Tietjens' Toryism vs. Today's English Tories

Christopher Hitchens has an article on today's Slate.com on the current state of the Conservative Party in Britain, under the cover lede "When did Britain's Conservatives get so namby pamby?"

A Kindler, Gentler Tory Party: Whatever happened to Britain's Conservatives?
O Tempora, O Mores! During the week I recently spent in London, almost all the political gossip was about whether or not the latest leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, had made recreational use of marijuana—and perhaps other drugs—while at Oxford. There were also photographs of him in his undergraduate days, garbed in the uniform of an upper-crust student dining club that could have been captioned "Brideshead Regurgitated." Thus, if only in a slightly frivolous way, the association of the Tories with the nobs and the toffs and the privileged was still preserved in tabloid form. But there was a time when no serious Conservative would have been caught dead with a joint—the very symbol of '60s fatuity. And the interesting thing was to notice not how incongruous the story was with the style of today's Tory leadership, but rather how perfectly it seemed to fit it.

1902 Women's Fashion Paper

Classfellow A.O. sends along this link to a scan of a women's fashion paper -The Designer - from December 1903, the Corelli period. It's great to read the journal online, and the fashions match extant photos of Miss Corelli.

The interest in this topic -- cultural studies, sociology, academic literature -- never diminishes, and there is still many a doctoral thesis to be written about this. I hope to read one someday from the standpoint of the lead-in the the First World War.

Plant blogging

It's wet, cold & snowing outside, but inside my aeschynanthus is blooming. The full delight is in the contrast: true for the literary as well as the horticultural voluptuary.

NYRB Exchange on Parade's End

Please treat yourself to this (typically catty) exchange between two literary scholars (one American one Canadian) on competing interpretations of Parade's End.

N.b. I'll see if I can get online access to the original article that sparked the exchange through our Library.

Mid-term essays & Monday Office Hours

I hope all is going smoothly for your mid-term essays. Feel free to bring a hard copy of your thesis paragraph, your essay outline, or a particular problem of structure or expression, to any of my Office Hours. Because my Office Hours this Monday are previously booked for Tutorial visits to my 101W course for this term, I will be available from one o'clock to three o'clock Tuesday just for our class. Office Hours resume as usual Wednesday.

A WWI Veteran's Death

One of Canada's three surviving WWI veterans,Victor (Lloyd) Clemett, has just died.

Born Dec. 10, 1899, in Toronto, Clemett lived a rich, long life spanning
more than a century....In 1916, Clemett enlisted in the army at the age of 16, following in the footsteps of his three older brothers. All four returned home at the end of the war.

Article on-line here at cbc.ca. The Canadian government is hoping to give one of its rare State funerals at the death of one or all of these remaining WWI veterans. Mr. Clemett has requested a private memorial.

Ford, Freud, Modernism & Fragmentation

A highly relevant book that you might be interested in is available through this ebrary link from our Library homepage. Its title declares its relevancy: Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War.
Two characteristic passages to get your attention.

But it is hard to talk about ‘modernism’ (or history) as a homogeneous mass, as will emerge in this Introduction. In my approach to Ford, then, I also fragment modernism itself. I focus on aspects of the modernist aesthetic that are particularly relevant to him and to his work; in so doing, I also demonstrate the fact that there is more to modernism than meets the eye. The prevailing wisdom concerning modernism and fragmentation (the ‘pattern’) is challenged in what follows. Ford, an advocate and cultivator of key modernist techniques, both uses these techniques to represent the fragmented experience and perception of modern life (in a text like The Good Soldier) and counters them (in what I call his positive fictions, like The Half Moon’).

Steven Marcus calls the relation between psychoanalysis and narrative writing ‘an ancient and venerable one’,11 and Freud himself stated in Studies on Hysteria that ‘it still strikes myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories’.12 As Marcus then deduces, ‘On this reading, human life is, ideally, a connected and coherent story, with all the details in explanatory place, and with everything [. . .] accounted for, in its proper causal or other sequence. And inversely, illness amounts at least in part to suffering from an incoherent story or an inadequate narrative account of oneself’ (p. 61).
Haslam, Sara. Fragmenting Modernism : Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War . Manchester , GBR p21 . http://site.ebrary.com/lib/sfu/Doc?id=10071290&ppg=34 Copyright © 2002. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.