon at the IATEFL conference in Budapest last October.

We often rush through things in class in order to “cover” material and in so doing deprive students of the necessary time they would need to explore topics in more depth. It is this depth which give students the hooks on which they hang the the little things which aid memory and language learning. (Stevick, Memory, Meaning and Method 1976)

The first time Less is More appeared in literature was, I think,  in a Robert Browning poem “Andrea Del Sarto” in 1855.   ” Less is More Lucrezia”.

Dogme, minimalism and stripping things down to their bare essentials

The phrase “Less is More” is often associated with the architect and furniture designer Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969). He was one of the founders of modernist architecture and a firm believer in simplicity of style and stripping things down to their bare essentials. In the ELT world it was in many ways similar to the pedagogy of bare essentials Scott Thornbury and Luke Meddings advocate in their “Teaching Unplugged” book and what the Dogme Yahoo group has been exploring over the last 10 years.

Teaching Unplugged, language teaching stripped down to the bare essentials
Teaching Unplugged, language teaching stripped down to the bare essentials

One of van der Rohe’s most famous buildings is the Tugendhat Villa in Brno, Czech Republic where talks were held back in 1992 which effectively led to the break up of Czechoslovakia. A great building  and well worth a visit.

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino

Today is Quentin Tarantino’s birthday. Happy Birthday Quentin!  In the spirit of less is more how about doing  a lesson (on Monday maybe, if you read this over the weekend) based solely on the title of his last film “Inglourious Basterds”.

Film promotion poster for "Inglourious Basterds"
Film promotion poster for “Inglourious Basterds”

There could be various promts into this. You could first just work with this poster and elicit as much information from your students as possible from it. This will depend on their level, age and cultural background. They might come up with anything related to film, history, fascism, handsome and beautiful actors, red and black colours or the spelling of the English language. Milk it for whatever you can, squeeze all the juice out of it you can. Less is more!

"Inglorious Bastards" film promotion poster
“The Inglorious Bastards” film promotion poster

Students could then be shown this poster from the 1978 film “The Inglorious Bastards”  and then asked  to find  the differences and similarities between that poster and the one they’ve just looked at. You can get them to focus  closely on the titles of the films and the reasons there may have been for Quentin Tarantino using this title in the first place for his new film and the reasons why he changed what he changed. One avenue to explore might be why on the 1978 poster it says “Action Packed From Start To Finish” and why that is absent from the poster promoting last year’s Tarantino film in which Christopher Waltz won an Oscar for supporting actor.

Inglorious

The word inglorious, a “difficult” word, can then be looked at.  It’s good to get students to unpack the morphology of the word, starting off with “glory” before then getting on to the “in” prefix. Ask the students if they know “glory” from anywhere.

The Power and the Glory, for ever and ever Amen

The Power and the Glory, for ever and ever Amen

The first time I heard the word glory was in the Lord’s Prayer, which I had to recite every morning in our religious assemblies at school.  And the first time that I heard the adjective glorious was in the National Anthem, send  her victorious, happy and glorious. (Cos Britain  always wins its wars… of course)

Getting the students to then look at other uses of glorious , with dictionaries or on google or with corpora, if you get students to  access any, is a further way of going deeper into the different meanings of and collocations with glorious (weather, career, food (“Oliver!”) etc).

You could then go into the function of the prefix “In” and look at some other pairs such as  flexible -inflexible, sensitive -insensitive, famous -infamous before arriving at inglorious.

A famous use of the word inglorious in literature

One of the most famous uses of inglorious in literature is in Gray’s elegy in the line  “some mute inglorious Milton, may here rest.”  This is a reference to a graveyard full of people who may have aspired to being great writers and having Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame but never quite made it.  Inglorious is a fairly literary word, not used very often in spoken English and, as a result of the film, it’s most common occurrence may well now be Tarantino’s film, but spelt slightly differently!  Dishonourable, disgraceful and shameful are all words which are close to inglorious in meaning.  Studying a word like this is likely to help students to analyze and process language in deeper ways which potentially help them to both memorise and later use words more appropriately.

This then takes us to Tarantino’s film and the the title of the film in Tarantino’s own handwriting at the beginning of the actual film itself.

The title of the film in Tarantino's own handwriting

The title of the film in Tarantino's own handwriting

With the students you might then discuss what the impact of this is and how it would be different if it was just typed out. This could then evolve into discussions about handwriting and when students ever write anything in handwriting and why.  After all this,  students could talk about why it might be that Tarantino deliberately calls the film “Inglourious Basterds” and not “Inglorious Bastards”. Tarantino himself said when asked about this:

“I’m never going to explain that. When you do an artistic flourish like that, to describe it, to explain it, would just … invalidate the whole thing  in the first place.”

Jean Michel Basquiat

Jean Michel Basquiat

Tarantino loves bringing what he describes as his “Basquiat touch” to genre cinema. Basquiat made handwriting an integral part of his artwork which the fashion world also took up later, an example of which are these sneakers/ trainers below, a great classroom topic.

Basquiat inspired sneakers

Basquiat inspired sneakers

And after you’ve done this with the students it might even inspire them to watch the film and that really does takes you to interesting places.

The importance of promts and beginnings

Ten years ago when we were writing a book for intermediate teenage learners here in Hungary, we spent a lot of time talking about how important the beginnings of classes are and how to open up topics for students in ways which engage them. George Pickering gave a wonderful plenary on this last year at the HUPE conference in Opatija, Croatia and Tarantino’s birthday and introducing the film poster of “Inglourious Basterds” and looking at Tarantino’s  handwriting and spelling of the title of the film may well be a good entry point into the lesson and working with less to get more. Anybody else got any thoughts on or experiences with “less is more”?

Inglourioius Basterds official trailer

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