Anthropology of the Working-class: Documentary Literature of 1930s Britain

<p>Bookmarked neatly by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the 1930s are often characterised as the decade in which writers felt compelled to engage in politics. According to one predominant critical narrative, modernist subjectivity and notions of aesthetic autonomy were eschewed in favour of a more direct involvement with the social and political realities of the time. This thesis explores, and follows in part, this interpretation of the decade’s literary direction by examining British documentary literature and its engagement with the social distress of the Depression. Driven by an intense fascination with the domestic working-classes (from which each of my professional “authors” remained outsiders), documentary writers journeyed to Britain’s industrial centres to experience working conditions directly. Writers of documentary literature took 1930s realist preoccupations to their most extreme by assuming the role, intentionally or not, of the anthropologist. Paradoxically, this move towards the empirical functioned as a means of crossing what C. P. Snow would later describe as the divide between the “two cultures” of science and arts. I apply Snow’s notion analogously, with documentary literature representing a bridging (depending on each text) of the divides between social science and literature, realism and modernism, political commitment and aesthetic autonomy, North and South, and between the working and middle-classes. My first chapter discusses Priestley’s English Journey (1934), which while crossing class and geographical divisions, stylistically remains the most conservative of my chosen texts and offers the most moderate example of a generic cultural crossing. The second chapter explores Grey Children (1937) by James Hanley, whose journalistic arrangement of verbatim working-class voices develops a modernist aesthetic. I then move to Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which unusually for a text by a “literary” author includes extensive figures and statistics, but is more successful in documenting the gritty realities of working life through literary means. The final chapter centres on Mass-Observation’s The Pub and the People (1943) whose obsessive recording of even the most minute details of pub life develops into a bizarre, almost surrealist work of literature. The order of my four chosen texts does not imply a sense of literary value but rather traces a trajectory from the least to the most radical experiments in documentary literature.</p>

Anthropology of the Working-class: Documentary Literature of 1930s Britain

<p>Bookmarked neatly by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the 1930s are often characterised as the decade in which writers felt compelled to engage in politics. According to one predominant critical narrative, modernist subjectivity and notions of aesthetic autonomy were eschewed in favour of a more direct involvement with the social and political realities of the time. This thesis explores, and follows in part, this interpretation of the decade’s literary direction by examining British documentary literature and its engagement with the social distress of the Depression. Driven by an intense fascination with the domestic working-classes (from which each of my professional “authors” remained outsiders), documentary writers journeyed to Britain’s industrial centres to experience working conditions directly. Writers of documentary literature took 1930s realist preoccupations to their most extreme by assuming the role, intentionally or not, of the anthropologist. Paradoxically, this move towards the empirical functioned as a means of crossing what C. P. Snow would later describe as the divide between the “two cultures” of science and arts. I apply Snow’s notion analogously, with documentary literature representing a bridging (depending on each text) of the divides between social science and literature, realism and modernism, political commitment and aesthetic autonomy, North and South, and between the working and middle-classes. My first chapter discusses Priestley’s English Journey (1934), which while crossing class and geographical divisions, stylistically remains the most conservative of my chosen texts and offers the most moderate example of a generic cultural crossing. The second chapter explores Grey Children (1937) by James Hanley, whose journalistic arrangement of verbatim working-class voices develops a modernist aesthetic. I then move to Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which unusually for a text by a “literary” author includes extensive figures and statistics, but is more successful in documenting the gritty realities of working life through literary means. The final chapter centres on Mass-Observation’s The Pub and the People (1943) whose obsessive recording of even the most minute details of pub life develops into a bizarre, almost surrealist work of literature. The order of my four chosen texts does not imply a sense of literary value but rather traces a trajectory from the least to the most radical experiments in documentary literature.</p>

Aesthetic Eating

The aim of this paper is to sketch a framework for perceiving the act of consumption as an aesthetic phenomenon. I shall argue that, under some circumstances, it is possible to receive aesthetic satisfaction from the act of eating food, in which the object of one’s appreciation is, for the most part, considered separately from what is actually eaten. I propose to call such a process “aesthetic eating” and argue that due to its aesthetic autonomy it might be a potential factor in enjoying certain kinds of food. This phenomenon is apparent in the case of the types of food that are acquired tastes. It is plausible that distinguishing the aesthetic pleasures of food from the ones associated with the act of eating can not only enrich our aesthetic life but also deepen the aesthetics of our overall gustatory experience.

From Automaton to Autonomy

This essay considers Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) in relation to Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) and the writings of two other Frankfurt School critics—Theodor Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer. Anticipating the larger argument of Benjamin’s essay, the film situates its central conflict around the “auratic” (as represented by Maria’s Christianity) and the “mechanical” (as embodied by Joh Fredersen’s technology). This conflict is crystallized by the robotic Maria, who is an exact duplicate of the real Maria. The essay highlights Adorno’s correspondence with Benjamin, examining how Metropolis itself engages with the positions these critics take on mechanical reproduction in film. Especially relevant in this regard is Kracauer’s classic study of German cinema, From Caligari to Hitler (1947), a book that levels against Lang the charge that Marxism often levels against modernism: its formalism mystifies its politics. The essay concludes with an analysis of the flood scene from Metropolis, demonstrating that the film’s formalism is not merely “ornamental”—as Kracauer claimed—and that for Lang political autonomy is inextricably linked with aesthetic autonomy.

Who’s afraid of Mihai Iovănel? Regimes of Relevance and New Literary Historiography

The present article addresses Mihai Iovănel’s recently published History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 while pursuing a series of similarities with other contributions to postcommunist national literatures in the Central and Eastern European cultural space, on the one hand, and with previous ways of understanding the concept of literary history, on the other. The article argues that Iovănel’s History is one of the first to assess the importance of the social in the production, study, and national, as well as transnational dissemination of Romanian literature, an emphasis without which the study of literary phenomena risks falling into the blindness of aesthetic autonomy, whose shortcomings are well documented in the book. Lastly, I will argue that Iovănel unwillingly describes several of the most notable shifts in the “regimes of relevance” (Galin Tihanov) that literature has undergone from the communist period to contemporary times.

Cognitive Media Ethics

This chapter surveys a breadth of approaches to the ethics of film and other narrative media, both contemporary and historic, and positions them in relation to developments in cognitive media ethics. These include cine-ethics and film philosophy, phenomenological approaches, literary ethics and hermeneutics, notions of aesthetic autonomy, and ethics in narratology. The contributions and challenges of each approach are summarized, as are their uses in the development of a normative ethics for cognitive media studies. Throughout this chapter, a case emerges for the complementary, elaborative rigors of cognitive science, normative ethics, and consequentialism. The chapter concludes by indicating how methods for analysis developed at the center of these areas of study will inform the remainder of the book.

Ottoman Tanzimat and the Decadence of Empire

This article considers late nineteenth-century Ottoman literature, concentrating specifically on the tension between the poetics of the avant-garde “New Literature” (1896–1901) and the poetics of conservative modernizers, spearheaded by the prominent Tanzimat author Ahmet Midhat. In calling for experimentation with traditional Ottoman poetic forms and a new mode of composition using an uncompromisingly elaborate style, the avant-gardists sought to capture the fin-de-siècle spirit in the Ottoman Empire, overwhelmed by the sense of decline and urgency for modernization. What unites the different decadent practices of the time is the objective to challenge the communicative language of systematic modernization by pursuing aesthetic autonomy. The conservative modernizers, politically committed to social and cultural reforms, attacked these authors for being decadent and excessively influenced by French literature, initiating what later came to be known as the “decadence controversy,” which became part of the larger historical question of modernization and westernization.

The “Coming” Epic of Freedom: Reading Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri as a Mythopoesis in Opposition to Sovereign Control

There is a general trend among Western critics, and scholars influenced by the West, to stereotype Third World Literatures, particularly those from India, either as the voice of national consolidation or as providing the emancipated West with the required dose of mysticism and spiritualism. Sri Aurobindo’s works have fallen within either of these two categories. As a result, much of the aesthetic autonomy of his writings have been ignored. This article focuses on the unique quality of Sri Aurobindo’s works, with particular reference to his epic poem Savitri, and shows how he recreates indigenous and classical Indian legends, myths and symbols to subvert sovereign control initiated by the West. Savitri emerges as the representative epic for a new nation that has much more to offer to the future generations apart from the intangible ideas of mysticism and spiritualism. By reinforcing the concept of Shakti and the Mother as the primal Universal Consciousness the mythopoesis in Savitri stands in opposition to the anthropocentric and the anthropogenic machines of sovereignty, both ancient and modern. It establishes the fact that in the human resides the divine and that divinity is a kind of life that can be lived on this earth.

Absolute Music

“Absolute music” names an idea, an aesthetic concept, a regulative construct, a repertoire, and an aspiration. The term also engages a range of broader claims about aesthetic autonomy, or the possibility of aesthetic experience more generally. This chapter investigates how and why the aspiration towards autonomy has seemed so necessary—and so powerfully subversive—for musical thinkers at certain times in history. It traces the entanglements and misalignments of the various meanings and uses of these ideas, and brings these insights into the remit of contemporary debates about music’s ineffability, and its capacity to facilitate resistance and political agency.