Of Mrs. Melrose Ape

For a winningly burlesque website on all things Aimee Semple McPherson, the original of Evelyn Waugh's parodic creation Mrs. Melrose Ape, click here. The original, by the bye, was Canadian-born ....

On Cynicism

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."

Final Essay

The Final Paper -- three thousand five hundred words due April 6th in the Instructor's Department mailbox -- is open topic. You have every encouragement to exercise your creativity in the choice of topic, which will be directly responsive to course themes, ideas or lecture information and will engage any two course texts in manner which advances academic understanding of the material and its historical and in intellectual context.

Imagism & Vorticism (& Fascism)

Here are the links I mentioned in lecture: of Imagism, and a scan of the Blast vanity publications of 1914-15.
Let me repeat that I entirely reprudiate, deplore & deprecate the loathesome and inexcusible anti-Semitism of Ezra Pound that so evidently animated the Blast tract.

Nature of Modernism

There is a certain uncertainty about the nature of the concept of modernism: the dominant literary mode of 'Twentieth Century British Literature to 194. We have explored its nature as the course has progressed, but you may additionally want to read this engagement with the issue of modernism & personal identity, especially important in Woolf and Madox Ford, from a Marxist angle: especially the key passage quoted here.

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'.

Eveleyn Waugh's Prophecy

Adam Fenwyck-Symes, writing as "Mr. Chatterbox" creates a person -- Mrs. Andrew Quest -- in his column for the sole purpose of writing gossip about her. In 1930, when Waugh wrote Vile Bodies, this was high satire.
It is now real-life.

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.

Diana Mitford-Guiness-Mosley

Careful step is needed through biographical sewage, and the prophylactic scholarship only just keeps back the diseased vapour.

From a succinct and comprehensive article in the online Telegraph at the death of the odious Hitlerite Diana Mosley:

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.)