A halo of warmth in the darkness of the year: what are you reading spring 2023?

Having read I, Robot I assume Asimov's sympathies lie more with the robot-friendly Spacers than the anti-robot Earthers (including bigoted protagonist), but the Spacer's hardline anti-immigration stance seems Not Great, even if there's a very compelling in universe explanation.

Lots of good new posts busting out all of a sudden (also some good 'uns over the years on that xpost Crying of Lot 49 thread).
Thanks for all the B.S. Johnson recs.
Now starting Isaac's Storm, in which 1900 science and politics and biz and other interests encounter a huge-ass hurricane ripping Galveston, a place I knew nothing about---only knew of coastal Texas culture re industrial Port Arthur as homeplace of Janis Joplin---this island city was depicted by boosters as a worker's'family's paradise, but the climate, like other factors, was pretty mavericky all along. Data-rich from the beginning, but also there I was put off by "non-fiction novel" scene-setting, although the world-building takes over as fact and fiction, plus the author, pop history veteran Erik Larsen, had the memoir of meteorologist Isaac Cline to draw from, as well as many other sources frequently sited in endnotes, so looks like it will go OK.

world-building takes over my attention span, that is, and so far it's fact *over* fiction, an impression encouraged by skimming ahead.

Got the new Nicole Flattery out of the library but wasn't doing it for me, so I've started:

William Gaddis - Carpenter's Gothic
Clemens Meyer - While We Were Dreaming
Missouri Williams - The Doloriad

Recently finished Canadian poet Colin Smith’s 8x8x7, a 2008 book that feels written in a mode that is no longer popular but which was very influential to me as a young poet— manic, winking, absolutely withering hard left politics. It was nice to read, tho it offered little in terms of form.

Have also read some other poetry books, and of course, Prynne reading group continues. Not sure what’s next!

Crisell's history of broadcasting takes a slightly unexpected turn into proposing that while TV has done some good, it has also been harmful to people's ways of seeing the world, and has affected how they act. It's very close to what David Thomson has very long argued about film, though I don't think Crisell realises this.

I can go along with much that Crisell says, except when he seems to say that the emotive nature of TV means that direct action and protest groups like CND or Greenpeace get beneficial treatment from it. Those groups have historically been viewed as subversive (have been infiltrated by Mi5, contained by police, etc), and I don't think it's true that such groups do or did get favourable TV coverage. No more, of course, did trade unions.

Read Jean d’Amérique’s No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace this morning, a book translated from French and Haitian creole. Interesting and depressing, full of elemental images (blood, dirt, glass, water, heat, saliva, etc). He has a new book of fiction out that has been getting some decent reviews.

I finished Crisell's book. He goes up to 1997 - Channel 5 has launched! - and is, to my eyes, prescient and bold in his predictions of the multi-channel, interactive future in which TV, radio, telephone, computer - and he adds, fax machine, CD player, VCR - might all converge into one 'apparatus'. For many people you could say that has turned out to be the 'phone'.

It's impressive that someone as cautious as Crisell is also so forward-looking, though the future he sees is not entirely positive. Actually what surprises me is how things have changed less than he expects. He says that the BBC licence fee may well be abolished in 2001! He also implies that in the near future broadcasting channels may be replaced by interactive modes like 'near video on demand'. That would be close to iPlayer or similar services. But compared to what Crisell posits, we still have dozens of broadcast channels beaming out somewhat 'mixed programming' - drama, travel programmes, documentaries. And the audience share for the old 4 channels that we had up to 1997 seems to have held up better than he would have predicted.

Two reflections that came to me were:

1: I am used to an 'era of neoliberalism' in which everything is always privatized and good decisions are never made. But if you look at broadcasting it's then surprising how often such decisions have been averted, and ideas of public service have been maintained. Even at the very start of the BBC, it moved from a more commercial arrangement to a more public one. BBC2 could have been ITV2 instead. ITV was given a much stronger public service remit from the early 1960s. Channel Four might have been ITV2 rather than the bold alternative channel it was. In 1986, the Thatcherite Peacock report proposed privatizing R1 and R2! - and it didn't happen.

2: On the other hand, it also seems to me that every time a new channel is started with high aims, it quite soon gets diluted. BBC2 is one. Channel Four another: after 1993 it has to sell itself more to advertisers and it sheds much of the minority programming / political / independent character that made it such a distinctive part of 1980s culture. Presumably no-one who doesn't remember the 1980s now thinks of C4 in those terms at all? BBC4 then repeats the pattern, supposedly a home for high culture stuff, then turned into an OK channel for documentary and music repeats. Even 6music is going through a like pattern, though it could be said that 6music's original indie-rock identity was too narrow - still, it's now shedding diverse and thoughtful programming to chase audiences. It seems that attempts to maintain locations for 'quality' in traditional broadcasting have never lasted. (Maybe it can be said that cable producers have actually ended up producing higher quality, in drama.)

I'm glad finally to have read Crisell's book. Media is still so pervasive a part of our lives, a historical perspective is good to have.

I wanted to carry on reading something that would be broadly and conceptually enlightening and clarifying on an area of interest to me - so on the shelf I found Wellek and Warren's THEORY OF LITERATURE (1949; third edition 1963). It's dry and stern in a way that would be alien to most critics and teachers now (though I suppose academic literary discourse is still notorious for abstraction and jargon, in a different way).

By page 20 we've reached the great chestnut: 'What is literature?'

David Olusoga The Kaiser's Holocaust
The story of teh German colony in South West Africa and its extremely detrimental effect on the native population.
Just got through the Nama people being sent to an International Fair in Berlin where they had been exp0ected to put on supposedly native dress instead of the Western suits and Boer like military uniforms they were used to. They refused and a lot of teh Berln populatio were pretty smitten. After having had the primitive image of African natives presented as the reality some of them began to quesion things. Shame they weren't the ones who prevailed. Namaland became a hell on earth under German control.

My reading club is going to read 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'. Do I need to know anything beforehand, or should I just dive in?

it tolls for thee

My reading club is going to read 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'. Do I need to know anything beforehand, or should I just dive in?

― ArchCarrier,

You gotta get used to the thees and thous

would a basic history of the Spanish Civil War be useful?

maybe Geography of Spain too?

would a basic history of the Spanish Civil War be useful?

I'm not sure if I've actually read it. Do know I've seen the Gary Cooper/Ingrid Bergman film version a few times.
Probably have at least one copy of it lying around the flat somewhere.
So not sure exactly what added background you need. Would think overview of the recent history and possibly the geography of the area might be useful.If there are things taht contrast with the wider held understanding of events or anything.

just dive in. if something seems unclear then do a bit of outside reading to situate yourself. wikipedia would prob be good enough. the novel was meant to be popular reading among a general audience.

May depend on the extent of discussion within the reading club as to what extra background you would want. It's mno longer recent history, not sure to what extent the man in the street was aware of events in the Spanish Civil War at the time either.
I know its an area that has a lot written about it from different political perspectives. I have a book by Antony Beevor on the whole war that I've yet to read

Wellek & Warren's THEORY OF LITERATURE is mostly the kind of thing I enjoy. It's surprisingly easy to read. Its style is austere in a way almost unimaginable now. The authors, I'm afraid, often rap other scholars over the knuckles for deviations from correct thought about literature. Of course they have a vast range, from ancient Greece to Goethe and just about up to modern times (though they very rarely mention C20 authors).

On the face of it, they're assembling a unified theory of literature. Sounds good. And yet, as they proceed, one doubt I have is ... how *logical* is their procedure? They seem to *tour* an issue, rather than quite to argue their way through it to a final position. The text is thus rangier than you'd think.

But things get truly odd when we reach PART TWO: PRELIMINARY OPERATIONS. Part Two starts with Chapter Six: 'The Ordering and Establishing of Evidence'. This turns out to be basically about textual editing, making sure you have the right text in front of you, etc. Very important. Proper scholarship. But how does it fit into this particular book? It stands out very strangely. It's not that there aren't 'theoretical' questions about editions. Certainly there are. But W&W's way of talking about editing is often like a bland 'how-to': 'In preparing an edition, one should keep firmly in mind its purpose and its presumed public'. Somehow they have wandered off from their grand project of a THEORY OF LITERATURE into something else, as though mislead by the all-inclusiveness of the project. They might as well start telling us that we can write about literature either with a fountain pen, or a typewriter - different tools will be appropriate to different occasions.

And then you realise that Chapter Six, which is only 12 pages, is the ONLY chapter in PART TWO !! This structure is crazy!

The good news is that overall, the book is fun to read if, like me, you like this kind of thing. Whether I will emerge with a unified THEORY OF LITERATURE, I am less sure.

I'm currently reading The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, continuing my tour of fin-de-siecle fiction. The plot itself seems a bit melodramatic. I guess the book is mainly of interest today as a showcase for Wilde's deft way with an aphorism and the none-too-subtle gay subtext.

The dialogue's cute.

Lots of good lines, but dialog seems a bit one-sided, with everyone else setting up softballs so Lord Wotton can come back with the wicked bon mots.

On the French Revolution thread Vegemitegrrl enthused about A New World Begins, Jeremy Popkin, so I found a library copy and have started it. It clocks in at ~550 pages, so I may not be coming up for air much in the next few weeks.

This promises to be the most comprehensive treatment of that revolution I've yet read. I agree with the idea that the French Revolution not only bequeathed the world with a new and very different era of politics from any seen before, but also swiftly manifested most of the political problems that have emerged throughout that era.

Yay! It’s about as engaging and easy a read as can be made of such a complex & dense period. He does a good job of weaving in pertintent first-hand accounts too here & there, which helps add some immediacy imo

The novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family is an dense and entertaining book. I listened to it on audible once and want to listen to it again.

Wellek & Warren proceed to a section on THE EXTRINSIC APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF LITERATURE, which will be followed by a longer section on INTRINSIC APPROACH. I am starting to sense that what this book is trying to do is whittle away what they consider irrelevances to get to the real core of literary study. I daresay there is a name for this, in ancient Greek dialogues or whatever - a mode of argument in which you keep on considering x,y and x, politely recognising some value in them, while dismissing as much as possible. There is logic here, but I also sense that the method may reductive; that if the mission is to cut down the things we should say about literature, it may prove self-denying and impoverishing.

Simply put, I am also realising that the whole book may be a manifesto for what was called New Criticism, which declared only 'intrinsic study' worthwhile. Yet it is worth adding that when you actually read major New Critics, including W&W, they are striking for the breadth of their knowledge - they do know authors' biographies, letters, literary history, perhaps broader history. They don't exclude out of mere ignorance.

Much of what W&W say appears factual. They make statements that are almost incontrovertible, like 'Literature is a social institution, using as its medium language, a social creation' (p.94). Much of the time, then, the question is, when will they say something that can be argued against? They do break cover enough for this to happen. In 'Literature and Psychology' they spend much time talking about rather irrelevantly extreme ideas of writers / artists as exaggerated psychological types. They print the sentence: 'With the artist, in any medium, every impression is shaped by his art; he accumulates no inchoate experience' (p.86). This is clearly false. Artists are just people. They have roughly the same amount of inchoate experience as everyone else.

The first page of that chapter also brings a moment that quite shocked me. They are talking, rather absurdly, about artists having 'deformities' - 'Byron had a club foot', etc - and this being an influence on their psychology. Some might already dislike this. But then they say: 'Proust was an asthmatic neurotic of partly Jewish descent' (p.81). In context, it is hard not to take 'partly Jewish descent' as another unfortunate deformity. It's incredible that they could write this in 1949, and reprint it in 1963. The best I can say is that the posited problem would lie not with Proust but with other, anti-semitic people; Proust, 'partly Jewish', was 'handicapped' by others' racism. Perhaps. But W&W don't say this, and leave the more obviously bigoted implication standing.

Leaving aside individual moments like this, the book is slightly disappointing me, I suppose in being less focused than I'd hoped; unless the focus is, as I suggested, just on clearing away false ideas. Yet it remains of interest.

^ the critics critiqued. lovely bit of exegesis there pinefox.

The novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family is an dense and entertaining book. I listened to it on audible once and want to listen to it again.

― Dan S,

It's teased me at the bookstore for almost a year, thanks to the typically excellent New York Review Books' striking cover.

New Criticism has always had some appeal for me insofar as the "intrinsic" fallacy insists on the primacy of the art object, of artist's personality, sensibilty, voice, generating and generated by what we perceive in the audience experience, as a reader, listener, viewer---although, while reading, listening, viewing we can't unsee etc. associations from what else we know of the artist's life, of life itself (that's why intrinsic is a fallacy, or just not true to life, and so your authors go on to amateur psychology, as you describe).
But the appeal is in the counter-tendency to letting the art get buried in biographical elements, as so often happens: judging the artist only or primarily in terms of problematic/plain shitty behavior for instance, and dismissing them or playing up the most shocking bits.

That's pretty much what I said last week re frustrations in music journalism, sorry for rehash.

Thanks Aimless - appreciated.

I am coming to think that W&W, despite being so sternly sober, are vulnerable to a quite simple counter-argument, which would be something like: 'Content is not extrinsic to literature'.

Their project of stripping away everything non-essential leads them to wanting to list only purely literary devices - metre, for instance - as the heart of literary study. There is something convincing about this or about all such projects of radical reduction and definition. But we know that literature is suggestive because it uses language, which is referential. Isn't it the case that Middlemarch isn't just 'an 800-page novel divided into 40 [or whatever] chapters', but 'a novel of the English C19, set in the 1820s and published in the 1870s?'. We can't experience Middlemarch *without* its social content - it's 'intrinsic' to what the text is. I sense that W&W don't want to see this.

On the other hand, they are quite good at disposing of 'Zeitgeist' ideas, hulking old German books that argue that every work of art in a given age must express the same spirit. W&W are soberly able to take down such fantasies - and as such, they are not so conceptually far from the Althusser, in LIRE LE CAPITAL (1965), who was arguing for a more differentiated view of social process rather than one where everything at every moment expressed the same thing.

At the start of their section on INTRINSIC STUDY, W&W start on some really wacky ideas. They say: 'We need to work out what a poem actually is. Where is it?', and they say 'You might think a poem is on paper, but actually, if you think about it, you could destroy every paper copy but if someone still remembered it in their head, the poem would still exist!'. It could be a hippy meditation.

It also occurs to me that a creative writer - maybe a poet or an SF author - could turn the tables by writing a literary work somehow containing and reusing all this stuff. I can imagine a Donald Barthelme story, certainly a John Barth one, THEORY OF LITERATURE. I think of the quite striking Lethem story 'The Dytopianist [...]', which takes literary discourse from outside to inside the story.

I read *Time Will Darken It* by William Maxwell. Maxwell was the fiction editor at the New Yorker for the best part of 40 years in the middle of the last century and edited Sylvia Townsend Warner, John Cheever, John Updike and Elizabeth Taylor amongst others. This is to say, he has an extraordinary facility with structure and restraint, holding back, holding back. The book isn't about very much: a nondescript Illinois town in 1912; a central character tortured by manners and reticence with a thin marriage, which is disrupted by a visit from a rambunctious southern family. Maxwell uses multiple viewpoints to tell the story and seems to know each character intimately - almost to the point of voyeurism in places. What unfolds is born of these simple ingredients and feels utterly inevitable.

In a way, the plot Maxwell has chosen, and the particular traits of the characters he draws, are like an analogue for the novel form itself. What is not said lays like sediment, an unconscious layer, thickening like the night waiting to enclose the reader. The final few chapters are pretty shattering.

The Folded Leaf is one of my favorite American novels

I've only read this and *So Long, See You Tomorrow*. I clearly need to read everything. Have you read any of the letters? Am tempted by his correspondence with Elizabeth Taylor.

Also reading *Stepping Stones*, a series of interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O'Driscoll. The interviews were mostly conducted by email, and are organised chronologically. It functions like an autobiography, with Heaney clearly treating it like an excavation, dredging memories from deep in his unconscious. Of what I've read so far, the book is full of beautiful details of his early life in Mossbawn and the Wood, the farm they moved to when Heaney was in his early teens.

It's also full of rich insight into his creative process, which, unsurprisingly, given the nature of his work, he frames with lots of digging and dredging metaphors. He also talks a lot about 'self-forgetting' and hints at the dissolution of the ego. I was surprised to note no mention of Freud in the index. It would be good to ask someone who knows more about Heaney whether this is a deliberate omission, or whether O'Driscoll simply didn't frame any questions that way (perhaps neither are interested!).

I hesitate to use the word (small c) conservative because, given my relative ignorance of Irish history, it feels clumsy and ugly but the picture of Heaney that emerges is kind of *that*. I think a good deal of it is his self-deprecation but, his facility with deep time aside, he seems to me a master of the local - social, cultural, emotional. He is, by his own admittance, completely unmusical, and despite growing up around Dylan and Leonard Cohen etc, felt nothing for them and, for all those riverine and fishing metaphors, has been 'on about a dozen riverbanks' in his whole life. It seems he found what he was good at, and did it like Hercules. Which, thank goodness.

Anyway, it's wholly fascinating.

I love Time Will Darken It! also recommend So Long, See You Tomorrow on a shattering, William Maxwell tip.

reading The Last Samurai btw; it rules

I like STEPPING STONES, indeed. It must be one of the single most useful resources for understanding any particular writer.

I agree with the description except that it never seemed Freudian to me. I suppose that like Heaney and O'Driscoll I don't particularly think that way.

I (inexactly) remember his description of Beatles and Dylan as 'like music from the fairground', pleasant but trivial.

Reading a lot of Heaney at particular times, I did realise how relatively uninterested he was (at least as an artist) in modern things - though they crop up occasionally in the poems: airfields, aeroplanes, telephones, the Underground (train) in the poem of (I think) that name, even fibre-optic wires in the late 'Tollund Man in Springtime'. But these things stand out as noticeable because the background of earth, grass, etc, not to mention the obsession with Classical myth, is so much more pervasive.

Well yeah, he did grow up on a farm in the middle of the countryside. He (like me) grew up in a part of the country where the bog and its strange past-present atmosphere pervades and his writing always feels very present in these poems. You should also consider that he grew up Catholic in (Co.) Derry, which was subject to neglect in terms of investment in infrastructure from Belfast due to sectarian reasons - cf the second university campus being located at Coleraine rather than in Derry - and actually the rail service was part of this. Like, they closed a rail line that served the west side of NI in the 60s -predominantly Catholic - and that remains the case to this day!

There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed

Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wide and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

Honeymooning, moonlighting, late from the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.

Immanuel Velikovsky Earth In Collision
Book from 1955 tracing the geological history of the planet commenting on various finds from the time. Think its been debunked since and not sure up to here what the author's own input is. Think I came across it being talked about in The Morning of the Magicians or something way way back. I got it on an interlibrary loan a few weeks ago and think it was from a storage space so surprised to see it's got a further request on it so having to read though it rapidly. He's been somebody I wanted to read for a few decades so thought I'd at least get some of it read. Got through first few chapters anyway.
So yeah he's talking about finds in geological history as applied to how long the planet has been around. He's talking about exotic animal fossils being found in th Northern hemisphere and what that has been seen to mean. Including hippopotami holidaying from Africa in Northern France and the UK or at least the geographical area.
THink I thought it was going to be weirder. Well may develop further once he gets through the understood history.

David Olusoga The Kaiser's Holocaust.
where the war between the local Herero tribe and the German colonial army has just reached a really negative point cos a military leader from a different tribe from the Nama has been killed. This is showing how deeply racist the German authorities were, Kaiser giving direct permission to wipe out the local tribe. Not sure if that is a great deal more so than other colonial powers of the time. They've just set up some of the first concentration camps to make Herero work and see feeding them to be a secondary concern. Revolting.
took a break to read this from
I really enjoyed Olusoga's The World's War about native men being brought into the army to fight pro European powers which also showed a massive amount of racism. But seems to be part of teh epistemology of the time disgustingly.

took a break to read this from
got displaced from in front of the David Olusoga title. Computer acting odd.

I left Wellek & Warren here:

At the start of their section on INTRINSIC STUDY, W&W start on some really wacky ideas. They say: 'We need to work out what a poem actually is. Where is it?', and they say 'You might think a poem is on paper, but actually, if you think about it, you could destroy every paper copy but if someone still remembered it in their head, the poem would still exist!'.

They quickly went on to list some other possible modes of existence for the literary work - which they have ominously shortened to 'the poem' for convenience (as if 'poem' is really a suitable shorthand for 'work of literature': the shorthand is clearly liable to introduce distortions). Thus: maybe the poem is the sound it makes when it's read out; or the reader's experience when reading it; or the writer's when writing it. They understandably say that these are inadequate. The implication is that they are working towards something like a Platonic version of the text, ie: a notional entity that can be manifested in various instances like books. You can imagine the same thing for a song. I don't know whether this approach is so helpful, but the oddity is that having pushed the argument in this direction they suddenly tend to refuse it, saying a literary text isn't actually like an ideal like 'triangle'.

So what is it? Surely some simple formula could be offered like: 'the literary work is a determinate set of words which can be manifested in an infinite number of instances including in different media'. W&W instead get bizarrely into the word 'norms' (p.150), arguing that the text is a set of norms - which is just a big deflection from the issue they've raised, especially as this word 'norms' has come almost out of nowhere and they say it's not to be confused with eg: ethical norms.

This whole chapter can be considered a philosophical rabbit-hole, a case of stopping and thinking (too?) hard about the object you were on the way to say things about, to the point where you almost dissolve the existence of said object. You could say it's philosophically valid, and interesting in itself. But then the really odd thing is: what does it have to do with literature? Is it only a literary text that raises these problems of 'modality of existence'?

Actually, not at all. Just consider eg: a speech by JFK - handwritten by JFK, typed up by an aide, delivered by JFK, published in the NYT, later included in a book called The Speeches of JFK (which goes through different editions, and gets translated), later appearing on the JFL official website. This text has just as many ambiguities of modality as a poem by Robert Frost, doesn't it? So maybe what W&W are really talking about is just the ambiguous status of any text, which may have a particular instance but, insofar as it can be copied out, seems also to have a transferrable identity that endures.

But is this even really limited to text? It's probably equally true of pictorial diagrams, for instance. In which case, W&W are very far from telling us anything specific to literature - which is generally their whole thrust and intent.

W&W go on to a relatively long chapter on 'Euphony, Rhythm, and Metre'. This is the driest so far by far. As often, their main approach seems to be to tell us about various other theories or descriptions that have been advanced, then sigh and rather dismiss them as inadequate. The learning involved is huge - greater than most critics ever obtain - but it is not being put to especially productive use. If this is a THEORY OF LITERATURE then what is the theoretical yield, the positive outlook, from this survey? Not very clear. They do seem quite keen on the Russian Formalists, which makes me wonder whether in Cold War times the Formalists were a) dangerously foreign or b) sympathetic and feted as anti-Stalinists.

The Making Of The English Working Class, E.P. Thompson - Finally finished this. Started due to thinking about how little of the left canon I've read, and since I live in England this seemed like a good place to start correcting that. Also the fact that it's history and not theory made it less intimidating.

Having finished it I feel like the title is misleading? The material conditions that lead to the creation of a modern proletariat are pretty much taken for granted, and what's focused on instead is a history of radical resistance, taking in the radical press, popular uprisings, trade unions. It feels more about the making of a class consciousness than of a class, though perhaps the argument is that the latter can only exist if the former does as well?

Some vague readings have suggested the book is taking a stand against economical determinism and, under the influence of Gramsci, showing how social history also molds class. I've probably butchered this argument, sorry. Anyway I can grasp Gramsci's hegemony easily enough but don't really understand how a history of radical resistance fits into this.

It was often tough going but I'm glad I preserved - I think my favourite part was about the underground jacobin resistance at the height of legislative repression. Thompson explains how the state's reliance on spies meant we got mostly overblown and fanciful accounts of this period, as obv spies had a personal interest in making things seem alarming, but also how this was overcorrected against by historians who ended up suggesting that this underground was entirely fictional. Feels like you could make a cracking BBC drama about it, with lots of room to let imagination run free as the historical sources are so scant and compromised.

I reach W&W's chapter 'Image, Symbol, Metaphor, Myth'. I think I understand the grouping, but the emphasis on 'myth' is not to my taste. The idea that people need myths to live is, I find, overrated, and the idea that myth is or must be central to literature does seem accurate. I think this is a historically dated, period attitude.

When they get to metonymy and synecdoche (p.194), I become confused. It's not that I don't understand the standard examples of these phenomena which are always given. But I don't seem to understand W&W's distinction between the two things. I also wonder if metonymy has basically been overstated within literary criticism for a long time. David Lodge's promotion of it as the key to realist writing has never really made sense to me. W&W give a couple of confusing examples. They think that 'the village green' is metonymy. If so then 'the city centre' is also metonymy. Unsure how helpful that is. Strange that this particular term always ends up puzzling me.

I suppose that the book has gradually become more dense and technical.

Should read: "the idea that myth is or must be central to literature does NOT seem accurate."

thompson directly addresses the issue issue of how he's defining class in the preface (his first sentence notes that the book's title is perhaps clumsy, but… ). the once-much-quoted sentence is this one: "… class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of the interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs"

(full preface here, rich in typos)

so yes, he is arguing (as i think woukld any english marxist in the early 60s) that class is a highly dynamic term rather than a passive or merely descriptive sociological banding, closer to a verb than an adjective, almost. class is a thing that happens, he says -- but what he also means is that people make it happen. and it absolutely entails consciousness of identity and purpose-in-identity.

the book (and certainly this ever so slightly tentative preface) was part of a (very 50s) project, i think, of translation alongside the historical archeology: taking concept from marxist thought that had perhaps become jargon (he was subsequently very hostile to the "theory turn") to present them to the many new readers that the post-war expansion of HE and FE was going to deliver. this was activism much more as it was in any sense academic

the gramsci issue is interesting: my understanding is that gramsci didn't really enter the uk left bloodstream until the end of the 60s (via tom nairn and perry anderson's version of the new left review rather than thompson's earlier version), at least as a body of work to reckon with (nairn spoke italian and indeed taught in italy, which is where he encountered it and brought it back). but there's an argument that the anderson-nairn version of gramsci is somewhat contorted towards the study of the effects of established instititions in reproducing the ruling ideology, where (and this is generally a more recent reading, i guess) gramsci's line and his activism were actually much more about "hegemonic struggle" (verb again) than "hegemony" (passive noun you can point to).

in particular -- writing just after WW1 -- he described "hegemonic struggle" as being like trench warfare: which i take to mean that (instead of hoping to seize the commanding heights of academia and shape things from there) the true communist is establishing perspective fighting school-by-school, library-by-library, even (since this is italy) church-by-church… in which case a history of radical resistance is precisely a history of (the emergence of a counter-)hegemony

except as i say, i think thompson wasn't yet responding to this framework with this book, bcz nairn wasn't back from italy yet (subs check this) and perry had only very recently effected his NLR boardroom coup

Naturally I approve that everything comes back to Perry.