The Waste Land on BBC Radio's In Our Time

This episode of Melvyn Bragg's BBC talk show In Our Time is a very useful introduction to the longish poem by T[homas]. S[tearns]. Eliot we are studying this week and next. One thing you get a sense of from popular - OK, quasi-popular - broadcasts like this is the sheer importance of The Waste Land as an event in twentieth-century Anglophone literary culture. In Our Time does programs on things like the Battle of Hastings, or Einstein's general theory of relativity, or Watergate; this discussion of The Waste Land addresses the poem itself but also why it has been so influential.

NYRB article on Ford Madox Ford

Was Ford lying when he said that choosing the 4th of August as a pivotal date in his novel was a coincidence, and not a late change made after Germany invaded Belgium on 4/8/14?

We'll never know for sure. However, I can state with certainty that the article on Ford by novelist Edmund White in the current New York Review of Books is a coincidence, and not a strategy designed by me to make our authors seem topical - which, clearly, they are.

It's a great piece and you should read it. Here is a highlight relevant to Monday's lecture:

In prose he said he was an “impressionist,” which meant several things to Ford, though he and Joseph Conrad, who worked out their ideas together, believed that fiction is primarily a visual art and that the writer should be more concerned with the vividness of his remembered or invented images than with facts. Ford wrote:

Impressionism exists to render those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass—through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects a face of a person behind you.

For Ford experience was rarely ordered or hierarchical. It was all a jumble and the function of literature was to reproduce that confusion, though in a fashion that was clear and intentional, never random. Simultaneity was one of his artistic strategies, which is most clearly seen in Parade’s End [Ford's series of four novels about the First World War].

And there are also juicy tit-bits about Ford's personal life - not that we are interested in such topics in ARTS2036, of course.

Although Ford was physically awkward and wheezed and was obese and looked like a seal with his limp blond hair and mustache and liquid eyes, he was a successful womanizer and moved from Elsie to her sister to Violet Hunt, an ex-lover of H.G. Wells, and on to half a dozen other women, and each time he was convinced he was in love.

Enjoy. You should also dip into Edmund White's own dazzling fictional oeuvre as soon as possible.

Gertrude Stein viva voce

I'm reposting here the link that Jacinta Kelly posted in her tutorial's blog to a recording of Stein reading her own work.

Thanks Jacinta!

Literary blogs: an example

There are blogs about everything, and literature is, of course, no exception. I said that I would point you in the direction of one or two literary or intellectual blogs as examples of tone: internet writing that is looser than you would find in an academic essay but still rigorous and articulate. Of course, there may not be anything essentially web-based about this kind of writing. You could find equally good models in print journalism about books and ideas, such as you might read in the reviews section of a good newspaper, like The Guardian's books section, or The Australian Literary Review.

Here is one to start off with: Mark Athitakis' American Fiction Notes. Athitakis mostly posts reviews and opinions about contemporary American writers there, as well as more broadly-themed pieces on the state of American letters and the publishing industry. What I like about it, apart from the fact that he is a good writer and a perceptive reader, is that he usually anchors his criticism in particular examples and words and passages quoted from the text, as in this piece on Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.

Gertrude Stein and Cubism

On Monday Professor Julian Murphet will lecture on our first literary author, Gertrude Stein. The reader contains a selection of short pieces that Stein called "portraits"; you should read them in preparation for the lecture and tutorials next week.

The reader also contains an editorial that the photographer Alfred Stieglitz wrote about Stein in his magazine Camera Work. This is a good starting point to getting a grip on Stein, who is the most radically experimental prose stylist that we will read on this course. Stieglitz basically says that Post-Impressionist painting is challenging in the same way as Stein's writing, but that whereas the P-Is achieved their effects in the medium of paint, Stein uses words: language is her paint. Below are two Cubist portraits, by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. It's hard to follow the analogy between words and paint, but you can see that like Stein, these inventors of Cubism have dislocated the idiom of traditional portraiture.

Georges Braque, "Le portugais" (1911)

Pablo Picasso, "Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler" (1910)

 These are not likenesses in the sense familiar from traditional figurative painting: rather, Cubism tries to give an effect of movement, of time, of multiple moments and perspectives jammed together into a single two-dimensional image. It's as if, rather than capturing the subject seen from a single angle at a single moment, the Cubists bring together multiple perspectives and give a sense of temporal duration: of the subject's identity over an extended period, along with  bits and pieces of their environment. Perhaps Stein's use of the continuing tense - the "-ing" verbs - in her portrait of Picasso is also designed to suggest flux and avoid a static image of her subject; or perhaps, the idea is that these infinitesimally different phrases are supposed to accumulate in the mind of the reader over the time it takes to read the piece, to produce a cumulative effect.

Virginia Woolf and December 1910

It being International Women's Day, I wanted to draw attention to an influential statement made by one of the greatest of modernist novelists, Virginia Woolf, whom we will study later in the course. Woolf's searching inquiry into the social and moral condition of the female writer in the twentieth century is recorded in her long essays A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. The statement I wanted to flag here, though, is her remark in a 1924 essay that "on or about December 1910, human character changed." This is how Woolf marked a moment of transition from the old order to a new one. Why December 1910? Most people think Woolf is referring to the death of King Edward VII and the coronation of George V--in her essay she uses the terms Edwardian and Georgian to distinguish between backward-looking and progressive novelists--but also to a controversial exhibition of modernist painting, the Post-Impressionist Exhibition curated by Roger Fry at the Grafton Galleries in London.

However, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that among the many gigantic social shifts that reached critical mass between 1900 and 1914 was the movement for female suffrage and the rights of women more generally, and that, in fact, the first International Women's Day was celebrated on March 19, 1911. So, although this does not coincide precisely with the date singled out by Woolf--December 1910--you might easily argue that one of the ways in which human character changed around this time was the increasing militancy of the female suffrage movement and the gradual ceding of new rights and freedoms to women in European societies. (Women were not given the vote until 1918 in Britain, and not until 1928 did they achieve equal electoral status with men in that nation.)

The Modernist Journals Project has taken Woolf's statement as the inspiration for an online exhibit of magazines from 1910. The idea is that periodicals give us a window into the culture of the time: what were people thinking, reading, buying, in December 1910, the date when, according to Woolf, the modern era began? One thing they were buying was Coke, as the above Cosmopolitan advertisement shows.

They were also buying large, armadillo-shaped hats, as we can see in the ad from the Ladies' Home Journal below.

I encourage you to check out the link: you can flip through page images from dozens of magazines, including some, like Cosmo, that still exist.


These ads give us a glimpse of the consumer culture of the time, not so different from our own, propagated by colourful advertisements in magazines, on billboards, and in shop windows. These signs of mass produced commodities remind us of the world Murphy et al are getting at in Ballet mécanique, with its motifs of repetition, of identical machined objects: saucepans, jelly moulds, and so on. They might also be a useful context for Stein's portraits Bon marché weather and Flirting at the Bon marché, whose titles refer to a Paris department store, and which seem to mock the way in which speech can itself become a sort of mass produced item, the same phrases repeated mechanically on everyone's lips.

Instructions for the blog post task

Welcome to ARTS2036. This is where I will post information, instructions and links to resources and other interesting modernist stuff. You, however, will complete the blog task in the blog for your tutorial, where it will only be visible to the members of your group. New posts that I make here will feed to each of the four tutorial blogs, so you will be able to keep track.

This post contains instructions for the discussion post assessment task.

Each tutorial has a blog, where you will post your discussion of one of the texts that we study this semester. You should already have access to the blog for your tutorial: if you don't, let me know.

If you came to the tutorial in week 1, then you should already know which text you need to discuss in your post. If you have not yet been assigned to a week, get in touch with me or your tutor as soon as possible.

You must post your discussion before 9pm on the night before your tutorial. This will give the class an opportunity to read what you have to say before we meet.

Your post should focus on one aspect of the text: something that you find interesting, and something that you can develop in the space of 750 words. For example, you might have been struck by the way in which women are assaulted, run over and molested in Un chien andalou, and you might therefore want to focus on the theme of violence against women. You would then plan out your discussion as you would an essay: perhaps, you could address the three main attacks on female figures in the film: the opening razor sequence, the killing of the androgynous woman by the speeding car, and the menacing and molesting of the woman in the apartment. Then, if all goes well, you will reach a conclusion: some way of tying together what you have discussed into a single coherent statement about the text.

The course outline lists assessment criteria for this task: you should refer to these before you start planning your post. One in particular that I would draw your attention to is the requirement of close reference to the text. In order to do this assignment well, you must demonstrate that you have a good knowledge of the text and that you know where to find just the right quotes and examples to illustrate your point. If you're writing on a literary text, this means quotation - short quotations of one sentence or even less are an effective way of showing the reader you know what you're talking about. Always give the page number in brackets. If it's a film, this means referring specifically to scenes and even frames to support your claims.

Just because this task is online, it is not something that you can write quickly, without preparation. You should read/watch the text/film, take notes on it, and re-read or re-watch as you plan your discussion.

That said, there is one difference between this exercise and an essay: tone, or register. You are free to write in a more personal way here than you would in an essay, as long as you are expressing yourself with clarity and precision. Your discussion will resemble an essay in that it is articulate, well organised, and uses evidence (i.e., close reference) to support its assertions, but it may resemble a blog in attempting to present these texts in an engaging and interesting way to your classmates.

I will provide links to some literary blogs that you can use to tune your ear for tone. I will also link to a class blog at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, which contains examples of blog posts by students that provide a rough model for what we're doing here.

Here is one: this blog from a class at UMW last year on women in modernism contains some good examples of student posts that use textual evidence and and analysis well and focus on a single idea. "Jane's Post on Cather" on page 3 is a good example of close reference and the formation of a cohesive discussion around a single main idea.