Christopher Hilliard
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199695171
- eISBN:
- 9780199949946
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695171.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter provides an anatomy of the Downing English School. It reconstructs the undergraduate population from 1932 until Leavis's retirement in 1962 using archival records and establishes the ...
More
This chapter provides an anatomy of the Downing English School. It reconstructs the undergraduate population from 1932 until Leavis's retirement in 1962 using archival records and establishes the social background of these students. The chapter goes on to identify the professions in which Leavis's pupils clustered and considers the connections and disconnects between their Cambridge education and their subsequent careers. The most common career choice was teaching, and significant numbers went on to become publishers, BBC staff, actors, and directors. Others made use of their training in professions alien or inimical to Leavis, such as advertising. Still others went on to careers in business or the professions. As well as being the leader of a movement, Leavis was a college teacher like other college teachers, working with undergraduates for whom literature would not be a vocation.Less
This chapter provides an anatomy of the Downing English School. It reconstructs the undergraduate population from 1932 until Leavis's retirement in 1962 using archival records and establishes the social background of these students. The chapter goes on to identify the professions in which Leavis's pupils clustered and considers the connections and disconnects between their Cambridge education and their subsequent careers. The most common career choice was teaching, and significant numbers went on to become publishers, BBC staff, actors, and directors. Others made use of their training in professions alien or inimical to Leavis, such as advertising. Still others went on to careers in business or the professions. As well as being the leader of a movement, Leavis was a college teacher like other college teachers, working with undergraduates for whom literature would not be a vocation.
Christopher Hilliard
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199695171
- eISBN:
- 9780199949946
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695171.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Working from the huge archive of the Oxford extra-mural network and the previous untapped resource of the Richard Hoggart archive at the University of Sheffield, Chapter 5 examines the heyday of ...
More
Working from the huge archive of the Oxford extra-mural network and the previous untapped resource of the Richard Hoggart archive at the University of Sheffield, Chapter 5 examines the heyday of Leavisism in adult education which was the fifteen years after the Second World War. It explores the ways in which practical criticism and the example of Knights's essays and Leavis and Thompson's Culture and Environment shaped adult ‘tutorial classes’. It traces the ways that initiatives in adult teaching informed the landmark books written in the moment of ‘left-Leavisism’: Hoggart's Uses of Literacy (1957) and Williams's Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1958). The latter was among other things a critique of Leavis's conception of culture; Hoggart's book turned Scrutiny's critical practice against some of its guiding assumptions.Less
Working from the huge archive of the Oxford extra-mural network and the previous untapped resource of the Richard Hoggart archive at the University of Sheffield, Chapter 5 examines the heyday of Leavisism in adult education which was the fifteen years after the Second World War. It explores the ways in which practical criticism and the example of Knights's essays and Leavis and Thompson's Culture and Environment shaped adult ‘tutorial classes’. It traces the ways that initiatives in adult teaching informed the landmark books written in the moment of ‘left-Leavisism’: Hoggart's Uses of Literacy (1957) and Williams's Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1958). The latter was among other things a critique of Leavis's conception of culture; Hoggart's book turned Scrutiny's critical practice against some of its guiding assumptions.
Ruth Cruickshank
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199571758
- eISBN:
- 9780191721793
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199571758.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
This chapter assesses how Redonnet's fin de millénaire prose fictions represent market‐driven violence (physical and symbolic) and the mass media (press, television, cinema, and the Internet). It ...
More
This chapter assesses how Redonnet's fin de millénaire prose fictions represent market‐driven violence (physical and symbolic) and the mass media (press, television, cinema, and the Internet). It shows how they invite the questions of French co‐implication in atrocities, and, via Adorno, of how bearing witness to the Holocaust risks, as does Redonnet, co‐implication and self‐satisfied contemplation. Benjamin is brought to bear in the analysis of Redonnet's evocation of the critical potential inherent in the production and reproduction of works of art. Discussion of implicit critiques of the contemporary literary field and of écriture féminine lead to the examination of Redonnet's challenges to contemporary conceptions of postmodern barbarism (her description of Houellebecq), women, and women's writing. The chapter concludes by identifying how her narrative strategies of resistance do not achieve their aim of making a travesty of homogenized manipulations of crisis, but are nonetheless a critical work in progress.Less
This chapter assesses how Redonnet's fin de millénaire prose fictions represent market‐driven violence (physical and symbolic) and the mass media (press, television, cinema, and the Internet). It shows how they invite the questions of French co‐implication in atrocities, and, via Adorno, of how bearing witness to the Holocaust risks, as does Redonnet, co‐implication and self‐satisfied contemplation. Benjamin is brought to bear in the analysis of Redonnet's evocation of the critical potential inherent in the production and reproduction of works of art. Discussion of implicit critiques of the contemporary literary field and of écriture féminine lead to the examination of Redonnet's challenges to contemporary conceptions of postmodern barbarism (her description of Houellebecq), women, and women's writing. The chapter concludes by identifying how her narrative strategies of resistance do not achieve their aim of making a travesty of homogenized manipulations of crisis, but are nonetheless a critical work in progress.
Nick Hubble
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474415828
- eISBN:
- 9781474438742
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474415828.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question argues that British proletarian literature was a politicised form of modernism which culturally transformed Britain. Critical analysis and extended ...
More
The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question argues that British proletarian literature was a politicised form of modernism which culturally transformed Britain. Critical analysis and extended close readings of key works such as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Naomi Mitchison’s We have Been Warned, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair and John Sommerfield’s May Day, are placed within a wider literary history of cross-class intersubjectivity stretching from early encounters between Ford Madox Ford and D.H. Lawrence, through Virginia Woolf’s association with the Women’s Co-operative Guild, and on to the activity of Mass Observation in the late 1930s and 1940s. The study analyses the way in which modernism and proletarian literature were related to an intersectional web of class and gender that took on a potent political shape following the 1926 General Strike and the Equal Franchise Act of 1928. The 1930s is revealed not as an atypical, isolated decade but as central to the literature of the twentieth century. Far from being the product of an inward-looking culture, British proletarian modernism is shown to be fundamentally concerned with relationships with the other and the intersubjective possibilities of more open, rewarding forms of social life than those afforded by capitalism and colonialism.Less
The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question argues that British proletarian literature was a politicised form of modernism which culturally transformed Britain. Critical analysis and extended close readings of key works such as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Naomi Mitchison’s We have Been Warned, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair and John Sommerfield’s May Day, are placed within a wider literary history of cross-class intersubjectivity stretching from early encounters between Ford Madox Ford and D.H. Lawrence, through Virginia Woolf’s association with the Women’s Co-operative Guild, and on to the activity of Mass Observation in the late 1930s and 1940s. The study analyses the way in which modernism and proletarian literature were related to an intersectional web of class and gender that took on a potent political shape following the 1926 General Strike and the Equal Franchise Act of 1928. The 1930s is revealed not as an atypical, isolated decade but as central to the literature of the twentieth century. Far from being the product of an inward-looking culture, British proletarian modernism is shown to be fundamentally concerned with relationships with the other and the intersubjective possibilities of more open, rewarding forms of social life than those afforded by capitalism and colonialism.
Charles Forsdick
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199258291
- eISBN:
- 9780191698538
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199258291.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter discusses changes in travel narratives, and one of these is where travellers represent the cultures they go to during their voyages. Some of the textual proofs of these changes can be ...
More
This chapter discusses changes in travel narratives, and one of these is where travellers represent the cultures they go to during their voyages. Some of the textual proofs of these changes can be found in French postcolonial literature. One example of this is French postcolonial literature and the literary works made in Polynesia.Less
This chapter discusses changes in travel narratives, and one of these is where travellers represent the cultures they go to during their voyages. Some of the textual proofs of these changes can be found in French postcolonial literature. One example of this is French postcolonial literature and the literary works made in Polynesia.
Nick Hubble
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474415828
- eISBN:
- 9781474438742
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474415828.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The conclusion considers the various legacies of proletarian modernism and the structures of feeling it supported, including the equalities legislation of the 1960s and 1970s, and the promotion of ...
More
The conclusion considers the various legacies of proletarian modernism and the structures of feeling it supported, including the equalities legislation of the 1960s and 1970s, and the promotion of self-reflexivity in the private sphere. It is argued that focusing on this kind of intersectional proletarian literature might provide a good direction for the future of modernist studies and a means for preserving and channelling the energy and radical analyses which have given the New Modernist Studies momentum over the last fifteen years or so into a wider-ranging, democratic and more global public engagement with everyday culture. It is argued that the possible futures imagined by the modernist-proletarian texts considered in this book far exceed the capacity of state infrastructure and mainstream political imagination. The conclusion also calls for a reinterpretation of literary history to focus on subjectivity, intersubjectivity and desire in relation to everyday life, which would have real-world consequences through its relevance to an intersectional approach to politics.Less
The conclusion considers the various legacies of proletarian modernism and the structures of feeling it supported, including the equalities legislation of the 1960s and 1970s, and the promotion of self-reflexivity in the private sphere. It is argued that focusing on this kind of intersectional proletarian literature might provide a good direction for the future of modernist studies and a means for preserving and channelling the energy and radical analyses which have given the New Modernist Studies momentum over the last fifteen years or so into a wider-ranging, democratic and more global public engagement with everyday culture. It is argued that the possible futures imagined by the modernist-proletarian texts considered in this book far exceed the capacity of state infrastructure and mainstream political imagination. The conclusion also calls for a reinterpretation of literary history to focus on subjectivity, intersubjectivity and desire in relation to everyday life, which would have real-world consequences through its relevance to an intersectional approach to politics.
Edward J. Hughes
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199609864
- eISBN:
- 9780191731761
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter explores the contrasting ways in which a range of traditional and often unconnected hierarchies subtend, and are sometimes renegotiated in, Le Temps retrouvé. These include: the ...
More
This chapter explores the contrasting ways in which a range of traditional and often unconnected hierarchies subtend, and are sometimes renegotiated in, Le Temps retrouvé. These include: the hierarchy of mental and manual labour, particularly in relation to the Narrator’s composition of his work and the analogies with domestic work; the forms of interaction between the proletariat and the aristocracy, specifically when linked to the First World War and to the description of Jupien’s male brothel; and the tension between the work-of-art-as-salvation model that shapes a substantial section of Le Temps retrouvé and the call to sociality and community implicit in the images of social overview and documentation present elsewhere in the volume.Less
This chapter explores the contrasting ways in which a range of traditional and often unconnected hierarchies subtend, and are sometimes renegotiated in, Le Temps retrouvé. These include: the hierarchy of mental and manual labour, particularly in relation to the Narrator’s composition of his work and the analogies with domestic work; the forms of interaction between the proletariat and the aristocracy, specifically when linked to the First World War and to the description of Jupien’s male brothel; and the tension between the work-of-art-as-salvation model that shapes a substantial section of Le Temps retrouvé and the call to sociality and community implicit in the images of social overview and documentation present elsewhere in the volume.
Thomas Karshan
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199603985
- eISBN:
- 9780191725333
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199603985.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
While in the late 1920s Nabokov was particularly interested in understanding play through the specific qualities of individual games and sports, in the next decade he was thinking about play in ...
More
While in the late 1920s Nabokov was particularly interested in understanding play through the specific qualities of individual games and sports, in the next decade he was thinking about play in relation to its antitheses with use and with work, and Chapter 4 is about play as the opposite of work in the novels of the 1930s. In the same month, December 1925, that Nabokov wrote his manifesto for play in ‘Play’, he also wrote a vision of art and the world as work in ‘A Guide to Berlin’. Nabokov's vision of play is haunted by a competing vision of work, and in Glory, Invitation to a Beheading, and Despair, both play and work are treated as provisional stages on a path towards some more complete goal. In the later 1930s Nabokov engaged in a battle against the nineteenth-century idealisation of labour, which he believed had led to the Soviet and Nazi ideologies, and in The Gift, he mounts an unambiguous assault on the culture of labour, focusing on the figure of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the Russian radical of the 1860s.Less
While in the late 1920s Nabokov was particularly interested in understanding play through the specific qualities of individual games and sports, in the next decade he was thinking about play in relation to its antitheses with use and with work, and Chapter 4 is about play as the opposite of work in the novels of the 1930s. In the same month, December 1925, that Nabokov wrote his manifesto for play in ‘Play’, he also wrote a vision of art and the world as work in ‘A Guide to Berlin’. Nabokov's vision of play is haunted by a competing vision of work, and in Glory, Invitation to a Beheading, and Despair, both play and work are treated as provisional stages on a path towards some more complete goal. In the later 1930s Nabokov engaged in a battle against the nineteenth-century idealisation of labour, which he believed had led to the Soviet and Nazi ideologies, and in The Gift, he mounts an unambiguous assault on the culture of labour, focusing on the figure of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the Russian radical of the 1860s.
Eric Hayot
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199926695
- eISBN:
- 9780199980499
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199926695.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter analyzes Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy' conceptions of the world and the work of art. The history of the world of the work of art is always, simultaneously, a history of the idea of the ...
More
This chapter analyzes Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy' conceptions of the world and the work of art. The history of the world of the work of art is always, simultaneously, a history of the idea of the world, and a history of the world as a material substrate, and object of human practice. This book proceeds toward a historicization of the world-concept (and its appearances in works of art) that recognizes that its history is not, or not simply, the history of a philosophical concept, but rather a history of the intersection between such a concept and its practical appearance in the realm of human life. Heidegger's work recalls how widely modernity is understood as a fracture in the world-idea. This fracture is literal and metaphorical. Nancy's work on the history of the world-concept confirms for a new era the ways a material understanding of the actual world situation can function as a complement to and subtending force of the world's apprehension as a philosophical concept.Less
This chapter analyzes Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy' conceptions of the world and the work of art. The history of the world of the work of art is always, simultaneously, a history of the idea of the world, and a history of the world as a material substrate, and object of human practice. This book proceeds toward a historicization of the world-concept (and its appearances in works of art) that recognizes that its history is not, or not simply, the history of a philosophical concept, but rather a history of the intersection between such a concept and its practical appearance in the realm of human life. Heidegger's work recalls how widely modernity is understood as a fracture in the world-idea. This fracture is literal and metaphorical. Nancy's work on the history of the world-concept confirms for a new era the ways a material understanding of the actual world situation can function as a complement to and subtending force of the world's apprehension as a philosophical concept.
Eric Hayot
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199926695
- eISBN:
- 9780199980499
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199926695.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter discusses the common use of the term “world” in literary studies that speaks to the relation between literature and worlds, and has nothing to do with world-systems or world literature. ...
More
This chapter discusses the common use of the term “world” in literary studies that speaks to the relation between literature and worlds, and has nothing to do with world-systems or world literature. We speak of “Balzac's world,” or “Hawthorne's world,” or “Rushdie's world” in ways that rely on two fairly conventional understandings of the word, neither of which is captured by the current world literature debates. In one use the word names the general social and historical space within which an author lived and worked. In its other use the phrase means something like the unity of form, diegesis, and feeling composed by the rough totality of a work: the world of the work of art.Less
This chapter discusses the common use of the term “world” in literary studies that speaks to the relation between literature and worlds, and has nothing to do with world-systems or world literature. We speak of “Balzac's world,” or “Hawthorne's world,” or “Rushdie's world” in ways that rely on two fairly conventional understandings of the word, neither of which is captured by the current world literature debates. In one use the word names the general social and historical space within which an author lived and worked. In its other use the phrase means something like the unity of form, diegesis, and feeling composed by the rough totality of a work: the world of the work of art.
