ENGLISH 3015 OQ13A: SURVEY OF ENGLISH LIT IIDR. MARY MCGLYNN
SPRING 2011DUE MAY 25TH, 2011 AT NOON
QUOTATIONS FOR ESSAY#LAST
"His theater of alienation intended to motivate the viewer to think. Brecht's postulate of a thinking comportment converges, strangely enough, with the objective discernment that autonomous artworks presupposes in the viewer, listener, or reader as being adequate to them. His didactic style, however, is intolerant of the ambiguity in which thought originates: It is authoritarian. This may have been Brecht's response to the ineffectuality of his didactic plays: As a virtuoso of manipulative technique, he wanted to coerce the desired effect just as he once planned to organize his rise to fame."( TheodorAdorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1970)
“On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.” (Raymond Williams ,The Country and The City, 1973)
“In the words of Barbara Foley, at stake here is whether or not “proletarian writers who worked in the form of the realistic novel ended up confirming the very world order they originally set out to oppose” (48), whether realism is wedded to a world view.[1] Kelman, unlike Sillitoe and other prior working-class writers, rejects the inherent linguistic superiority of narrator over character. Moreover, he avoids equating narrative progress with economic advancement, even shunning the notion of plot development. While Sillitoe is remarkable for being perhaps “the first author ever to allow for intelligent musing in factory workers while they operate their machines” (D. Craig 81), he still seems to emphasize the “tragic impossibility of escape from the working class for those with special gifts…[and] the implication of a lost potential” (C. Craig, “Resisting,” 100). Middle-class consciousness and status remain norms and even goals, implying the desirability of a trajectory or progress in much the same way as plot resolution is desirable in conventional novels, radically different goals than Kelman’s choice to disintegrate narrative hierarchies as a means of critiquing social ones” (Mary McGlynn, “‘Middle-class wankers’ and working class texts: the critics and James Kelman,” 2002)
“A dominant power may legitimate itself by promoting beliefs and values congenial to it; naturalizing and universalizing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself. Such ‘mystification,’ as it is commonly known, frequently takes the form of masking or suppressing social conflicts, from which arises the conception of ideology as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions.”(Terry Eagleton, Ideology, 1991).
[1] Foley answers that while formal constraints assert a conservative textual politics, a radical theme often manages to overcome formal limitations.