Michael Bell Research Articles

Borges: ‘The Reader’ in The Twenty-First Century

I gladly accepted Dominique Jullien's invitation last year to edit an homage to Borges on the twentieth anniversary of his death, June 14 1986. I first entered the Borgesian labyrinth via One Hundred Years of Solitude, in the late sixties, guided by one of Borges's most important readers, the Uruguayan Emir Rodriguez Monegal, who introduced to Latin American criticism the useful notion of 'Borges: the Reader as Writer.' Like a number of Borges's friends and acquaintances, Emir ended up in one of the maestro's 'ficciones,' a gaucho tale that takes place in Uruguay called Other Death (1949). (1) Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, also inhabited by some of its author's friends, turned me into a writing reader, particularly when I saw, through the eyes of Emir, that it was a progeny of Borges's fictions, notably Circular Ruins (1940) and his early imaginary biographies Universal History of Infamy (1935). Borges wrote his best known works between 1935 and 1960, and continues to be the most significant writer Spanish America and perhaps the twentieth century (he was born on the cusp in August 1899) has engendered. He's the one we return to, again and again, to find yet another metaphysical nugget shining back at us from its jolly corner, yet another textual palimpsest to incite literary treasure seekers, yet another fundamental truth or ironic boutade on any page in his whirling books of sand. Everything he wrote was brief--from his innovative ficciones to his essays, reviews, prefaces, condensed biographies and poetry--but the sheer number of these pieces, approximately 3000 (some lost to us forever), leaves in our hands something close to infinitude. The physical man died over twenty years ago but his spirit endures as long as his readers remember him. And they evidently do, hence the necessity for this volume: When I asked a colleague to compile a bibliography of only the last ten years of Borges editions and scholarship, after scouring the web and principal libraries, she reported: There are 1336 entries for Borges's bibliography (1996-2006). Would you like me to include all works, or would you prefer a selected bibliography? veritable industry persists, and one has no choice but to continue selecting ... The eleven essays and articles selected here not only confirm the ongoing discussions that Borges's work provokes but also share the rich pleasure of the revisited passage as well as the illumination of obscure allusions. Their topics range from aesthetics to ethics (he was passionately committed to both); from the early poetry to the final fiction. We encounter new inquisitions--to coin his own term--of Borges's attraction to the Orient as well as to Western thought, to dueling philosophies and favorite philosophers as well as his extended literary relations with the likes of Poe and Joyce. We see how the arguably central oeuvre, Ficciones (1941) and El aleph (1949)--and such ambiguous inventions as the memorious Funes, the impossible Pierre Menard, and the disquieting Emma Zunz--can continue to yield plausible new and paradoxical readings. Michael Bell (the essays are presented in alphabetical order according to the author's name) opens the issue with a meditation on Borges as a reader of modernity's prophet Nietzsche. Furies the memorious, the rustic insomniac who can neither forget nor think--elsewhere considered (mockingly) the ideal reader of the most impossible of modernist novels, Finnegan's Wahe (2)--is introduced by Borges, with his usual understated wit, as a vernacular Argentine precursor to the Nietzschean Superman. Taking off from the German philosopher's nihilistic ruminations on history as a fatal record of man's forgetfulness, as well as Borges's magnificently mischievous essay A New Refutation of Time Professor Bell discusses how the Borgesian presence in Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude illuminates the novel's Nietzchean dialogue between history and myth, and the ultimately tragic limitations of man's and philosophy's rational attempts to order the universe. …

A Response to Michael Mayerfeld Bell's “In the River: A Socio-Historical Account of Dialogue and Diaspora”

I respond to Michael Bell's account of how the people of Grenadier Island fended off the threat of dislocation by the St. Lawrence Islands National Park project and instead established a working partnership with Parks Canada. This was contrasted with the far-from- desirable outcome of the Between the Rivers people in our attempts to gain recognition of our cultural heritage that was transformed forever by forced dislocation for the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. I attempt to compare and contrast the context and efforts of the Grenadier and the Between the Rivers people and examine our current situation in light of the hope that the Grenadier case exemplifies. I conclude with a suggestion for further research and analysis.

The United States and East Asia after Iraq

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the US government. The author thanks Steven Duke for research assistance, and Bernard Cole, Bonnie Glaser, James Schear, Colonel Michael Bell and Lieutenant-Colonel Jaime Laughrey for helpful comments. Notes 1. This article is based on three sets of sources. The first is discussions with Asian government officials and security experts over the last three years, including annual dialogues with Japanese, South Korean and Chinese experts and research trips to ten Asian countries. The second is a review of commentary from major Asian newspapers on the fifth anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, which provided a good overview of Asian concerns about US involvement in Iraq. The third is a review of recent public opinion polls, including 2006 studies by the Pew Global Attitudes Project and by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. 2. 'U.S. image in Asia Deteriorating', Yomiuri Shimbun , 10 September 2006; ‘Survey: US Image Deteriorates in Asia’, Associated Press, 10 September 2006. 3. Other studies consulted include the 2006 Pew Global Attitudes Poll, ‘America's Image Slips, But Allies Share U.S. Concerns Over Iran, Hamas’, 13 June 2006, http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=252; a BBC World Service/GlobeScan Poll, ‘Global Poll: Iran Seen Playing Negative Role’, 3 February 2006, http://www.globescan.com/news_archives/bbc06-3/index.html; and a BBC World Service/GlobeScan Poll, 'World Public Says Iraq War Has Increased Global Terrorist Threat’, 28 February 2006, http://www.globescan.com/news_archives/bbcpoll06-4.html. 4. Chicago Council on Global Affairs, The United States and the Rise of China and India: Results of a 2006 Multination Survey of Public Opinion (Chicago, IL: Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 2006), pp. 52, 57. 5. 85% in China, 84% in South Korea, 73% in Australia, 72% in Indonesia and 61% in the Philippines said that the Iraq War had increased the threat of terrorism. 44% of those surveyed in India felt the war had increased the threat of terrorism, while 18% felt the war had reduced terrorist threats. BBC World Service/GlobeScan Poll, ‘World Public Says Iraq War Has Increased Global Terrorist Threat’, p. 5. 6. Chicago Council on Global Affairs, The United States and the Rise of China and India , pp. 52, 57. 7. Ibid. , pp. 50–53. Proportions viewing the United States as playing a ‘very positive’ or 'somewhat positive' role in resolving Asian problems were 59% in China, 66% in India and 58% in South Korea. 8. The 600 Japanese troops deployed in Samara were assigned to reconstruction duties; South Korea's 3,500 troops made it the third largest contributor to the coalition. 9. See 'China in Asia: Chinese Influence, Asian Strategies, and U.S. Policy Responses', report of American Enterprise Institute and National Defense University conference, http://www.ndu.edu/inss/AEI-NDU_China_Seminars. 10. China's position is ambivalent: it officially opposes all military alliances, but supports the presence of US troops in Asia so long as they contribute to regional stability and are not aimed against China. 11. China's initiatives have been in the political and economic spheres. US commitments in Iraq may have increased North Korea's confidence that it could conduct a nuclear test without inciting US military retaliation. However, US willingness to invade Iraq likely reinforced North Korean fears of US military capabilities; North Korean official statements justifying its nuclear test emphasise the need to deter a possible US military attack. 12. Ann Scott Tyson, ‘U.S. Casualties in Iraq Rise Sharply’, Washington Post , 8 October 2006, p. A1. 13. Bill Gertz, ‘More Muscle, with Eye on China’, Washington Times , 20 April 2006. 14. Valiant Shield 2006 , http://www.pacom.mil/exercises/vs2006/index.shtml. 15. Julian E. Barnes, 'Army is Stretched Too Thin', Los Angeles Times , 15 December 2006. 16. Because combat is the crucible for evaluating officer performance, Iraq will also have a significant effect on the composition of the senior officer corps. Additional informationNotes on contributorsPhillip C. SaundersPhillip C. Saunders is Senior Research Fellow, Institute for National Security Studies, National Defense University. This article was prepared for a Council on Foreign Relations/IISS Symposium on Iraq's Impact on the Future of US Foreign and Defence Policy, with generous support from Rita E. Hauser.

Manly Traditions: The Folk Roots of American Masculinity (review)

Reviewed by: Manly Traditions: The Folk Roots of American Masculinity Pauline Greenhill Manly Traditions: The Folk Roots of American Masculinity. Edited by Simon Bronner . 2005. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 392 pages. ISBN: 0-253-34613-4 (hard cover), 0-253-21781-4 (soft cover). I took on this book because I hoped it would provide a text for a women's and gender studies course I teach on gender and folklore. But, although there is a wealth of fine work in this collection, it has significant flaws that make it less useful than it might be for courses in gender studies, men's studies, or folklore. Its problems lie in the introductory and opening materials by Simon J. Bronner, which betray a singular lack of sophistication with respect to current work on gender, and in the first essay. I'm genuinely gobsmacked that an author introducing this subject could not only frame it on a fairly limited quasi-Freudian perspective, but could also apparently ignore the work of the two people who have arguably made the most significant contributions to late twentieth and early twenty-first century studies of gender—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler. I didn't initially argue with the book's claim to be "the first to focus on the problem of the construction of manliness in American folklife" (p. xvi), and yet when I read through the essays, example after example of the inaccuracy of this evaluation came to mind. To mention only a few of the best known American authors, the works of Roger Abrahams, Dick Bauman, Michael Bell, Alan Dundes, Joe Goodwin, Jay Mechling, and Américo Paredes do just that. [End Page 197] Further, the editor's contention that men's culture isn't "well documented or understood" (p. xvi) is simply wrong on the former point and misleading on the latter. The feminist truism that we need women's studies because the rest of the academy is men's studies applies as much to studies of culture as it does to any other area. Men's culture has been taken simply as culture, unmarked, but it has been extensively and very well documented. And while the analysis hasn't for the most part taken (men's) culture as men's culture (with many exceptions including those mentioned above), when read and understood through a gender lens, the material is clearly understandable as just that. The equation of "this new men's studies, [and] what some might call post-feminist studies" (p. xvii) and the implication that feminist studies have created a "universe of exclusion and ideological bias" (p. xviii) are profound misconceptions about a range of ideological, empirical, and political practices that are much less exclusionary and biased than the blindly androcentric scholarship that preceded them. Bronner's assertion that men are biologically "different" and the catalogue of physiological traits that follows (p. 1) completely discount transgendered and transsexual men. Essentialist in the worst possible way—apparently presuming that men are violent and women sensitive (pp. 9–10), for example—his "Menfolk" chapter goes through the same old sexist notions—that men are afraid of women's reproductive power, that women are really in charge and keep men in line by a combination of whining and nagging, and so on. The raced privilege implicated—in the chapter's photographs, pictures of African-American men are identified as to race/ethnicity (p. 33), while the rest are just "hunters," "soldiers," etc.—disappears the extent to which hegemonic masculinity isn't only unmarked, but also white. The glaring oversight that ignores female masculinity and female to male transgender and transsex continues throughout the entire work. The first essay in the body of the work, by Gary Alan Fine, similarly exemplifies white male privilege and ignorance about it. The presumption that there were "domains that were exclusively male" (p. 61) ignores the fact that most such locations were served and maintained in America by women, often women of color. The assertion that "whether females are accepted in the folk culture of male-dominated groups depends upon their willingness to accept and engage with the sexualized masculine culture of the group" (p. 61) discounts both...

‘Designed specially for television purposes and technique’: the development of the television cinema programme in Britain in the 1950s

In her article ‘The new media aristocrats: home theater and the domestic film experience’, Barbara Klinger argues that: For most of the cinema's existence, scholars analyzed the medium almost exclu...

Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling. Michael Bell.

Previous articleNext article No AccessSentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling. Michael Bell.Chris Koenig-WoodyardChris Koenig-Woodyard Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 33, Number 4Fall 2002 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24044209 Views: 1Total views on this site © 2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Cambridge companion to D.H. Lawrence

Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Chronology List of abbreviations Introduction Anne Fernihough Part I. Texts: 1. Ideas, histories, generations and beliefs: the early novels to Sons and Lovers Rick Rylance 2. Narrating sexuality: The Rainbow Marianna Torgovnick 3. Sex and the nation: 'The Prussian Officer' and Women in Love Hugh Stevens 4. Decolonising imagination: Lawrence in the 1920s Mark Kinkead-Weekes 5. Work and selfhood in Lady Chatterley's Lover Morag Shiach 6. Lawrence's tales Con Coroneos and Trudi Tate 7. Lawrence's poetry Helen Sword 8. Lawrence as dramatist John Worthen Part II. Contexts and Critical Issues: 9. The biographical issue: lives of Lawrence Paul Eggert 10. Lawrence and modernism Michael Bell 11. Lawrence and the politics of sexual politics Drew Milne 12. Lawrence and psychoanalysis Fiona Becket 13. Apocalypse now (and then). Or, D. H. Lawrence and the swan in the electron Sandra M. Gilbert 14. Post-mortem: Lawrence's critical and cultural legacy Chris Baldick Guide to further reading Paul Poplawski Index.

Myth and the Making of Modernity: The Problem of Grounding in Early Twentieth-Century Literature

Acknowledgements. Michael BELL: Introduction. I Antecedents: A New Mythology? Bianca THEISEN: Romantic Myths of Myth: Myth as Autopoiesis. Edward LARRISSY: Zoas and Moods: Myth and Aspects of the Mind in Blake and Yeats. Maike OERGEL: Myth in the Nineteenth Century: Tennyson's Idylls and Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen. Peter POELLNER: Myth, Art and Illusion in Nietzsche. II Myth, Science, Technology. Bruce CLARKE: A Different Sun: The Allegory of Thermodynamics in D.H. Lawrence. David E. COOPER: Reactionary Modernism and Self-Conscious Myth. Robert SEGAL: The Existentialist Reinterpretation of Myth: Rudolf Bultmann and Hans Jonas. III Poeticizing the Modern: Myth as a Form of Life. Leon BURNETT: The Domination of Memory: Dark Days of Modernism. Peter NICHOLLS: To Unscrew the Inscrutable: Myth as Fiction and Belief in Ezra Pound's Cantos. Marc MANGANARO: Myth as Culture: The Lesson of Anthropology in T.S. Eliot. IV A New Immediacy: Grounding or Overcoming the Subject? John MCGOVERN: Like Water in Water: Primitivism and Modernity. Rainer EMIG: Macro-Myths and Micro-Myths: Modernist Poetry and the Problem of Artistic Creation. Gerald SIEGMUND: Freud's Myths: Memory, Culture and the Subject. Steven CONNOR: Echo's Bones: Myth, Modernity and the Vocalic Uncanny. Notes on Contributors. Bibliography of Works Cited. Index.

Myth and the Making of Modernity: The Problem of Grounding in Early Twentieth-Century Literature by Michael Bell , Peter Poellner (review)

(published in I912 in TheNew York Herald),to volume. These are the three main 'evolutionary' stages of the novel, but Jones also tells us about a short story ('Dynamite', later 'Explosives')planned by Conrad earlyon in his careerbut never writtenout, which helps towardsan understandingof the woman protagonistin the finalwork.Mainly, however, this chapterstressesthe differencesbetween serialand book, the cuts that show Conrad's new attitude to women readers in placing a woman at the centre of the book as protagonist, as well as a shift of stress from textualityto vision, a female mode of literaryperception, and hence consumption, which are the concerns of the two following chapters, 'Marketing for Women Readers' and 'Visualityand Gender in Late Conrad'. Chapter 8 ('Suspense and the Novel of Sensation')completesthe book, with a Conclusion. UNIVERSITY OF MILAN MARIALUISA BIGNAMI MythandtheMakingofModernity: TheProblem of Grounding in EarlyTwentieth-Century Literature. Ed. by MICHAELBELL and PETERPOELLNER. (Text: Studies in Comparative Literature, I6) Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. I998. vii + 260 pp. Hfl. 80; $44. Most of these fourteen essayswere given as conference papers at Warwick'sCentre for Research in Philosophy and Literaturein I995. It must have been a divided occasion, to judge from this outcome. The clumsy subtitleis presumablyintended to cover as many topics as possible, but hardly points to a vital issue. One contributor,Marc Manganaro, conteststhe book'srationalewhen he writesthat 'as a force in modernity "culture"matters more than "myth". It is a greater master narrative for modernity, and postmodernity; it functions more powerfully in our age as a thing to thinkwith'. Severalcontributorsarenot at ease tryingto thinkwith myth, and one sensesthe effortrequiredto get out of myth and backinto modernity again. The essaysbasedon Germanculturalmaterialsdifferfromthosebasedon French theory. The discussions of nineteenth-century German thought are comfortable with the term mythopceia, and generate large-scale argumentsthat integratepast, present, and future, as Bianca Theisen does in her discussionof Schlegel, Novalis, and Hoffman. Maike Orgel finds a convergence between Tennyson's Idyllsand Wagner'sRingof such improbableinclusivenessthat one wantsto resist,not leastby pointing out that a poem that never liftsfrom the page cannot begin to qualifyas a Gesamtkunstwerk. When early Nietzsche, in Poellner's reading, characterized the aesthetic as the true metaphysical activity, he gave modernism the authority to transformthe unsatisfactoryreal,but left behind tensions that requireda change of direction in his thought. Poellner's discussion of wholeness ends unsatisfactorily distantfromthe aesthetic,however. By contrast, Freud, Lacan, and Barthes generate outcomes that are, in Gerald Siegmund's words, 'immune to dangerously compulsive and organicist notions of myth'. Modernistpoetry, read out of Adorno and Lacan by Rainer Emig, desiresa 'wholeness,control and totality'that is impossible,so that Pound's Cantos emerge as an 'excess of endless utterances'.Freedomfrom the authorityof myth is necessary but difficult to achieve, because myths turn up again, as 'micro-myths', in the smallestdetailsof poetry. (Emig'sdiscussionis marredby his invention of'Vorticist' poetry, not possible because Vorticismwas an art movement). As the big systems lose out to such decentralizingguerrillaactivityas this, Frenchtheory, plus Freud, emerges as the answerto Germanmyth criticism. (published in I912 in TheNew York Herald),to volume. These are the three main 'evolutionary' stages of the novel, but Jones also tells us about a short story ('Dynamite', later 'Explosives')planned by Conrad earlyon in his careerbut never writtenout, which helps towardsan understandingof the woman protagonistin the finalwork.Mainly, however, this chapterstressesthe differencesbetween serialand book, the cuts that show Conrad's new attitude to women readers in placing a woman at the centre of the book as protagonist, as well as a shift of stress from textualityto vision, a female mode of literaryperception, and hence consumption, which are the concerns of the two following chapters, 'Marketing for Women Readers' and 'Visualityand Gender in Late Conrad'. Chapter 8 ('Suspense and the Novel of Sensation')completesthe book, with a Conclusion. UNIVERSITY OF MILAN MARIALUISA BIGNAMI MythandtheMakingofModernity: TheProblem of Grounding in EarlyTwentieth-Century Literature. Ed. by MICHAELBELL and PETERPOELLNER. (Text: Studies in Comparative Literature, I6) Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. I998. vii + 260 pp. Hfl. 80; $44. Most of these fourteen essayswere given as conference papers at Warwick'sCentre for Research in Philosophy and Literaturein I995. It must have been a divided occasion, to judge from this outcome. The clumsy subtitleis presumablyintended...

Literature, Modernism, and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century

The use of myth in Modernist literature is a misleadingly familiar theme. Joyce's appropriation of Homer's Odyssey and Eliot's of Frazer's Golden Bough are, like Lawrence's primitivism or Yeats's nationalist folklore, attempts to discover an underlying metaphysic in an increasingly fragmented world. In Literature, Modernism and Myth Michael Bell also examines the relationship of myth and modernism to postmodernism. Myth, Bell shows, is inherently flexible; it was used to justify Pound's totalizing vision of society which eventually descended into fascism, and the liberal, ironic vision of human existence Joyce and Mann expressed. Those theorists who present myth as another form of mystification, a search for false origins, ignore its use by modernists to emphasise the ultimate contingency of all values. This anti-foundational element, Bell claims, enables myth to act as a corrective to the claims of ideological critique. Bell shows how postmodern concerns with political and social responsibility, and the role literature plays in formulating this, have in fact been inherited from modernism.

Ted Hughes and Schopenhauer: The Poetry of the Will

Tennyson's scarifying glimpse of nature in In Memoriam as a scene of primordial violence revisits a weltanschauung as old as philosophy itself - an outlook famously summed up in 1651 by Thomas Hobbes when he asserted that condition of humanity is warre . . . of every man, against every man and that life in a state of nature is solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short (88-89). Ironically, Hobbes's own century would see emergence of natural theology, with its emphasis on nature as an incarnation of highest ethical ideal, summed up by third Earl of Shaftesbury as morality, justice, piety, and natural religion (Cooper 1: 301-02). It was this view that would dominate English nature poetry well into Romantic era, when - as next installment of irony - Hobbesian strain would resurface with singular vigor and trenchancy in philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, Tennyson's older contemporary. affinity between poet's fleeting visions of animal savagery and philosopher's sustained ruminations on it is salient. Tennyson considers awful possibility that mankind is linked, as an even more degenerate monster, with Dragons of prime, / That tare each other in their slime (56.22-23). And here is Schopenhauer on the observable life of animals: we see only momentary gratification, fleeting pleasure conditioned by wants, much and long suffering, constant struggle, omnium, everything a hunter and everything hunted, pressure, want, need and anxiety, shrieking and howling, and this goes on in saecula seculorum, or until once again crust of planet breaks. (World 2: 254) Tennyson, of course, would recant in favor of a revised natural theology by poem's end, but outlook so mercilessly articulated by Schopenhauer would become more compelling as modernist perspectives gradually impinged on Victorian intellectual milieu. Both Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence, inheritors and elaborators - in their very different ways - of Tennyson's primordial vision, would admit to basic affinities with German philosopher's thought.(1) This thought finds its fullest poetic realization, however, in our own time, in verse of Ted Hughes. His menagerie - hawk, jaguar, shark, and their ilk - fits even better than Lawrence's birds, beasts, and flowers into Schopenhauer's bellum omnium of predation. A paradigm case is cannibalistic pike, driven by appetites and killer instincts so fierce that poet is able to find two of them, six pounds each, over two feet long, / High and dry and dead in willow-herb - / One jammed past its gills down other's gullet (Pike, Lupercal). human animal figures prominently in this company of killers. In Mayday on Holderness, for instance, a pierced helmet and Cordite oozings of Gallipoli explicitly evoke The expressionless gaze of leopard / coils of sleeping anaconda / nightlong frenzy of shrews (Lupercal). But affinity between Schopenhauer and Hughes runs much deeper than their mutual obsession with animal savagery. From his first principle of der Wille - will - which he sees as generating not only phenomenon of hunter and hunted but all other phenomena of existence, Schopenhauer articulates a complex ontology and epistemology that in illuminating ways poet's instinctual assumptions about what nature fundamentally is and how we perceive it.(2) When Michael Bell speaks of language philosophy of Ernst Cassirer as providing an explicatory parallel or an appropriate conceptual analogy to work of Lawrence, he is describing interpretive dynamic I am assuming here - outlining of a sort of philosophical force-field that brings out internal cogency and complexity of given author's conceptions (3-4). aspects of Hughes's work that I wish to examine in this regard are his fabulation of a fierce feminine presence as presiding deity of natural order, his projection of some sort of consciousness onto vegetable and mineral realms, his esoteric renditions of sheer dynamic process, and his stylistic evolution from explicit interpretive frameworks to implicit ones. …

Cervantes and the Modernists: The Question of Influence

Introduction - the question of influence, Edwin Williamson towards a typology of Quixotisms, Nicholas G. Round invisible works - Cervantes reads Borges and Nabokov, Michael Wood Cervantes, Goytisolo and the sodomitical scene, Paul Julian Smith prisons and pleasured of the mind - a comparative reading of Cervantes and Proust, Edward J. Hughes whatever happened to heroes? Don Quixote and some major European novels of the 20th century, E.C. Riley novel, story and the foreign - Cervantes, Thomas Mann and Primo Levi, Michael Bell the Quixotic roots of magic realism - history and fiction from Carpentier to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edwin Williamson writing the present, reading the past - Cervantes, Guiraldes, Fuentes, Philip Swanson the problem of the book - Don Quixote in the age of mechanical reproduction, Dietrich Scheunemann.

The Afterlife of F. R. Leavis: Dead but won't Lie Down

The Afterlife of F. R. Leavis: Dead but won't Lie Down Re-Reading Leavis Culture and Literary Criticism by Gary Day. Routledge, £37.50 ISBN 0-333-62900-0. Michael Bell Michael Bell Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume XXVI, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 196–199, https://doi.org/10.1093/camqtly/XXVI.2.196 Published: 01 February 1997

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS Get access D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being. By Michael Bell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. x + 246pp. MARGARET MASSON MARGARET MASSON University of Durham Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Literature and Theology, Volume 10, Issue 2, June 1996, Pages 197–198, https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/10.2.197 Published: 01 June 1996

Michael Bell (University College, London, 1959)

Michael Bell (University College, London, 1959)

Defiant Desire: Some Dialectical Legacies of D. H. Lawrence , and: D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (review)

Reviewed by: Defiant Desire: Some Dialectical Legacies of D. H. Lawrence, and: D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being Lydia Blanchard Kingsley Widmer , Defiant Desire: Some Dialectical Legacies of D. H. Lawrence. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. $29.95. Michael Bell , D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. No price given. Although the differences between these two recent books by major critics of D. H. Lawrence are obviously important, the similarities are more interesting: both writers draw on years of reflection and experience (Kingsley Widmer has been writing on Lawrence for more than thirty years, Michael Bell says that his study was conceived some twenty years ago); both are intolerant of other readings of Lawrence (Widmer of the normative critics, Bell of more recent approaches); and both are as concerned with what they perceive as Lawrence's failures as with his successes. Widmer is the more fun to read. Those who entertain the notion that we become more conservative as we age need to account for this man. In 1962 Widmer took on normative critics of Lawrence with The Art of Perversity; now 30 years later, in Defiant Desire, he reads Lawrence not only against the grain of normative scholarship but against most other Lawrence scholarship as well. In this reworking of several earlier essays, Widmer revels in his own, well, perverse readings of Lawrence, and since he finds Lawrence or his work totally obtuse, incoherent, overweaning, desperate, patronizing, racist, inconsistent, muddled, redundant, nasty (and this is only for starters, in the first quarter of the book), we must certainly wonder why Widmer keeps coming back for more. He gives us the answer. It is to rescue Lawrence: "Much of the critic's job . . . is to try to recognize what is significantly there, and then to attempt to relate it to a possibly better truth, including its own better truth." The arrogance is typical Widmer, but Lawrence gives us the better truth: "It is [End Page 402] the fight of opposites which is holy." Whatever his arrogance, Widmer is a powerful reader of that fight of opposites. Widmer takes his subject from Lawrence's argument about Women in Love: "Desire is . . . primal." The religious experience of intense desire comes at great cost, however, including the negation of much, Widmer argues, that we understand as fundamental to the values of Western civilization. Lawrence is best understood "as a révolte, an outsider prophet, considerably belonging to a different and darker matrix of sensibility." For Widmer, it is the polarity between desire and will that furnishes the central dialectic informing Lawrence's work. Widmer traces the way in which that dialectic between desire and will is worked out by Lawrence in his response to Nietzsche, an affirmation as well as an attack on the Nietzchean Will to Power "as an expression of ego, rather than deeper, spontaneous vitalities." In succeeding chapters, Widmer considers the tensions of the dialectic first in Lady Chatterley's Lover and then in readings of Lawrence by Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Herman Melville (as read by Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature), concluding with a chapter on "Lawrence as Dissident Culture Hero." This final chapter is both the most challenging and most frustrating of the study, for here Widmer makes explicit that he is not as interested in the texts that Lawrence created (seeing almost all of them as flawed in important ways) as in a broader socio-cultural phenomenon that he calls Lawrenceanism, the shaping of contemporary thought about such subjects as obscenity and censorship, misogyny, and eroticism. Admirers of the Lawrence of Sons and Lovers or "Snake" or "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter" will gain much from Widmer's reading but will nevertheless leave this study fundamentally unconvinced of the conclusion. Similarly Michael Bell, in Language and Being, sees Lawrence as a flawed writer who must be rescued from critics, although not the normative critics like F. R. Leavis who concern Widmer. Rather, Bell takes on more recent critics of Lawrence (including this reviewer) who draw on structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction to discuss Lawrence's awareness of language: "Unfortunately, acquaintance with such thought has not so much alerted people to Lawrence's...

Defence industries: Progress in decline?: An overview

Although today's European and American defence industries are experiencing cutbacks, Michael Bell argues that there are some offsetting compensations for the British industry in the shape of healthy defence exports. As technology becomes increasingly more sophisticated and military operations executed on a multi‐national level, so collaboration and rationalisation between national defence industries must increase. Government interference would theoretically be limited by the natural pressures of competition, although the implementation of an open European market is not being imposed on a statutory level, which in turn leads to the issue of US protectionism of its defence industry and the degree of permeability of the European markets to American exports. Not only must defence industries be aware of the needs of their markets, but governments must continue to create as much common ground as possible between themselves.

NARRATION AS ACTION: GOETHE'S ‘BEKENNTNISSE EINER SCHÖNEN SEELE’ AND ANGELA CARTERS NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS

German Life and LettersVolume 45, Issue 1 p. 16-32 NARRATION AS ACTION: GOETHE'S ‘BEKENNTNISSE EINER SCHÖNEN SEELE’ AND ANGELA CARTERS NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS Michael Bell, Michael BellSearch for more papers by this author Michael Bell, Michael BellSearch for more papers by this author First published: January 1992 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0483.1992.tb00344.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume45, Issue1January 1992Pages 16-32 RelatedInformation

The Sentiment of Reality: Truth of Feeling in the European Novel. By Michael Bell. Pp. xiii + 210. London, Boston, Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1983. £12.50

The Sentiment of Reality: Truth of Feeling in the European Novel. By Michael Bell. Pp. xiii + 210. London, Boston, Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1983. £12.50 Get access Thom Braun Thom Braun Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 32, Issue 3, September 1985, Pages 422–423, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/32.3.422 Published: 01 September 1985

4399229 Rapid radioimmunoassay product and method of making and using same : Arden Kelton, Michael Bell, Roy A Chung assigned to Immutron Inc

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