English III
Session Coordinator: Matthew Hart
Dept. of English, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
608 S. Wright St., Urbana, IL 61801
matthart@english.upenn.edu

The Judgment of the Past: Chesterton's Critique of Modernism

Like T. S. Eliot or Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton was preoccupied with a world that he thought “too much with us.” Like Eliot, he saw literature as part of a discourse that was inextricably bound up with society and politics. Dismissed as half a hybrid (the “Chesterbelloc”), an anti-Semite, and an incurable nostalgist, Chesterton has been unjustly neglected. This paper argues that his diagnosis of modernist ills and his recommendations for alleviating them are more comprehensive, more topical, and more insightful than the eclipse of his reputation suggests.

One of the most striking examples of Chesterton’s uncanny prescience as a cultural critic is his linking of modernism and consumer society. His main subjects comprise both the modernism that aestheticizes in order to disguise and the one that lends its support to the economics of rapid production and change by constantly reimagining itself. Articulating the case for seeing Chesterton as the first great modernist cultural critic, the one who asked the most searching questions about the nature of meaning and representation in the world the modernists redefined, is long overdue.

David Rampton
University of Ottowa
David.Rampton@uottawa.ca

Towards a Discourse of Freedom: Cultural Theory as Performance in Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis welcomed the description of himself as a '"personal appearance" artist', and took over Montagu Slater's phrase in Men Without Art by ironically accounting himself 'a mere performer' as writer and artist. When early modernist practice irrupted on to the London scene in 1913-15, it was dramatized by Lewis in Blast magazine. Lewis theorized post-war culture and philosophy in The Art of Being Ruled (1926) and Time and Western Man (1927). As late as 1949, in America and Cosmic Man, he originated 'the global village' concept taken up by McLuhan. His work amounts to the most comprehensive theorization of culture in anglophone modernism.

Lewis's theoretical writings are performances in defense of his creative work. His strategy is to enter fully into both sides of the argument, quoting often in order to dramatize alternatives. He makes his own position clear more through comedy and satire than in attempts at authoritative discourse. These are non-coercive performances, situating the reader in a position of freedom before the argument: “Freedom is certainly our human goal.” In these respects, Lewis's cultural criticism differs from that of other male modernists. By exploring Lewis's cultural theory as performance, this paper will contend that the dualistic self-other structure of his arguments invites the reader into an 'open' field where the discourse of theory becomes compatible with freedom.

Alan Munton
University of Plymouth (Exmouth campus)
amunton@plymouth.ac.uk

“Accidents of personal association": Practical Criticism, the Sentimentalist, and T.S. Eliot’s Critique of Mass Culture

Recent scholarship has sought to revalue T.S. Eliot's religiously and politically conservative critical legacy by placing Eliot in a trajectory of mass culture critique that includes Adorno, Marcuse, and other Frankfurt School culture industry critics. This realignment focuses on Eliot's conceptions of the "dissociation of sensibility" and the Romantic and Classic modes as critiques of capitalist reification; I would argue that this realignment also duplicates the now standard reading of a misogynistic high modernism responding to – and constructing – mass culture as feminine. My paper focuses instead on Eliot’s 1920s critical work in relation to the work of his contemporary, I.A. Richards, especially Richards’s Practical Criticism (1926). Reading Eliot alongside Richards highlights the importance of a conception of sentimentality to both men's critical projects. Through the idea of sentimentality, and through the figure of the sentimentalist (often gendered male), Eliot and Richards seem to be implicitly working out the terms of their critique of the effects of capitalist culture. I seek to reopen the question of modernism’s gendered relation to mass culture through a reading of the sentimentalist in the cultural criticism of Eliot and Richards.

Laura Heffernan
University of Pennsylvania
laurah@english.upenn.edu