I teach and research twentieth century literature and culture. My research is mainly into music and modernism, particularly in the work of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Townsend Warner, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford and Theodor Adorno.
Twenty-First-Century Readings of E.M. Forster's 'Maurice', 2020
Women exerted a considerable influence on Maurice, even though admirable female characters are ab... more Women exerted a considerable influence on Maurice, even though admirable female characters are absent from the narrative. Before the First World War, a sexually conservative reform movement called Social Purity was bringing male sexuality under particular scrutiny, making this a difficult time for Forster to be claiming that homosexuality was not morally wrong. Interpreted against this background, Maurice can be read not as a rebellion against attenuated Victorian attitudes or against women but as a challenge to the contemporary social purity movement. In this context – the difficulty of talking about homosexuality, of which the novel explores the effects – the willingness of Forster’s friend and confidante, Florence Barger, to discuss homosexuality also needs to be seen as significant. She contributed to Forster’s ability to represent homosexuality as a valid alternative to bourgeois masculinity that equated heterosexuality with morality, health and economic success.
Abstract: Scholarship on Forster and music has tried to resolve contradictions in the texts: biog... more Abstract: Scholarship on Forster and music has tried to resolve contradictions in the texts: biographical information is recruited to produce readings that are consistent with his documented musical preferences and political opinions. This article analyzes music in A Room with a View and Howards End to explore the presence of receding nineteenth- and emerging twentieth-century approaches to music. The different and contradictory ways music is presented can be understood as competing notions of what music is and means. This discussion uses T. W. Adorno’s writing on Beethoven and Mahler to analyze the different guises in which music appears in Forster’s novels to show that music is a site of conflict. Residues of nineteenth-century aestheticism are contained in the depictions of “sublime” music, while at other times music is shown to be a product of existing material conditions.
This introduction explains the rationale for the Sylvia Townsend Warner and Modernism conference,... more This introduction explains the rationale for the Sylvia Townsend Warner and Modernism conference, at which the essays that follow were presented. The conference sought to place Warner’s work in relation to current debates about modernism and to build on existing work – notably by David James – that began to think about Warner’s texts with attention to issues of form and style. An overview of the range of papers and topics is also provided.
Parade's End registers the potential and necessity for a transition in conceptions of music infor... more Parade's End registers the potential and necessity for a transition in conceptions of music informed by new sounds experienced during the First World War. In the trenches, Tietjens interprets a bombardment as a Wagnerian orchestra, encouraging contemplation of where and why demarcation lines between music and noise are drawn, as well as reflection on the utopian project of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Art-Work). Ford's tetralogy has a significant contribution to make towards understanding how writers were navigating the impact of noise on music in the early twentieth century.
St. Mawr (written 1924, published 1925) is usually addressed in terms of Lawrence’s encounters wi... more St. Mawr (written 1924, published 1925) is usually addressed in terms of Lawrence’s encounters with otherness and difference, as well as his broader critique of industrialisation. This article argues for the significance of popular culture in the novella to show how it also participates in the discussion of issues – around the self, culture and society – usually associated with Lawrence’s final period in Europe. By offering a new reading of the Devil’s Chair scene, that explores the importance of a “new dance tune” (SM 75) and extends arguments about Rico as “representative of modern civilized ‘life’” and its damaging effects, I examine how Lawrence critiques popular art, music and film as limiting peoples’ capacities for independent thought. St. Mawr thus anticipates Lawrence’s claims about the effects of mass culture in Pornography and Obscenity (1929) and his exploration of the modern “psychological condition” in his 1927 ‘Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow’ (IR 332).
Twenty-First-Century Readings of E.M. Forster's 'Maurice', 2020
Women exerted a considerable influence on Maurice, even though admirable female characters are ab... more Women exerted a considerable influence on Maurice, even though admirable female characters are absent from the narrative. Before the First World War, a sexually conservative reform movement called Social Purity was bringing male sexuality under particular scrutiny, making this a difficult time for Forster to be claiming that homosexuality was not morally wrong. Interpreted against this background, Maurice can be read not as a rebellion against attenuated Victorian attitudes or against women but as a challenge to the contemporary social purity movement. In this context – the difficulty of talking about homosexuality, of which the novel explores the effects – the willingness of Forster’s friend and confidante, Florence Barger, to discuss homosexuality also needs to be seen as significant. She contributed to Forster’s ability to represent homosexuality as a valid alternative to bourgeois masculinity that equated heterosexuality with morality, health and economic success.
Abstract: Scholarship on Forster and music has tried to resolve contradictions in the texts: biog... more Abstract: Scholarship on Forster and music has tried to resolve contradictions in the texts: biographical information is recruited to produce readings that are consistent with his documented musical preferences and political opinions. This article analyzes music in A Room with a View and Howards End to explore the presence of receding nineteenth- and emerging twentieth-century approaches to music. The different and contradictory ways music is presented can be understood as competing notions of what music is and means. This discussion uses T. W. Adorno’s writing on Beethoven and Mahler to analyze the different guises in which music appears in Forster’s novels to show that music is a site of conflict. Residues of nineteenth-century aestheticism are contained in the depictions of “sublime” music, while at other times music is shown to be a product of existing material conditions.
This introduction explains the rationale for the Sylvia Townsend Warner and Modernism conference,... more This introduction explains the rationale for the Sylvia Townsend Warner and Modernism conference, at which the essays that follow were presented. The conference sought to place Warner’s work in relation to current debates about modernism and to build on existing work – notably by David James – that began to think about Warner’s texts with attention to issues of form and style. An overview of the range of papers and topics is also provided.
Parade's End registers the potential and necessity for a transition in conceptions of music infor... more Parade's End registers the potential and necessity for a transition in conceptions of music informed by new sounds experienced during the First World War. In the trenches, Tietjens interprets a bombardment as a Wagnerian orchestra, encouraging contemplation of where and why demarcation lines between music and noise are drawn, as well as reflection on the utopian project of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Art-Work). Ford's tetralogy has a significant contribution to make towards understanding how writers were navigating the impact of noise on music in the early twentieth century.
St. Mawr (written 1924, published 1925) is usually addressed in terms of Lawrence’s encounters wi... more St. Mawr (written 1924, published 1925) is usually addressed in terms of Lawrence’s encounters with otherness and difference, as well as his broader critique of industrialisation. This article argues for the significance of popular culture in the novella to show how it also participates in the discussion of issues – around the self, culture and society – usually associated with Lawrence’s final period in Europe. By offering a new reading of the Devil’s Chair scene, that explores the importance of a “new dance tune” (SM 75) and extends arguments about Rico as “representative of modern civilized ‘life’” and its damaging effects, I examine how Lawrence critiques popular art, music and film as limiting peoples’ capacities for independent thought. St. Mawr thus anticipates Lawrence’s claims about the effects of mass culture in Pornography and Obscenity (1929) and his exploration of the modern “psychological condition” in his 1927 ‘Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow’ (IR 332).
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