Group memberships

Here are the memberships of the four Groups for the assigned project.

Some Do Not:
H.B.
M.G.
D.B.
T.B.
R.S.
B.B.
No More Parades:
A.W.
M.Z.
C.L.
H.S.
A.O.
J.L.
D.S.
A Man Could Stand Up:
R.S.
S.R.
C.R.
J.T.
C.B.
L.H.
The Last Post:
K.S.
L.W.
D.G.
H.L.
S ....
J.G.

The three people absent last Wednesday can each slot into one of the six-member groups, next class.

State & Citizen: Pre-WWI versus Now

Opening lecture detailed the far remove at which the State was held from the individual in Britain before the Great War. You can find the same thesis argued in this history. One of the radical consequences of the First World War, and of the Modernist movement, was, as stated, the involvement of the State in individual lives to an increasing extent.

Immediate evidence for the degree to which the State's responsibility is presently conceived can be found in this article from the Vancouver Province.

Its author, one Joey Thompson, reacts to the dragging death in Maple Ridge of gas station attendant Grant De Patie (pictured here) ..... by blaming the government for not having a law: in effect conceiving of the State as capable of preventing all human tragedy if it would just pass enough laws or apply sufficent taxation.

Whether this fundamental faith in the omnipotency of government is laudable or damnable is outside the purview of our course. What concerns us is how utterly alien Ms. Thompson's mentality would have been to people in Britain before World War One.

To them, it would be be as if Ms. Thompson read of the serial decisions made by the teenaged Darnell Pratt to (i.) drink to excess, (ii.) steal a car, (iii.) drive impaired, (iv.) drive without licence, (v.) steal petrol, (vi.) deliberately run an attendant over, and (vii.) remain indifferent to the screams while he slowly grinded the innocent man's face, limbs, and chest to the bone under the car over a five-mile drive toward an unimaginably agonising death .... and then after she had considered the matter, Ms. Thompson were to decide that the blame belongs to the athletic & administrative incompetancy of the Vancouver Canucks.

Update: the only noble thing about this sickeningly revealing event & its aftermath is explained in an article entitled "Grieving parents reject hate."

Update2: via the indispensable Arts & Letters Daily, a timely and somewhat biting article from Britain's Telegraph developing this topic, with the lede:

Despite being richer, people are not happier than in earlier times. Only government can solve the problem, with a more caring attitude. And more therapists... more>>>>

"Damn Tempest" Discussion

A useful follow-up e-mail from a classfellow on our vigourous "damn Tempest" debate from this Monday. (And my respects go to students sticking to their guns in class .....)

Tempest's decision to choose heaven by becoming a better man and giving up his money is more noble and useful in a sense, because even while living in poverty, he will aid others and reform himself into a good man - both of which would take a great deal of perseverance and work. One can thus look at surrender to hell as a cowardly act. If Tempest had given himself to hell, it could have been considered a show of unwillingness to put the effort into becoming a man empathetic to others in pain, while leading a far more difficult life of poverty. In hell, Tempest would neither have been able to become a good man, nor help others. He also would not havelearned empathy, only regret and suffering.

Group Project: Wendesday Class

First & foremost, I want you to know how grateful I am for your kind forebearance at this time. I promise it will not unappreciated.

So, for the Group Project. As I detailed, an SFU emeritus professor of English, Dr. Ralph Maud, has, I'm told, the film rights to Parade's End. Now, Parade's End is a very great book, and -- like with any book great in both senses -- it will be a source of pride & of value to have read it as your life goes on.

Because it is a large book, the more assistance and time one has appreciating it the better. So for these two reasons, a Group Project engaging Parade's End will be very rewarding.

Accordingly, our class this term will create a compendium to the book: a sort of superior Coles Notes by university undergraduate scholars aimed at the generally-educated public who will be attracted to, and by, the film version of Parade's End.

This Wednesday's class, then, you will begin the project, in the following way.

1. Divide yourselves into four groups of equal numbers.
2. The groups will be divided according to the four books of the Parade's End tetralogy: one group for each of the four books.
3. All four books were published separately in series, and are each written in a different style -- each of which has its own attractiveness. Some Do Not.... is set in pre-War Edwardian England; No More Parades in the early half of the War; A Man Could Stand Up-- in the ending and de-mobbing; The Last Post is post-War.
4. Each group will exchange names & e-mail, list your names and Book assignment and e-mail them to me later, and decide on a rough plan of attack. This will include how you think a compendium of a book, to be used in support of a Film version of that book, will most effectively be formatted & informed.
5. Decide if you want to run a blog (easy to set-up, easy to communicate by: virtually, at your convenience & from anywhere -- no need to meet in person then); or create a log-book or some other method of writing up your project.
6. Then, repair yourselves to the Libray and (a.) pull out the Collections material on Ford Madox Ford & the books of Parade's End, then (b.) consult with the Librarians at the Main Floor Reference Desk and research articles under the Library Home Page, SFU Library Databases. Do Not use Googled articles and never use nor cite "Wikipedia:" this is a scholarly project.

One way in which this project will be supported is the background material to the period & World War One provided by our Individual Presentations: we might consider making our Individual work generally available in e-text form.

Victorians: Fin de Siecle & Degeneration

A question was asked about fin de siecle and end-of-the-world mentality. The apocalyptic attitude is ages-old. Even in the New Testament warning is given:

[1] This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. [2] For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, [3] Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, [4] Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; [5] Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away. [II Timothy 3.]

Indeed, an argument I find myself making frequently is that History is a process of reaction away from, with each current denouncing its predecessor (in the manner of teenagers to parents) - frequently special pleading by label: "The Enlightenment" & "the Dark Ages;" and not to forget "Modernism."

Yet, for all that, among the Victorians was an obsession with they perceived as a crisis of degeneracy unique in its degree and different in its kind. To give a slightly trivial example, the tang of degeneration is part of the piquancy contributing to the enormous popularity of the Sherlock Holmes stories. A much better piece of evidence is ... Marie Corelli! The unmatched popularity of her fiction and its immediate and uniform concern with degeneracy is very strong testimony to the zeitgeist. I own a copy of one of the better scholarly treatments of the matter,
Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880-1940 by William Greenslade, which I will put on course reserve.

Reasons for the obsession with degeneracy among Victorians, ones that cut across class, sex and income, are manifold and over-determining. Ordinary fin de siecle consequences are of course important. Additionally, a technological explosion had originally driven the Industrial Revolution which at once created a working class and forced it into urban concentrations. The resulting slums throughout the proliferating major cities -- Manchester, Bradford, Leeds, Birmingham, Newcastle, &c. -- ignored hygiene and bred disease and ignored social welbeing and bred vice: gambling, prostitution, brawling and drunkenness. Victorian England was the high water mark of Methodism and Evangelicism and its crusade for social reformation was uniquely intense. Slavery and child labour were abolished; fourteen-hour factory work days were reduced for women; prisons and hospitals, through campaigners such as Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale, were made more humane. The Salvation Army campaigned to counter alcoholism and other vices. And the ever-intensifying technology of the Industrail revolution was turned, by reformers, to improve drainage, sewage and potable water systems.

To this social atmosphere I would add an element that I have not yet fully defined nor mapped the origins of (beyond its evolutionary connection to Puritanism), but which amounts to an aesthetic, emotional and an erotic preference for hid delights. It can be contrasted with an Age -- such as ours perhaps -- which prefers things revealed and decries restraint. The Victorians were titillated, and comforted, by what was known to exist but was draped from universal sight.

Add to this the intellectual earthquake which was Darwinism: a theory taken as a justification for progress and improvement -- the progress and improvement, that is, which is so much the character of Victorianism. The intellectual climate, then, produced a cast of mind which can be termed, not merely progressivist, but outright perfectibilian.

These, and indeed other, aspects of the Victorian Age, then, made it intensely (I don't say uniquely) expressive when developments which are comprehensibly termed "degeneracy" became evident. And thus it has become a commonplace among scholars of the Nineteenth Century to take obsession with degeneracy as a salient characteristic of the times.

"Sorrows of Satan" ... in song

Don Henley's song "In the Garden of Allah" has a very similar conceit to Corelli's Sorrows of Satan, which you will recognise when you read the lyrics, here, and would be able to watch, were it not immoral to go to the YouTube link, here, so ....Don't.

Borat & the British Class System

The following quotation, from this article , in today's Times of London interviewing Sacha Baran Cohen on the success of his "Borat" persona, is very revealing; not only of the continued existence of, but also some of the different defining characteristics between, the three social classes in Britain, as we have touched upon them in lecture. (The supporting comment on America is pertinent, on the MacNeil thesis that southern American landowners are -- as their Elizabethan accent reveals -- vestigal British aristocracy who emigrated to the American colonies.)

One of the most intriguing questions about Baron Cohen’s characters is: why do so many people fall for the act? Partly he relies on good manners and politeness: “Ali G and Borat worked very well in England with the upper class because they were so polite. They would keep this person in their room. Members of the working class might have thrown him out; members of the middle class might not have revealed themselves as much.
“We found that the Deep South of America was very good for Borat because people were so polite and so welcoming of strangers. They were so proud of their American heritage that they would talk to this person about America and American values for an hour and a half.”