МИНИСТЕРСТВО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ И НАУКИ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ НОВОСИБИРСКИЙ НАЦИОНАЛЬНЫЙ ИССЛЕДОВАТЕЛЬСКИЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ

МИНИСТЕРСТВО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ И НАУКИ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ
НОВОСИБИРСКИЙ НАЦИОНАЛЬНЫЙ ИССЛЕДОВАТЕЛЬСКИЙ
ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ
ФИЗИЧЕСКИЙ ФАКУЛЬТЕТ
Кафедра истории культуры
Н. А. Пермякова
АНГЛО-АМЕРИКАНСКАЯ ЛИТЕРАТУРА ХХ ВЕКА: ТЕМЫ, ЗАДАНИЯ,
УЧЕБНЫЕ МАТЕРИАЛЫ, МЕТОДИЧЕСКИЕ РЕКОМЕНДАЦИИ
ENGLISH & AMERICAN LITERATURE IN THE XX CENTURY: TOPICS, TASKS,
TEACHING MATERIAL, GUIDELINE
Учебно-методический комплекс
Новосибирск
2013
Пермякова Н. А. Англо-американская литература ХХ века: темы, задания,
учебные материалы, методические рекомендации / English & American Literature in the XX
century: topics, tasks, teaching material, guideline: Учебно-методический комплекс/ Новосиб.
гос. ун-т, Новосибирск, 2013
Учебно-методический комплекс представляет собой комплекс материалов и ряд
методических разработок, необходимых для полноценного представления о структуре и
содержании курса «Англо-американская литература ХХ века», а также для более
эффективного усвоения студентами материалов курса.
УМК включает:
1) программу курса «Англо-американская литература ХХ века / English & American
Literature in the XX century» (на рус. и анг. яз);
2) подробный тематический план курса и рекомендации по организации
самостоятельной работы студентов (в том числе список литературы; рекомендации по
подготовке презентаций и написанию рефератов) (на рус. и анг. яз);
3) банк обучающих и контролирующих материалов (в том числе вопросы для;
вопросы и задания для подготовки к экзаменам и т.д.).
Учебно-методический комплекс предназначен для студентов 1-2 курса физического
факультета (основная образовательная программа по направлению «Физика», уровень
подготовки – магистратура, факультатив).
Учебно-методический комплекс подготовлен в рамках реализации Программы
развития НИУ НГУ на 2009–2018 гг.
 Новосибирский государственный
университет, 2013
Программа учебного курса «Англо-американская литература ХХ века / English &
American Literature in the XX century»
Программа курса «Англо-американская литература ХХ в. / English & American
Literature in the XX century» составлена в соответствии с требованиями к обязательному
минимуму содержания и уровню подготовки Основной образовательной программы по
направлению «Физика» (цикл М.1 (общенаучный, вариативная часть), уровень подготовки
– магистратура, факультатив), а также задачами, стоящими перед Новосибирским
государственным университетом по реализации Программы развития НГУ.
Автор: Пермякова Наталья Александровна
Факультет: физический
Кафедра: истории культуры
1. Цели освоения дисциплины (курса)
Курс «Англо-американская литература ХХ века / English & American Literature in
the XX century» имеет своей целью:
•
познакомить студентов физического факультета НГУ с основными
представителями и базовыми произведениями англо-американской литературы ХХ в.; на
основе анализа текстов англо-американской литературы сделать выводы относительно
направлений и тенденций развития английской и американской культуры в XX в.;
•
способствовать развитию аналитических навыков: развитию независимого и
непредвзятого мышления, формулировке собственных идей и мнений на основании
прочитанных текстов;
•
усовершенствовать навыки понимания, рассуждения и подготовки презентаций на
английском языке.
Данный курс способствует формированию ряда компетенций, необходимых для
дальнейшей
научно-исследовательской,
организационно-управленческой
и
педагогической деятельности, что соотносится с общими целями образовательной
программы по направлению подготовки «Физика».
2. Место дисциплины в структуре образовательной программы
Курс «Англо-американская литература ХХ века / English & American Literature in
the XX century» относится к вариативной части общенаучного цикла дисциплин (М.1).
Данный курс логически и содержательно-методически связан с такими дисциплинами ОП,
как «История культуры», «Философия», «Иностранный язык (английский)»
Немаловажным аспектом данного курса является междисциплинарный подход к
изучению литературы. Предполагается, что слушатели курса используют свои знания по
истории, социологии, философии, психологии, литературе и другим гуманитарным
дисциплинам с тем, чтобы обеспечить цельный, всеобъемлющий подход к осмыслению
особенностей английской и американской культуры ХХ в.
Уникальность даннго курса заключается в том, что впервые в НГУ студентам
негуманитарных специальностей (физика) предлагается знакомство с зарубежной
культурой и литературой на языке оригинала. Таким образом, обеспечивается эффект
«погружения» слушателей в культуру изучаемой страны (Великобритания и США), а
также развиваются навыки говорения и мышления на английском языке, что является
актуальным для будущих ученых.
Необходимый для слушателей курса уровень знания английского языка – владение
устной речью на уровне Intermediate и понимание неадаптированных текстов.
Программа курса составлена с опорой на современные отечественные и
зарубежные культурологические и литературоведческие концепции и методики изучения
истории национальных литератур и культур; демонстрирует синтез современного
научного знания, педагогических инноваций и информационных технологий; создана с
учетом специфики целевой аудитории.
3. Компетенции обучающегося, формируемые в результате освоения дисциплины
Курс «Англо-американская литература ХХ века / English & American Literature in
the XX century» способствует формированию у студентов следующих компетенций:
Общекультурные компетенции (ОК):
•
способность демонстрировать углубленные знания в области гуманитарных и
экономических наук (ОК-2);
•
способность самостоятельно приобретать с помощью информационных технологий
и использовать в практической деятельности новые знания и умения, в том числе в новых
областях знаний, непосредственно не связанных со сферой деятельности, расширять и
углублять своё научное мировоззрение (ОК-3);
•
способность совершенствовать и развивать свой интеллектуальный и
общекультурный уровень, добиваться нравственного и физического совершенствования
своей личности (ОК-6);
•
способность к коммуникации в научной, производственной и социальнообщественной сферах деятельности, свободное владение русским и иностранным языками
как средством делового общения (ОК-8);
Профессиональные компетенции (ПК):
•
способность и готовность применять на практике навыки составления и
оформления научно-технической документации, научных отчетов, обзоров, докладов и
статей (в соответствии с профилем магистерской программы) (ПК-4);
•
способность проводить свою профессиональную деятельности с учетом
социальных, этических и природоохранных аспектов (ПК-8).
В результате освоения курса «Англо-американская литература ХХ века / English &
American Literature in the XX century» обучающийся должен:
•
Знать: содержание и понимать идейно-художественную специфику базовых
текстов англо-американской литературы XX в.; иметь представление об основных этапах
истории английской и американской литературы и культуры в ХХ в. и главных
представителях литературного и культурного процесса;
•
Уметь: самостоятельно проанализировать художественный текст на английском
языке, определить его идейные и художественные особенности;
•
Владеть: навыками презентации результатов самостоятельной работы по анализу
текстов англо-американской литературы на английском языке.
ХХ век как
Неделя семестра
1
Семестр
4. Структура и содержание дисциплины «Англо-американская литература ХХ века /
English & American Literature in the XX century»
Общая трудоемкость дисциплины составляет 2 зачетных единицы, 64 часа (из них 32
лекционных часа). Семинарские занятия и лабораторные работы учебным планом не
предусмотрены.
Формы текущего
Виды учебной работы,
контроля
Раздел
включая
успеваемости
№
дисциплины
самостоятельную работу
(по неделям
п/п
студентов и трудоемкость
семестра)
(в часах)
Форма
промежуточной
аттестации
Лекции
Самост.
(по семестрам)
работа
2
1
2
1
Подготовка
2
3
4
5
6
7
специфический период в
развитии европейской и
американской культуры
и литературы.
Концепция «заката
Европы» и ее
отражение в англоамериканской
литературе. Понятие
модернизма как стиля
эпохи.
Пути развития
реалистической прозы в
англо-американской
литературе рубежа XIX–
ХХ вв. и в первой
половине ХХ в.
Натурализм.
Англо-американский
неоромантизм как
реакция на
натуралистические
тенденции. Творчество
Л. Кэрролла, Р.
Киплинга, Дж. Лондона.
Первая мировая война и
литература
«потерянного
поколения». Творчество
Э. Хемингуэя, Р.
Олдингтона.
«Век джаза» в США как
реакция на последствия
Первой мировой войны.
Творчество Ф. С.
Фицджеральда.
Литература времен
«Великой депрессии».
Представление о
человеке, времени и
пространстве в
литературе англоамериканского
модернизма. Роман
«потока сознания» как
одно из основных
направлений
модернистской прозы.
Творчество Дж. Джойса.
Повествовательная
техника Дж. Джойса.
Роман «Улисс» как
презентации
2
2
2
1
Подготовка
презентации
2
3
2
1
Подготовка
презентации
2
4
2
1
Подготовка
презентации
2
5
2
1
Подготовка
презентации
2
6
2
1
Подготовка
презентации
2
7
2
1
Подготовка
презентации
8
9
10
11
12
13
произведение на
границе модернизма и
постмодернизма.
Модернистский
эксперимент в
творчестве Дж. Дос
Пассоса. Роман
«Манхеттен» как
«апофеоз урбанизма».
Модель мира в романах
У. Фолкнера о
Йокнапатофе
Интерпретация
модернистских
представлений о
времени и пространстве
в художественной
структуре романа «Шум
и ярость».
Эволюция жанра
литературной утопии в
ХХ в. Романы О.
Хаксли, Дж. Оруэлла, К.
Кизи как образцы
негативной утопии
Социальные и
моральные аспекты
проекта «Манхэттен».
Англо-американская
научно-фантастическая
литература периода
«холодной войны» как
реакция на
политические проблемы
и на угрозу глобальной
катастрофы.
Вторая мировая война и
английский роман
«философской
тенденции». Творчество
У. Голдинга. Идея
«обратной эволюции» в
романе «Повелитель
мух».
Контркультура 19501970-х гг. «Битники» и
их роль в американской
и мировой культуре.
Разрушение
писательских традиций
и обновление
творческих принципов в
2
8
2
1
Подготовка
презентации
2
9
2
1
Подготовка
презентации
2
10
2
1
Подготовка
презентации
2
11
2
1
Подготовка
презентации
2
12
2
1
Подготовка
презентации
2
13
2
1
Подготовка
презентации
14
15
16
литературе битников.
Творчество Дж.
Керуака, А. Гинзберга,
У. Берроуза.
Творчество Дж. Фаулза
2
в контексте европейской
культуры второй
половины ХХ в.
«Художники» и
«коллекционеры» в
концепции Дж. Фаулза.
Постмодернизм как
2
феномен культуры во
второй половине ХХ в.
Постмодернизм как
постструктурализм.
Дискредитация
реалистического модуса
в теории и практике
постмодернизма.
Содержательная
2
специфика и
формальные приемы
постмодернистской
литературной практики.
Англо-американский
постмодернистский
роман (Дж. Гарднер, Дж.
Барт, Т. Пинчон, Дж.
Барнс).
В течение семестра
Аттестация по итогам
освоения дисциплины
14
2
1
Подготовка
презентации
15
2
1
Подготовка
презентации
16
2
1
Подготовка
презентации
16
Написание реферата
Экзамен в конце 2
семестра
5. Образовательные технологии
Семинарские занятия, контрольные и лабораторные работы, коллоквиумы по курсу
«Англо-американская литература ХХ века / English & American Literature in the XX
century» учебным планом не предусмотрены, однако для наиболее полного усвоения
студентами материала, а также для стимулирования их дальнейшей самостоятельной
деятельности по изучению мировой художественной литературы в учебном процессе в
рамках курса предлагаются современные образовательные технологии:
Технологии проектных разработок: студентам предлагается подготовить в
течение семестра минимум одну презентацию продолжительностью около 15 минут. Темы
для презентаций представлены в программе курса. Презентация проходит в форме
выступления перед аудиторией. Студент должен не только тщательно подготовить текст
своего выступления, но и сопроводить выступление визуальным рядом (рисунки,
фотографии, карты и т.д.), подготовить раздаточные материалы для слушателей.
Разбор конкретных ситуаций: обсуждение докладов-презентаций, по завершении
которых в группе происходит разбор не только содержательной стороны доклада, но и
формы подачи материала, умения докладчика выступать перед аудиторией,
аргументировать свое мнение, поддерживать контакт со слушателями.
Интерактивные формы проведения занятий: во время лекционных занятий по
курсу работа происходит в формате «круглого стола» на заданную тему. В процессе
обсуждения темы студенты приобретают навыки ведения публичной дискуссии.
Внеаудиторная работа: подготовка реферата. Реферат оформляется в
соответствии с правилами оформления научных работ, снабжается библиографическим
справочным аппаратом. Используются фонды научной библиотеки НГУ, НГОПБ и
ГПНТБ.
6. Оценочные средства для текущего контроля успеваемости, промежуточной
аттестации по итогам освоения дисциплины и учебно-методическое обеспечение
самостоятельной работы студентов
В течение семестра формой текущего контроля усвоения дисциплины являются
презентации, которые студенты делают в сответствии с программой курса. Количество
презентаций определяется количеством материала, включенного в программу курса, а
также количеством студентов, посещающих курс.
Текущий контроль усвоения дисциплины также осуществляется на основании
оценки активности студента внимания студента во время лекционных занятий и степени
его вовлеченности в процесс обсуждения материала лекции преподавателем и студентами
в аудитории.
Для итогового контроля усвоения дисциплины учебным планом предусмотрен
экзамен в конце второго семестра.
Самостоятельная работа студентов предполагает ознакомление и анализ текстов
англо-американский художественной литературы в соответствии с тематическим планом
курса, а также написание реферата и подготовку презентации.
Образцы тем для написания реферата:
1. Антиутопия в литературе ХХ века. Происхождение и поэтика жанра антиутопии.
2. Человек и социум в структуре антиутопии. Анализ любого романа-антиутопии
(Дж. Оруэлл, О. Хаксли, К. Кизи).
3. Герой Дж. Лондона как сверхчеловек.
4. Человек «века джаза» в творчестве Ф. С. Фитцджеральда.
5. Концепция человека и пространства-времени в культуре модернизма. Принципы
создания модернистского текста.
6. Принцип изображения персонажей в романе Дж. Джойса «Улисс».
7. Повествовательная техника Д. Джойса (анализ одного или нескольких эпизодов
романа «Улисс»).
8. Создание / развенчание американского «южного мифа» в романах У. Фолкнера о
Йокнапатофе.
9. Интерпретация модернистской концепции времени и пространства в романе У.
Фолкнера «Звук и ярость».
10. «Портрет» времени в литературе «потерянного поколения».
11. «Потерянное поколение» и экзистенциализм (на примерах романов Э. Хемингуэя,
Р. Олдингтона).
12. Психологический портрет «потерянного поколения» в романе Э. Хэмингуэя
«Фиеста». Символика фиесты и корриды.
13. Полемика с неоромантическими идеями в романе Э. Хэмингуэя «Прощай,
оружие!».
14. Конструктивные принципы прозы В. Вулф: законы памяти в роману «Миссис
Дэллоуэй».
15. Художественное время и пространство в романе В. Вулф «На маяк»
16. Идея «обратной эволюции» в творчестве У. Голдинга.
17. Дегуманизация человека в романе У. Голдинга «Повелитель мух».
18. Роман У. Голдинга «Шпиль». «Божественное» и «дьявольское» в структуре
характера создателя Храма.
19. Творчество Дж. Фаулза: судьба творческой личности в современном мире.
20. Манипуляция литературной традицией и стереотипами читательского восприятия в
романах Фаулза.
21. Принципы и приемы создания постмодернистского текста.
22. Проблема соотношения реальности и текста в культуре постмодернизма.
Образцы тем для подготовки презентации:
1.
Человек и Город в рассказах О. Генри о Нью-Йорке (Сборник «Горящий
светильник» и т.д.).
2.
«Американская трагедия» Теодора Драйзера. Человек и социум.
Символический смысл названия романа.
3.
Натуралистические и неоромантические тенденции прозы Амброуза Бирса:
«В гуще жизни: рассказы о военных и штатских» («Чикамога», «Всадник в небе», «Один
офицер, один солдат», «Сраженье в ущелье Коултри»и др.), мистические рассказы
(«Заколоченное окно», «Страж мертвеца», «Проклятая тварь» и др.)..
4.
. Человек и Сверхчеловек в романе Джека Лондона «Морской Волк» (Волк
Ларсен или Хэмфри Ван-Вейден?)
5. Психологический портрет «потерянного поколения» в романе Эрнеста Хемингуэя
«Фиеста» («И восходит солнце»). Смысл обоих эпиграфов к роману. Символика
фиесты и корриды в романе.
6. Символический смысл названия романа «Смерть героя» Ричарда Олдингтона.
«Смерть героя» как «роман-джаз».
7. «Век Джаза» как особое измерение жизни на материале эссе «Отзвуки века джаза»
и рассказов Фрэнсиса Скотта Фитцджеральда («Первое мая», «Молодой богач»,
«Алмазная гора», «Возвращение в Вавилон» и др.).
8. Крушение «американской мечты» в романе Фрэнсиса Скотта Фитцджеральда
«Великий Гэтсби».
9. Процесс формирования личности героя и принципы изображения персонажей в
романе Джеймса Джойса «Портрет художника в юности». Особенности
композиции романа.
10. Принципы организации художественного пространства и времени, способ
изображения персонажей в романе Вирджинии Вулф «Миссис Дэллоуэй» / «На
маяк» (один из романов по выбору).
11. Миф об американском Юге и история одной семьи в романе Уильяма Фолкнера
«Сарторис». Время историческое и время мифологическое в романе.
12. Город как герой романа Джона Дос Пассоса «Манхэттен». Человек в пространстве
«Манхэттена».
13. Критика концепций научного переустройства общества в романе Олдоса Хаксли,
«О, дивный новый мир!»
14. Роман Джорджа Оруэлла «1984» как «классическая тоталитарная дистопия»
15. Человек и «Комбинат» в романе Кена Кизи «Пролетая над гнедом кукушки»
16. Идея «обратной эволюции» в романе-антиутопии Уильяма Голдинга «Повелитель
мух».
17. Судьба творческой личности в современном мире (по роману Джона Фаулза
«Коллекционер»).
18. Манипуляция литературной традицией и стереотипами читательского восприятия в
романах Джона Фаулза («Любовница французского лейтенанта» /«Волхв» /
«Червь»; 1 роман по выбору).
19. Современная интерпретация англо-саксонского эпоса «Беовульф» в романе Джона
Гарднера «Грендель».
20. Ирония над историческими путями человечества в романах Курта Воннегута
(«Сирены Титана» / «Колыбель для кошки» / «Галапагосы»; 1 роман по выбору).
21. Ирония над познавательными возможностями человека в романах Томаса Пинчона
(«V.» / «Выкрикивается лот № 49» / «Радуга гравитации»; 1 роман по выбору).
22. Ирония над человеческой культурой в романах Джулиана Барнса («История мира в
10 ½ главах» / «Англия, Англия»; 1 роман по выбору).
Образцы вопросов для подготовки к экзамену:
ХХ век как специфический период в развитии европейской и американской культуры и
литературы. Концепция «заката Европы» и ее отражение в англо-американской литературе.
Понятие модернизма как стиля эпохи.
Пути развития реалистической прозы в англо-американской литературе рубежа XIX–ХХ вв. и в
первой половине ХХ в. Натурализм.
Англо-американский неоромантизм как реакция на натуралистические тенденции. Творчество
Л. Кэрролла, Р. Киплинга, Дж. Лондона.
Первая мировая война и литература «потерянного поколения». Творчество Э. Хемингуэя, Р.
Олдингтона.
«Век джаза» в США как реакция на последствия Первой мировой войны. Творчество Ф. С.
Фицджеральда. Литература времен «Великой депрессии».
Представление о человеке, времени и пространстве в литературе англо-американского
модернизма. Роман «потока сознания» как одно из основных направлений модернистской
прозы.
Творчество Дж. Джойса. Повествовательная техника Дж. Джойса. Роман «Улисс» как
произведение на границе модернизма и постмодернизма.
Модернистский эксперимент в творчестве Дж. Дос Пассоса. Роман «Манхеттен» как «апофеоз
урбанизма».
Модель мира в романах У. Фолкнера о Йокнапатофе Интерпретация модернистских
представлений о времени и пространстве в художественной структуре романа «Шум и ярость».
Эволюция жанра литературной утопии в ХХ в. Романы О. Хаксли, Дж. Оруэлла, К. Кизи как
образцы негативной утопии
Социальные и моральные аспекты проекта «Манхэттен». Англо-американская научнофантастическая литература периода «холодной войны» как реакция на политические проблемы
и на угрозу глобальной катастрофы.
Вторая мировая война и английский роман «философской тенденции». Творчество У. Голдинга.
Идея «обратной эволюции» в романе «Повелитель мух».
Контркультура 1950-1970-х гг. «Битники» и их роль в американской и мировой культуре.
Разрушение писательских традиций и обновление творческих принципов в литературе
битников. Творчество Дж. Керуака, А. Гинзберга, У. Берроуза.
Творчество Дж. Фаулза в контексте европейской культуры второй половины ХХ в.
«Художники» и «коллекционеры» в концепции Дж. Фаулза.
Постмодернизм как феномен культуры во второй половине ХХ в. Постмодернизм как
постструктурализм. Дискредитация реалистического модуса в теории и практике
постмодернизма.
Содержательная специфика и формальные приемы постмодернистской литературной практики.
Англо-американский постмодернистский роман (Дж. Гарднер, Дж. Барт, Т. Пинчон, Дж. Барнс).
7. Учебно-методическое и информационное обеспечение дисциплины
а) основная литература:
Пермякова Н.А. История англо-американской литературы ХХ века / History of English &
American Literature in the XX century: Учебное пособие. Новосибирск, НГУ. 2013.
Тексты англо-американской художественной литературы (на английской языке):
Aldington, Richard. Death od a Hero.
Asimov, Isaac. The Foundation Trilogy.
Asimov, Isaac. I, Robot.
Barnes, Julian. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters.
Barnes, Julian. England, England.
Barth, John. Lost in the Funhouse.
Barth, John. Chimera.
Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Experience.
Bierce, Ambrose. Short Stories.
Bierce, Ambrose. Devil’s Dictionary.
Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles.
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451.
Burrough, William. Naked Lunch.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Prairie.
Crane, Stephen. The Open Boat.
Dos Passos, John. Manhattan Transfer.
Dos Passos, John. The Big Money.
Dos Passos, John. The 42nd Parallel.
Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy.
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk.
Gardner, John. Grendel.
George Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four
Ginsberg, Allen. Howl.
Golding, William. The Lord of the Flies.
Golding, William The Spire.
Fowles, John. The Collector.
Fowles, John. The Magus.
Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant's Woman.
Fowles, John. The Ebony Tower.
Irwing, Washington. Rip Van Winkle.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World Revisited.
Huxley, Aldous. Island
Faulkner, William. Sartoris.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury.
Fitzgerald, Francis Scott. The Great Gatsby.
Fitzgerald, Francis Scott . Tales of the Jazz Age.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Joyce, James. The Ulysses.
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms.
Hemingway, Ernest. In Our Time.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises.
Keruac, Jack. On the Road.
Keruac, Jack. The Dharma Bums.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Book
Lewis Carroll. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Lewis Carroll. Through the Looking-Glass.
Lewis Carroll. The Hunting of the Snark.
London, Jack. The Sea-wolf.
London, Jack. Martin Eden.
London, Jack. To Build a Fire. Love to Life. Other short stories.
Mark Twain. The Mysterious Stranger.
Pynchon, Thomas. Crying a lot 49.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow.
Pynchon, Thomas. Slow Learner.
Pynchon, Thomas. V.
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men.
Toomer, Jean. Cane.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, or Life in the Woods.
Vonnegut, Kurt. The Sirens of Titan.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Cat's Cradle.
Vonnegut, Kurt.Galapagos.
б) дополнительная литература:
A Feminist Memoir Project (edited by Rachel Blau Du Plessis and Ann Snitow). Three
Rivers Press, New York, 1998.
A Nineteenth-Century American Reader (edited by M. Thomas Inge). USIA, Washington,
1991.
A Twentieth-Century American Reader. Volume 1. 1900-1945. USIA, Washington, 1999.
Allen, Walter E. The English Novel: a Short Critical History. Dutton, 1954.
Antin, M. The Promised Land. Boston and New York Houghton Mifflin Company. The
Riverside Press Cambridge.1912
Beer, G. Darwin's Plots. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Beveridge, A. J. America’s Destiny. From the Congressional Record, 56th Congress, 1st
session, 704-712. 1900.
Boorstin, Daniel J. The Americans: the National Experience. Vintage Books, New York,
1965.
Boorstin, Daniel J. The Americans: the Democratic Experience. Vintage Books, New
York, 1974.
Conjunctions:34. American Poetry: States of the Art (edited by Bradford Morrow). Bard
College, 2000.
Conjunctions:35. American Fiction:States of the Art (edited by Bradford Morrow). Bard
College, 2000.
Cuddon, J. A. A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Harmondsworth:Penguin Books, 1984.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Dover Publications, Inc. New York, 1994.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford University Press, 1959, 1982.
Garraty, John A. A Short History of the American Nation. Harper Collins Colledge
Publishers, 1993.
Ginsberg, A. Deliberate Prose. Selected essays 1952-1995. Perennial, 2001.
Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. Penguin Books, USA, 1961.
Lewis, Barry. Postmodernism and Literature / The Routledge Companion to
Postmodernism. NY: Routledge, 2002
Literary Theory: an Anthology (edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan). Blackwell
Publishers Inc., 2000.
Maddox, L. Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline. The Johns
Hopkins Universiy Press. Baltimore and London. 1999.
Making Amerca: the Society and Culture of the United States (edited by Luther S.
Luedtke).USIA, Washington, 1992.
Marx, L. The Machine in the Garden. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Parrington V. L. Main Currents in American Thought. New York: Harcourt Brace And
Co., 1927.
Phillips, C. F. New World Order. A Vintage International Original, 2002.
Potter, David M. People of Plenty. The University of Chicago Press. 1961.
Shell, J. Time of Illusion. Vintage Books, New York, 1975.
Sontag, S. In America. Picador, 2001.
Stevenson, R. Modernist Fiction: An Introduction. Lexington: University of Kentucky,
1992.
The Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature (edited by Marion Wynne-Davies). New
York: Prentice Hall, 1990.
The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (edited by Alain Locke). Touchstone
Edition, 1997.
The Norton Antology of American Literature. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. New York,
1998.
The Norton Antology of English Literature. Vol. F: The Twentieth Century & After.
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2005.
The Oxford Companion to English Literature (edited by Margaret Drabble). Oxford:
Oxford University Press,1996.
The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (edited by Judith Clavir Albert).
Praeger, 1984.
Tichi, C. Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America.
University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
Trachtenberg, A. The Tumultuous Fifties. Yale University Press, 2001.
в) программное обеспечение и Интернет-ресурсы:
Пермякова Н.А. Электронная учебно-методическая разработка (электронный
лекционный курс) «Англо-американская литература ХХ века / English & American
Literature in the XX century».
The Norton Anthology of American Literature Student Website.
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/naal7/
The Norton Antology of English Literature: Norton Topics Online.
https://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/
8. Материально-техническое обеспечение дисциплины
Мультимедийный комплекс с проектором.
Фонды библиотеки НГУ, ГПНТБ, НГОНБ.
Рецензент: Бартош Н.Ю., к.ф.н., зав. кафедрой истории культуры ГФ НГУ.
Программа одобрена на заседании кафедры истории культуры от 21.08.2013 г.
Общая характеристика курса «Англо-американская литература ХХ века / English &
American Literature in the XX century»
В современном обществе с превалированием средств массовой информации и
коммуникации, информационных технологий происходит снижение общекультурного
уровня населения, снижается способность к эстетическому восприятию, утрачивается
чувство «подлинности» явлений культуры и литературы. В этих условиях приобретает
особое значение возможность напрямую познакомиться с произведением художественной
литературы; осознать особую роль литературы и культуры в жизни общества, постичь
литературный процесс в его цельности.
Предметом курса «Англо-американская литература ХХ века / English & American
Literature in the XX century» является история культуры Великобритании и США XX в.,
представленная сквозь призму восприятия английских и американских писателей, поэтов,
журналистов и общественных деятелей. Слушатели курса познакомятся с наиболее
значимыми произведениями литературы Великобритании и США, в «которых отразился
век и современный человек…». Социальные катаклизмы, экономические потрясения,
мировые войны и угроза тотального уничтожения человечества в ядерной войне,
стихийные бедствия и надвигающаяся экологическая катастрофа – все эти и многие
другие события вызывают у писателей и поэтов англоязычных стран мысль о грядущем
Апокалипсисе и помогают понять специфический характер англо-американской
литературы ХХ в.
Научная новизна курса заключается в том, что курс базируется на современных
теориях о закономерностях формирования и развития культуры, о природе литературного
творчества, психологии творческого сознания, возможностях и границах интерпретации
текста. Проблема самобытности той или иной национальной культуры и концепция
«национального характера» является актуальной отраслью социальных исследований.
Принятые в более ранние периоды концепции «наследственных расовых» черт,
определяющих уникальность той или иной национальной культуры, сейчас замещаются
исследованиями, принимающими во внимание большее количество факторов,
формирующих «особую душу» того или иного народа. До какой степени «шаблонные»,
стандартные условия жизни в определенном обществе влияют на появление
определенных «шаблонов» личности членов этого общества? До какой степени
социокультурная система порождает определенные формы социальных стереотипов?
Каковы последствия подобной стандартизации личности для стабильности или, наоборот,
изменчивости социального порядка? Какова связь между особенностями национальной
культуры и событиями национальной истории? Может ли страна с уникальной историей
создать уникальную культуру, и как эта уникальность соотносится универсальными
правилами, общими для культур всего мира? В чем состоит уникальность именно
американской культуры? Это лишь часть вопросов, на которые мы пытаемся ответить в
рамках нашего курса.
В своем подходе к исследованию американской культуры мы исходим из
предположения о том, что культура отдельно взятой страны, с одной стороны, несет черты
сходства и починяется в своем развитии тем же самым законам, которым подчиняется
любая другая культура; но, с другой стороны, является носительницей неких уникальных
черт, которые мы будем называть «устойчивыми культурными моделями», или
«паттернами».
Произведение литературы – это, с одной стороны, порождение авторского «я», идея
о мире, воплощенная в образы и оформленная сюжетом. С другой стороны, всякое
произведение человеческой мысли и духа – это отклик на требование времени.
Литература (как и культура в целом) не есть «вещь в себе», она встроена в процесс
человеческой деятельности по осмыслению и преобразованию реальности. Разные
исторические и культурные ситуации требуют от литературы выполнения тех или иных
задач, а язык предоставляет автору художественного произведения возможность
использовать разные инструменты эстетической интерпретации и воспроизведения
реальности.
Анализ текста художественной литературы предполагает рассмотрение трех
основных аспектов:
1.
Собственно анализ идейно-художественных особенностей изучаемого текста;
2.
Исследование культурного и исторического контекста – т.е. биографии автора,
сведение о других его произведениях, о времени, когда он жил и работал, о проблемах,
которые волновали его современников (т.е. метатекст);
3.
Свободная интерпретация сюжета и образов в рамках возникающих
культурных ассоциаций.
Курс «Англо-американская литература ХХ века / English & American Literature in
the XX century» является уникальным в своем роде, так как впервые в НГУ предлагает
студентам негуманитарных специальностей (физика) познакомиться с зарубежной
культурой и литературой на языке оригинала. Таким образом, обеспечивается эффект
погружени» слушателей в культуру изучаемой страны (Великобритания и США), а также
развиваются навыки понимания, говорения и мышления на английском языке, что
является актуальным для будущих ученых.
Слушателям курса в своем анализе текстов английской и американской
художественной литературы рекомендуется опираться в основном на первоисточники (то
есть на неадаптированные тексты на английском языке), нежели чем на учебники и
учебные пособия. Материалы, предлагаемые слушателям курса для чтения и анализа,
предоставляются в электронном формате.
Задача данного курса: познакомить студентов с содержанием и научить понимать
идейно-художественную
специфику
базовых
текстов
англо-американской
художественной литературы XX в; сформировать у студентов представление об основных
этапах развития литературы и культуры; развить умение анализировать художественный
текст и определять идейные и художественные особенности того или иного произведения.
Тематический план курса
1. ХХ век как специфический период в развитии европейской и американской
культуры и литературы. Концепция «заката Европы» и ее отражение в англоамериканской литературе. Понятие модернизма как стиля эпохи.
«Новое время» как «время модерна» (Ю. Хабермас, «Философский дискурс о
модерне», 1985). Философия А. Шопенгауэра (1788-1860) как предвестье
катастрофического мироощущения «эпохи модерна». Учение А. Шопенгауэра о «воле» и
«страдании». Влияние его учения на общественные настроения «конца века» и на
иррационалистические философские концепции XX века.
Тенденции развития культуры Европы и Америки на рубеже XIX–XX вв.
Катастрофическое мироощущение «конца века». Отражение пессимистических
умонастроений рубежа веков в англо-американской художественной литературе.
Концепция О. Шпенглера (1880–1936): рубеж XIX–XX вв. и XX в. как период угасания
(«зима») западной цивилизации. Фаза цивилизации как финал и исход культуры.
Отрицание идеи исторического прогресса и идея циклического развития культуры в книге
О. Шпенглера «Закат Европы» (1918–1922). Понятие о европейской культуре как о
«фаустовской».
Ф. Ницше (1844-1900) как предтеча модернизма и постмодернизма. Развитие идей
А. Шопенгауэра в работе Ф. Ницше «Рождение трагедии из духа музыки» (1971). Дионис
и Аполлон в концепции Ф. Ницше как персонификации двух составляющих бытия.
Соотношение «аполлонического» и «дионисийского» начал в человеческой культуре.
Развенчание Ф. Ницше европейского «логоцентризма» в философском романе «Так
говорил Заратустра» (1883-1885). Деконструкция как метод критики Ф. Ницше ключевых
понятий традиционной европейской культуры. Критика христианского вероучения в
трактате Ф. Ницше «Антихрист» (1888).
2. Пути развития реалистической прозы в англо-американской литературе
рубежа XIX–ХХ вв. и в первой половине ХХ в. Натурализм.
Зарождение реализма в литературе второй половины XVIII века в романах Г.
Филдинга (1707–1754) как отражение стремления исследовать объективную
действительность. Продолжение реалистической традиции в творчестве Ч. Диккенса
(1812–1870), У. Теккерея (1811–1863). Человек как продукт воздействия среды в
произведениях английских писателей-реалистов.
Гражданская война 1961–1965 гг. в США и кризис романтического
мировосприятия. Зарождение реалистического метода в американской литературе.
Творчество Ф. Брет Гарта (1836–1902) и М. Твена (1935–1910).
Позитивизм и детерминизм как мировоззренческая основа англо-американских
писателей социологического направления во второй половине XIX в. Социальные и
культурные процессы эпохи индустриализации и урбанизации. Социально-сатирическая,
социально-психологическая, социологическая, натуралистическая проза. Эволюционная
теория Ч. Дарвина (1809–1882) «Происхождение видов путём естественного отбора, или
Сохранение благоприятствуемых пород в борьбе за жизнь» (1859) как научная основа для
интерпретации социальных процессов в литературе натурализма. «Социальный
дарвинизм» Г. Спенсера (1820–1903): закон естественного отбора как фактор эволюции и
как объяснение социальных процессов.
Нью-йоркский цикл рассказов О. Генри (1862–1910) как отражение проблем
урбанистический культуры. Малая проза С. Крэйна (1871-1900) как иллюстрация
положений литературы натурализма. Роман «Джунгли» (1906) Э. Синклера (1878–1968)
как образец натуралистического социологического исследования. Роман Т. Драйзера
(1871–1945) «Американская трагедия» (1925) как иллюстрация теории социального
дарвинизма.
3. Англо-американский неоромантизм как реакция на натуралистические
тенденции. Творчество Л. Кэрролла, Р. Киплинга, А. Бирса, Дж. Лондона и др.
Предпосылки возникновения неоромантизма в англо-американской культуре
рубежа XIX-XX вв. «Философия жизни» Ф. Ницше как идеологическая основа литературы
неоромантизма. Концепция «сверхчеловека» и концепция «вечного возвращения».
Сущность неоромантизма в сравнении с романтизмом.
Главные представители английского неоромантизма: Р. Л. Стивенсон (1850-1894),
А. Конан Дойль (1859-1930), Р. Киплинг (1865-1936), Дж. Конрад (1857-1924).
Неормантический герой и особенности трактовки законов мироздания в культуре
неоромантизма.
Творчество американского прозаика А. Бирса (1842–1913?) как сочетание
натуралистических и неоромантических тенденций. Психологизм А. Бирса в сборнике «В
гуще жизни: рассказы о военных и штатских» (1891). Социальная сатира Бирса в «Словаре
Сатаны» (1911).
1900-е гг.: конец эпохи фронтира и начало американской внешнеполитической
экспансии. Экспансия как компонент американской ментальности. Неоромантическое
представление об исторических перспективах Америки. Учение Ф. Ницше о
сверхчеловеке и герой американской культуры («A He-Man»). Творчество Дж. Лондона
(1876–1916) в контексте неоромантической культуры. Его роман «Морской волк» (1904) в
свете ницшеанской «философии жизни». Столкновение ницшеанства и христианской
системы ценностей в романе «Морской волк»: Волк Ларсен и Хэмфри Ван Вейден как
носители двух систем ценностей.
4. Первая мировая война и литература «потерянного поколения». Творчество
Э. Хемингуэя, Р. Олдингтона.
Первая мировая война (1914-1918) и ее влияние на культуру Европы и Америки.
«Потерянное
поколение»
как
социкультурный
феномен.
Формирование
экзистенциального мироощущения в литературе «потерянного поколения». Романы Э. М.
Ремарка (1898-1970), Э. Хемингуэя (1899-1961), Р. Олдингтона (1892-1962) как манифест
«потерянного поколения». Система жизненных ценностей героев литературы
«потерянного поколения». Проблема «отцов и детей» в контексте социокультурных
процессов после Первой мировой войны.
Сборник рассказов Э. Хемингуэя «В наше время» (1924/25) как портрет времени и
роман «И восходит солнце» («Фиеста», 1926) как психологический портрет «потерянного
поколения». Мировоззрение и жизненная позиция героев романа «Фиеста». Смысл двух
эпиграфов к роману. Символика фиесты и корриды в художественном мире Э. Хемингуэя.
Полемика с неоромантическими представлениями о войне и воине в романе Э. Хемингуэя
«Прощай, оружие!» (1929).
5. «Век джаза» в США как реакция на последствия Первой мировой войны.
Творчество Ф. С. Фицджеральда. Литература времен «Великой депрессии»
1920-е гг: «Ревущие Двадцатые». Расцвет модернистской Америки. Повышение
качества жизни и переоценка традиционных ценностей. Революция в манерах и морали.
Новое «Евангелие богатства» и принципы бизнеса по-американски в интерпретации Г.
Форда (1863-1947) («Моя жизнь и работа», 1922).
Роль культурного движения «Гарлемский Ренессанс» для формирования
специфической духовной атмосферы «века джаза» (1919-1929). Основные представители
и концепции «Гарлемского Ренессанса». А. Локк (1886-1954) о роли, традициях и
перспективах афро-американской культуры в культуре США и мирового сообщества.
Эсхатологическое мироощущение человека западной культуры в «век джаза».
«Сказки» и «отзвуки» «века джаза» в творчестве Ф. С. Фицджеральда (1896-1940).
Девальвация традиционных американских ценностей в «век джаза». Развенчание мифа об
«американской мечте» в рассказах Ф. С. Фицджеральда («Сказки Века Джаза», 1922) и в
романе «Великий Гэтсби» (1925).
1930-е гг.: резкое снижение качества жизни и кризис стереотипов в период
«Великой депрессии». Отражение социального и мировоззренческого кризиса «Великой
депрессии» в творчестве Дж. Стейнбека (1902-1968) (роман «Грозди гнева», 1939).
6. Представление о человеке, времени и пространстве в литературе англоамериканского модернизма. Роман «потока сознания» как одно из основных
направлений модернистской прозы.
Влияние психоаналитических и философских теорий начала ХХ в. на становление
и развитие модернистской литературы. Представление о мире и человеческом сознании
как о «потоке» в концепции У. Джеймса (1842-1910) («Научные основы психологии»,
1890). Роль «интуитивизма» А. Бергсона (1859-1941) в формировании концепции
пространства и времени в литературе модернизма («Опыт о непосредственных данных
сознания», 1889). Учение о бессознательном З. Фрейда (1856-1939) («Толкование
сновидений», 1900), аналитическая психология и учение об архетипах коллективного
бесознательного К.Г. Юнга (1875-1961) как основа модернистской концепции личности.
Миф как основа для понимания и описания мира в модернистском романе. Понятие
«неомифологизма» в литературе ХХ в. Особенности поэтики модернистского романа
«потока сознания».
7. Творчество Дж. Джойса. Повествовательная техника Дж. Джойса. Роман
«Улисс» как произведение на границе модернизма и постмодернизма.
Творческая эволюция Дж. Джойса (1882-1941). Сборник рассказов «Дублинцы»
(1904-1914) в контексте литературы модернизма. Процесс формирования личности героя и
принципы изображения персонажей в романе Дж. Джойса «Портрет художника в юности»
(1907-1914). Особенности композиции романа.
Роман «Улисс» (1914-1921) как «сумма всего универсума». Поэтика ассоциативных
рядов и символического порядка в «Улиссе». Повествовательная техника Дж. Джойса:
«поэтика поперечного разреза» и «поэтика экспрессивной формы» (У. Эко, «Поэтики
Джойса»). Интертекстуальные связи в «Улиссе». Роман «Улисс» как произведение на
границе модернизма и постмодернизма.
8. Модернистский эксперимент в творчестве Дж. Дос Пассоса. Роман
«Манхеттен» как «апофеоз урбанизма».
Модернистский эксперимент в творчестве Дж. Дос Пассоса (1896-1970).
Особенности повествовательной техники Дж. Дос Пассоса: «Манхеттен» (1925) как роман
«полифонного монтажа». Включение фрагментов «потока сознания», документальных
текстов и др. материала в художственную структуру романа. Принцип «камера обскура» в
прозе Дос Пассоса.
Роман «Манхеттен» как апофеоз урбанизма. Человек в пространстве «Манхэттена».
Город как главный герой романа. Мифология Манхеттена. Символы и культурные
аллюзии в романе.
9. Модель мира в романах У. Фолкнера о Йокнапатофе. Интерпретация
модернистских представлений о времени и пространстве в художественной
структуре романа «Шум и ярость».
Создание / развенчание американского мифа в романах У. Фолкнера (1897—1962)
о Йокнапатофе. Миф об американском Юге и история одной семьи в романе У. Фолкнера
«Сарторис» (1926). Переплетение в романе времени исторического и мифологического.
Интерпретация модернистских представлений о времени и пространстве в
художественной структуре романа «Шум и ярость» (1929). Особенности использования У.
Фрлкгенром приема «внутреннего монолога» (техника «потока сознния»). Время как один
из главных героев романа «Шум и ярость».
10. Эволюция жанра литературной утопии в ХХ в. Романы О. Хаксли, Дж.
Оруэлла, К. Кизи как образцы негативной утопии.
Утопия как тип мышления и как литературный текст. Генезис и поэтика жанра
литературной утопии. Роман «Утопия» (1516) Томаса Мора (1478-1535) как модель жанра
позитивной утопии. Реалии ХХ века и эволюция литературной утопии и утопического
мышления. Корреляция содержательных и структурных компонентов в оппозиции
«утопия» / «антиутопия».
Утопия и сопредельные жанры: антиутопия, дистопия, государственносатирический роман, научно-фантастический роман, фэнтези. Дистопия как этап
эволюции жанра утопии. Образцы дистопий в англо-американской литературе ХХ века.
Критика концепций научного переустройства общества в романе Олдоса Хаксли
(1894-1963) «О, дивный новый мир!» (1932). Роман Джорджа Оруэлла (1903-1950) «1984»
(1948) как «классическая тоталитарная дистопия». Судьба культуры в романе Р. Брэдбери
(1920-2012) «451 градус по Фаренгейту» (1953). Человек и «Комбинат» в романе К. Кизи
(1935-2001) «Пролетая над гнедом кукушки» (1962).
11. Социальные и моральные аспекты проекта «Манхэттен». Англоамериканская научно-фантастическая литература периода «холодной войны» как
реакция на политические проблемы и на угрозу глобальной катастрофы.
1939-1945 гг.: участие Великобритании и США во Второй мировой войне.
Социальные и моральные аспекты проекта «Манхэттен». 1950-1970-е гг: период
«холодной войны». Научно-фантастическая литература как реакция на политические
проблемы и на угрозу глобальной катастрофы. Анализ произведений английских и
американских писателей-фантастов (Р. Шекли, Р. Брэдбери, А. Азимов и др.) по выбору
слушателей курса.
12. Вторая мировая война и английский роман «философской тенденции».
Творчество У. Голдинга. Идея «обратной эволюции» в романе «Повелитель мух».
Вторая мировая война и послевоенные культурные процессы в Европе и Америке.
Роман с «философской тенденцией» в английской литературе ХХ в. как реакция на
катаклизм Воторой мировой войны. Эволюция идей экзистенциализма в произведениях
английских писателей периода после Второй мировой войны. Поиск ответа на вопросы о
сути человека в романах-притчах и романах-мифах У. Голдинга (1911–1993). Мотив тьмы
в творчестве У. Голдинга. Идея «обратной эволюции» в романе «Повелитель мух» (1954):
«Человек – самое опасное животное». Амбивалентный характер голдиновских символов в
романе «Повелитель мух» (раковина-рог, очки, костер, свиная голова). Сакральное и
инфернальное в структуре характера героев У. Голдинга. Семиотика и поэтика храма в
романе «Шпиль» (1964).
13. Контркультура 1950-1970-х гг. «Битники» и их роль в американской и
мировой культуре. Разрушение писательских традиций и обновление творческих
принципов в литературе битников. Творчество Дж. Керуака, А. Гинзберга, У.
Берроуза.
Контркультура 1950-1970-х гг. «Разбитое поколение» как социокультурное явление
1950–1960-х гг. Представители «разбитого поколения» как продолжатели традиций
«потерянного поколения». Содержание термина «битник» (beat / beatific – разбитый /
блаженный). Разрушение писательских традиций и обновление творческих принципов в
литературе битников. Творчество А. Гинзберга (1926-1997), У. Берроуза (1914-1997).
Принципы «спонтанной прозы» Дж. Керуака (1922-1969). Романы Дж. Керуака как
художественная реализация манифестов «битников». Творчество Дж. Керуака и архетипы
американского национального самосознания. Мифологемы американской культуры в
романах Дж. Керуака «В дороге» (1951, публ. 1957), «Бродяги дхармы» (1958). Роль
«битников» в дальнейшем развитии американской и европейской культуры.
14. Творчество Дж. Фаулза в контексте европейской культуры второй
половины ХХ в. «Художники» и «коллекционеры» в концепции Дж. Фаулза.
Творчество Дж. Фаулза (1926–2005) в контексте европейской культуры второй
половины ХХ в. «Художники» и «коллекционеры» в концепции Дж. Фаулза (по трактату
«Аристос» (1964-1969). Миссия творческой личности и судьба творчества в современном
мире. Романы «Коллекционер» (1963), «Волхв» (1965-1977) как художественная
реализация взглядов писателя. Постмодернизм в произведениях Дж. Фаулза: манипуляция
литературной традицией и стереотипами читательского восприятия в романах «Женщина
французского лейтенанта» (1969), «Мантисса» (1982).
15. Постмодернизм как феномен культуры во второй половине ХХ в.
Постмодернизм как постструктурализм. Дискредитация реалистического модуса в
теории и практике постмодернизма.
Постмодернизм
как
комплекс
философских,
научно-теоретических
и
эмоционально-эстетических представлений во второй половине ХХ века. Постмодернизм
как постструктурализм. Дискредитация реалистического модуса в теории и практике
постмодернизма. Постмодернистская «деконструкция» как принцип анализа текста.
Терминология постмодернизма (эпистема, дискурс, текст, интертекст, гипертекст,
метатекст и т. д.).
16. Содержательная специфика и формальные приемы постмодернистской
литературной практики. Англо-американский постмодернистский роман (Дж.
Гарднер, Дж. Барт, Т. Пинчон, Дж. Барнс).
Содержательная специфика и формальные приемы постмодернистской
литературной практики («смерть автора», авторская маска, пастиш, нонселекция,
фрагментарность повествования, ризома и пр.). Постмодернизм в английской и
американской литературе. Современная интерпретация англо-саксонского эпоса
«Беовульф» в романе Джона Гарднера (1933-1982) «Грендель» (1971). Ирония над
историческими путями человечества в романах Курта Воннегута (1922-2007) («Сирены
Титана», 1959, «Колыбель для кошки», 1963, «Галапагосы», 1985). Ирония над
познавательными возможностями человека в романах Томаса Пинчона (р. 1937) («V.»,
1963, «Выкрикивается лот № 49», 1966, «Радуга гравитации», 1973). Ирония над
человеческой культурой в романах Джулиана Барнса (р. 1946) («История мира в 10 ½
главах», 1989, «Англия, Англия», 1998).
Методические рекомендации для подготовки презентации
В течение семестра слушателям курса предлагается подготовить минимум одну
презентацию в пределах изучаемых тем. Темы выступлений должны быть посвящены тем
или иным аспектам англо-американской литературы ХХ века. Принципы анализа
литературного текста и способы раскрытия темы должны соответствовать требованиям,
предъявляемым к написанию реферата (см. Методические рекомендации для написания
реферата). Биографию автора следует давать в презентации предельно лаконично,
обращая внимание только на те моменты, которые необходимы для понимания
особенностей его творчества (желательно ограничиться 10-15 предложениями). Основная
часть доклада должна быть посвящена анализу собственно художественного
произведения (обязательно с цитатами и примерами из текста).
Презентация проходит в форме выступления перед аудиторией. Студент должен не
только тщательно подготовить текст своего выступления, но и сопроводить выступление
визуальным рядом (рисунки, фотографии, карты и т.д.). Наиболее предпочтительно
подготовить презентацию в формате PowerPoint (не менее 10 слайдов при заполняемости
одного слайда текстовым и / или графическим материалом не менее 40%).
Продолжительность выступления около 15 минут.
Также желательно подготовить раздаточные материалы для слушателей, в которых
указать имя автора, даты его жизни и смерти, название и год издания анализируемого
произведения; имена основных действующих лиц, цитаты из анализируемого
произведения, а также любую информацию, способствующую лучшему пониманию
слушателями содержания презентации.
Методические рекомендации для написания реферата
В течение семестра студентам предлагается написать один реферат на выбранную
из списка тему с целью углубленного знакомства с произведениями англо-американской
художественной литературы, а также для формирования навыков самостоятельной работы
с научно-исследовательской литературой и самостоятельного анализа литературного
текста. Студент может предложить собственную тему для реферата при условии
обязательного обсуждения и согласования темы с преподавателем. Темы для написания
рефератов охватывают англо-американскую литературу XX в. периода модернизма и
постмодернизма.
Требования к содержанию и оформлению реферата:
1.
Тема, сформулированная в заглавии реферата, раскрывается на основе
анализа одного или нескольких произведений указанного автора, релевантных для
исследования данной темы. Если студент берет для анализа произведения лирических
жанров (стихотворения, поэмы) или произведения малых эпических жанров (сказки,
новеллы, рассказы), то для раскрытия темы достаточно подробно проанализировать 3-6
произведений. Если студент работает с текстами в жанре романа или повести, то
достаточно подробного анализа 1 произведения.
2.
Реферат должен продемонстрировать: отличное знание исследуемого текста
(текстов); знакомство с литературоведческими работами по данной теме; наличие у
студента собственного мнения, идей и концепций относительно исследуемой темы.
3.
Текст реферата должен включать:
•
Небольшой обзор наиболее важных литературоведческих работ по данной
теме;
•
Краткие сведения о том времени, когда жил и работал данный автор, то есть
об историческом и культурном контексте создания исследуемого произведения
(произведений);
•
Информацию об условиях и обстоятельствах создания данного текста
(текстов);
•
Высказывания самого автора относительно целей и задач, которые он ставил
перед собой, создавая данный текст (тексты), или целей и задач своего творчества вообще;
•
Собственно анализ текста (текстов) с целью раскрытия заявленной темы.
4.
Особое внимание следует уделить работе с литературоведческими
материалами. Если студент опирается на чью-либо концепцию или поддерживает чьелибо мнение относительно данного вопроса, то следует процитировать это мнение в
тексте реферата, правильно оформить цитату, указать ее источник и после этого выразить
свое отношение к данной концепции. Если студент использует информацию, взятую из
монографий, статей и других работ о данном авторе или произведении, то следует
указывать на это в форме ссылок («Как пишет исследователь NN в своей работе SS…»)
или прямых цитат с обязательным указанием источника.
5.
Анализ исследуемого текста (текстов) обязательно должен опираться в
первую очередь на сам текст, а не на чье-то мнение об этом тексте. Мнение автора
реферата может не совпадать с мнением ни одного из исследователей данного вопроса.
Выводы относительно исследуемой проблемы необходимо подкреплять ссылками и
цитатами из текста.
6.
Текст реферата должен быть структурирован, то есть разбит на главы в
соответствии с логикой исследования. Целесообразно включить в текст реферата
«Введение» (постановка проблемы; библиография; исторический и биографический
материал); при наличии нескольких глав – «Оглавление»; 1-4 главы, «Заключение», то
есть выводы относительно поставленной в реферате задачи; «Список литературы».
7.
Объем «Введения» должен составлять не более ¼ текста реферата.
8.
Последний раздел реферата – это «Список литературы», который
обязательно
должен
включать
собственно
исследуемый
текст
(тексты);
литературоведческие работы, цитированные в реферате; литературоведческие работы, так
или иначе упомянутые или использованные при написании реферата. Список литературы
оформляется в алфавитном порядке, с обязательным указанием места и года издания
книги. Список исследовательских работ (статьи, монографии, сборники и т.д.) должен
состоять не менее чем из 3-х наименований. Учебники и учебные пособия (как для
высшей, так и для средней школы) не входят в понятие «исследовательских работ» и не
должны служит основой исследования, хотя могут быть включены в список литературы.
9.
Объем реферата (не считая титульный лист и «Список литературы») должен
составлять 16-20 страниц печатного текста формата А 4 (размер страницы 21х29,7; поля
2х3х2х1,5; размер шрифта 12; междустрочный интервал одинарный или полуторный).
10.
Нумерация страниц обязательна. На титульном листе указать: учебное
заведение, факультет и номер группы; фамилию, имя и отчество выполнившего реферат;
тему реферата с пояснением (на материале какого именно текста или текстов
рассматривалась данная тема).
11.
Оформление цитат, выходных данных в списке литературы и т.д. следует
делать в соответствии с одним из общепринятых стандартов (можно взять в качестве
образца любую печатную научную работу, монографию, учебник и т.д.)
12.
Сдать реферат для проверки и оценки необходимо до конца зачетной сессии
и до начала экзаменационной сессии.
Permyakova, Natalya A. English & American Literature in the XX century: topics,
tasks, teaching material, guideline: Learner's Guide / Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk,
2013.
The Learner's Guide offers a complex of teaching material and learner’s instructions
giving a full idea of the structure and contents of the course “English & American Literature in
the XX century” and is necessary for the full-fledged mastering the course by the students.
The Learner's Guide consists of:
1) the Programme of the course "English & American Literature in the XX century" (in
Russian and in English);
2) a detailed list of lecture topics and the instructions for organizing the students'
independent work (including a detailed recommended reading list for each lecture topic;
instructions for preparing oral presentations and completing essays and some examples of similar
work) (in English and in Russian);
3) the bank of teaching and controlling material (including the questions for the interim
control of the students' progress during the check weeks; questions and tasks for the examination,
etc.);
The Learner's Guide is created on the basis of up-to-date Russian and foreign
culturological and philological concepts and approaches of studying national literatures and
cultures; Разработка выполнена с опорой на современные отечественные и зарубежные
культурологические и литературоведческие концепции и методики изучения истории
национальных литератур и культур; designed considering the specific character of the target
audience.
The Learner's Guide is oriented to the students of the Department of Physics (Master’s
degree program) and can be also used by anyone interested in the history of English and
American literature and culture.
Course Description
The course is based on interdisciplinary approach to studying literature and encourages
the students to use their background in History, Culturology, Sociology, Psychology,
Philosophy, and other humanities to provide all-embracing approach to studying Anglophone
civilization and culture of the XX century..
The aim of the course is both to make the attendants acquainted with the main streams of
English and American literature in the XX century and to encourage them to develop
independent and unbiased thinking, train analytical abilities, work out their own ideas and
opinions. The attendants are encouraged to use mostly the primary sources in the original
language rather than to rely upon textbooks.
The focus of the course is to reveal and to analyze the links between the most
characteristic texts of the 20th century American fiction and the historical, social, and cultural
“environment”. The analysis is based on the idea that every new historical period gives birth to
new patterns of thinking and searches for new answers to such eternal questions as “What is
Man?”, “What is Happiness?”, “What is Law?”, etc. as a result we have different “models of the
World” – basic concepts of Universe and Life, which are peculiar for different periods of
national history. Thus, the emphasis of the course is to find these “models” in fiction and nonfiction. At the same time there are so called persistent patterns of American culture (“the main
currents in the American Mind”). So, it is also important to see how these “main currents” coexist and communicate with “emergent” cultural issues.
“English & American Literature in the XX century” Course Programme
Types of Activities
Forms of Control
Term
Week
Course Section
№
п/п
Lectures
1
2
3
4
5
The XXth century as a
peculiar period in the
development of European
and American culture and
literature. The concept of
“The Decline of the West
” by Oswald Spengler and
its reflection in English
and American literature
Evolution of Realism in
English and American
literature at the turn of the
XIX-XX centuries and in
the 1st half of the XXth
century. Naturalism
English and American
Neo Romanticism as a
reaction to Naturalism.
Creative work by Lewis
Carroll, Rudyard Kipling,
Jack London.
The World War I and
“Lost Generation”
literature. Creative work
by rnest. Hemingway,
Richard Aldington
The Jazz Age as a reaction
to the consequences of
World War I. в США.
Creative work by Francis
Scott Fitzgerald. The
Great Depression period
2
1
2
Independent
Work
1
2
2
2
1
Presentation
2
3
2
1
Presentation
2
4
2
1
Presentation
2
5
2
1
Presentation
Presentation
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
and its literature
Modernism as a style of
the epoch. Concept of a
human being, time and
space in English and
American modernist
literature. “Stream-ofconcsiousness” novel as
one of the main directions
in modernist prose.
Creative work by James
Joyce. Narrative
techniques by Joyce. “The
Ulysses” as a novel on the
border of Modernism and
Postmodernism.
Modernist experiment in
prose by John. Dos
Passos. “Manhattan
Transfer” as an apotheosis
of urbanism..
The model of the
Universe in
Yoknapatawpha novels by
William Faulkner. The
interpretation of
modernist concept of
space and time in the
artistic structure of “The
Sound and the Fury”.
The evolution of a literary
utopia in the XXth
century. Novels by
Aldous Huxley, George
Orwell, Ken Kesey as
examples of negative
utopia.
Social and moral aspects
of the Manhattan Project.
English and American
science fiction of the Cold
War period as a reaction
to political problems and
the threat of the global
disaster.
World War II and English
novels of philosophical
tendency. Creative work
by William Golding. The
concept of “reverse
evolution” in “The Lord
of the Flies”.
2
6
2
1
Presentation
2
7
2
1
Presentation
2
8
2
1
Presentation
2
9
2
1
Presentation
2
10
2
1
Presentation
2
11
2
1
Presentation
2
12
2
1
Presentation
13
14
15
16
Counter Culture in the
1950s -1970s. The “Beat
Generation” and its role in
American and world
culture. The destruction of
writing traditions and
renewal of creative
principles in creative work
by Allen Ginsberg, Jack
Kerouac, William
Burroughs.
Creative work by John
Fowles in the context of
European culture in the
second half of the XXth
century. “Artists” and
“Collectors” in Fowles’s
concept.
Postmodernism as a
cultural phenomenon of
the second half of the
XXth century.
Postmodernism as PostStructuralism. Discredit to
a realistic modus in theory
and creative practice of
Postmodernism.
Topical peculiarity and
formal methods of
Postmodernist literary
practice. English and
American postmodernist
novels by John Gardner,
John Barth, Thomas
Pynchon, Julian Barnes.
During the term
Assessment of academic
progress
2
13
2
1
Presentation
2
14
2
1
Presentation
2
15
2
1
Presentation
2
16
2
1
Presentation
16
Essay
Examination
Sample Essay Topics
1. A negative utopia in the XXth century literature. The genesis and poetics of the
negative utopia.
2. An individual and the society in the structure of the negative utopia. Analyzing of any
novel in the genre ( by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey).
3. Jack London’s literary character as a He-Man.
4. An individual of the Jazz Age in prose by Francis Scott Fitzgerald.
5. The concept of a human being, time and space in Modernism. Principles of modernist
literature.
6. Principles of creating an image of a personage in The Ulysses by James Joyce.
7. Narrative styles by James Joyce. Analyzing episodes of The Ulysses.
8. Creating and destroying a myth of American South in Yoknapatawha novels by
W.illiam Faulkner.
9. The interpretation of modernist concept of space and time in The Sound and the Futy
by William Faulkner.
10. Portraying the epoch in Lost generation literature.
11. Lost Generation and existentialism (Ernest Hemingway, Richard Aldington).
12. Psycology of the Lost generation in The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.
Symbols of fiesta and bull fighting.
13. Arguing Neo Romantic visions in A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway.
14. Principles of prose by Virginia Woolf. Laws of memory in Mrs Dalloway.
15. Time and space in To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
16. The concept of reverse evolution in novels by William Golding.
17. Dehumanisation in The Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
18. The Spire by William Golding. Divine and diabolic in the character of the
protagonist.
19. The fate of a creator in the modern world (by John Fowles).
20. Manipulation of a literary tradition and the reader’s stereotypes in Fowles’s novels.
21. Principles and techniques of creating a postmodernist novel.
22. The problem of text and reality in Postmodernism.
Sample Cover Page
THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE OF RUSSIAN FEDERATION
NOVOSIBIRSK NATIONAL RESEARCH STATE UNIVERSITY
Department of Physics
Chair of Radiophysics
Essay
THE ANALYSIS OF “SLOW LEARNER” BY THOMAS PYNCHON:
“THE SMALL RAIN” AND “ENTHROPY”
Performed by
Kolmakov M.V.
Group №
Novosibirsk, 2010
Examination Questions
The XXth century as a peculiar period in the development of European and American culture and
literature. The concept of “The Decline of the West ” by Oswald Spengler and its reflection in English
and American literature.
Evolution of Realism in English and American literature at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries and in the
1st half of the XXth century. Naturalism
English and American Neo Romanticism as a reaction to Naturalism. Creative work by Lewis Carroll,
Rudyard Kipling, Jack London
The World War I and “Lost Generation” literature. Creative work by Ernest Hemingway, Richard
Aldington
The Jazz Age as a reaction to the consequences of World War I. в США. Creative work by Francis
Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Depression period and its literature
Modernism as a style of the epoch. Concept of a human being, time and space in English and American
modernist literature. “Stream-of-concsiousness” novel as one of the main directions in modernist prose.
Creative work by James Joyce. Narrative techniques by Joyce. “The Ulysses” as a novel on the border
of Modernism and Postmodernism.
Modernist experiment in prose by John Dos Passos. “Manhattan Transfer” as an apotheosis of
urbanism..
The model of the Universe in Yoknapatawpha novels by William Faulkner. The interpretation of
modernist concept of space and time in the artistic structure of “The Sound and the Fury”.
The evolution of a literary utopia in the XXth century. Novels by Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ken
Kesey as examples of negative utopia.
Social and moral aspects of the Manhattan Project. English and American science fiction of the Cold
War period as a reaction to political problems and the threat of the global disaster.
World War II and English novels of philosophical tendency. Creative work by William Golding. The
concept of “reverse evolution” in “The Lord of the Flies”.
Counter Culture in the 1950s -1970s. The “Beat Generation” and its role in American and world
culture. The destruction of writing traditions and renewal of creative principles in creative work by
Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs.
Creative work by John Fowles in the context of European culture in the second half of the XXth
century. “Artists” and “Collectors” in Fowles’s concept.
Postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon of the second half of the XXth century. Postmodernism as
Post-Structuralism. Discredit to a realistic modus in theory and creative practice of Postmodernism.
Topical peculiarity and formal methods of Postmodernist literary practice. English and American
postmodernist novels by John Gardner, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Julian Barnes.
Basic English and American Literature (any edition available):
Aldington, Richard. Death od a Hero.
Asimov, Isaac. The Foundation Trilogy.
Asimov, Isaac. I, Robot.
Barnes, Julian. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters.
Barnes, Julian. England, England.
Barth, John. Lost in the Funhouse.
Barth, John. Chimera.
Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Experience.
Bierce, Ambrose. Short Stories.
Bierce, Ambrose. Devil’s Dictionary.
Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles.
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451.
Burrough, William. Naked Lunch.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Prairie.
Crane, Stephen. The Open Boat.
Dos Passos, John. Manhattan Transfer.
Dos Passos, John. The Big Money.
Dos Passos, John. The 42nd Parallel.
Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy.
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk.
Gardner, John. Grendel.
George Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four
Ginsberg, Allen. Howl.
Golding, William. The Lord of the Flies.
Golding, William The Spire.
Fowles, John. The Collector.
Fowles, John. The Magus.
Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant's Woman.
Fowles, John. The Ebony Tower.
Irwing, Washington. Rip Van Winkle.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World Revisited.
Huxley, Aldous. Island
Faulkner, William. Sartoris.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury.
Fitzgerald, Francis Scott. The Great Gatsby.
Fitzgerald, Francis Scott . Tales of the Jazz Age.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Joyce, James. The Ulysses.
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms.
Hemingway, Ernest. In Our Time.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises.
Keruac, Jack. On the Road.
Keruac, Jack. The Dharma Bums.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Book
Lewis Carroll. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Lewis Carroll. Through the Looking-Glass.
Lewis Carroll. The Hunting of the Snark.
London, Jack. The Sea-wolf.
London, Jack. Martin Eden.
London, Jack. To Build a Fire. Love to Life. Other short stories.
Mark Twain. The Mysterious Stranger.
Pynchon, Thomas. Crying a lot 49.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow.
Pynchon, Thomas. Slow Learner.
Pynchon, Thomas. V.
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men.
Toomer, Jean. Cane.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, or Life in the Woods.
Vonnegut, Kurt. The Sirens of Titan.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Cat's Cradle.
Vonnegut, Kurt.Galapagos.
The Norton Anthology of American Literature Student Website.
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/naal7/
The Norton Antology of English Literature: Norton Topics Online.
https://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/
Recommended Further Reading List:
A Feminist Memoir Project (edited by Rachel Blau Du Plessis and Ann Snitow). Three
Rivers Press, New York, 1998.
A Nineteenth-Century American Reader (edited by M. Thomas Inge). USIA, Washington,
1991.
A Twentieth-Century American Reader. Volume 1. 1900-1945. USIA, Washington, 1999.
Allen, Walter E. The English Novel: a Short Critical History. Dutton, 1954.
Antin, M. The Promised Land. Boston and New York Houghton Mifflin Company. The
Riverside Press Cambridge.1912
Beer, G. Darwin's Plots. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Beveridge, A. J. America’s Destiny. From the Congressional Record, 56th Congress, 1st
session, 704-712. 1900.
Boorstin, Daniel J. The Americans: the National Experience. Vintage Books, New York,
1965.
Boorstin, Daniel J. The Americans: the Democratic Experience. Vintage Books, New
York, 1974.
Conjunctions:34. American Poetry: States of the Art (edited by Bradford Morrow). Bard
College, 2000.
Conjunctions:35. American Fiction:States of the Art (edited by Bradford Morrow). Bard
College, 2000.
Cuddon, J. A. A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Harmondsworth:Penguin Books, 1984.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Dover Publications, Inc. New York, 1994.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford University Press, 1959, 1982.
Garraty, John A. A Short History of the American Nation. Harper Collins Colledge
Publishers, 1993.
Ginsberg, A. Deliberate Prose. Selected essays 1952-1995. Perennial, 2001.
Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. Penguin Books, USA, 1961.
Lewis, Barry. Postmodernism and Literature / The Routledge Companion to
Postmodernism. NY: Routledge, 2002
Maddox, L. Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline. The Johns
Hopkins Universiy Press. Baltimore and London. 1999.
Making Amerca: the Society and Culture of the United States (edited by Luther S.
Luedtke).USIA, Washington, 1992.
Marx, L. The Machine in the Garden. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Parrington V. L. Main Currents in American Thought. New York: Harcourt Brace And
Co. 1927.
Phillips, C. F. New World Order. A Vintage International Original, 2002.
Potter, David M. People of Plenty. The University of Chicago Press. 1961.
Shell, J. Time of Illusion. Vintage Books, New York, 1975.
Sontag, S. In America. Picador, 2001.
Stevenson, R. Modernist Fiction: An Introduction. Lexington: University of Kentucky,
1992.
The Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature (edited by Marion Wynne-Davies). New
York: Prentice Hall, 1990.
The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (edited by Alain Locke). Touchstone
Edition, 1997.
The Norton Antology of American Literature. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. New York,
1998.
The Norton Antology of English Literature. Vol. F: The Twentieth Century & After.
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2005.
The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed Margaret Drabble. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press,1996)
The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (edited by Judith Clavir Albert).
Praeger, 1984.
Tichi, C. Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America.
University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
Trachtenberg, A. The Tumultuous Fifties. Yale University Press, 2001.
Literary Theory and Social and Political Journalism helping to understand the
peculiar character of the XXth century
Henry George. Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial
Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth (1879)
Introduction—The Persistence of Poverty
The present century has been marked by a prodigious increase in wealthy producing
power. The utilization of steam and electricity, the introduction of improved processes and laborsaving machinery, the great subdivision and grander scale of production, the wonderful facilitation
of exchanges, have multiplied enormously the effectiveness of labor.
At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and it was expected, that
labor-saving inventions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of the laborer; that the
enormous increase in the power of producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of the past.
Could a man of the last century—a Franklin or a Priestley—have seen, in a vision of the future,
the steamship taking the place of the sailing vessel, the railroad train of the wagon, the reaping
machine of the scythe, the threshing machine of the flail; could he have heard the throb of the
engines that in obedience to human will, and for the satisfaction of human desire, exert a power
greater than that of all the men and all the beasts of burden of the earth combined; could he have seen
the forest tree transformed into finished lumber—into doors, sashes, Winds, boxes or barrels,
with hardly the touch of a human hand; the great workshops where boots and shoes are turned out
by the case with less labor than the old-fashioned cobbler could have put on a sole; the factories
where, under the eye of a girl, cotton becomes cloth faster than hundreds of stalwart weavers could
have turned it out with their hand-looms; could he have seen steam hammers shaping mammoth
shafts and mighty anchors, and delicate machinery making tiny watches; the diamond drill cutting
through the heart of the rocks, and coal oil sparing the whale; could he have realized the enormous
saving of labor resulting from improved facilities of exchange and communication— sheep killed
in Australia eaten fresh in England, and the order given by the London banker in the afternoon
executed in San Francisco in the morning of the same day; could he have conceived of the hundred
thousand improvements which these only suggests, what would he have inferred as to the social
condition of mankind?
It would not have seemed like an inference; further than the vision went it would have
seemed as tough he saw; and his heart would have leaped and his nerves would have thrilled, as
one who from a height beholds just ahead of the thirststricken caravan the living gleam of rustling
woods and the glint of laughing waters. Plainly, in the sight of the imagination, he would have
beheld these new forces elevating society from its very foundations, lifting the very poorest above
the possibility of want, exempting the very lowest from anxiety for the material needs of life; he
would have seen these slaves of the lamp of knowledge taking on themselves the traditional curse,
these muscles of iron and sinews of steel making the poorest laborer's life a holiday, in which every
high quality and noble impulse could have scope to grow.
And out of these bounteous material conditions he would have seen arising, as necessary
sequences, moral conditions realizing the golden age of which mankind have always dreamed.
Youth no longer stunted and starved; age no longer harried by avarice; the child at play with the
tiger; the man with the muck-rake drinking in the glory of the stars! Foul things fled, fierce things
tame; discord turned to harmony! For how could there be greed where all had enough? How could
the vice, the crime, the ignorance, the brutality, that spring from poverty and the fear of poverty,
exist where poverty had vanished? Who should crouch where all were freemen; who oppress
where all were peers?
More or less vague or clear, these have been the hopes, these the dreams born of the
improvements which give this wonderful century its pre-eminence. They have sunk so deeply into
the popular mind as radically to change the currents of thought, to recast creeds and displace the
most fundamental conceptions. The haunting visions of higher possibilities have not merely
gathered splendor and vividness, but their direction has changed—instead of seeing behind the faint
tinges of an expiring sunset, all the glory of the daybreak has decked the skies before.
It is true that disappointment has followed disappointment, and that discovery upon
discovery, and invention after invention, have neither lessened the toil of those who most need
respite, nor brought plenty to the poor. But there have been so many things to which it seemed this
failure could be laid, that up to our time the new faith has hardly weakened. We have better
appreciated the difficulties to be overcome; but not the less trusted that the tendency of the times
was to overcome them.
Now, however, we are coming into collision with facts which there can be no mistaking.
From all parts of the civilized world come complaints of industrial depression; of labor condemned
to involuntary idleness; of capital massed and wasting; of pecuniary distress among business men;
of want and suffering and anxiety among the working classes. All the dull, deadening pain, all the
keen, maddening anguish, that to great masses of men are involved in the words "hard times,"
afflict the world to-day. This state of things, common to communities differing so widely in
situation, in political institutions, in fiscal and financial systems, in density of population and in
social organization, can hardly be accounted for by local causes. There is distress where large
standing armies are maintained, but there is also distress where the standing armies are nominal;
there is distress where protective tariffs stupidly and wastefully hamper trade, but there is also
distress where trade is nearly free; there is distress where autocratic government yet prevails, but
there is also distress where political power is wholly in the hands of the people; in countries where
paper is money, and in countries where gold and silver are the only currency. Evidently, beneath
all such things as these, we must infer a common cause
That there is a common cause, and that it is either what we call material progress or
something closely connected with material progress, becomes more than an inference when it is
noted that the phenomena we class together and speak of as industrial depressions are but
intensifications of phenomena which always accompany material progress, and which show
themselves more clearly and strongly as material progress goes on. Where the conditions to which
material progress everywhere tends are most fully realized—that is to say, where population is
densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly
developed—we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most of
enforced idleness....
This fact—the great fact that poverty and all its concomitants show themselves in
communities just as they develop into the conditions toward which material progress tends—
proves that the social difficulties existing wherever a certain stage of progress has been reached, do
not arise from local circumstances, but arc, in some way or another, engendered by progress
itself.
And, unpleasant as it may be to admit it, it is at last becoming evident that the enormous
increase in productive power which has marked the present century and is still going on with
accelerating ratio has no tendency to extirpate poverty or to lighten the burdens of those compelled to
toil. It simply widens the gulf between Dives and Lazarus, and makes the struggle for existence
more intense. The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the
boldest imagination could not have dreamed. But in factories where labor-saving machinery has
reached its most wonderful development, little children are at work; wherever the new forces are
anything like fully utilized, large classes are maintained by charity or live on the verge of recourse
to it; amid the greatest accumulations of wealth, men die of starvation, and puny infants suckle dry
breasts; while everywhere the greed of gain, the worship of wealth, shows the force of the fear of
want. The promised land flies before us like the mirage. The fruits of the tree of knowledge turn,
as we grasp them, to apples of Sodom that crumble at the touch.
It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure,
and refinement has been raised; but these gains are not general. In them the lowest class do not
share. I do not mean that the condition of the lowest class has nowhere nor in anything been
improved; but that there is nowhere any improvement which can be credited to increased
productive power. I mean that the tendency of what we call material progress is in nowise to
improve the condition of the lowest class in the essentials of healthy, happy human life. Nay,
more, that it is still further to depress the condition of the lowest class. The new forces, elevating
in their nature though they be, do not act upon the social fabric from underneath, as was for a long
time hoped and believed, but strike it at a point intermediate between top and bottom. It is as
though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society. Those
who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down.
This depressing effect is not generally realized, for it is not apparent where there has long
existed a class just able to live. Where the lowest class barely lives, as has been the case for a long
time in many parts of Europe, it is impossible for it to get any lower, for the next lowest step is out
of existence, and no tendency to further depression can readily show itself. But in the progress of
new settlements to the conditions of older communities it may clearly be seen that material progress
does not merely fail to relieve poverty—it actually produces it. In the United States it is clear that
squalor and misery, and the vices and crimes that spring from them, everywhere increase as the
village grows to the city, and the march of development brings the advantages of the improved
methods of production and exchange. It is in the older and richer sections of the Union that
pauperism and distress among the working classes are becoming most painfully apparent. If there is
less deep poverty in San Francisco than in New York, it is not because San Francisco is yet behind
New York in all that both cities are striving for? When San Francisco reaches the point where
New York now is, who can doubt that there will also be ragged and bare-footed children on her
streets?
This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times. It the central
fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world, and with
which statesmanship and philanthropy and education grapple in vain. From it come the clouds that
overhang the future of the most progressive and self-reliant nations. It is the riddle which the Sphinx
of Fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer is to be destroyed. So long as all the
increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase
luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want,
progress is not real and cannot be permanent. The reaction must come. The tower leans from its
foundations and every new story but hastens the final catastrophe. To educate men who must be
condemned to poverty, is but to make them restive; to base on a state of most glaring social
inequality political institutions under which men are theoretically equal, is to stand a pyramid on
its apex.
All-important as this question is, pressing itself from every quarter painfully upon
attention, it has not yet received a solution which accounts for all the facts and points to any clear
and simple remedy. This is shown by the widely varying at tempts to account for the prevailing
depression. They exhibit not merely a divergence between vulgar notions and scientific theories,
but also show that the concurrence which should exist between those who avow the same general
theories breaks up upon practical questions into an anarchy of opinion. Upon high economic
authority we have been told that the prevailing depression is due to overconsumption; upon equally
high authority, that it is due to over-production; while the wastes of war, the extension of railroads,
the attempts of workmen to keep up wages, the demonetization of silver, the issues of paper
money, the increase of labor-saving machinery, the opening of shorter avenues to trade, etc., are
separately pointed out as the cause, by writers of reputation.
BOOK VIII, CHAPTER II
The Single Tax
It is an axiom of statesmanship, which the successful founders of tyranny have
understood and acted upon—that great changes can best be brought about under old forms. We,
who would free men, should heed the same truth. It is the natural method. When nature would
make a higher type, she takes a lower one and develops it. This, also, is the law of social growth.
Let us work by it. With the current we may glide fast and far. Against it, it is hard pulling and slow
progress.
I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate private property in land. The first would
be unjust; the second, needless. Let the individuals who now hold it still retain, if they want to,
possession of what they are pleased to call their land. Let them continue to call it their land. Let
them buy and sell, and bequeath and devise it. We may safely leave them the shell, if we take the
kernel. It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent.
Nor to take rent for public uses is it necessary that the State should bother with the letting
of lands, and assume the chances of the favoritism, collusion, and corruption this might involve. It
is not necessary that any new machinery should be created. The machinery already exists. Instead
of extending it, all we have to do is to simplify and reduce it. By leaving to landowners a
percentage of rent which would probably be much less than the cost and loss involved in
attempting to rent lands through State agency, and by making use of this existing machinery, we
may, without jar or shock, assert the common right to land by taking rent for public uses.
We already take some rent in taxation. We have only to make some changes in our modes
of taxation to take it all.
What I, therefore, propose, as the simple yet sovereign remedy, which will raise wages,
increase the earnings of capital, extirpate pauperism, abolish poverty, give remunerative
employment to whoever wishes it, afford free scope to human powers, lessen crime, elevate
morals, and taste, and intelligence, purify government and carry civilization to yet nobler heights,
is—to appropriate rent by taxation.
In this way the State may become the universal landlord without calling herself so, and
without assuming a single new function. In form, the ownership of land would remain just as now.
No owner of land need be dispossessed, and no restriction need be placed upon the amount of land
any one could hold. For, rent being taken by the State in taxes, land, no matter in whose name it
stood, or in what parcels it was held, would be really common property, and every member of the
community would participate in the advantages of its ownership.
Now, insomuch as the taxation of rent, or land values, must necessarily be increased just
as we abolish other taxes, we may put the proposition into practical form by proposing—
To abolish all taxation save that upon land values.
William Dean Howells. A Defence of Realism (from the book Criticism and Fiction,
1891)
As for those called critics," the author [Edmund Burke] says [in the Philosophical Inquiry
into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756)], "they have generally sought
the rule of the arts in the wrong place; they have sought among poems, pictures, engravings,
statues, and buildings; but art can never give the rules that make an art. This is, I believe, the
reason why artists in general, and poets principally, have been confined in so narrow a circle;
they have been rather imitators of one another than of nature. Critics follow them, and therefore
can do little as guides. I can judge but poorly of anything while I measure it by no other standard
than itself. The true standard of the arts is in every man's power; and an easy observation of the
most common, sometimes of the meanest things, in nature will give the truest lights, where the
greatest sagacity and industry that slights such observation must leave us in the dark, or, what is
worse, amuse and mislead us by false lights."
If this should happen to be true—and it certainly commends itself to acceptance—it
might portend an immediate danger to the vested interests of criticism, only that it was written a
hundred years ago; and we shall probably have the "sagacity and industry that slights the
observation" of nature long enough yet to allow most critics the time to learn some more useful
trade than criticism as they pursue it. Nevertheless, I am in hopes that the communistic era in
taste foreshadowed by Burke is approaching, and that it will occur within the lives of men now
overawed by the foolish old superstition that literature and art are anything but the expression of
life, and are to be judged by any other test than that of their fidelity to it. The time is coming, I
hope, when each new author, each new artist, will be considered, not in his proportion to any
other author or artist, but in his relation to the human nature, known to us all, which it is his
privilege, his high duty, to interpret. "The true standard of the artist is in every man's power"
already, as Burke says; Michelangelo's "light of the piazza," the glance of the common eye, is
and always was the best light on a statue; Goethe's "boys and blackbirds" have in all ages been
the real connoisseurs of berries; but hitherto the mass of common men have been afraid to apply
their own simplicity, naturalness, and honesty to the appreciation of the beautiful. They have
always cast about for the instruction of some one who professed to know better, and who
browbeat wholesome common sense into the self-distrust that ends in sophistication. They have
fallen generally to the worst of this bad species, and have been "amused and misled" (how pretty
that quaint old use of amuse is!) "by the false lights" of critical vanity and self-righteousness.
They have been taught to compare what they see and what they read, not with the things that
they have observed and known, but with the things that some other artist or writer has done.
Especially if they have themselves the artistic impulse in any direction they are taught to form
themselves, not upon life, but upon the masters who became masters only by forming themselves
upon life. The seeds of death are planted in them, and they can produce only the still-born, the
academic. They are not told to take their work into the public square and see if it seems true to
the chance passer, but to test it by the work of the very men who refused and decried any other
test of their own work. The young writer who attempts to report the phrase and carriage of everyday life, who tries to tell just how he has heard men talk and seen them look, is made to feel
guilty of something low and unworthy by the stupid people who would like to have him show
how Shakespeare's
men talked and looked, or Scott’s, or Thackeray's, or Balzac's, or Hawthorne's, or
Dickens's; he is instndori to idealize his personages, that is, to take the life-likeness out of them,
and-put the book-likeness into them. He is approached in the spirit of the wretched pedantry into
which learning, much or little, always decays when it withdraws itself and stands apart from
experience in an attitude of imagined superiority, and which would say with the same confidence
to the scientists: "I see that you are looking at a grasshopper there which you have found in the
grass, and I suppose ycu intend to describe it. Now don't waste your time and sin against culture
in that w ay. I've got a grasshopper here, which has been evolved at considerable pains and
expense out of the grasshopper in general; in fact, it's a type. It's made up of wire and card-board,
very prettily painted in a conventional tint, and it's perfectly indestructible. It isn't very much like
a real grasshopper, but it's a great deal nicer, and it's served to represent the notion of a
grasshopper ever since man emerged from barbarism. You may say that it's artificial. Well, it is
artificial; but then it's ideal too; and what you want to do is to cultivate the ideal. You'll find the
books full of my kind of grasshopper, and scarcely a trace of yours in any of them. The thing that
you are proposing to do is commonplace; but if you say that it isn' t commonplace, for the very
reason that it hasn't been done before, you'll have to admit that it's photographic."
As I said, I hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but the common, average
man, who always "has the standard of the arts in his power," will have also the courage to apply
it, and will reject the ideal grasshopper wherever he finds it, in science, in literature, in art,
because it is not "simple, natural, and honest," because it is not like a real grasshopper. But I will
own that I think the time is yet far off, and that the people who have been brought up on the ideal
grasshopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted,
adventureful, good old romantic card-board grasshopper, must die out before the simple, honest,
and natural grasshopper can have a fair field. I am in no haste to compass the end of these good
people, whom I find in the mean time very amusing. It is delightful to meet one of them, either in
print or out of it—some sweet elderly lady or excellent gentleman whose youth was pastured on
the literature of thirty or forty years ago— and to witness the confidence with which they preach
their favorite authors as all the law and the prophets. They have commonly read little or nothing
since, or, if they have, they have judged it by a standard taken from these authors, and never
dreamed of judging it by nature; they are destitute of the documents in the case of the later
writers; they suppose that Balzac was the beginning of realism, and that Zola is its wicked end;
they are quite ignorant, but they are ready to talk you down, if you differ from them, with an
assumption of knowledge sufficient for any occasion. The horror, the resentment, with which
they receive any question of their literary saints is genuine; you descend at once very far in the
moral and social scale, and anything short of offensive personality is too good for you; it is expressed to you that you are one to be avoided, and put down even a little lower than you have
naturally fallen.
These worthy persons are not to blame; it is part of their intellectual mission to represent
the petrifaction of taste, and to preserve an image of a smaller and cruder and emptier world than
we now live in, a world which was feeling its way towards the simple, the natural, the honest,
but was a good deal "amused and misled" by lights now no longer mistakable for heavenly
luminaries. They belong to a time, just passing away, when certain authors were considered
authorities in certain kinds, when they must be accepted entire and not questioned in any
particular. Now we are beginning to see and to say that no author is an authority except in those
moments when he held his ear close to Nature's lips and caught her very accent. These moments
are not continuous with any authors in the past, and they are rare with all. Therefore I am not
afraid to say now that the greatest classics are sometimes not at all great, and that we can profit
by them only when we hold them, like our meanest contemporaries, to a strict accounting, and
verify their work by the standard of the arts which we all have in our power, the simple, the
natural, and the honest.
Those good people, those curious and interesting if somewhat musty back-numbers, must
always have a hero, an idol of some sort, and it is droll to find Balzac, who suffered from their
sort such bitter scorn and hate for his realism while he was alive, now become a fetich in his
turn, to be shaken in the faces of those who will not blindly worship him. But it is no new thing
in the history of literature: whatever is established is sacred with those who do not think. At the
beginning of the century, when romance was making the same fight against effete classicism
which realism is making to-day against effete romanticism, the Italian poet Monti declared that
"the romantic was the cold grave of the Beautiful," just as the realistic is now supposed to be.
The romantic of that day and the real of this are in certain degree the same. Romanticism then
sought, as realism seeks now, to widen the bounds of sympathy, to level every barrier against
aesthetic freedom, to escape from the paralysis of tradition. It exhausted itself in this impulse;
and it remained for realism to assert that fidelity to experience and probability of motive are
essential conditions of a great imaginative literature. It is not a new theory, but it has never
before universally characterized literary endeavor. When realism becomes false to itself, when it
heaps up facts merely, and maps life instead of picturing it, realism will perish too. Every true
realist instinctively knows this, and it is perhaps the reason why he is careful of every fact, and
feels himself bound to express or to indicate its meaning at the risk of overmoralizing. In life he
finds nothing insignificant; all tells for destiny and character; nothing that God has made is
contemptible. He cannot look upon human life and declare this thing or that thing unworthy of
notice, any more than the scientist can declare a fact of the material world beneath the dignity of
his inquiry. He feels in every nerve the equality of things and the unity of men; his soul is
exalted, not by vain shows and shadows and ideals, but by realities, in which alone the truth
lives. In criticism it is his business to break the images of false gods and misshapen heroes, to
take away the poor silly toys that many grown people would still like to play with. He cannot
keep terms with Jack the Giant-killer or Puss in Boots, under any name or in any place, even
when they reappear as the convict Vautrec, or the Marquis de Montrivaut, or the Sworn Thirteen
Noblemen. He must say to himself that Balzac, when he imagined these monsters, was not
Balzac, he was Dumas; he was not realistic, he was romantic.
16. Breaking New Ground
"How few materials," says Emerson, "are yet used by our arts! The mass of creatures and
of qualities are still hid and expectant," and to break new ground is still one of the uncommonest
and most heroic of the virtues. The artists are not alone to blame for the timidity that keeps them
in the old furrows of the worn-out fields; most of those whom they live to please, or live by
pleasing, prefer to have them remain there; it wants rare virtue to appreciate what is new, as well
as to invent it; and the "easy things to understand" are the conventional things. This is why the
ordinary English novel, with its hackneyed plot, scenes, and figures, is more comfortable to the
ordinary American than an American novel, which deals, at its worst, with comparatively new
interests and motives. To adjust one's self to the enjoyment of these costs an intellectual effort,
and an intellectual effort is what no ordinary person likes to make. It is only the extraordinary
person who can say, with Emerson: "I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic. I embrace
the common; I sit at the feet of the familiar and the low. Man is surprised to find that things near
are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The perception of the worth of the vulgar
is fruitful in discoveries. The foolish man wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual..
To-day always looks mean to the thoughtless; but to-day is a king in disguise. Banks and tariffs,
the newspaper and caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest
on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Delphos."
Perhaps we ought not to deny their town of Troy and their temple of Delphos to the dull
people; but if we ought, and if we did, they would still insist upon having them. An English
novel, full of titles and rank, is apparently essential to the happiness of such people; their weak
and childish imagination is at home in its familiar environment; they know what they are
reading; the fact that it is hash many times warmed over reassures them; whereas a story of our
own life, honestly studied and faithfully represented, troubles them with varied misgiving. They
are not sure that it is literature; they do not feel that it is good society; its characters, so like their
own, strike them as commonplace; they say they do not wish to know such people.
Everything in England is appreciable to the literary sense, while the sense of the literary
worth of things in America is still faint and weak with most people, with the vast majority who
"ask for the great, the remote, the romantic," who cannot "embrace the common," cannot "sit at
the feet of the familiar and the low," in the good company of Emerson. We are all, or nearly all,
struggling to be distinguished from the mass, and to be set apart in select circles and upper
classes like the fine people we have read about. We are really a mixture of the plebeian
ingredients of the whole world; but that is not bad; our vulgarity consists in trying to ignore "the
worth of the vulgar," in believing that the superfine is better.
18. Tests of Fiction
In General Grant's confession of novel-reading there is a sort of inference that he had
wasted his time, or else the guilty conscience of the novelist in me imagines such an inference.
But however this may be, there is certainly no question concerning the intention of a
correspondent who once wrote to me after reading some rather bragging claims I had made for
fiction as a mental and moral means. "I have very grave doubts," he said, "as to the whole list of
magnificent things that you seem to think novels have done for the race, and can witness in
myself many evil things which they have done for me. Whatever in my mental make-up is wild
and visionary, whatever is untrue, whatever is injurious, I can trace to the perusal of some work
of fiction. Worse than that, they beget such high-strung and supersensitive ideas of life that plain
industry and plodding perseverance are despised, and matter-of-fact poverty, or every-day,
commonplace distress, meets with no sympathy, if indeed noticed at all, by one who has wept
over the impossibly accumulated sufferings of some gaudy hero or heroine."
I am not sure that I had the controversy with this correspondent that he seemed to
suppose; but novels are now so fully accepted by every one pretending to cultivated taste—and
they really form the whole intellectual life of such immense numbers of people, without question
of their influence, good or bad, upon the mind— that it is refreshing to have them frankly
denounced, and to be invited to revise one's ideas and feelings in regard to them. A little honesty,
or a great deal of honesty, in this quest will do the novel, as we hope yet to have it, and as we
have already begun to have it, no harm; and for my own part I will confess that I believe fiction
in the past to have been largely injurious, as I believe the stage play to be still almost wholly
injurious, through its falsehood, its folly, its wantonness, and its aimlessness. It may be safely
assumed that most of the novel-reading which people fancy an intellectual pastime is the
emptiest dissipation, hardly more related to thought or the wholesome exercise of the mental
faculties than opium-eating; in either case the brain is drugged, and left weaker and crazier for
the debauch. If this may be called the negative result of the fiction habit, the positive injury that
most novels work is by no means so easily to be measured in the case of young men whose
character they help so much to form or deform, and the women of all ages whom they keep so
much in ignorance of the world they misrepresent. Grown men have little harm from them, but in
the other cases, which are the vast majority, they hurt because they are not true—not because
they are malevolent, but because they are idle lies about human nature and the social fabric,
which it behooves us to know and to understand, that we may deal justly with ourselves and with
one another. One need not go so far as our correspondent, and trace to the fiction habit "whatever
is wild and visionary, whatever is untrue, whatever is injurious," in one's life; bad as the fiction
habit is it is probably not responsible for the whole sum of evil in its victims, and I believe that if
the reader will use care in choosing from this fungus-growth with which the fields of literature
teem every day, he may nourish himself as with the true mushroom, at no risk from the
poisonous species.
The tests are very plain and simple, and they are perfectly infallible. If a novel flatters the
passions, and exalts them above the principles, it is poisonous; it may not kill, but it will
certainly injure; and this test will alone exclude an entire class of fiction, of which eminent
examples will occur to all. Then the whole spawn of so-called unmoral romances, which imagine
a world where the sins of sense are un-visited by the penalties following, swift or slow, but
inexorably sure, in the real world, are deadly poison: these do kill. The novels that merely tickle
our prejudices and lull our judgment, or that coddle our sensibilities or pamper our gross appetite
for the marvelous, are not so fatal, but they are innutritious, and clog the soul with unwholesome
vapors of all kinds. No doubt they too help to weaken the moral fiber, and make their readers
indifferent to "plodding perseverance and plain industry," and to "matter-of-fact poverty and
commonplace distress."
Without taking them too seriously, it still must be owned that the "gaudy hero and
heroine" are to blame for a great deal of harm in the world. That heroine long taught by example,
if not precept, that Love, or the passion or fancy she mistook for it, was the chief interest of a
life, which is really concerned with a great many other things; that it was lasting in the way she
knew it; that it was worthy of every sacrifice, and was altogether a finer thing than prudence,
obedience, reason; that love alone was glorious and beautiful, and these were mean and ugly in
comparison with it. More lately she has begun to idolize and illustrate Duty, and she is hardly
less mischievous in this new role, opposing duty, as she did love, to prudence, obedience, and
reason. The stock hero, whom, if we met him, we could not fail to see was a most deplorable
person, has undoubtedly imposed himself upon the victims of the fiction habit as admirable.
With him, too, love was and is the great affair, whether in its old romantic phase of chivalrous
achievement or manifold suffering for love's sake, or its more recent development of the "virile,"
the bullying, and the brutal, or its still more recent agonies of self-sacrifice, as idle and useless as
the moral experiences of the insane asylums. With his vain posturings and his ridiculous
splendor he is really a painted barbarian, the prey of his passions and his delusions, full of
obsolete ideals, and the motives and ethics of a savage, which the guilty author of his being does
his best—or his worst—in spite of his own light and knowledge, to foist upon the reader as
something generous and noble. I am not merely bringing this charge against that sort of fiction
which is beneath literature and outside of it, "the shoreless lakes of ditch-water," whose miasms
fill the air below the empyrean where the great ones sit; but I am accusing the work of some of
the most famous, who have, in this instance or in that, sinned against the truth, which can alone
exalt and purify men. I do not say that they have constantly done so, or even commonly done so;
but that they have done so at all marks them as of the past, to be read with the due historical
allowance for their epoch and their conditions. For I believe that, while inferior writers will and
must continue to imitate them in their foibles and their errors, no one hereafter will be able to
achieve greatness who is false to humanity, either in its facts or its duties. The light of
civilization has already broken even upon the novel, and no conscientious man can now set about
painting an image of life without perpetual question of the verity of his work, and without feeling
bound to distinguish so clearly that no reader of his may be misled, between what is right and
what is wrong, what is noble and what is base, what is health and what is perdition, in the actions
and the characters he portrays.
The fiction that aims merely to entertain—the fiction that is to serious fiction as the
opera-bouffe, the ballet, and the pantomime are to the true drama—need not feci the burden of
this obligation so deeply: but even such fiction will not be gay or trivial to any reader's hurts, and
criticism will hold it to account if it passes from painting to teaching folly.
More and more not only the criticism which prints its opinions, but the infinitely vaster
and powerfuler criticism which thinks and feels them merely, will make this demand. I confess
that I do not care to judge any work of the imagination without first of all applying this test to it.
We must ask ourselves before we ask anything else, Is it true?—true to the motives, the
impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women? This truth, which
necessarily includes the highest morality and the highest artistry—this truth given, the book
cannot be wicked and cannot be weak; and without it all graces of style and feats of invention
and cunning of construction are so many superfluities of naughtiness. It is well for the truth to
have all these, and shine in them, but for falsehood they are merely meretricious, the
bedizenment of the wanton; they atone for nothing, they count for nothing. But in fact they come
naturally of truth, and grace it without solicitation; they are added unto it. In the whole range of
fiction we know of no true picture of life—that is, of human nature—which is not also a
masterpiece of literature, full of divine and natural beauty. It may have no touch or tint of this
special civilization or of that; it had better have this local color well ascertained; but the truth is
deeper and finer than aspects, and if the book is true to what men and women know of one
another's souls it will be true enough, and it will be great and beautiful. It is the conception of
literature as something apart from life, super-finely aloof, which makes it really unimportant to
the great mass of mankind, without a message or a meaning for them; and it is the notion that a
novel may be false in its portrayal of causes and effects that makes literary art contemptible even
to those whom it amuses, that forbids them to regard the novelist as a serious or right-minded
person. If they do not in some moment of indignation cry out against all novels, as my
correspondent does, they remain besotted in the fume of the delusions purveyed to them, with no
higher feeling for the author than such maudlin affection as the habitue of an opium-joint
perhaps knows for the attendant who fills his pipe with the drug.
Or, as in the case of another correspondent who writes that in his youth he "read a great
many novels, but always regarded it as an amusement, like horse-racing and card-playing," for
which he had no time when he entered upon the serious business of life, it renders them merely
contemptuous. His view of the matter may be commended to the brotherhood and sisterhood of
novelists as full of wholesome if bitter suggestion; and we urge them not to dismiss it with high
literary scorn as that of some Boeotian dull to the beauty of art. Refuse it as we may, it is still the
feeling of the vast majority of people for whom life is earnest, and who find only a distorted and
misleading likeness of it in our books. We may fold ourselves in our scholars' gowns, and close
the doors of our studies, and affect to despise this rude voice; but we cannot shut it out. It comes
to us from wherever men are at work, from wherever they are truly living, and accuses us of
unfaithfulness, of triviality, of mere stage-play; and none of us can escape conviction except he
prove himself worthy of his time—a time in which the great masters have brought literature back
to life, and filled its ebbing veins with the red tides of reality. We cannot all equal them; we need
not copy them; but we can all go to the sources of their inspiration and their power; and to draw
from these no one need go far—no one need really go out of himself.
Fifty years ago, Carlyle, in whom the truth was always alive, but in whom it was then
unperverted by suffering, by celebrity, and by despair, wrote in his study of Diderot: "Were it not
reasonable to prophesy that this exceeding great multitude of novel-writers and such like must, in
a new generation, gradually do one of two things; either retire into the nurseries, and work for
children, minors, and semi-fatuous persons of both sexes, or else, what were far better, sweep
their novel-fabric into the dust-cart, and betake themselves with such faculty as they have to
understand and record what is true, of which surely there is, and will forever be, a whole
infinitude unknown to us of infinite importance to us? Poetry, it will more and more come to be
understood, is nothing but higher knowledge; and the only genuine Romance (for grown
persons), Reality."
If, after half a century, fiction still mainly works for "children, minors, and semi-fatuous
persons of both sexes," it is nevertheless one of the hopefulest signs of the world's progress that
it has begun to work for "grown persons," and if not exactly in the way that Carlyle might have
solely intended in urging its writers to compile memoirs instead of building the "novel-fabric,"
still it has, in the highest and widest sense, already made Reality its Romance. I cannot judge it, I
do not even care for it, except as it has done this; and I can hardly conceive of a literary selfrespect in these days compatible with the old trade of make-believe, with the production of the
kind of fiction which is too much honored by classification with card-playing and horse-racing.
But let fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the
motives and passions in the measure we all know; let it leave off painting dolls and working
them by springs and wires; let it show the different interests in their true proportions; let it
forbear to preach pride and revenge, folly and insanity, egotism and prejudice, but frankly own
these for what they are, in whatever figures and occasions they appear; let it not put on fine
literary airs; let it speak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know—the language of
unaffected people everywhere-—and there can be no doubt of an unlimited future, not only of
delightfulness but of usefulness, for it.
Virginia Woolf. Modern Fiction (1919)
In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern fiction, it is difficult not to
take it for granted that the modern practice of the art is somehow an improvement upon the old.
With their simple tools and primitive materials, it might be said, Fielding did well and Jane
Austen even better, but compare their opportunities with ours! Their masterpieces certainly have
a strange air of simplicity. And yet the analogy between literature and the process, to choose an
example, of making motor cars scarcely holds good beyond the first glance. It is doubtful
whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we
have learnt anything about making literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be
said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular
tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. It
need scarcely be said that we make no claim to stand, even momentarily, upon that vantage
ground. On the flat, in the crowd, half blind with dust, we look back with envy to those happier
warriors, whose battle is won and whose achievements wear so serene an air of accomplishment
that we can scarcely refrain from whispering that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us. It
is for the historian of literature to decide; for him to say if we are now beginning or ending or
standing in the middle of a great period of prose fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We
only know that certain gratitudes and hostilities inspire us; that certain paths seem to lead to
fertile land, others to the dust and the desert; and of this perhaps it may be worth while to attempt
some account.
Our quarrel, then, is not with the classics, and if we speak of quarrelling with Mr. Wells,
Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy, it is partly that by the mere fact of their existence in the flesh
their work has a living, breathing, everyday imperfection which bids us take what liberties with it
we choose. But it is also true that, while we thank them for a thousand gifts, we reserve our
unconditional gratitude for Mr. Hardy, for Mr. Conrad, and in a much lesser degree for the Mr.
Hudson of The Purple Land, Green Mansions, and Far Away and Long Ago. Mr. Wells, Mr.
Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy have excited so many hopes and disappointed them so persistently
that our gratitude largely takes the form of thanking them for having shown us what they might
have done but have not done; what we certainly could not do, but as certainly, perhaps, do not
wish to do. No single phrase will sum up the charge or grievance which we have to bring against
a mass of work so large in its volume and embodying so many qualities, both admirable and the
reverse. If we tried to formulate our meaning in one word we should say that these three writers
are materialists. It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they
have disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that the sooner English fiction turns its back
upon them, as politely as may be, and marches, if only into the desert, the better for its soul.
Naturally, no single word reaches the centre of three separate targets. In the case of Mr. Wells it
falls notably wide of the mark. And yet even with him it indicates to our thinking the fatal alloy
in his genius, the great clod of clay that has got itself mixed up with the purity of his inspiration.
But Mr. Bennett is perhaps the worst culprit of the three, inasmuch as he is by far the best
workman. He can make a book so well constructed and solid in its craftsmanship that it is
difficult for the most exacting of critics to see through what chink or crevice decay can creep in.
There is not so much as a draught between the frames of the windows, or a crack in the boards.
And yet — if life should refuse to live there? That is a risk which the creator of The Old Wives’
Tale, George Cannon, Edwin Clayhanger, and hosts of other figures, may well claim to have
surmounted. His characters live abundantly, even unexpectedly, but it remains to ask how do
they live, and what do they live for? More and more they seem to us, deserting even the wellbuilt villa in the Five Towns, to spend their time in some softly padded first-class railway
carriage, pressing bells and buttons innumerable; and the destiny to which they travel so
luxuriously becomes more and more unquestionably an eternity of bliss spent in the very best
hotel in Brighton. It can scarcely be said of Mr. Wells that he is a materialist in the sense that he
takes too much delight in the solidity of his fabric. His mind is too generous in its sympathies to
allow him to spend much time in making things shipshape and substantial. He is a materialist
from sheer goodness of heart, taking upon his shoulders the work that ought to have been
discharged by Government officials, and in the plethora of his ideas and facts scarcely having
leisure to realise, or forgetting to think important, the crudity and coarseness of his human
beings. Yet what more damaging criticism can there be both of his earth and of his Heaven than
that they are to be inhabited here and hereafter by his Joans and his Peters? Does not the
inferiority of their natures tarnish whatever institutions and ideals may be provided for them by
the generosity of their creator? Nor, profoundly though we respect the integrity and humanity of
Mr. Galsworthy, shall we find what we seek in his pages.
If we fasten, then, one label on all these books, on which is one word materialists, we
mean by it that they write of unimportant things; that they spend immense skill and immense
industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.
We have to admit that we are exacting, and, further, that we find it difficult to justify our
discontent by explaining what it is that we exact. We frame our question differently at different
times. But it reappears most persistently as we drop the finished novel on the crest of a sigh — Is
it worth while? What is the point of it all? Can it be that, owing to one of those little deviations
which the human spirit seems to make from time to time, Mr. Bennett has come down with his
magnificent apparatus for catching life just an inch or two on the wrong side? Life escapes; and
perhaps without life nothing else is worth while. It is a confession of vagueness to have to make
use of such a figure as this, but we scarcely better the matter by speaking, as critics are prone to
do, of reality. Admitting the vagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the
opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than
secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential
thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments
as we provide. Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and
thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds.
So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not
merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the
light of the conception. The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some
powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy,
tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his
figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their
coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes,
more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as
the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?
Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”. Examine for a moment
an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial,
fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an
incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of
Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not
here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he
chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon
convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the
accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it.
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the
task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever
aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as
possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the
proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.
It is, at any rate, in some such fashion as this that we seek to define the quality which
distinguishes the work of several young writers, among whom Mr. James Joyce is the most
notable, from that of their predecessors. They attempt to come closer to life, and to preserve
more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them, even if to do so they must discard
most of the conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist. Let us record the atoms
as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however
disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the
consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly
thought big than in what is commonly thought small. Any one who has read The Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man or, what promises to be a far more interesting work, Ulysses,9 now
appearing in the Little Review, will have hazarded some theory of this nature as to Mr. Joyce’s
intention. On our part, with such a fragment before us, it is hazarded rather than affirmed; but
whatever the intention of the whole, there can be no question but that it is of the utmost sincerity
and that the result, difficult or unpleasant as we may judge it, is undeniably important. In contrast
with those whom we have called materialists, Mr. Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs
to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain,
and in order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him
adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence, or any other of these signposts which for
generations have served to support the imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what
he can neither touch nor see. The scene in the cemetery, for instance, with its brilliancy, its
sordidity, its incoherence, its sudden lightning flashes of significance, does undoubtedly come so
close to the quick of the mind that, on a first reading at any rate, it is difficult not to acclaim a
masterpiece. If we want life itself, here surely we have it. Indeed, we find ourselves fumbling
rather awkwardly if we try to say what else we wish, and for what reason a work of such
originality yet fails to compare, for we must take high examples, with Youth or The Mayor of
Casterbridge. It fails because of the comparative poverty of the writer’s mind, we might say
simply and have done with it. But it is possible to press a little further and wonder whether we
may not refer our sense of being in a bright yet narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than
enlarged and set free, to some limitation imposed by the method as well as by the mind. Is it the
method that inhibits the creative power? Is it due to the method that we feel neither jovial nor
magnanimous, but centred in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces
or creates what is outside itself and beyond? Does the emphasis laid, perhaps didactically, upon
indecency, contribute to the effect of something angular and isolated? Or is it merely that in any
effort of such originality it is much easier, for contemporaries especially, to feel what it lacks
than to name what it gives? In any case it is a mistake to stand outside examining “methods”.
Any method is right, every method is right, that expresses what we wish to express, if we are
writers; that brings us closer to the novelist’s intention if we are readers. This method has the
merit of bringing us closer to what we were prepared to call life itself; did not the reading of
Ulysses suggest how much of life is excluded or ignored, and did it not come with a shock to
open Tristram Shandy or even Pendennis and be by them convinced that there are not only other
aspects of life, but more important ones into the bargain.
9
Written April 1919.
However this may be, the problem before the novelist at present, as we suppose it to have
been in the past, is to contrive means of being free to set down what he chooses. He has to have
the courage to say that what interests him is no longer “this” but “that”: out of “that” alone must
he construct his work. For the moderns “that”, the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark
places of psychology. At once, therefore, the accent falls a little differently; the emphasis is upon
something hitherto ignored; at once a different outline of form becomes necessary, difficult for
us to grasp, incomprehensible to our predecessors. No one but a modern, no one perhaps but a
Russian, would have felt the interest of the situation which Tchekov has made into the short
story which he calls “Gusev”. Some Russian soldiers lie ill on board a ship which is taking them
back to Russia. We are given a few scraps of their talk and some of their thoughts; then one of
them dies and is carried away; the talk goes on among the others for a time, until Gusev himself
dies, and looking “like a carrot or a radish” is thrown overboard. The emphasis is laid upon such
unexpected places that at first it seems as if there were no emphasis at all; and then, as the eyes
accustom themselves to twilight and discern the shapes of things in a room we see how complete
the story is, how profound, and how truly in obedience to his vision Tchekov has chosen this,
that, and the other, and placed them together to compose something new. But it is impossible to
say “this is comic”, or “that is tragic”, nor are we certain, since short stories, we have been
taught, should be brief and conclusive, whether this, which is vague and inconclusive, should be
called a short story at all.
The most elementary remarks upon modern English fiction can hardly avoid some
mention of the Russian influence, and if the Russians are mentioned one runs the risk of feeling
that to write of any fiction save theirs is waste of time. If we want understanding of the soul and
heart where else shall we find it of comparable profundity? If we are sick of our own materialism
the least considerable of their novelists has by right of birth a natural reverence for the human
spirit. “Learn to make yourself akin to people. . . . But let this sympathy be not with the mind —
for it is easy with the mind — but with the heart, with love towards them.” In every great
Russian writer we seem to discern the features of a saint, if sympathy for the sufferings of others,
love towards them, endeavour to reach some goal worthy of the most exacting demands of the
spirit constitute saintliness. It is the saint in them which confounds us with a feeling of our own
irreligious triviality, and turns so many of our famous novels to tinsel and trickery. The
conclusions of the Russian mind, thus comprehensive and compassionate, are inevitably,
perhaps, of the utmost sadness. More accurately indeed we might speak of the inconclusiveness
of the Russian mind. It is the sense that there is no answer, that if honestly examined life presents
question after question which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over in hopeless
interrogation that fills us with a deep, and finally it may be with a resentful, despair. They are
right perhaps; unquestionably they see further than we do and without our gross impediments of
vision. But perhaps we see something that escapes them, or why should this voice of protest mix
itself with our gloom? The voice of protest is the voice of another and an ancient civilisation
which seems to have bred in us the instinct to enjoy and fight rather than to suffer and
understand. English fiction from Sterne to Meredith bears witness to our natural delight in
humour and comedy, in the beauty of earth, in the activities of the intellect, and in the splendour
of the body. But any deductions that we may draw from the comparison of two fictions so
immeasurably far apart are futile save indeed as they flood us with a view of the infinite
possibilities of the art and remind us that there is no limit to the horizon, and that nothing — no
“method”, no experiment, even of the wildest — is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence. “The
proper stuff of fiction” does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling,
every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss. And
if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly
bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and
her sovereignty assured.
Oswald Spengler. The Decline of the West (1918-1921)
Tables of civilization models
Phase
Indian
from 1500 BC
Classical
from 1100 BC
Arabian
from 0
Western
from 900
Birth of a myth of the grand style expressing a new God-feeling. World-fear and world-longing
1500–1200 BC
•
Vedic
religion
•
Aryan
hero-tales
1100–800 BC
•
HellenicItalian "Demeter"
religion of the people
•
Homer
•
Heracles and
Theseus legends
1–300
•
Primitive
Christianity
(Mandaeans, Marcion,
gnosis)
•
Syncretism
(Mithras, Baal)
•
Gospels
•
Apocalypses
•
Christian,
Mazdaist and pagan
legends
900–1200
•
German
Catholicism
•
Edda (Balder)
•
Bernard of
Clairvaux, Joachim of
Floris, Francis of
Assisi
•
Popular epos
(Siegfried)
•
Chivalric epos
(Grail)
•
Western
legends of the saints
Spring
Landscapely
intuitive. Great
creations of the
newly awakened
dream-heavy
soul.
Earliest mystical-metaphysical shaping of the new world-outlook. Zenith of Scholasticism
Suprapersonal
unity and fullness
Preserved in the
•
Oldest (oral) •
Origen († 254), •
Thomas
oldest parts of the
Orphic, Etruscan
Plotinus († 269)
Aquinas († 1274)
Vedas
discipline
•
Mani († 276), •
Duns Scotus
•
After-effect: Iamblichus († 330)
(† 1308)
Hesiod, cosmogonies •
Avesta,
•
Dante
Talmud, patristic
Alighieri († 1321)
literature
•
Meister
Eckhart († 1329)
•
Mysticism
•
Scholasticism
Summer
Ripening
consciousness.
Earliest urban
and critical
stirrings
Reformation: internal popular opposition to the great springtime forms
10th–9th
century BC
•
Brahmanas,
oldest elements of
the Upanishads
7th century BC
•
Orphic
movement
•
Dionysiac
religion
•
Religion of
Numa Pompilius
•
Augustine of
Hippo († 430)
•
Nestorianism
(ca. 430)
•
Monophysitism
(ca. 450)
•
Mazdak
(ca. 500)
•
Nicolaus
Cusanus († 1464)
•
Hus († 1415),
Savonarola, Karlstadt,
Luther, Calvin († 1564)
Beginning of a purely philosophical form of the world-feeling. Opposition of idealistic and
realistic systems
Preserved in the
Upanishads
6th–5th century BC
•
The great
6–7th century
•
Byzantine,
16–17th century
•
Galileo Galilei
pre-Socratics
Jewish, Syrian, Coptic
and Persian literature
•
Francis Bacon
•
René
Descartes
•
Giordano
Bruno
•
Jakob Böhme
•
Gottfried
Leibniz
Formation of a new mathematic conception of number as copy and content of world-form
Missing
Number as magnitude
(measure)
•
Geometry,
arithmetic
•
Pythagoreans
(from 540)
The indefinite number
(algebra)
•
Development
not yet investigated
Number as function
(analysis)
•
Descartes,
Pascal, Fermat
(ca. 1630)
•
Newton,
Leibniz (ca. 1670)
Puritanism. Rationalistic-mystic impoverishment of religion
Traces in the
Upanishads
•
Pythagorean
Society (from 540)
•
Mohammed
(622)
•
Paulicians and
Iconoclasts (from 650)
•
English
Puritans since 1620
•
French
Jansenists since 1640
(Port Royal)
"Enlightenment". Belief in the almightiness of reason. Cult of "Nature". "Rational" religion
Sutras; Sankhya;
Buddha; later
Upanishads
•
Sophism (5th
century BC)
•
Socrates
(† 399 BC)
•
Democritus
(† ca. 360 BC)
•
•
•
Nazzam
•
Mutazilite
Sufism
Ibrahim alAl-Kindi
•
Sensualism
•
John Locke
•
Encyclopedie
•
Voltaire
•
Jean Jacques
Rousseau
Zenith of mathematical thought. Elucidation of the world of numerical concepts
Autumn
Zero as a number
•
Archytas
•
Number theory •
Leonhard
Intelligence of the
(†
365)
Euler
(†
1783),
Joseph•
Spherical
city. Zenith of
Louis
Lagrange
•
Plato
(†
346)
trigonometry
rigorous
(† 1813)
•
Eudoxus
conceptualization
•
Pierre-Simon
(† 355) (conic
Laplace († 1827) (the
section)
infinitesimal problem)
The great conclusive systems
Idealism: Yoga,
Vedanta
Epistemology:
Vaisheshika Logic:
Nyaya
Winter
Onset of
cosmopolitan
civilization. End
of crystallization
of emotions into
concepts. Life
itself becomes
problematical.
Ethical-practical
tendencies of a
realized
•
Plato
(† 346 BC)
•
Aristotle
(† 322 BC)
•
Al-Farabi
(† 950)
•
Avicenna
(† ca. 1000)
Goethe, Kant
•
Schelling
•
Hegel
•
Fichte
Crystallized world-view. Cult of holistic understanding and emotionlessness
Sankhya, Cārvāka
(Lokoyata)
Cynics, Cyrenaics,
last Sophists
(Pyrrhon)
•
Communistic,
atheistic, Epicurean
sects of Abbasid times
•
Brethren of
Sincerity
Bentham, Comte,
Darwin, Spencer,
Stirner, Marx,
Feuerbach
Ethical-social ideals of life. Epoch of "nonmathematical philosophy". "Skepsis"
Tendencies in
Buddha's time
•
Hellenism
•
Epicurus
(† 270 BC), Zeno
Movements in Islam
•
Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche
•
Socialism,
(† 265 BC)
cosmopolitanism
anarchism
•
Hebbel,
Wagner, Ibsen
Inner completion of the world of mathematical concepts. The concluding thought
(lost)
•
Euclid,
Apollonius
(ca. 300 BC)
•
Archimedes
(ca. 250 BC)
•
Al-Khwarizmi
(800), ibn Qurra (850)
•
Al-Karaji, AlBiruni (10th century)
•
Gauss
(† 1855), Cauchy
(† 1857)
•
Riemann
(† 1866)
Degradation of abstract thinking into professional lecture-room philosophy. Compendium
literature
•
The "six
classical systems"
•
The
Academy,
Peripatetics, Stoics,
Epicureans
Schools of Baghdad and •
Basra
•
•
Kantianism
Logic
Psychology
Spread of a final world-sentiment
Indian Buddhism
since 500
Hellenistic-Roman
Stoicism since 200
The practical fatalism in The spread of ethical
Islam since 1000
socialism from 1900
Artistic epochs
Phase
Precultural period
Chaos of primitive
expression forms. Mystical
symbolism and naive
imitation
Culture
Life history
of a style
formative
of the
entire outer
being.
Formlanguage of
deepest
Early period
symbolic
Ornamentation
necessity
and
architecture as
elementary
expression of
the young
world-feeling
(the
"primitives")
Egyptian
Classical
Arabian
Western
•
Thinite
period (3400–
3000 BC)
•
Mycenian age
(1600–1100 BC)
•
Late Egyptian
(Minoan)
•
Late
Babylonian (Asia
Minor)
•
Persian•
Merovingia
Seleucid period
Carolingian era (500
(500 BC–0)
900)
•
Late classical
(Hellenistic)
•
Late Indian
(Indo-Iranian)
OLD KINGDOM
(2900–2400 BC)
DORIC (1100–500 BC) EARLY ARABIAN
FORM-WORLD
(Sassanid, Byzantine,
Armenian, Syrian,
Sabæan, "late
classical" and "early
Christian") (0–500)
GOTHIC (900–1500
Birth and rise. Forms sprung from the land, unconsciously shaped
Dynasties IV–V
(2930–2625 BC)
•
Geometrical
temple style
•
Pyramid
temples
•
Ranked
plant-columns
•
Rows of flat
relief
•
Tomb statues
11th–9th centuries BC
•
Timber
building
•
Doric column
•
Architrave
•
Geometric
(Dipylon) style
•
Burial urns
1st–3rd centuries
•
Ritual
interiors
•
Basilica
•
Dome
•
Mosque
•
Sarcophagus
11–13th centuries
•
Romanesqu
architecture
•
Gothic
architecture
•
Dome
•
Stained gla
Completion of the early form-language. Exhaustion of possibilities. Contradiction
2320–2200 BC
•
6th dynasty
•
End of
pyramid and epic
relief styles
•
Bloom of
archaic portraits.
8th–7th centuries BC
•
End of Dorian
and Etruscan styles
•
Corinth
•
Attica
•
Greek
mythology
4th–5th centuries
•
End of
Persian, Syrian, and
Coptic arts
•
Mosaic
•
Arabesque
14–15th centuries
•
Late Gothic
Renaissance
•
Bloom and
of fresco and statue,
from Giotto to
Michelangelo
•
Baroque
•
Siena
•
Nuremberg
•
Panel paint
from Jan van Eyck t
Hans Holbein the
Younger
•
Counterpoi
•
Oil painting
Formation of a mature artistry
2130–1990 BC
•
11th dynasty
•
No trace of
lost art
Late period
Formation of a
group of
urbanely
exquisite arts
in the hands of
individuals
(the "great
masters")
•
Completion of
the temple (peristyle)
•
Ionic order
•
Polygnotus
(460)
•
Apollo of
Tenea of Ageladas
•
Completion
of the mosque (Hagia
Sophia)
•
Completion
of the arabesque style
(Mshatta facade)
•
Architectur
painting from
Michelangelo to Gia
Lorenzo Bernini
(† 1680)
•
Dominance
oil painting from Tit
to Rembrandt († 166
•
Rise of mu
from Orlande de Las
to Heinrich Schütz
(† 1672)
7–8th centuries
•
Umayyad
dynasty
•
Complete
victory of featureless
arabesque over
architecture also
Rococo
•
Musical
architecture ("rococo
•
Reign of
classical music from
Bach to Mozart
•
End of clas
oil painting from
Watteau to Goya
Perfection of an intellectualized form-language
1990–1790 BC
•
12th dynasty
•
Use of
pylons in temple
construction
•
Labyrinth
480–350 BC
•
Bloom of
Athens
•
Acropolis
•
Rule of
classical forms from
Myron to Phidias
•
Decline of
fresco and clay painting
(Zeuxis and Parrhasius)
Exhaustion of strict creativeness. Dissolution of grand form. End of style. "Classicism and
romanticism"
Confusion after about •
1750
Great
•
column
•
•
Civilization
Existence without inner
form. Cosmopolitan art as a
habit, luxury, sport, thrill.
Rapidly changing fashions
in art (revivals, arbitrary
inventions, borrowings)
Alexander the
•
Harun al•
Classicist ta
Raschid (ca. 800)
in architecture
The Corinthian •
"Moorish art" •
Second Em
•
Biedermeie
Lysippos
•
Neoclassici
Apelles
•
Ludwig van
Beethoven
•
Eugène
Delacroix
Modern art. "Art problems". Attempts to portray or to excite the metropolitan consciousness.
Transformation of music, architecture and painting into mere craft arts
Hyksos period (1675–
1550 BC). Preserved
only in Crete (Minoan
art)
Hellenism
•
Pergamene art
(theatricality)
•
Hellenistic
painting modes (veristic,
bizarre, subjective)
•
Archetictual
display in the cities of
the Diadochi
Sultan dynasties of
9th–10th centuries
•
Prime of
Spanish-Sicilian art
•
Samarra
19th and 20th centur
•
Liszt, Berli
Wagner
•
Impression
from Constable to L
and Manet
•
American
architecture
End of form development. Meaningless, empty, artificial, pretentious architecture and ornamen
Imitation of archaic and exotic motives
18th dynasty (1550–
1328 BC)
•
Rock temple
of Deir el-Bahri.
Colossi of Memnon.
Art of Knossos and
Amarna
Roman period (100 BC– Seljuks (since 1050)
From 2000
100 AD)
•
"Oriental art"
•
Indiscriminate of the crusade period
piling of all three orders.
Fora, theaters
(Colosseum). Triumphal
arches
Finale. Formation of a fixed stock of forms. Imperial display by means of material and mass.
Provincial craft art
19th dynasty (1328–
1195 BC)
•
Gigantic
buildings of Luxor,
Karnak, and Abydos
•
Small art
(animal sculpture,
textiles, arms)
Trajan to Aurelian
•
Gigantic fora,
thermae, colonnades,
triumphal arches
•
Roman
provincial art (ceramics,
statues, arms)
Mongol period (from
1250)
•
Gigantic
buildings (e.g. in
India)
•
Oriental craft
art (rugs, arms,
implements)
Political epochs
Phase
Egyptian
Classical
Chinese
Western
Precultural period
Primitive folk. Tribes and
their chiefs. As yet no
"politics" and no "state"
Thinite period
(MENES) 3100–
2600
Mycenaean age
("AGAMEMNON")
1600–1100
Shang period
1700–1300
Frankish period
CHARLEMAGNE
500–900
Culture
National
groups of
definite
style and
particular
worldfeeling
("nations").
Working of
an
immanent
state-idea
OLD KINGDOM
2600–2200
DORIC PERIOD
1100–650
EARLY CHOU
PERIOD 1300–
800
GOTHIC PERIOD
900–1500
1. Feudalism. Spirit of countryside and countryman. The "city" only a market or
stronghold. Chivalric-religious ideals. Struggles of vassals amongst themselves and
against overlord
Early period
Organic
differentiation
of political
existence. The
first two
estates—
nobility and
priesthood.
Feudal
natural
economy
Late period
Actualization
of the
matured
state-idea.
Town versus
•
Feudal
conditions of IV and
V dynasties (2550–
2320 BC)
•
Increasing
power of feudatories
and priesthoods. The
pharaoh as
incarnation of Ra
•
The Homeric
kingship
•
Rise of the
nobility (Ithaka,
Etruria, Sparta)
The central ruler
(Wang) pressed
hard by the feudal
nobility
•
RomanGerman imperial
period
•
Crusading
nobility
•
Empire and
papacy
2. Crisis and dissolution of patriarchal forms. From feudalism to aristocratic state
934–904: I-Wang
and the vassals
•
842:
Interregnum
•
VI dynasty
(2320–2200 BC):
Breakup of the
kingdom into
heritable
principalities.
•
VII and VIII
dynasties:
Interregnum
•
Aristocratic
synoecism
•
Dissolution
of kingship into
annual offices
•
Oligarchy
MIDDLE
KINGDOM 2150–
1800
IONIC PERIOD 650– LATE CHOU
BAROQUE
300
PERIOD 800–500 PERIOD 1500–1800
3. Fashioning of a world of states of strict form. Frondes
•
Territorial
princes
•
Renaissance
towns. Lancaster and
York
•
1254:
Interregnum
countryside:
emergence of
the Third
Estate
(bourgeoisie).
Victory of
money over
barter
11th dynasty
•
Overthrow
of the baronage by
the rulers of Thebes
•
Centralized
bureaucracy-state
6th century
•
The first
tyrannis (Cleisthenes,
Periander, Polycrates,
the Tarquins)
•
The city-state
Period of the
"Protectors"
(Ming-Chu 685–
591) and the
congresses of
princes (–460)
Dynastic familypower, and Fronde
(Richelieu,
Wallenstein,
Cromwell)—
ca. 1630
4. Climax of the state-form ("absolutism"). Unity of town and country ("state" and
"society", the "three estates")
1990–1790: 12th
dynasty
•
Strictest
centralization of
power
•
Court and
finance nobility
•
Amenemhet,
Sesostris
The pure polis
(absolutism of the
demos)
•
Agora
politics
•
Rise of the
tribunate
•
Themistocles,
Pericles
590–480: ChunChiu period
("Spring and
Autumn")
•
Seven
powers
•
Perfection
of social forms
(Li)
Ancien Régime.
Rococo. Court
nobility of
Versailles. Cabinet
politics. Habsburg
and Bourbon. Louis
XIV, Frederick the
Great
5. Break-up of the state-form (revolution and Napoleonism). Victory of the city over the
countryside (of the "people" over the privileged, of the intelligentsia over tradition, of
money over politics)
1788–1680:
Revolution and
military government.
Decay of the realm.
Small potentates, in
some cases sprung
from the people
Civilization
The body of the people,
now essentially urban in
constitution, dissolves into
a formless mass.
Cosmopolis and provinces.
The Fourth Estate (the
"masses")—inorganic,
cosmopolitan
4th century: Social
revolution and the
second tyrannis
(Dionysus I, Jason of
Pherae, Appius
Claudius the Censor)
Alexander
480: Beginning of
the Chan-Kwo
period
441: Fall of the
Chou dynasty.
Revolutions and
annihilation-wars
End of the 18th
century: Revolution
in America and
France (Washington,
Fox, Mirabeau,
Robespierre)
Napoleon
1. Domination of money ("democracy"). Economic powers permeating the political forms
and authorities
1675–1550: Hyksos
period. Deepest
decline. Dictatures of
alien generals
(Chian). After 1600,
definitive victory of
the rulers of Thebes
300–100: Political
Hellenism. From
Alexander to Hannibal
and Scipio, royal allpower; from
Cleomenes III and
C. Flaminius (220) to
C. Marius, radical
demagogues
480–230: Period
of the "contending
states"
•
288: The
imperial title. The
imperialist
statesmen of Tsin
•
From
289, incorporation
of the last states
into the empire
1800–2000
•
19th
century: From
Napoleon to World
War I. "System of
great powers",
standing armies,
constitutions
•
20th
century: Transition
from constitutional
to informal sway of
individuals.
Annihilation wars.
Imperialism
2. Formation of Caesarism. Victory of force-politics over money. Increasing
primitiveness of political forms. Inward decline of the nations into a formless population,
and constitution thereof as an imperium of gradually increasing crudity of despotism
1580–1350:
Eighteenth dynasty
of Egypt
•
Thutmose
III
100 BC–100 AD:
Sulla to Domitian
•
Julius Caesar
•
Tiberius
250 BC–26 AD:
House of WangCheng and
Western Han
dynasty
•
221 BC:
Augustus title
(Shi) of emperor
(Hwang-ti)
•
140–
2000–2200
80 BC: Wu-ti
3. Maturing of the final form. Private and family policies of individual leaders. The world
as spoil. Egypticism, mandarinism, Byzantinism. Historyless stiffening and enfeeblement
even of the imperial machinery, against young peoples eager for spoil, or alien
conquerors. Primitive human conditions slowly thrust up into the highly civilized mode
of living
1350–1205:
Nineteenth dynasty
of Egypt
•
Sethos I
•
Rameses II
100–300: Trajan to
Aurelian
•
Trajan
•
Septimius
Severus
25–320: Eastern
Han dynasty
•
58–71:
Emperor Ming of
Han
after 2200
Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Echoes of the Jazz Age (1931)
It is too soon to write about the Jazz Age with perspective, and without being suspected
of premature arteriosclerosis. Many people still succumb to violent retching when they happen
upon any of its characteristic words - words which have since yielded in vividness to the
coinages of the underworld. It is as dead as were the Yellow Nineties in 1902. Yet the present
writer already looks back to it with nostalgia. It bore him up, flattered him and gave him more
money than he had dreamed of, simply for telling people that he felt as they did, that something
had to be done with all the nervous energy stored up and unexpended in the War.
The ten-year period that, as if reluctant to die outmoded in its bed, leaped to a spectacular
death in October, 1929, began about the time of the May Day riots in 1919. When the police rode
down the demobilized country boys gaping at the orators in Madison Square, it was the sort of
measure bound to alienate the more intelligent young men from the prevailing order. We didn't
remember anything about the Bill of Rights until Mencken began plugging it, but we did know
that such tyranny belonged in the jittery little countries of South Europe. If goose-livered
business men had this effect on the government, then maybe we had gone to war for J. P.
Morgan's loans after all. But, because we were tired of Great Causes, there was no more than a
short outbreak of moral indignation, typified by Dos Passos' Three Soldiers. Presently we began
to have slices of the national cake and our idealism only flared up when the newspapers made
melodrama out of such stories as Harding and the Ohio Gang or Sacco and Vanzetti. The events
of 1919 left us cynical rather than revolutionary, in spite of the fact that now we are all
rummaging around in our trunks wondering where in hell we left the liberty cap - "I know I had
it" - and the moujik blouse. It was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics
at all.
It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age
of satire. A Stuffed Shirt, squirming to blackmail in a lifelike way, sat upon the throne of the
United States; a stylish young man hurried over to represent to us the throne of England. A world
of girls yearned for the young Englishman; the old American groaned in his sleep as he waited to
be poisoned by his wife, upon the advice of the female Rasputin who then made the ultimate
decision in our national affairs. But such matters apart, we had things our way at last. With
Americans ordering suits by the gross in London, the Bond Street tailors perforce agreed to
moderate their cut to the American long-waisted figure and loose-fitting taste, something subtle
passed to America, the style of man. During the Renaissance, Francis the First looked to
Florence to trim his leg. Seventeenth-century England aped the court of France, and fifty years
ago the German Guards officer bought his civilian clothes in London. Gentlemen's clothes symbol of "the power that man must hold and that passes from race to race."
We were the most powerful nation. Who could tell us any longer what was fashionable
and what was fun? Isolated during the European War, we had begun combing the unknown
South and West for folkways and pastimes, and there were more ready to hand.
The first social revelation created a sensation out of all proportion to its novelty. As far
back as 1915 the unchaperoned young people of the smaller cities had discovered the mobile
privacy of that automobile given to young Bill at sixteen to make him "self-reliant." At first
petting was a desperate adventure even under such favorable conditions, but presently
confidences were exchanged and the old commandment broke down. As early as 1917 there
were references to such sweet and casual dalliance in any number of the Yale Record or the
Princeton Tiger.
But petting in its more audacious manifestations was confined to the wealthier classes among other young people the old standard prevailed until after the War, and a kiss meant that a
proposal was expected, as young officers in strange cities sometimes discovered to their dismay.
Only in 1920 did the veil finally fall - the Jazz Age was in flower.
Scarcely had the staider citizens of the republic caught their breaths when the wildest of
all generations, the generaнtion which had been adolescent during the confusion of the War,
brusquely shouldered my contemporaries out of the way and danced into the limelight. This was
the generation whose girls dramatized themselves as flappers, the generation that corrupted its
elders and eventually overreached itself less through lack of morals than through lack of taste.
May one offer in exhibit the year 1922! That was the peak of the younger generation, for though
the Jazz Age continued, it became less and less an affair of youth.
The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders, leaving the children
puzzled and rather neglected and rather taken aback. By 1923 their elders, tired of watching the
carnival with ill-concealed envy, had discovered that young liquor will take the place of young
blood, and with a whoop the orgy began. The younger generation was starred no longer.
A whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure. The precocious intimacies of the
younger generation would have come about with or without prohibition - they were implicit in
the attempt to adapt English customs to American condiнtions. (Our South, for example, is
tropical and early maturing - it has never been part of the wisdom of France and Spain to let
young girls go unchaperoned at sixteen and seventeen.) But the general decision to be amused
that began with the cocktail parties of 1921 had more complicated origins.
The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then
music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the
lines of a war. To many English the War still goes on because all the forces that menace them are
still active - Wherefore eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die. But different causes had
now brought about a corresponding state in America - though there were entire classes (people
over fifty, for example) who spent a whole decade denying its existence even when its puckish
face peered into the family circle. Never did they dream that they had contributed to it. The
honest citizens of every class, who believed in a strict public morality and were powerful enough
to enforce the necessary legislation, did not know that they would necessarily be served by
criminals and quacks, and do not really believe it to-day. Rich righteousness had always been
able to buy honest and intelligent servants to free the slaves or the Cubans, so when this attempt
collapsed our elders stood firm with all the stubbornness of people involved in a weak case,
preserving their righteousness and losing their children. Silver-haired women and men with fine
old faces, people who never did a consciously dishonest thing in their lives, still assure each
other in the apartment hotels of New York and Boston and Washington that "there's a whole
generation growing up that will never know the taste of liquor." Meanwhile their grand
daughters pass the well-thumbed copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover around the boarding-school
and, if they get about at all, know the taste of gin or corn at sixteen. But the generation who
reached maturity between 1875 and 1895 continue to believe what they want to believe.
Even the intervening generations were incredulous. In 1920 Heywood Broun announced
that all this hubbub was nonsense, that young men didn't kiss but told anyhow. But very shortly
people over twenty-five came in for an intensive education. Let me trace some of the revelations
vouchнsafed them by reference to a dozen works written for various types of mentality during
the decade. We begin with the suggestion that Don Juan leads an interesting life (Jurgen, (1919);
then we learn that there's a lot of sex around if we only knew it (Winesburg, Ohio, 1920) that
adolescents lead very amorous lives (This Side of Paradise, 1920), that there are a lot of
neglected Anglo-Saxon words (Ulysses, 1921), that older people don't always resist sudden
temptations (Cytherea, 1922), that girls are sometimes seduced without being ruined (Flaming
Youth, 1922), that even rape often turns out well (The Sheik, 1922), that glamorous English
ladies are often promiscuous (The Green Hat, 1924), that in fact they devote most of their time to
it (The Vortex, 1926), that it's a damn good thing too (Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1928), and finally
that there are abnormal variations (The Well of Loneliness, 1928, and Sodom and Gomorrah,
1929).
In my opinion the erotic clement in these works, even The Sheik written for children in
the key of Peter Rabbit, did not one particle of harm. Everything they described, and much more,
was familiar in our contemporary life. The majority of the theses were honest and elucidating their effect was to restore some dignity to the male as opposed to the he-man in American life.
("And what is a 'He-man'?" demanded Gertrude Stein one day. "Isn't it a large enough order to
fill out to the dimensions of all that 'a man' has meant in the past? A He-man'!") The married
woman can now discover whether she is being cheated, or whether sex is just something to be
endured, and her compensation should be to establish a tyranny of the spirit, as her mother may
have hinted. Perhaps many women found that love was meant to be fun. Anyhow the objectors
lost their tawdry little case, which is one reason why our literature is now the most living in the
world.
Contrary to popular opinion, the movies of the Jazz Age had no effect upon its morals.
The social attitude of the producers was timid, behind the times and banal - for example, no
picture mirrored even faintly the younger generation until 1923, when magazines had already
been started to celebrate it and it had long ceased to be news. There were a few feeble splutters
and then Clara Bow in Flaming Youth; promptly the Hollywood hacks ran the theme into its
cinematographic grave. Throughout the Jazz Age the movies got no farther than Mrs. Jiggs,
keeping up with its most blatant superficialities. This was no doubt due to the censorship as well
as to innate conditions in the inнdustry. In any case, the Jazz Age now raced along under its own
power, served by great filling stations full of money.
The people over thirty, the people all the way up to fifty, had joined the dance. We
graybeards (to tread down F.P.A.) remember the uproar when in 1912 grandmothers of forty
tossed away their crutches and took lessons in the Tango and the Castle-Walk. A dozen years
later a woman might pack the Green Hat with her other affairs as she set off for Europe or New
York, but Savonarola was too busy flogging dead horses in Augean stables of his own creation to
notice. Society, even in small cities, now dined in separate chambers, and the sober table learned
about the gay table only from hearsay. There were very few people left at the sober table. One of
its former glories, the less sought-after girls who had become resigned to sublimating a probable
celibacy, came across Freud and Jung in seeking their intellectual recompense and came tearing
back into the fray.
By 1926 the universal preoccupation with sex had become a nuisance. (I remember a
perfectly mated, contented young mother asking my wife's advice about "having an affair right
away," though she had no one especially in mind, "because don't you think it's sort of
undignified when you get much over thirty?") For a while bootleg Negro records with their
phallic euphemisms made everything suggestive, and simultaneously came a wave of erotic
plays - young girls from finishing-schools packed the galleries to hear about the romance of
being a Lesbian and George Jean Nathan protested. Then one young producer lost his head
entirely, drank a beauty's alcoholic bath-water and went to the penitentiary. Somehow his
pathetic attempt at romance belongs to the Jazz Age, while his contemporary in prison, Ruth
Snyder, had to be hoisted into it by the tabloids - she was, as The Daily News hinted deliciously
to gourmets, about "to cook, and sizzle, AND FRY!" in the electric chair.
The gay elements of society had divided into two main streams, one flowing towards
Palm Beach and Deauville, and the other, much smaller, towards the summer Riviera. One could
get away with more on the summer Riviera, and whatever happened seemed to have something
to do with art. From 1926 to 1929, the great years of the Cap d'Antibes, this corner of France was
dominated by a group quite distinct from that American society which is dominated by
Europeans. Pretty much of anything went at Antibes - by 1929, at the most gorgeous paradise for
swimmers on the Mediterranean no one swam any more, save for a short hang-over dip at noon.
There was a picturesque graduation of steep rocks over the sea and somebody's valet and an
occasional English girl used to dive from them, but the Americans were content to discuss each
other in the bar. This was indicative of something that was taking place in the homeland Americans were getting soft. There were signs everywhere: we still won the Olympic games but
with champions whose names had few vowels in them - teams composed, like the fighting Irish
combination of Notre Dame, of fresh overseas blood. Once the French became really interested,
the Davis Cup gravitated automatically to their intensity in competition. The vacant lots of the
Middle-Western cities were built up now - except for a short period in school, we were not
turning out to be an athletic people like the British, after all. The hare and the tortoise. Of course
if we wanted to we could be in a minute; we still had all those reserves of ancestral vitality, but
one day in 1926 we looked down and found we had flabby arms and a fat pot and couldn't say
boop-boop-a-doop to a Sicilian. Shades of Van Bibber! - no Utopian ideal, God knows. Even
golf, once considered an effeminate game, had seemed very strenuous of late - an emasculated
form appeared and proved just right.
By 1927 a widespread neurosis began to be evident, faintly signalled, like a nervous
beating of the feet, by the popularity of crossword puzzles. I remember a fellow expatriate
opening a letter from a mutual friend of ours, urging him to come home and be revitalized by the
hardy, bracing qualities of the native soil. It was a strong letter and it affected us both deeply,
until we noticed that it was headed from a nerve sanatorium in Pennsylvania.
By this time contemporaries of mine had begun to disappear into the dark maw of
violence. A classmate killed his wife and himself on Long Island, another tumbled 'accidently'
from a skyscraper in Philadelphia, another purposely from a skyscraper in New York. One was
killed in a speak-easy in Chicago; another was beaten to death in a speak-easy in New York and
crawled home to the Princeton Club to die; still another had his skull crushed by a maniac's axe
in an insane asylum where he was confined. These are not catastrophes that I went out of my
way to look for - these were my friends; moreover, these things happened not during the
depression but during the boom.
In the spring of '27, something bright and alien flashed across the sky. A young
Minnesotan who seemed to have had nothing to do with his generation did a heroic thing, arid
for a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speak-easies and thought of
their old best dreams. Maybe there was a way out by flying, maybe our restless blood could find
frontiers in the illimitable air. But by that time we were all pretty well committed; and the Jazz
Age continued; we would all have one more.
Nevertheless, Americans were wandering ever more widely - friends seemed eternally
bound for Russia, Persia, Abyssinia, and Central Africa. And by 1928 Paris had grown
suffocating. With each new shipment of Americans spewed up by the boom the quality fell off,
until towards the end there was something sinister about the crazy boatloads. They were no
longer the simple pa and ma and son and daughter, infinitely superior in their qualities of
kindness and curiosity to the corresponding class in Europe, but fantastic neanderthals who
believed something, something vague, that you remembered from a very cheap novel. I
remember an Italian on a steamer who promenaded the deck in an American Reserve Officer's
uniform picking quarrels in broken English with Americans who criticized their own institutions
in the bar. I remember a fat Jewess, inlaid with diamonds, who sat behind us at the Russian ballet
and said as the curtain rose, 'Thad's luffly, dey ought to baint a bicture of it.' This was low
comedy, but it was evident that money and power were falling into the hands of people in
comparison with whom the leader of a village Soviet would be a gold-mine of judgement and
culture. There were citizens travelling in luxury in 1928 and 1929, who, in the distortion of their
new condition, had the human value of Pekingese, bivalves, cretins, goats. I remember the Judge
from some New York district who had taken his daughter to see the Bayeux Tapestries and made
a scene in the papers advocating their segregation because one scene was immoral. But in those
days life was like the race in Alice in Wonderland, there was a prize for every one.
The Jazz Age had had a wild youth and a heady middle age. There was the phase of the
necking parties, the Leopold-Loeb murder (I remember the time my wife was arrested on
Queensborough Bridge on the suspicion of being the 'Bob-haired Bandit') and the John Held
Clothes. In the second phase such phenomena as sex and murder became more mature, if much
more conventional. Middle age must be served and pyjamas came to the beach to save fat thighs
and flabby calves from competition with the one-piece bathing-suit. Finally skirts came down
and everything was concealed. Everybody was at scratch now. Let's go But it was not to be. Somebody had blundered and the most expensive orgy in history
was over.
It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop
received an enormous jolt, and it didn't take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And
after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time
anyhow - the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand dukes and the
casualness of chorus girls. But moralizing is easy now and it was pleasant to be in one's twenties
in such a certain and unworried time. Even when you were broke you didn't worry about money,
because it was in such profusion around you. Towards the end one had a struggle to pay one's
share; it was almost a favour to accept hospitality that required any travelling. Charm, notoriety,
mere good manners weighed more than money as a social asset. This was rather splendid, but
things were getting thinner and thinner as the eternal necessary human values tried to spread over
all that expansion. Writers were geniuses on the strength of one respectable book or play; just as
during the War officers of four months' experience commanded hundreds of men, so there were
now many little fish lording it over great big bowls. In the theatrical world extravagant
productions were carried by a few second-rate stars, and so on up the scale into politics, where it
was difficult to interest good men in positions of the highest importance and responsibility,
importance and responsibility far exceeding that of business executives but which paid only five
or six thousand a year.
Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we
look back at our wasted youth. Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums,
an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into the early twenties when we
drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first
abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you
didn't want to know said 'Yes, we have no bananas', and it seemed only a question of a few years
before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as
they were Ч and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will
never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.
George Orwell. Literature and Totalitarianism (1941)
I said at the beginning of my first talk that this is not a critical age. It is an age of
partisanship and not of detachment, an age in which it is especially difficult to see literary merit
in a book with whose conclusions you disagree. Politics — politics in the most general sense —
have invaded literature, to an extent that does not normally happen, and this has brought to the
surface of our consciousness the struggle that always goes on between the individual and the
community. It is when one considers the difficulty of writing honest unbiased criticism in a time
like ours that one begins to grasp the nature of the threat that hangs over the whole of literature
in the coming age.
We live in an age which the autonomous individual is ceasing to exist — or perhaps one
ought to say, in which the individual is ceasing to have the illusion of being autonomous. Now,
in all that we say about literature, and (above all) in all that we say about criticism, we
instinctively take the autonomous individual for granted. The whole of modern European
literature — I am speaking of the literature of the past four hundred years — is built on the
concept of intellectual honesty, or, if you like to put it that way, on Shakespeare’s maxim, ‘To
thine own self be true’. The first thing that we ask of a writer is that he shall not tell lies, that he
shall say what he really thinks, what he really feels. The worst thing we can say about a work of
art is that it is insincere. And this is even truer of criticism than of creative literature, in which a
certain amount of posing and mannerism, and even a certain amount of downright humbug,
doesn’t matter, so long as the writer is fundamentally sincere. Modern literature is essentially an
individual thing. It is either the truthful expression of what one man thinks and feels, or it is
nothing.
As I say, we take this notion for granted, and yet as soon as one puts it into words one
realizes how literature is menaced. For this is the age of the totalitarian state, which does not and
probably cannot allow the individual any freedom what ever. When one mentions totalitarianism
one thinks immediately of Germany, Russia, Italy, but I think one must face the risk that this
phenomenon is going to be world-wide. It is obvious that the period of free capitalism is coming
to an end and that one country after another is adopting a centralized economy that one can call
Socialism or state capitalism according as one prefers. With that the economic liberty of the
individual, and to a great extent his liberty to do what he likes, to choose his own work, to move
to and fro across the surface of the earth, comes to an end. Now, till recently the implications of
this were not foreseen. It was never fully realized that the disappearance of economic liberty
would have any effect on intellectual liberty. Socialism was usually thought of as a sort of
moralized liberalism. The state would take charge of your economic life and set you free from
the fear of poverty, unemployment and so forth, but it would have no need to interfere with your
private intellectual life. Art could flourish just as it had done in the liberal-capitalist age, only a
little more so, because the artist would not any longer be under economic compulsions.
Now, on the existing evidence, one must admit that these ideas have been falsified.
Totalitarianism has abolished freedom of thought to an extent unheard of in any previous age.
And it is important to realize that its control of thought is not only negative, but positive. It not
only forbids you to express — even to think — certain thoughts, but it dictates what you shall
think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a
code of conduct. And as far as possible it isolates you from the outside world, it shuts you up in
an artificial universe in which you have no standards of comparison. The totalitarian state tries,
at any rate, to control the thoughts and emotions of its subjects at least as completely as it
controls their actions.
The question that is important for us is: can literature survive in such an atmosphere? I
think one must answer shortly that it cannot. If totalitarianism becomes world-wide and
permanent, what we have known as literature must come to an end. And it will not do — as may
appear plausible at first — to say that what will come to an end is merely the literature of postRenaissance Europe.
There are several vital differences between totalitarianism and all the orthodoxies of the
past, either in Europe or in the East. The most important is that the orthodoxies of the past did
not change, or at least did not change rapidly. In medieval Europe the Church dictated what you
should believe, but at least it allowed you to retain the same beliefs from birth to death. It did not
tell you to believe one thing on Monday and another on Tuesday. And the same is more or less
true of any orthodox Christian, Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim today. In a sense his thoughts are
circumscribed, but he passed his whole life within the same framework of thought. His emotions
are not tampered with.
Now, with totalitarianism, exactly the opposite is true. The peculiarity of the totalitarian
state is that though it controls thought, it does not fix it. It sets up unquestionable dogmas, and it
alters them from day to day. It needs the dogmas, because it needs absolute obedience from its
subjects, but cannot avoid the changes, which are dictated by the needs of power politics. It
declared itself infallible, and at the same time it attacks the very concept of objective truth. To
take a crude, obvious example, every German up to September 1939 had to regard Russian
Bolshevism with horror and aversion, and since September 1939 he had to regard it with
admiration and affection. If Russia and Germany go to war, as they may well do within the next
few years, another equally violent change will have to take place. The German’s emotional life,
his loves and hatreds, are expected, when necessary, to reverse themselves overnight. I hardly
need to point out the effect of this kind of thing upon literature. For writing is largely a matter of
feeling, which cannot always be controlled from outside. It is easy to pay lip-service to the
orthodoxy of the moment, but writing of any consequence can only be produced when a man
feels the truth of what he is saying; without that, the creative impulse is lacking. All the evidence
we have suggests that the sudden emotional changes which totalitarianism demands of its
followers are psychologically impossible. And that is the chief reason why I suggest that if
totalitarianism triumphs throughout the world, literature, as we have known it, is at an end. And,
in fact, totalitarianism does seem to have had that effect so far. In Italy literature has been
crippled, and in Germany it seems almost to have ceased. The most characteristic activity of the
Nazis is burning books. And even in Russia the literary renaissance we once expected has not
happened, and the most promising Russian writers show a marked tendency to commit suicide or
disappear into prison.
I said earlier that liberal capitalism is obviously coming to an end, and therefore I may
have seemed to suggest that freedom of thought is also inevitably doomed. But I do not believe
this to be so, and I will simply say in conclusion that I believe the hope of literature’s survival
lies in those countries in which liberalism has struck its deepest roots, the non-military countries,
western Europe and the Americas, India and China. I believe — it may be no more than a pious
hope — that though a collectivized economy is bound to come, those countries will know how to
evolve a form of Socialism which is not totalitarian, in which freedom of thought can survive the
disappearance of economic individualism. That, at any rate, is the only hope to which anyone
who cares for literature can cling. Whoever feels the value of literature, whoever sees the central
part it plays in the development of human history, must also see the life and death necessity of
resisting totalitarianism, whether it is imposed on us from without or from within.
George Orwell. Politics and the English Language (1946)
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in
a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.
Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in
the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental
archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this
lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we
shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and
economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an
effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an
intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be
a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that
is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are
foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The
point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad
habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary
trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a
necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not
frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this
presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become
clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually
written.
These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad -- I could
have quoted far worse if I had chosen -- but because they illustrate various of the mental vices
from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative
examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:
1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not
unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in
each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to
tolerate.
Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)
2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which
prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a
loss for bewilder .
Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa)
3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has
neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what
institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would
alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally
dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of
these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small
academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?
Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)
4. All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains,
united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass
revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval
legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and
rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the
revolutionary way out of the crisis.
Communist pamphlet
5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious
reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C.
Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound
and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in
Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream -- as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain
cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete
languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standard English." When the Voice of
Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly
dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless
bashful mewing maidens!
Letter in Tribune
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two
qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of
precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says
something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This
mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern
English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are
raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that
are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning,
and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. I list
below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose
construction is habitually dodged:
Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image,
while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in
effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness.
But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all
evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases
for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride
roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to
the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed.
Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and
incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what
he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning
withouth those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is
sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always
used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that
breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying
would avoid perverting the original phrase.
Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs
and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an
appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make
contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part
(role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The
keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop,
spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some
general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is
wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of
gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by
means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of
profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced
by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the
interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such
resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development
to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory
conclusion, and so on and so forth.
Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective,
categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize,
eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific
impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable,
triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of
international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color,
its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler,
banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime,
deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to
give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is
no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad
writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by
the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like
expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of
others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers.* The jargon peculiar to
*An interesting illustration of this is the way in which English flower names were in use
till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, Snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-menot becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is
probably due to an instinctive turning away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that
the Greek word is scientific.
Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey,
flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German,
or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the
appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of
this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to
think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in
slovenliness and vagueness.
Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary
criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in
meaning.† Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as
used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in
† Example: Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in
range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling
atmospheric accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness . . .Wrey
Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bull's-eyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and
through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bittersweet of resignation." (Poetry
Quarterly)
the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever
expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's
work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's
work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words
like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at
once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly
abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not
desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of
them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a
word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is
resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are
praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and
fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words
of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has
his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.
Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world,
The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive.
Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class,
totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another
example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary
one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort.
Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the
strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to
men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success
or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity,
but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains
several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation.
The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the
middle the concrete illustrations -- race, battle, bread -- dissolve into the vague phrases "success
or failure in competitive activities." This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am
discussing -- no one capable of using phrases like "objective considerations of contemporary
phenomena" -- would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole
tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little
more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are
those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of
those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid
images, and only one phrase ("time and chance") that could be called vague. The second contains
not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened
version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of
sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of
writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worstwritten page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes,
we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from
Ecclesiastes.
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words
for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It
consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by
someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of
writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my
opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made
phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with
the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less
euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry -- when you are dictating to a stenographer, for
instance, or making a public speech -- it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags
like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us
would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale
metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning
vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The
sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash -- as in The Fascist
octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot -- it can be taken as
certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he
is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor
Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense
of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip -- alien for akin -- making further
nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness.
Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions,
and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in
the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is
simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of
the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an
accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and
meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general
emotional meaning -- they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another -- but
they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every
sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image
fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it
more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all
this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made
phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even think your
thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of
partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special
connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it
will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and
not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The
political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the
speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that
one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches
some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities,
iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one
often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy:
a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's
spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is
not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance
toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but
his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech
he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost
unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this
reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political
conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the
dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are
too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the
political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging
and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants
driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary
bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent
trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or
rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the
neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable
elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental
pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian
totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get
good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the
humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the
right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the
rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in
the sphere of concrete achievement."
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the
facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear
language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns
as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In
our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and
politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general
atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have
not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all
deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can
spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The
debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not
unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a
consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of
aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I
have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I
have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt
impelled" to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: "[The Allies]
have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and
political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the
same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe." You see, he "feels
impelled" to write -- feels, presumably, that he has something new to say -- and yet his words,
like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary
pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a
radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and
every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this
would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social
conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and
constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is
not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any
evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were
explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few
journalists. There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if
enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the
not un- formation out of existence*, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average
sentence, to drive out foreign phrases
*One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not
unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.
and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But
all these are minor points. The defense of the English language implies more than this, and
perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.
To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words
and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard English" which must never be departed
from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom
which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which
are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of
Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good prose style." On the other hand, it is not
concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it
even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using
the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let
the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do
with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and
then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until
you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more
inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the
existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even
changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get
one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose -not simply accept -- the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and
decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the
mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and
humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a
phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules
will cover most cases:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing
in print.
(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an
everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude
in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of
them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those
five specimens at the beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an
instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others
have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a
pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how
can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought
to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one
can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your
English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the
necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to
yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from
Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,
and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but
one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly
enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting
pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it
belongs.