James Bond Guest Lecture #1: Historical Context & Role-playing the "Angry Young Man"

I was given the opportunity this year to do a number of guest lectures on Ian Fleming's Casino Royale. In this first lecture, I discussed the historical context of that first James Bond novel, focusing on the widespread poverty and economic destruction following Britain's losses in the wake of World War 2. I argue that this creates both a personal and a national identity crisis which Fleming seeks to address with this novel.

One of my favourite aspects of this lesson is the opportunity for role-playing for the students. For many traditional instructors, this type of activity might seem silly. Even I acknowledge that such an activity could become too much about the novelty and not enough about actually learning the material. However, I like to use role-playing activities as a means of getting my students to engage with characters. In this case, it enables the students to create a personal connection to the cultural context. They do not just understand the economic perils of the British people from an intellectual perspective, but rather they come to understand those social ills from an emotional perspective, also. This engages students with kinesthetic learning preferences, as well as students with high emotive intelligence. In that this activity it different from their usual learning devices, the historical and emotional context of the novels enters their longterm memory more fully because they connect these feelings of disenfranchisement and national insecurity into their own perceptions.

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The historical context of postwar Britain is both geographically and intellectually remote for our students, so grounding them in the historical background is a must.

We talk about the interrelationship between personal and national identity. This is an interesting concept for them: they do not usually consider how national identity influences personal identity, perhaps because Canadians are so wishy-washy about their national identity.

John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" (1956) is another contemporary text that explores the engagement of individual identity with historical context, so I like mentioning it here.

There are two parts to this role-playing section: the first one could be omitted if you had a smaller group of people who were very comfortable already.

So what do you do to respond to the world when things seem to be falling apart? Write fiction!

I think this is a good way into talking about Ian Fleming: his personal experience is definitely part of his writing, and I think this ties into the idea of personal identity very nicely.

I love this chart from The Economist: 

So this is the introduction to the novel: they understand historically, socially, and emotionally how people would respond to Casino Royale in 1953.