This essay locates Christopher Isherwood's radical energy in the use of emergent visual technologies to curate a space for queer desire in his works Goodbye to Berlin (1939) and Prater Violet (1945). ...Isherwood subverts the heteronormative cinematic discourses by pausing them and preparing Instantaneous Photographs out of small moments that engage in a play of stillness and movement. The pauses enable the narratives to constantly draw attention toward themselves as well as the namesake narrators who voice their queer desire in those moments. This presents to us the unique esthetics of Isherwood wherein the visual does not only serve the novelistic in being a narrative strategy but becomes an epistemological mode through which the visual constructs queer subjectivity, in a world witnessing the rise of fascist forces. In short, the "queer camera," seizing the grand narrative of history, forges queer time and queer voice, and, thereby, an alternative history that acknowledges queer presence.
Autobiographical remembering thus entails the reflection of the subject on her earlier incarnations, the younger selves from which the present self has evolved. ...the autobiographical "I" can never ...be singular, but is necessarily split into more positions, among them the narrating self and the experiencing self. In Reading Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson present a taxonomy with four types of "I" in autobiographical texts: the "real" or historical "I," the flesh-and-blood author, "unknown and unknowable by readers" (72); the narrating "I," a persona of the historical "I," accessible to readers through the narrative and the "remembering agent" that tells the story of self (73); the narrated "I," the protagonist who is "the version of the self that the narrating T chooses to constitute through recollection" (73); and the ideological "I," expressing the culturally determined, yet largely internalized models of selfhood available to the narrator, which determine self-representation (76). According to Franz Stanzel, "the classical first-person novel with autobiographical form" preserves "an equilibrium . . . between the experiencing and the narrating self": although the narrative mediates the experiencing self's perspective most of the time, the narrating self is also there to comment on and thus potentially correct the character's perception (210). Löschnigg is right to claim that distinguishing between teller and experiencer may prove counterproductive when examining autobiographical works as documents of their authors' searches for self-definition.
Mia Spiro'sAnti-Nazi Modernismmarks a major step forward in the critical debates over the relationship between modernist art and politics. Spiro analyzes the antifascist, and particularly anti-Nazi, ...narrative methods used by key British and American fiction writers in the 1930s. Focusing on works by Djuna Barnes, Christopher Isherwood, and Virginia Woolf, Spiro illustrates how these writers use an "anti-Nazi aesthetic" to target and expose Nazism's murderous discourse of exclusion. The three writers challenge the illusion of harmony and unity promoted by the Nazi spectacle in parades, film, rallies, and propaganda. Spiro illustrates how their writings, seldom read in this way, resonate with the psychological and social theories of the period and warn against Nazism's suppression of individuality. Her approach also demonstrates how historical and cultural contexts complicate the works, often reinforcing the oppressive discourses they aim to attack. This book explores the textual ambivalences toward the "Others" in society-most prominently the Modern Woman, the homosexual, and the Jew. By doing so, Spiro uncovers important clues to the sexual and racial politics that were widespread in Europe and the United States in the years leading up to World War II.
Battershill's most important resources are the Hogarth Press Business Archives (University of Reading, England); Monk's House Papers and The Leonard Woolf Papers (University of Sussex); the ...digitalized Modernist Archives Publishing Project; and additional holdings in the US and Canada. Working with data and correspondence from the original files, the author cites details on manuscript acquisitions, genre categorization, print runs, editions, pricing, marketing venues, book design, reviewing, and more. Battershill interweaves information from the archives with analyses of individual books in order to emphasize the variety of approaches and techniques.
There are numerous references to Christopher Isherwood’s prejudices against Jews in scholarly literature; however, this subject has not yet been approached in depth. This study aims to fill that void ...by dissecting the author’s bias against Jews: its origin and nature. The article discusses the references to Jews in the writer’s novels, memoirs and diaries within the frame of reference of Tajfel and Turner’s social identity theory which holds that humans innately derogate those who are perceived as being opposed. A close reading reveals that Isherwood, in a specific social and political context, considered Jews alien to him and —in accordance with social identity theory predictions— he instinctually derogated them. Before his stay in Berlin, Judaism did not interest him and he disliked Jews because he regarded them as ‘exotic’. During the rise and rule of Nazism, the writer felt compelled to support Jews —although reticently— because they had become the main target of persecution of national socialism. Later, once in America, Isherwood distinguished between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ anti-Semitism and stated that Jewish politics were whining and belligerent. Even though he had Jewish friends, his diaries show a persistent instinctual dislike of Jews. Ironically, the anti-prejudice fighter could not help having his own prejudices.
Upon receipt of the Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Washington State University's Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections (MASC) began to collect materials to enhance this collection. ...Dr. Trevor Bond, MASC Head, and Julie King, MASC cataloger, are most familiar with the Woolf Library's history and contents. ...he identifies Hogarth Press and other Woolfiana titles currently held by MASC to avoid duplicate purchases.
A Genealogy of Queer Detachment PRICE, MATTHEW BURROUGHS
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
05/2015, Letnik:
130, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Despite their widespread attention to the confluence of queer sexualities and "decadence" in fin-de-siècle writing, queer theorists have yet to overcome the two concepts' persistently destructive ...conflation. This essay explores the latent positive affinities of queerness and decadence in Walter Pater's Renaissance, which links them through what I call queer detachment. A balance of engagement with and withdrawal from history, this critical perspective anticipates queer theory's methodologies as well as other queer modernist productions. Examining Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood's chronicle of decadent Weimar Germany, I demonstrate how queer detachment becomes an increasingly politicized method of literary and social world making, a means of reengaging the politics and aesthetics of queer history. These works, and others like them, encourage scholars to realize decadence's positivity, to conceptualize a queer theory that refuses to acquiesce to residual historical narratives and philosophical systems—without, for all that, refusing their value entirely.
W.H. Auden's The Ascent of F6 (1936), In Time of War (1938), and William Empson's “Autumn on Nan-Yűeh” (1937-38) feature holy mountains in East Asia. The experience of mountains in Tibetan/Chinese ...Buddhisms intrudes, and complicates, the political bearing of Auden's and Empson's writings. Although neither author embraces Eastern religions doctrinally, religious mountaineering nevertheless urges both to contemplate the tension in literature between aesthetic autonomy and political engagement. For both Auden and Empson, their experiences continue to linger as a formative catalyst in the shaping of their religious and political views during the postwar years.
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