Leon Surette. Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics. Montreal and King... more Leon Surette. Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics. Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queens up, 2011. 363 pp. US$59.95. In this new volume, Leon Surette historicizes the troubling political commentaries made by T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound between the run up to World War I and the years following World War II. Surette's methodology represents a departure from prior studies of these authors, which, according to Surette, have suffered from the biases of changing literary debates or from excessive derision for their subjects. While insisting these authors must be held to account for supporting authoritarian movements, Surette believes a historical account can spare these men reputations for "malign intentions" (283). Although often foolish, Eliot, Lewis, and Pound were, Surette suggests, quite conventionally skeptical of democratic capitalism in the years that bore witness to trench warfare, the Depression, and the expansion of mass culture. Their turn, toward the royalism of Charles Maurras in the case of Eliot, and toward Italian and German fascism, respectively, in the cases of Pound and Lewis, was consistent with the reformist fashion of the era's critical output. And like many of their peers, writes Surette, they harboured no fundamental predilection for authoritarian power. They did, however, feel an understandable antagonism for the rise of a modern democracy they saw as defined by oligarchy, industrialism, and the influence of popular culture. As Surette puts it: "The aim of this study is to demonstrate that the social and political views of Lewis, Eliot, and Pound were not primarily motivated by a hope to establish any particular social or political model--at least not initially--but rather by distaste for the social and political status-quo in which they found themselves" (4). Surette identifies two "principal factors" responsible for the particular shape of commentary by Eliot, Lewis, and Pound: the perceived need for an avant-garde that would break with the past and, simultaneously, an awareness of how the period's rapid changes in technology and mass culture threatened the European cultural tradition (274). In focusing on such factors, Surette engages that which continues to fascinate readers of modernism: authors like Eliot, Lewis, and Pound pioneered a new mix of aesthetic formula that today still feels radically invented, yet they often resisted key revolutions in cultural production. Further, they championed the collective but resented the collectivity's new popular forms. Their works are fragmented responses to kitsch, but they desired for themselves the role of the master-artist who might provide clear cultural orientation. Surette quite lucidly unravels these knotted interests, which do not always accommodate plain or easy explanation. Surette parses the various critical strains in which Eliot, Pound, and Lewis participated by labeling each author a Pollyanna or a Cassandra depending upon their attraction to theories of cultural ascension or decline. In the years before the first war, he shows his three subjects navigating between Cassandras like Oswald Spengler, who "perceived an endemic malaise in European culture and civilization" (37), and Pollyannas, often communists, who expected next-stage progressions in political economy to move away from failed institutions. It appears both Eliot and Pound were optimistic Pollyannas. Pound came to Europe to pursue an energetic new art that lay latent but unexplored in America. Eliot, forever cool to his home country, embraced British manners in order to separate himself from American experience and its cultural deprivations, even while noticing widespread cultural diminishment among the British. Lewis, although later a Cassandra who feared a second war, objected to Spengler's aggressive historicizing of cultural phenomena and labeled him a relativist hostile to essential truth. In sum, "the rejection of Spengler by our trio reflects their adherence to the Enlightenment conviction that human beings create their own destiny, a conviction which Eliot, Pound, and Lewis share--however much they may diverge on just whither society is headed or toward what it should strive" (40). …
I wish to explore the nature of that literary convention and the manner in which Kroetsch is movi... more I wish to explore the nature of that literary convention and the manner in which Kroetsch is moving away from it. He had earlier confessed to an impatience "with certain traditional kinds of realism, because," he said, "I think there is a more profound kind available to us."2 It ...
... Gordon Graham, Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics Reviewed by. Leon Surett... more ... Gordon Graham, Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics Reviewed by. Leon Surette. Keywords. philosophy, book reviews. Bookmark and Share. This journal is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical 3.0 Unported license. ...
This is an unusual book to emerge from a university press in that Lachapelle fails to establish a... more This is an unusual book to emerge from a university press in that Lachapelle fails to establish any posture of either credulity or skepticism toward the investigations into the superor paranormal that are her subject. Instead of assessing the value of such investigations, she provides a neutral history of the individuals and organizations devoted to such studies – primarily in France – between 1853 and 1931. Insofar as Lachapelle has a thesis it is that relations between investigators into supernatural phenomena and mainstream science and religion in France describe an arc from cautious entertainment of the possibility of such phenomena by mainstream science and religion in the 1850s to pretty general dismissal of it by the 1930s. As it happens, the serious-minded investigation into such phenomena neither began in nor was confined to France, making the focus on French individuals and institutions rather troublesome. Perhaps it is that difficulty that persuaded Lachapelle to eschew a...
This text considers what happens when the "natural speech" model inherited from the Mod... more This text considers what happens when the "natural speech" model inherited from the Modernist poets comes up against the "natural speech" of the "Donahue" talk show, or again, how visual poetics and verse forms are responding to the languages of billboards and sound bytes. Among the many poets whose works are discussed are John Ashbery, George Oppen, Susan Howe, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Charles Bernstein, Johanna Drucker, and Steve McCaffery. But the strongest presence in Perloff's book is John Cage, a "poet" better known as a composer, a philosopher, a printmaker, and one who understood, almost half a century ago, that from now on no word, musical note, painted surface, or theoretical statement could ever again escape "contamination" from the media landscape in which we live. It is under his sign that "Radical Artifice" was composed.
Leon Surette. Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics. Montreal and King... more Leon Surette. Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics. Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queens up, 2011. 363 pp. US$59.95. In this new volume, Leon Surette historicizes the troubling political commentaries made by T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound between the run up to World War I and the years following World War II. Surette's methodology represents a departure from prior studies of these authors, which, according to Surette, have suffered from the biases of changing literary debates or from excessive derision for their subjects. While insisting these authors must be held to account for supporting authoritarian movements, Surette believes a historical account can spare these men reputations for "malign intentions" (283). Although often foolish, Eliot, Lewis, and Pound were, Surette suggests, quite conventionally skeptical of democratic capitalism in the years that bore witness to trench warfare, the Depression, and the expansion of mass culture. Their turn, toward the royalism of Charles Maurras in the case of Eliot, and toward Italian and German fascism, respectively, in the cases of Pound and Lewis, was consistent with the reformist fashion of the era's critical output. And like many of their peers, writes Surette, they harboured no fundamental predilection for authoritarian power. They did, however, feel an understandable antagonism for the rise of a modern democracy they saw as defined by oligarchy, industrialism, and the influence of popular culture. As Surette puts it: "The aim of this study is to demonstrate that the social and political views of Lewis, Eliot, and Pound were not primarily motivated by a hope to establish any particular social or political model--at least not initially--but rather by distaste for the social and political status-quo in which they found themselves" (4). Surette identifies two "principal factors" responsible for the particular shape of commentary by Eliot, Lewis, and Pound: the perceived need for an avant-garde that would break with the past and, simultaneously, an awareness of how the period's rapid changes in technology and mass culture threatened the European cultural tradition (274). In focusing on such factors, Surette engages that which continues to fascinate readers of modernism: authors like Eliot, Lewis, and Pound pioneered a new mix of aesthetic formula that today still feels radically invented, yet they often resisted key revolutions in cultural production. Further, they championed the collective but resented the collectivity's new popular forms. Their works are fragmented responses to kitsch, but they desired for themselves the role of the master-artist who might provide clear cultural orientation. Surette quite lucidly unravels these knotted interests, which do not always accommodate plain or easy explanation. Surette parses the various critical strains in which Eliot, Pound, and Lewis participated by labeling each author a Pollyanna or a Cassandra depending upon their attraction to theories of cultural ascension or decline. In the years before the first war, he shows his three subjects navigating between Cassandras like Oswald Spengler, who "perceived an endemic malaise in European culture and civilization" (37), and Pollyannas, often communists, who expected next-stage progressions in political economy to move away from failed institutions. It appears both Eliot and Pound were optimistic Pollyannas. Pound came to Europe to pursue an energetic new art that lay latent but unexplored in America. Eliot, forever cool to his home country, embraced British manners in order to separate himself from American experience and its cultural deprivations, even while noticing widespread cultural diminishment among the British. Lewis, although later a Cassandra who feared a second war, objected to Spengler's aggressive historicizing of cultural phenomena and labeled him a relativist hostile to essential truth. In sum, "the rejection of Spengler by our trio reflects their adherence to the Enlightenment conviction that human beings create their own destiny, a conviction which Eliot, Pound, and Lewis share--however much they may diverge on just whither society is headed or toward what it should strive" (40). …
I wish to explore the nature of that literary convention and the manner in which Kroetsch is movi... more I wish to explore the nature of that literary convention and the manner in which Kroetsch is moving away from it. He had earlier confessed to an impatience "with certain traditional kinds of realism, because," he said, "I think there is a more profound kind available to us."2 It ...
... Gordon Graham, Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics Reviewed by. Leon Surett... more ... Gordon Graham, Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics Reviewed by. Leon Surette. Keywords. philosophy, book reviews. Bookmark and Share. This journal is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical 3.0 Unported license. ...
This is an unusual book to emerge from a university press in that Lachapelle fails to establish a... more This is an unusual book to emerge from a university press in that Lachapelle fails to establish any posture of either credulity or skepticism toward the investigations into the superor paranormal that are her subject. Instead of assessing the value of such investigations, she provides a neutral history of the individuals and organizations devoted to such studies – primarily in France – between 1853 and 1931. Insofar as Lachapelle has a thesis it is that relations between investigators into supernatural phenomena and mainstream science and religion in France describe an arc from cautious entertainment of the possibility of such phenomena by mainstream science and religion in the 1850s to pretty general dismissal of it by the 1930s. As it happens, the serious-minded investigation into such phenomena neither began in nor was confined to France, making the focus on French individuals and institutions rather troublesome. Perhaps it is that difficulty that persuaded Lachapelle to eschew a...
This text considers what happens when the "natural speech" model inherited from the Mod... more This text considers what happens when the "natural speech" model inherited from the Modernist poets comes up against the "natural speech" of the "Donahue" talk show, or again, how visual poetics and verse forms are responding to the languages of billboards and sound bytes. Among the many poets whose works are discussed are John Ashbery, George Oppen, Susan Howe, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Charles Bernstein, Johanna Drucker, and Steve McCaffery. But the strongest presence in Perloff's book is John Cage, a "poet" better known as a composer, a philosopher, a printmaker, and one who understood, almost half a century ago, that from now on no word, musical note, painted surface, or theoretical statement could ever again escape "contamination" from the media landscape in which we live. It is under his sign that "Radical Artifice" was composed.
Latour’s polemical strategy is a negative one. He does not champion the virtues or plausibility ... more Latour’s polemical strategy is a negative one. He does not champion the virtues or plausibility of religious beliefs, but, like Rorty, attacks the plausibility of empirical science’s claim to objective, true knowledge. In other words, his strategy is the same one of “calling into question” that Derrida adopted. (The label for such a rhetorical strategy is “aporetics”, of which more below.) In that respect Latour belongs to a French strain of Marxist-tinged philosophical scepticism which runs from J-P Sartre, through Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida (a French in culture, though Algerian born).
Deconstruction is seen as a belated attack on the Frege/Russell positive theory of language. Bela... more Deconstruction is seen as a belated attack on the Frege/Russell positive theory of language. Belated because Wittgenstein, Austin & Searle had rendered their referential theory of language obsolete roughly a decade before OF GRAMMATOLOGY. Derrida's deconstruction belongs to an older theory of language meaning most commonly called the Whorf/Sapir hypothesis, and found in an extreme form in Kabbalism. Derrida's analysis of Saussurean semiology and Peircean semiotics is shown to be based mostly on equivocation.
A positioning of the American reception of Deconstructive and New Historical (Foucauldian) critic... more A positioning of the American reception of Deconstructive and New Historical (Foucauldian) criticism within the political and ideological context of the sixties and seventies: the Hippie movement, political assassinations and the Viet Nam War. This is a lightly revised version of a previously posted paper of the same title.
A discussion of Jeffrey Mehlman's situation of Deconstruction in its historical moment in the wa... more A discussion of Jeffrey Mehlman's situation of Deconstruction in its historical moment in the wake of the De Man revelations, of Derrida's inadequate response to those revelations. Placed in the context of Derrida's exchange with John Searle, and of the Alan Sokal hoax perpetrated on Social Text.
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This is a lightly revised version of a previously posted paper of the same title.