Dark Angel Research Articles

Becoming Max, Athena, and Kristin: Transnormative Nationalism in Dark Angel, Battlestar Galactica, and the Chelsea Manning Controversy

Abstract In Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir Puar introduces the concept of homonationalism as an analytic for a sociohistorical moment of seeming contradictions in gay politics. Since the book's first edition in 2007, several scholars have theorized the relation between homonationalism and transgender politics by examining nonfictional texts from 2007 onward. That scholarship most often explores the controversy surrounding US transparency activist Chelsea Manning's 2010 leaks of government information and subsequent “coming out” as transgender. However, interactions among homonationalism, transgender politics, and fictional texts remain undertheorized. Analyzing those interactions with a focus on American exceptionalism and science fiction television, this article shows that transnormative nationalism began territorializing through transtextuality as early as 2000. This argument not only contributes a more comprehensive explanation of the relation between homonationalism and transgender politics but also reveals the role of science fiction television in connecting the two. The argument's supporting evidence comprises a science fiction television figure termed the post-post-gender cyborg woman. This figure is incarnated in Max, a transgenic woman in Dark Angel (Fox, 2000–2002), and Sharon, a female humanoid Cylon (or robot) in Battlestar Galactica (Sky1 and Sci Fi Channel, 2004–2009). The method is a multiperspectival cultural studies approach, which holistically interprets a text's cultural meanings through analyzing not only the text but also its transtextually related texts, production, and reception. The data include television episodes, webisodes, DVD special features, tie-in novels, published interviews, professional criticism, fan fiction, and fan video. The analysis concludes with how transnormative nationalism reterritorialized in the Manning controversy.

“Because I Do not Hope to Turn”: Anglo-Catholic Doctrines in Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday

This essay aims to examine the centrality of the Anglo-Catholic doctrines in Eliot’s poem, Ash-Wednesday, as a part of the Anglo-faith which Eliot embraced as his way of life. The poem, as Ronald Schuchard notes in his book, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art, could also be seen as a poem of Eliot’s journey towards penance. The poetic persona offers a prayer to a Lady of Silences—a venerated figure similar to Mary—before he begins his journey. In this way, the title itself has the Anglo-Catholic significance in that Ash Wednesday refers to a period in which people undergo their penance and wait for the Easter. Thus, Anglo-Catholic element plays a crucial role in the poetic narrative. In this way, Ash-Wednesday can be read as an Anglo-Catholic poem in a way different from other poems such as “Journey of the Magi” and Four Quartets, in which Anglo-Catholic or Christian theme appear only occasionally, often, indirectly.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Daniel Simon a dark angel flies with a shofar playing his trumpet in flight – Boris Khersonsky Click for larger view View full resolution HOW IS IT possible to think about art during a time of war? Years before the Russian military began the full-scale destruction of the Ukrainian cities of Mariupol, Kharkiv, Kyiv, and many others in February 2022, writers and artists had been raising their voices in defense of freedom and peace. And while Vladimir Putin's ethnonationalist, irredentist campaign to annex Ukraine continues to kill thousands of people, wreak untold destruction, and send millions of refugees into exile, the current "Muses" issue of WLT makes the case for a Republic of Arts and Letters that transcends geopolitical conflicts and promotes a shared sense of humanity through cultural ties. Many of the cultural linkages present in this issue go as far back as Odessa in the late nineteenth century, where the Russian painters Leonid Pasternak (1862–1945) and Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1914) both attended the Grekov Odessa art school. Pasternak's painting of his famous son, Boris beside the Baltic at Mereküla (1910), appears alongside a letter that Boris wrote to a young University of Oklahoma student soon after Pasternak had been awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, which, under pressure from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and the Union of Soviet Writers, he declined to accept (page 20). Romanian artist and writer Constantin Severin's poem dedicated to Kandinsky appears alongside the latter's Composition #218 (Two Ovals) (1919). In a note introducing his poem, Severin writes: "Kandinsky inspired me as a symbol of interferences and fusion between music and art, soul and spirit, human and angel, dark history and bright culture" (page 42). A dark gulf looms between history and culture in the present moment, however. A further cultural connection presents itself in the interview with Russian Jewish émigré writer Yelena Lembersky (page 22). Her grandfather, Felix Lembersky (1913–1970), created a series of paintings between 1944 and '52 depicting the murder of more than 33,000 Ukrainian Jews at Babyn Yar in September 1941, "the largest single mass killing by the German army during its campaign against the Soviet Union" (Wolfram Wette). These paintings are the earliest representations of the massacre and among the earliest artistic images of the Holocaust. "Under the Stalinist regime," Lembersky's daughter Galina writes, "my father was offered fame, wealth, position, and endless opportunities to paint [and] exhibit his work," but instead "he refused the grand offer and chose instead poverty, persecution, and deprivation" (lembersky.org). For her part, Galina stood guard on the roof of the Academy of Arts during the Nazi siege of Leningrad (1941–44), armed with a bucket of sand. Back in Kyiv, over the course of the war, more than 100,000 victims of Nazi mass murder died at Babyn Yar during the occupation. On March 1, 2022, when Russian airstrikes killed at least five people at the site of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the attack on Twitter, writing: "What is the point of saying 'never again' for eighty years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar?" In their just-released verse collection The Country Where Everyone's Name Is Fear, by Odessan writers Lyudmyla and Boris Khersonsky (Lost Horse Press), war pervades the poems like an "angel of destruction" hovering over a landscape where a "black sun of melancholy shines like a shrapnel hole." As editors Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky note in their introduction, both poets have switched from Russian to Ukrainian in their recent work, in solidarity with other Ukrainian writers and artists. "Against the backdrop of silent muses heavy gunfire thunders louder," Boris writes in one poem, "and then there's a shank in your ribcage or gunshots at pointblank." In another poem, he imagines an era of "postwar executions" in which "the only justice is the bullet and the rope." Will writers and artists look away while such justice is rendered? Art must bear witness in a time of war as well as its aftermath. And even when they fall...

The Renaissance of Natural Law: Tolkien, Fantasy, and Video Games

I review the moral systems that designers create inside their video games. There’s much similarity across games, despite wide differences in narratives, backgrounds, target demographics, and mechanics. Using the terms of Dungeons & Dragons morality, most games have three moral factions: Lawful Good, Chaotic Good, and Chaotic Evil. Players usually get to choose between Lawful or Chaotic Good, while the AI plays Chaotic Evil. Now, why does this pattern appear so frequently? I’ll argue it has something to do with Natural Law. Natural Law derives moral judgment from the notion that any reasonably well‐formed human mind can discern what the purpose or end of an item is: What it’s for. It’s a common‐sense morality, which may or may not work well in advanced bioethics but suits the moral world of video games perfectly, where bad guys are really easy to identify but the players fight back and forth about whether to be a rule‐following hero of light or a renegade, rebellious, dark angel. That law/chaos tension is also an aspect of Natural Law. As for how Natural law got into games, the path seems to run through JRR Tolkien – devout Roman Catholic and therefore no stranger to the teachings of Aquinas. From Aquinas to Tolkien to D&D to modern video games, the LG/CG/CE triangle persists as a simple moral world, but one that, judging from player numbers, people very earnestly want to live in. Is this in itself a good thing? Since we’re talking Natural Law, let’s conclude by asking – what is the purpose of fantasy? Does this usage suit fantasy’s purpose?

A Lawless Breed: John Wesley Hardin, Texas Reconstruction, and Violence in the Wild West by Chuck Parsons, Norman Wayne Brown (review)

Reviewed by: A Lawless Breed: John Wesley Hardin, Texas Reconstruction, and Violence in the Wild West by Chuck Parsons, Norman Wayne Brown Kenneth W. Howell A Lawless Breed: John Wesley Hardin, Texas Reconstruction, and Violence in the Wild West. By Chuck Parsons and Norman Wayne Brown, foreword by Leon C. Metz. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2013. Pp. 512. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index.) Who was the real John Wesley Hardin? This has been a question that has eluded scholars since the death of the notorious outlaw and gunman in 1895. One reason that historians have found this a difficult question is that Hardin left behind an autobiographical sketch that was factually flawed and that exaggerated his criminal activities, including the supposed number of men that he killed. According to Hardin, he primarily killed his victims in self-defense. In other words, Hardin frequently claimed that he was the victim and only used his gun to protect himself, his family, and his friends from thieves and murderers. Prior to the publication of the study under review, the best account of Hardin’s life was Leon Metz’s John Wesley Hardin: Dark Angel of Texas (1996). While his work certainly brought to light some of the inaccuracies in Hardin’s autobiographical sketch and provided new insights into the desperado’s shadowy past, Metz still leaned too heavily on the outlaw’s autobiography, leaving many unanswered questions about the life experiences of this infamous Texas gunman. While Parsons and Brown do not completely dismiss Hardin’s personal account of his life, they are not fooled by the killer’s bravado, and in some cases, his outright lies. In A Lawless Breed, the authors closely examine the murderous career of Hardin from East Texas in the late 1860s to his death in 1895 when he was gunned down by John Selman in El Paso. While some scholars speculate that Hardin may have killed as many as forty or more men during his life, Parsons and Brown place the number of verifiable murders in the low to mid-twenties. The authors do not simply recount the number of Hardin’s victims. They also do an excellent job of placing the infamous Texan in the context of his times, providing substantial coverage of the sixteen years that Hardin spent in the state penitentiary at Huntsville, as well as the years after he received a pardon from Governor James Hogg and made his way west to El Paso. Throughout the study, the authors discuss Hardin’s relationship with his family, including wife and children, whom he seemed to truly love. Parsons and Brown also attempt to explain what drove Hardin to become a cold-blooded murderer, stating that his views of the world were shaped by perceived wrongs committed by Federal troops stationed in Texas during Reconstruction, the tumultuous events associated with the famous Sutton-Taylor feud, and the outlaw’s propensity for alcohol and gambling. Parsons and Brown make no excuses for Hardin, pointing out that he had serious psychological issues. In an effort to understand his psyche, the authors explain that Hardin believed that he had killed his victims in an effort to defend his own life, his honor, or to protect a family member. Hardin would have argued that he never killed a man who did not deserve it. While the historical record does not answer all the questions about the life of this Texas outlaw, Chuck Parsons and Norman Wayne Brown provide readers with [End Page 229] the best account of John Wesley Hardin published to date, making it the definitive work on the Texas gunman’s life. Scholars and students interested in the history of Texas will definitely want to add A Lawless Breed to their shelves. Kenneth W. Howell Prairie View A&M University Copyright © 2014 The Texas State Historical Association

The Somatope: from Bakhtin's Chronotope to Haraway's Cyborg via James Cameron's Dark Angel and Avatar

The Somatope: from Bakhtin's Chronotope to Haraway's Cyborg via James Cameron's <i>Dark Angel</i> and <i>Avatar</i>

Transhumanist dreams and dystopian nightmares: the promise and peril of genetic engineering

Transhumanists advocate for the development and distribution of technologies that will enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities, even eliminate aging. What if the dystopian futures and transhumanist utopias found in the pages of science journals, Margaret Atwood novels, films like Gattaca, and television shows like Dark Angel are realized? What kind of world would humans have created? Maxwell J. Mehlman considers the promises and perils of using genetic engineering in an effort to direct the future course of human evolution. He addresses scientific and ethical issues without choosing sides in the dispute between transhumanists and their challengers. However, Transhumanist Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares reveals that radical forms of genetic engineering could become a reality much sooner than many people think, and that we need to encourage risk management efforts. Whether scientists are dubious or optimistic about the prospects for directed evolution, they tend to agree on two things. First, however long it takes to perfect the necessary technology, it is inevitable that humans will attempt to control their evolutionary future, and second, in the process of learning how to direct evolution, we are bound to make mistakes. Our responsibility is to learn how to balance innovation with caution.

Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science and Technology (review)

Reviewed by: Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science and Technology Rachel Maines (bio) Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science and Technology. By Carol Colatrella. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+246. $46.95. Toys and Tools in Pink is based on the author’s previously published essays on obstacles to recruiting women into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Carol Colatrella asserts that “This book applies critical theories elaborated by feminist critics, narratologists, and social studies of science scholars to identify particular constellations of narrative reference of gender, science, and technology” (p. 25), mainly through an analysis of novels and films. She describes her objective on page 6: “Analyzing texts about women, science and technology prepares women for working in fields traditionally dominated by men and could help reduce bias and negative attitudes toward women.” No evidence is adduced in support of this hypothesis. Of the 188 pages of text, 141 are devoted to plot summaries of books, movies, and television shows, which range from classics of Western literature by Ovid, Balzac, Zola, Mary Shelley, Hawthorne, and Melville to children’s cartoons, with sparse representation in between. No author can be expected to survey all of Western literature and film, even that subset which could be construed as representing women’s interactions with science and technology. Still, if there is some guiding principle behind Colatrella’s choice of examples, it entirely escaped this reviewer. Colatrella says that she is excluding most science fiction from her analysis (p. 5), but then goes on to devote nine pages (63–72) to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). There is no mention of other nineteenth-century portrayals such as Margaret Oliphant’s feisty and resourceful seamstress in Kirsteen (1890), Wilkie Collins’s Armadale (1866), with its gas-poisoner arch-villainess, or Charlotte Yonge’s aspiring young doctor Janet Carey in Magnum Bonum (1879). Similarly, female characters in the television series iCarly, Grey’s Anatomy, and Power-puff Girls are discussed and analyzed, but the evolution of women’s roles in the Star Trek series from the 1960s to the 1990s is mentioned briefly only twice in the text (pp. 162 and 187). Colatrella calls our attention to a 1991 film, Eve of Destruction, in which a robot created by a woman scientist goes on a rampage, enabled by its lack of an “off” switch (pp. 162–63), but does not mention Data’s daughter Lal in Star Trek: the Next Generation, who, unlike human children, could be stopped in her tracks with a switch on her neck. Inexplicably, the female robot in the iconic film Metropolis (1927) is not mentioned, nor is the cyborg Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager. The examples chosen for the “Babe Scientist” chapter (pp. 108–37) do not include any Star Trek or [End Page 513] Battlestar Galactica characters. “Max,” the female cyborg of Dark Angel, is also among those missing from this chapter, as is the nefarious neuroscientist Rachel Palmquist in Richard Dooling’s 1998 novel Brain Storm. The most irritating aspect of Colatrella’s work to a historian of technology, however, is that while women in science and technology are her theme, neither “science” nor “technology” is defined, even in very loose terms. Anything containing computer chips appears to be “technology” in this author’s world, and refrigerators, typewriters, and cameras are included, but sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, food processors, automobiles, and even firearms are not so privileged. Women control “technology” when they fly aircraft, build robots, look through telescopes, or make telephone calls, but not when they cook, drive cars, carry guns, make films, or write books. Another missing definition undermines Colatrella’s central message that analysis of negative gender stereotypes in popular culture will somehow help repair the “leaky pipeline” of young women in STEM careers (pp. 1, 14, 27). What exactly is a “negative gender stereotype”? If popular culture is a major culprit in keeping women out of science, we must then explain why two centuries of negative stereotypes of male scientists, engineers, and doctors have failed to discourage young men from entering these professions. Apparently, the ambition of boys to enter the...

Sound warrior

Dark Angel , a high-budget, American cyberpunk serial set in a near-future, post-apocalyptic and dystopic Seattle, has been grouped with a number of late 1990s and early 2000s television programmes as featuring powerful female heroes. Several academics have noted this significant wave in programmes that include Buffy the Vampire Slayer , Xena: Warrior Princess and La Femme Nikita . While analysis has focused predominantly on narrative and visual cues, the role of sound and music in constructing these ‘feminine’ warriors has been largely unexplored. This article analyses the Dark Angel series to illuminate how sound elements, including voice-over and music soundtrack, interplay with the visual to suggest gendered meanings in the text.

Asking for Trouble

Asking for Trouble

Neuroscience and Young Adult Fiction: A Recipe for Trouble?

Neuroscience and Young Adult Fiction: A Recipe for Trouble?

STAR POWER FOR SAFE CHEMICALS

DISCUSSIONS ABOUT modernizing the 35-year-old federal chemical control law have, thus far, been decidedly unsexy. Now, Hollywood star Jessica Alba is injecting pizazz into efforts to overhaul the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Alba appeared in Washington, D.C., last week to support a bill (S. 847) sponsored by Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) to rewrite TSCA. Star of the television series “Dark Angel” and the films “Fantastic Four” and “Sin City,” Alba is the new spokeswoman for Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. That coalition is lobbying for revisions to TSCA that go significantly beyond reforms supported by chemical manufacturers. The coalition consists of environmental and health activists, parents’ organizations, health care providers, and companies seeking safer substances for the products they use, make, or sell. Speaking at a news conference at the Capitol, Alba called for Congress to overhaul TSCA. “Like many other moms out there, I try to buy safe products for my family, ...

Music, Sound, and Silence in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." (review)

Reviewed by: Music, Sound, and Silence in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Sandy Thorburn Music, Sound, and Silence in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Edited by Paul Attinello, Janet K. Halfyard, and Vanessa Knights. (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series.) Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. [xxiii, 278 p. ISBN 9780754660415 (hardcover), $124.95; ISBN 9780754660422 (paperback), $39.95.] Music examples, illustrations, index. Buffy the Vampire Slayer began life as an offbeat and attractive cult film created by Joss Whedon; grew into a television series with a cult-like following of viewers, bloggers, and internet fans; and has had more books, articles, and critical analysis than almost any other television series. The latest book to come out on this subject, Music, Sound, and Silence in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," is by a trio of British academics. Paul Attinello is a musicologist based in the School of Arts and Cultures at the University of Newcastle, Janet K. Halfyard is Head of Undergraduate Studies at the Birmingham Conservatoire, and Vanessa Knights was a senior lecturer in Hispanic studies at the University of Newcastle. She was the one whose idea it was to study the music in this series, and her death in 2007 was the impetus to complete this volume of essays by some of the foremost academics in the field of music and media studies. Some of the contributors to this volume are familiar names in the field: Anahid Kassabian, Renee Coulombe, and Louis Niebur, while others, including all three editors, are less well known. The book starts with a tribute to Knights, which is both touching and well deserved. Then, Keith Negus situates the argument in the area of television studies, outlining why this area (music in series television) has been neglected, and positing methodologies for remedying that neglect. His idea is that music on television can function in many ways, but typically either as representationally (of moods, background descriptor, or cultural specifiers) or non-representationally. This second definition includes a number of cultural, sensual, subconscious means by which music, sound, and silence can lead a viewer to experience the series by means that are difficult to pinpoint. That, in effect, is the goal of this volume: to identify the areas that function in new ways in this and other new series that use diegetic and non-diegetic music. There are also several prefaces, with insider views of how it was to work on the series, both from the music supervisor John C. King, and Christophe Beck, the series composer. The first article in the volume, which serves as something of an introduction, is by Knights, and deals with a specific episode in which music is repeatedly referenced as a cultural placeholder. However, she also notes that intertextuality in television music in general has been little studied, and that it now requires closer observation (something that, I should add, has been done since this article was written, possibly inspired by this and other similar work). Part 1 is entitled "Constructing Sound: Music, Noise and Silence," and begins with Janet Halfyard's paper "Love, Death, [End Page 771] Curses, and Reverses (in E Minor)" a paper that discusses theme music in Buffy and Dark Angel, introducing the idea that music can be gendered by content and by audience response (she uses Philip Tagg's observations on male and female characteristics in music as a basis for this assertion). Of course, where there is gender, there is confusion, and so gender reversals and ironic musical employment need to be itemized as well. These elements and advances are influential in later television programs, including Dark Angel and Alias, and the new world of transgressive gender roles is well itemized in the paper, as are the corresponding transgressions of the series, which are many and various. Since Buffy has long been viewed as a ground-and mold-breaking series, this is hardly surprising from the perspective of 2011, but nevertheless, the paper leads nicely into Louis Niebur's paper on genre in Buffy. Niebur points out that the strength of Buffy as a television series, and, by extension, of the music used in the series, is the ability of the writers to mimic specific genres, and then turn...

Richard Wilbur's Uncouth Muse

Koneazny continuedfrom previous page television obsessively, which functions as escape, tutor —"Oprah has trained Americans to say anything anywhere"—and newsreel. Watching is what she does when there is nothing to be done or when she can't sleep. Indeed, some ofus are already dead although still alive. Among the "illustrations" included in Don 'tLet Me Be Lonely are images of medicine bottle labels and television screens (some with pictures, others black except for lines ofwhite text or the white static snow one observes when the TV is on but there is nothing on). With their phonemic slip and slide of separation, the words mediate and medicate function as the flip sides of Rankine's thematic coin. She describes how at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are staring into our medicine cabinets and at our television sets. This is how life happens to us: while under medication and as filtered through the media. Instead of a system ofvalues, instructions on how to live, we're left with the warning labels on our medicine bottles, our "life-saving" poisons. She draws a line between healing and harming that appears ever so thin, a border we can cross over as easily and as absurdly as her relatives crossed from life to death. We are always at that juncture. For this reader, the center of gravity in Claudia Rankine's poem/essay lies at the bottom of page sixty-three where she says, "A husband wakes up beside me, stretching, asking, // Sweetheart, honey, dearest, / how did you sleep?" As if to say that in the midst ofdevastation, despite an existential loneliness, there can be tenderness. However, not even such evidence of love seems sufficient to keep her mind focused on the elusive present rather than upon death. For her, death is the condition, the fact, and life the story, the fiction. Claudia Rankine's prose is both elegant and eloquent. In Don't Let Me Be Lonely, she holds up a mirror (the mirror on the door of the medicine cabinet ?) and what we see there can be chilling indeed. The loneliness she describes throughout her book "stems from a feeling of uselessness," a uselessness redeemed in the end by a handshake, which is the poem. As Rankine concludes, "In orderfor something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive. We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of." Paula Koneazny lives in Sebastopol, California. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Spinning Jenny and Double Room and isforthcoming in 580 Split, Volt, and Luna. Richard Wilbur's Uncouth Muse Anthony Cuda Collected Poems: 1943-2004 Richard Wilbur Harcourt http://www.harcourtbooks.com 608 pages; cloth, $35.00 ForYeats, the internal voice with which the poet struggles over the course ofhis career arose from the irascible daemon of the soul. For Eliot, it came from the dark angel of moral corruption. But for Richard Wilbur, who steps squarely into the modern tradition in this regard, its source isn't always so mysteriously angelic or demonic. "I set two voices going against each other," he reveals in a 1977 interview: "One is a kind of lofty and angelic voice, the other is a slob voice.... The slob, in whom I trust a great deal, is saying to the angelic part: 'Come off it. Get down here where you belong.'" Though he published his first volume, The Beautiful Changes, in 1947, he didn't submit to this belligerent muse until his Pulitzer Prize winning Things ofthis World (1956), in which he demands that the angels hidden in the radiantly clean laundry fluttering outside his window "[descend] once more in bitter love / To accept the waking body" and adorn "the backs of thieves" and lovers. The magisterial lyric "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" was a breakthrough for Wilbur, and the chord that it strikes somewhere between the ideal and the actual (between the angel's impersonal "deep joy" and our own bitter, imperfect hopes and regrets) reverberates throughout his entire body ofwork, among the most generous, distinct, and accomplished of the later twentieth century. "The...

Did Eliot Know Hulme? Final Answer

X question posed in my title has been on table for at least seventy years, and history of answers to date has been yes, no, maybe so. Some readers may be familiar with my own attempts to answer this long-unresolved question, most recently in Eliot's Dark Angel (1999).11 am now prepared to give a final answer (if not a final word) regarding question of a personal and intellectual relationship between Eliot and Hulme in London between 1915 and 1917. In leading up to answer, I must rehearse briefly three periods of scholarly inquiry that have made a defmitive resolution a crucial matter for both Eliot studies and literary history. T.S. Eliot reviewed posthumous publication of TE. Hulme's Speculations on opening pages ofthe Criterion for April 1924, declared book a harbinger ofthe new classical age. When Hulme was killed in Flanders in 1917, Eliot recalled with seeming familiarity of friendship, he was known to a few people as a brilliant talker, a brilliant amateur of metaphysics, and author of two or three of most beautiful short poems in language. In this volume appears as forerunner of a new of mind, which should be twentieth-century mind, if twentieth century is to have a mind of its own.2 In succeeding years, Eliot was openly and repeatedly to champion Hulme's intellectual conservatism and embrace religious attitude of his Humanism. Such was his enthusiasm that by early 1930s Eliot's first critics naturally began to wonder if had known and been influenced by Hulme in London during war years. In earliest comprehensive study of Eliot's critical theory in 1932, Ants Oras examined likelihood of an early Eliot-Hulme relationship and stated inconclusively that the belated publication of his [Hulme's] posthumous papers makes it questionable how far Eliot knew his ideas before bringing out his [Eliot's] first collection of essays.3 Eliot went to Harvard for 1932-33 academic

Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art

Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art

Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art by Ronald Schuchard

Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art by Ronald Schuchard

My Reply: Eliot and the Foregone Conclusions

When my Eliot’s Dark Angel (Oxford, 1999) was reviewed in Modernism/Modernity (September 2001), I was criticized for not addressing Eliot’s alleged anti-Semitism and for leaving my opposition to the motives, methods, and conclusions of Anthony Julius’s book couched in an endnote, where I stated that, when restricted materials eventually become available, a full scholarly investigation would require “a book length study rather than a chapter . . . and a larger context than Julius and previous critics have provided.”1 The reviewer found this an injudicious way of avoiding a hotly-contested point and felt that I seemed

Did Eliot Know Hulme? Final Answer

Did Eliot Know Hulme?Final Answer Ronald Schuchard (bio) The question posed in my title has been on the table for at least seventy years, and the history of the answers to date has been yes, no, maybe so. Some readers may be familiar with my own attempts to answer this long-unresolved question, most recently in Eliot's Dark Angel (1999).1 I am now prepared to give a final answer (if not a final word) regarding the question of a personal and intellectual relationship between Eliot and Hulme in London between 1915 and 1917. In leading up to the answer, I must rehearse briefly the three periods of scholarly inquiry that have made a definitive resolution a crucial matter for both Eliot studies and literary history. When T.S. Eliot reviewed the posthumous publication of T.E. Hulme's Speculations on the opening pages of the Criterion for April 1924, he declared the book a harbinger of the new classical age. "When Hulme was killed in Flanders in 1917," Eliot recalled with the seeming familiarity of friendship, "he was known to a few people as a brilliant talker, a brilliant amateur of metaphysics, and the author of two or three of the most beautiful short poems in the language. In this volume he appears as the forerunner of a new attitude of mind, which should be the twentieth-century mind, if the twentieth century is to have a mind of its own."2 In succeeding years, Eliot was openly and repeatedly to champion Hulme's intellectual conservatism and embrace the "religious attitude" of his Humanism. Such was his enthusiasm that by the early 1930s Eliot's first critics naturally began to wonder if he had known and been influenced by Hulme in London during the war years. In the earliest comprehensive study of Eliot's critical theory in 1932, Ants Oras examined the likelihood of an early Eliot-Hulme relationship and stated inconclusively that "the belated publication of his [Hulme's] posthumous papers makes it questionable how far Eliot knew his ideas before bringing out his [Eliot's] first collection of essays."3 When Eliot went to Harvard for the 1932-33 academic [End Page 63] year as Norton lecturer, he was interviewed by F.O. Matthiessen, who was also intrigued by their possible relationship. He might well have been, for Eliot was lecturing on Hulme to his undergraduate students and praising him in his Norton lectures for his classical view, his "remarkable poems" and his "aptitude for theology."4 Nonetheless, Eliot swiftly disabused Matthiessen of his critical queries about Hulme, and when Matthiessen's The Achievement of T.S. Eliot appeared in 1935 he stated authoritatively that "Eliot had not known Hulme personally, though he had heard much about him from Pound; and he had not read any of Hulme's essays before they were published, by which time Eliot's own theory had already matured."5 The similarity of their ideas, Matthiessen concluded, should be attributed to "an emerging general state of mind." Matthiessen's book should have ended the matter, but when speculation persisted David Daiches was quick to cut it off again, stating in his Poetry and the Modern World (1940) that whether or not Eliot directly knew Hulme or his ideas before the publication of Speculations in 1924 is "a question not very easy to determine and not of any great importance."6 It was not until the late 1920s, Daiches asserted, that Eliot's criticism owed any of its essential features to Hulme. There was no further pursuit of the question for the next fourteen years, until Samuel Hynes felt obliged to write to Eliot about Hulme while preparing his edition of Hulme's Further Speculations (1955). Hynes was including in the volume Hulme's controversy with Bertrand Russell over pacifism in the Cambridge Magazine and had asked Russell about Eliot's knowledge of Hulme. In a letter of 23 March 1954, Eliot wrote in response to a series of questions from Hynes that he never met or corresponded with Hulme and that Russell's recollection that Vivien had introduced her husband to Hulme must be in error.7 Eliot was confident...

The demon and the angel: searching for the source of artistic inspiration

An exploration of the source of artistic inspiration in poets, jazz musicians, writers...From Rimbaud to Lorca, Hirsch examines the emotional power of creativity and its results, covering the creation of music and poetry in a completely original way. This power is called duende, a Spanish word meaning roughly dark angel, and is the force that inspires artists to create their most powerful works.