Session 1 - 'The Passions of Youth'. Dr Melanie Tebbutt (MMU)

Anthony Burgess had a humdrum existence of being young. It was an ordinary working-class youth spent in Manchester. He lived above a pub which gave him a sense of cynicism and independence.
He felt an outsider at school.
As the sociologist Richard Hoggart described, most working-class boys drifted into gangs. These gangs provided a transition from childhood into adulthood. Burgess described gangs as having an 'innate pack mentality.' Youth workers at the time however, said that drifting into a pack was a natural part of being a working-class boy.
In 1928 Burgess started at Xaverian College after passing the scholarship. Here he noticed that the tensions between the high and low cultures were apparent. He had several hobbies whilst at school, and he disliked an education system that discounted passion in hobbies.
After returning to the UK in 1959 after teaching in Malaysia, Burgess found a new and unfamiliar youth culture.
In Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy he presents a very negative perception of youth; in particular the Americanisation that was prevalent with teenagers, or as Hoggart dubbed them, 'Jukebox Boys'.
Burgess decided to avoid using Americanised slang, or any type of youth slang and set A Clockwork Orange in the future to avoid his language becoming dated.
Burgess believed that "violence among young people is an aspect of the desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy."
The key difference between Hoggart and Burgess is that Hoggart looked back to an idealised version of the working-class, a belief that the working-class youth had the potential to 'return' to an ideal that was linked to the past. Burgess however, was horrified by what he saw and how he perceived the future.
Both however, believed in the power of learning.

They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/anthonybur399536.html#MyzmjLMAKj9CXtZk.99

They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/anthonybur399536.html#MyzmjLMAKj9CXtZk.99

Day of the Droogs Symposium at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation.

On the 29th January I attended a series of lectures on a new approach to Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. We were told that this was the first of its kind in the world! What follows are my notes from each of the papers presented, along with commentary.