One certain literary source to which Madox is alluding with the multi-layered iterations of the Tea Tray image in Parade's End is this poem from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll:Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat,
How I wonder what you're at:
Up above the world you fly
Like a tea tray in the sky.
"[M]odernism is the struggle of the future to free itself from the clinging hands of a dying past"- from "Modernism as a World-Wide Movement." A. Eustace Haydon, The Journal of Religion, January 1925.You will notice the support this lends to my repeated thesis in lecture about Modernism's troubled position vis à vis the temporal present -- yet one more concept that analogises to shell-shock.
So, the weather, from my office today, in mid-March is....
As argued in lecture, there was no cause to the First World War. The popular factoid that the death of a minor (though pleasant and competant) European royal in a dour Balkan capital caused the West to immolate itself in four years of a Dantean Inferno in French ditches is not false but merely silly on its face.[Tietjens'] mind was at rest because there was going to be a war. From the first moment of his reading the paragraph about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand he had known that, calmly and with assurance. Had he imagined that this country would come in he would not have known a mind at rest. He loved this country for the run of the hills, the shape of its elm trees and the way the heather, running uphill to the skyline, meets the blue of the heavens. War for this country could only mean humiliation, spreading under the sunlight, an almost invisible pall over the elms, the hills, the heather, like the vapour that spread from .... oh, Middlesbrough! .... But of war for us [i.e. Britain] he had no fear. He saw our Ministry sitting tight till the opportune moment, and then grabbing a French channel port or a few German colonies as the price of neutrality.And to conclude, there was indeed no "cause" for the First World War: but there were, as for everything, four causes.
À propos our discussion in Monday's lecture on cynicism, here is Douglas Coupland:"I am the most uncynical person on Earth," he says, earnestly. "I'm ironic. I admit that. I'm Joe Irony. But people confuse irony with cynicism, which is like battery acid. It just wrecks everything."
Modernism is a term used to lump together an enormous body of artistic work in all forms--poetry, cinema, painting, architecture--that was produced roughly between the 1890s and the mid 20th century. General definitions are difficult, but modernist work tends to be formally experimental and highly self conscious--think of the Cubist paintings of Picasso or the 'flow of consciousness' of James Joyce's novels. Gareth Jenkins is right to emphasise dislocation and fragmentation as characteristics of modernism. The 'high period' of modernism from 1900-1930 was of course a time of unmatched upheaval, in which the promises of the bourgeois revolution were finally shattered by war, slump and workers' revolt. The accelerating development of technology and the penetration of mass production techniques into every sphere of life added to a deep sense of uncertainty. In Perry Anderson's words, 'European modernism in the first years of this century thus flowered in the space between a still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical present and a still unpredictable political future'.
It has been very tempting for Marxist criticism to glorify modernism given its origin in such a period of upheaval, and its--at least formal--rejection of the past. After the Russian Revolution the intellectuals of Proletkult argued for a rejection of all previous culture, claiming that modernist techniques were the basis for a brave new working class art. Such a simple minded response misses the contradictory nature of all modernism. Gareth is right to point out that modernist work often appears as a retreat from society. Its emphasis on dislocation and alienation could open the way to a kind of rampant subjectivity. His criticism of Virginia Woolf, for example, is telling: 'one cannot escape the feeling, beneath the richness of language, of artistic impoverishment which follows from impoverished grasp of social reality'.
Sony pays $1.5m over fake critic.
A judge has finalised a settlement in which film studio Sony will pay $1.5m (£850,000) to film fans after using a fake critic to praise its movies. In 2001, ads for films including Hollow Man and A Knight's Tale quoted praise from a reviewer called David Manning, who was exposed as being invented.
One of the funny, charming, intelligent and glamorous Mitford sisters; a denizen of the "Hons' cupboard''; a dedicatee of Vile Bodies; a beautiful woman whom Churchill called "Dinamite''; an inspired interior decorator; a steadfast friend to a wide galère (including some Jews); a fine autobiographer and loving mother; yet Diana Mosley was also a woman who could - when she was inadvisedly invited to appear on Desert Island Discs - describe Adolf Hitler in almost wholly positive terms.When Evelyn Waugh dedicated Vile Bodies to Bryan and Diana Guinness, the future Lady Mosely was still married to the likeable Guinness heir -- later a novelist, playwrite and poet -- and one of society's belles. This was a decade before she would abandon the future 2nd Baron Moyne and, in Joseph Goebbels' front room with Adolf Hitler the Best Man, marry Sir Oswald Mosley; founder and head of the British Union of Fascists; ordinary hero and wounded veteran of the Trenches; buffoon; sycophant; imitator; rank traitor who would have been shot had he not been English and thus forced to suffer, for him, fate worse than death -- his countrymen's derisory farce, ridicule, mockery and lampoon (indeed, imortalised in ignomy by the Master, P.G. Wodehouse.)
Well, on the principles of the Freudianity which underlies Jacob's Room, laughter is in part how human beings react to uncomfortable encroachment or threats or perceived danger to deeply-seated beliefs & values. In the jargon of Freud, this is covered under the concept of tabou. Thus, where the rises of the Scilly Isles invoke the sense of the noumenal which similar British phenomena are recorded to have done through so much of the nation's literature and folk tales, forms of disbelief (such as scepticism) among vestigal Victorian and Edwardian casts of mind are challenged. One result of this, then, is internal discomfort, impinging on the individual's idea of God -- still strong by virtue of its historical foundation in the national character -- and producing uncomfortable jokes as a (Freudian) means of dealing with the inner dis-ease.I am hoping to use Jacob's Room my paper topic and I came to the part in the novel about the Scilly Isles and how they "shake the very foundations of scepticism and lead to jokes about God" (42). I remember you had said something in lecture that provided a lot of insight into this passage and I can't remember exactly what it was, perhaps you could remind me?
MODERNISM: an omnibus term for a number of tendencies in the arts which were prominent in the first half of the twentieth century: in English literature it is particularily associated with the writings of V. Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Pound Joyce, Yeats F.M. Ford & Conrad. Broadly, modernism reflects the impact upon literature of the psychology of Freud and the anthropology of J.G. Frazer as expressed in The Golden Bough.... it was marked by a persistent experimentalism; it is 'the tradition of the new' in Harold Rosenberg's phrase. It rejected the traditional .... Although so diverse in its manifestation, it was recognised as representing as H. Read wrote (ArtNow, 1933) , 'an abrupt break with all tradition ...'Modernist works (for instance, the poetry of Elot & Pound) may have a tendency to dissolve into a chaos of sharp atomistic impressions.
So, I'll hear your preferences this week in class.
All teasing aside, my best wishes for an enjoyable and fun-filled reading break: you are all doung great work in this class and deserve it for that alone. For your additional enjoyment, classfellow Dana W. sent me the following very apt and helpful reference from "my-day" former punk Morrissey (correctly dating me to the late 70s...):....I came across some Morrissey lyrics that fit very well with your lecture on Monday. In the song "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get," there is a line that reads "I am now an essential part of your mind's landscape / whether you care or do not." This relates to your point about how we all make impressions on each other that fundamentally change our consciousness.
From classfellow Brett J., this link to his Freudian slip...ers -- a Freudian slip being, as he gives the exquisite quip, 'saying one thing but meaning your mother.'It is now conventional wisdom that the First World War and its senseless, unimaginable slaughter was the Ur-catastrophe of the last century. It brutalized a Europe that before 1914, though deeply flawed by injustice and arrogance, also contained the promise of great emancipatory movements, championing the demands for social justice, for equality, for women’s emancipation, for all of human rights. The war radicalized Europe; without it, there would have been no Bolshevism and no Fascism. In the postwar climate and in the defeated and self-deceived Germany, National Socialism flourished and ultimately made it possible for Hitler to establish the most popular, the most murderous, the most seductive and the most repressive regime of the last century.From the right, an analogy between England before, after and during the First World War with the United States of America today:
At the beginning of the 20th century, the British Empire was an unopposed hyperpower (much as the United States has been since 1989). As historian Colin Cross observes: "In terms of influence it was the only world power" .... But after the conclusion of the first World War, Britain's imperial psyche began to fracture" .... Why did it all crumble? Several interrelated reasons - among them the grisly fact that England had lost virtually an entire generation of future leaders in the trenches of Europe. But another important cause was the waning of confidence on the part of liberal British elites .... In an important sense, the British Empire's strength failed because its elite liberal citizens stopped believing in it.Most pertinent for us in the article from which this quotation is taken -- most especially in relation to Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End -- is the writer's premis (and our own course's thesis!) that England was irrecoverably ruined by the First World War: the Great War, that is, still directly effects all that is English -- its literature very much included.
A student of mine once sent me this intriguing email engaging a statement that Freud dropped regards his phsychoanalytical theories & the Irish race. I like it very well (save the Wikipedia part.):"This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever" - (Sigmund Freud on the Irish). I once tried to find information on the internet regarding the reason he said this but there were very few answers. Mostly it was comments from Irish people either slandering his career because he thought they were stupid or boosting about how proud they were that Irish people were so smart that even Freud couldn't figure them out. There was however, one comment regarding his ideas towards religion: "When Freud spoke of religion as an illusion, he maintained that it is fantastic structure from which a man must be set free if he is to grow to maturity; and in his treatment of the unconscious he moved toward atheism." I didn't know if this had anything to do with his contempt for the Irish people and their close cultural association with religion that English people seemed to lack but perhaps it answers some questions.In reply, I found the following at http://www.sheilaomalley.com/:
"From the introduction to a book of Irish short stories - intro written by Anthony Burgess (this is where I originally came upon this quote from Freud - which I had never heard before) -
"One of [Freud's] followers split up human psychology into two categories - Irish and non-Irish. The Irish, like the Neopolitans, are not sure what truth is, and they have a system of logic which defies logic. They have something in common with Chekhov's Russians, and it is no accident that many of the stories here will seem Chekhovian. I was taking a bath in a Leningrad hotel when the floor concierge yelled that she had a cable for me. 'Put it under the door,' I cried. 'I can't,' she shouted. 'It's on a tray.' There is a deep logic, or epistemology, there which is far from absurd. The Irish and the Russians have one way of looking at entities (the entity in this instance was a cable-on-a-tray) and the rest of the world another."
There is a sense that Freud had, too, that the Irish, when in psychic trouble, go to poetry, go to storytelling, go to escapism - they have no interest in picking apart their own brains."
These four groups are comprised of five students each. The members of each group take notes through the reading of Parade's End on sections of text pertinent to their group's area. The members then meet, discuss, and collate their group's notes. This collation is then organised into a format which can be used as material for a script centred on the character of Sylia Tietjens. The four groups represent an effective four-part structure of an appealing dramatisation.
Each group can themselves decide whether they prefer to work in egalitarian manner, or to designate one member to collate and format the notes, in consultation with the full group.
The loose date for delivery of the final research work is March 16th.
Script-Writing Group
This group is responsible for developing a script or script outline, a series title, and an idea for the series structure, using the material collated and formatted by the four research groups. An idea and general outline will be nascent before the March 16th date of delivery of the research work.
Note that,in terms of script, there are obvious thematic connection across all four research divisions. For instance, the theme of politics connects "Suffragism & the New Woman," "marriage and adultery;" "triumph of the middle class;" and "war."
Filming Group
A group of up to three students responsible for arranging and organising the filming of a series trailer: this includes setting, wardrobe, directing and camera.
Organising Tribunal
A group of three students will form a tribunal to oversee, facilitate, direct and track the on-going progress of the project, including the drafting and distribution of the pitch bible.
The completion date for the project is April 13th. Seminar time will be apportioned for work on the project, concentratedly during the five course weeks set for lecture and seminar work apart from the Field Project on the novel itself.
Note that each student is expected to contribute no more than, and no less than, thirty percent of the course effort on the Field project, in addition to project work done during seminar.
I have set up a course group on facebook.com, primarily as a gallery for your individual photographs and names so that I can more quickly attach the proper names to your faces.
A propos Virginia Woolf's modernist literary experiment in the representation of the experiences between mothers and sons, Jacob's Room, here is the link to the on-line library of First World War recruitment posters as raised in seminar discussion of Sasson's poem "Glory of Women."
The poems from our First World War anthology are, as I promise, glorious--and appreciated by many types of reader. Our class film Regeneration (& the novel which it dramatises) suggests the power that the poets still have on artistic imagination. Let us read the Rupert Brook poem 1914: Safety (29); the Owen poem Dulce et Decorum Est (141); and Sassoon's Redeemer (62) or the other mentioned in Wednesday class.
À propos lecture discussion locating Virginia Woolf in her upper-middle level on the British class system, as a means of better appreciating her specific literary art, "Woolf's Servants get their Due" is the title of an interview, linked from Arts & Letters Daily, with author Alison Light on her new book Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury.Several additional journals have published articles on what s obviously perceived as a compelling aspect of Virgina Woolf's life & letters.Q. How did you become interested in Woolf's servants?
A. By reading Woolf's diaries, which I love, but which contain appalling references to the servants: Lottie Hope or Nellie Boxall being compared to animals and vermin. Woolf's disgust riveted me. I also wondered why she and Boxall had such rows. Then the fact that my grandmother was in service and my mother's sisters started out in service before the Second World War.
"a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early 20th century.... Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions and of their consensus between author and reader: conventions of realism ... or traditional meter. Modernist writers tended to see themselves as an avant-garde disengaged from bourgeois values, and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles. In fiction, the accepted continuity of chronological development was upset by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted new ways of tracing the flow of characters' thoughts in their stream-of-consciousness styles. In poetry, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions..... Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories. Its favoured techniques of juxtaposition and multiple point of view challenge the reader to reestablish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms." (My emphases.)(Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], s.v.)
Modernism is a term used to lump together an enormous body of artistic work in all forms--poetry, cinema, painting, architecture--that was produced roughly between the 1890s and the mid 20th century. General definitions are difficult, but modernist work tends to be formally experimental and highly self conscious--think of the Cubist paintings of Picasso or the 'flow of consciousness' of James Joyce's novels. Gareth Jenkins is right to emphasise dislocation and fragmentation as characteristics of modernism. The 'high period' of modernism from 1900-1930 was of course a time of unmatched upheaval, in which the promises of the bourgeois revolution were finally shattered by war, slump and workers' revolt. The accelerating development of technology and the penetration of mass production techniques into every sphere of life added to a deep sense of uncertainty. In Perry Anderson's words, 'European modernism in the first years of this century thus flowered in the space between a still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical present and a still unpredictable political future'.
It has been very tempting for Marxist criticism to glorify modernism given its origin in such a period of upheaval, and its--at least formal--rejection of the past. After the Russian Revolution the intellectuals of Proletkult argued for a rejection of all previous culture, claiming that modernist techniques were the basis for a brave new working class art. Such a simple minded response misses the contradictory nature of all modernism. Gareth is right to point out that modernist work often appears as a retreat from society. Its emphasis on dislocation and alienation could open the way to a kind of rampant subjectivity. His criticism of Virginia Woolf, for example, is telling: 'one cannot escape the feeling, beneath the richness of language, of artistic impoverishment which follows from impoverished grasp of social reality'.
And again, take the working-class attitude towards ‘education’. How different it is from ours, and how immensely sounder! Working people often have a vague reverence for learning in others, but where ‘education’ touches their own lives they see through it and reject it by a healthy instinct. The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a ‘job’ should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly. The idea of a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his lessons! Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a man when the other is still a baby. Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel Butler’s Way of All Flesh, after he had had a few glimpses of real life, looked back on his public school and university education and found it a ‘sickly, debilitating debauch’. There is much in middle-class life that looks sickly and debilitating when you see it from a working-class angle.Note how this corrects the mistaken North American misunderstanding that the proletariat pines in frustrated envy for the values of the middle and upper middle classes. As an exemplary aside, I often observe students and professoriat alike stating that some group or another of fellow citizen are "deprived" of a university education: making, that is, university attendance a quality of universal worth. Too flagrantly pretentious and distastefully preening, I believe, to insist that one's own accidental preference or aptitude must be the sine qua non of social worth.
The destruction of the class system in England is, then, the destruction of the aristocracy and the lower class by the bourgeois: the former they tore down to their level from resentment & envy; the latter they pulled up by sheer condescension.For a nation of this temper, the movement towards democracy is fraught with peculiar dangers. Profoundly aristocratic in his sympathies, the Englishman has always seen in the patrician class not merely a social, but a moral, superiority; the man of blue blood was to him a living representative of those potencies and virtues which made his ideal of the worthy life. Very significant is the cordial alliance from old time between nobles and people; free, proud homage on one side answering to gallant championship on the other; both classes working together in the cause of liberty. However great the sacrifices of the common folk for the maintenance of aristocratic power and splendour, they were gladly made; this was the Englishman's religion, his inborn pietas; in the depths of the dullest soul moved a perception of the ethic meaning attached to lordship. Your Lord was the privileged being endowed by descent with generous instincts, and possessed of means to show them forth in act. A poor noble was a contradiction in terms; if such a person existed, he could only be spoken of with wondering sadness, as though he were the victim of some freak of nature. The Lord was Honourable, Right Honourable; his acts, his words virtually constituted the code of honour whereby the nation lived.
In a new world beyond the ocean there grew up a new race, a scion of England, which shaped its life without regard to the principle of hereditary lordship; and in course of time this triumphant republic began to shake the ideals of the mother land. Its civilization, spite of superficial resemblances, is not English; let him who will think it superior; all one cares to say is that it has already shown in a broad picture the natural tendencies of English blood when emancipated from the old cult. Easy to understand that some there are who see nothing but evil in the influence of that vast commonwealth. If it has done us good, assuredly the fact is not yet demonstrable. In old England, democracy is a thing so alien to our traditions and rooted sentiment that the line of its progress seems hitherto a mere track of ruin. In the very word is something from which we shrink; it seems to signify nothing less than a national apostasy, a denial of the faith in which we won our glory. The democratic Englishman is, by the laws of his own nature, in parlous case; he has lost the ideal by which he guided his rude, prodigal, domineering instincts; in place of the Right Honourable, born to noble things, he has set up the mere plebs, born, more likely than not, for all manner of baseness. And, amid all his show of loud self-confidence, the man is haunted with misgiving.
Here are the points of e-mail protocol for our course :Missed classes and deadlines are not to be reported by e-mail: if a medical or bereavement exception is being claimed, the supporting documentation is handed in, along with the completed assignment, either in person or to the Instructor's mailbox outside the Department Office.
A+ 96-100
A 90-95
A- 85-89
B+ 80-84
B 75-79
B- 70-74
C+ 65-69
C 60-64
C- 55-59
D 50-54
F 0-49
N
Incomplete
DE Deferred
