Subject In Twentieth Century Research Articles

“The Foul System”: The Great War and Instrumental Rationality in Parade’s End

Wyndham Lewis's 1919 painting A Battery Shelled is a mural-sized warscape of grey and green, billowing with brown smoke. In center, a handful of enlisted men load shells into great guns, but their bodies are shaped into their machines' tubes and angles. Meanwhile, left foreground shows three officers in loose posture of human beings wearing soft caps; they look on while their men change into war machines. Lewis's Vorticist abstraction delivers battlefield and enlisted men in hard lines of industry. But, war's administrators watch comfortably from left frame--one even smokes a pipe--and their recognizable human features distinguish them as a different species from their soldiers. Lewis's work hangs in Imperial War Museum in London but offers a version of Great War different from museum's authorized exhibits and explanations: in this painting, enemy forces are those that reshape human beings according to a logic of production. A Battery Shelled gives us one artist's vision of modern efficiency transforming people into machine-like objects, and an image of army institutionalizing these relations between human beings. A pointed anxiety about instrumentalizing relations is also at heart of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End. My essay's project is to show that critique implicit in Lewis's A Battery Shelled is fully enacted in Parade's End's evocation of wartime Britain. When Wilfred Owen promised to make his poetry's subject the pity of war, he was targeting sufferings of trench life that we see also in Parade's End. The crucial difference is that Parade's End targets industrial, bureaucratic society behind war. (See also Macauley vi.) In Ford's fiction, Great War empowers an intellectual formation of instrumental, means-ends rationality that becomes dominant structure of feeling for both Britain's soldiers and civilians. In my reading, novels illuminate a massive shift in lived experience, otherwise obscured by dust and sorrow of conflict. Parade's End is a series of war novels--Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925), and A Man Could Stand Up (1926)--and these three novels tell story of a changing Britain in first part of twentieth century. (1) The main character, Christopher Tietjens, is carefully positioned between old Britain of his family's feudal estate and modern Britain of his job at new Imperial Department of Statistics. In Parade's End certainties of old Britain unravel around Tietjens, while momentum of new Britain threatens to crush him. One current of Parade's End is broad flow of social history--Tietjens laments dissolution of traditional values, and he protests expanding power of modern ones. The second current of Parade's End is a domestic stream--Christopher Tietjens has a wife named Sylvia who has alienated him with her indiscretions, and a love named Valentine Wannop whose affections he cannot claim without sinning against gods of his tradition. Christopher Tietjens is, therefore, a man displaced in all aspects of life. He joins army as an escape but in that escape finds both his societal and personal problems intensified. However, this intensification proves key to novel, because army at war distills forces acting to destroy Tietjens into an essence of instrumental rationality he can identify and resist. By instrumental rationality I mean shaping of human will to designs of technical administration. This idea is most fully theorized by Frankfurt School critics Theodor Adomo, Walter Benjamin, and Max Horkheimer. Their historical long-view focuses on instrumental reason as primary tool of bourgeois subject--that independent, self-actualizing monad of age of capital--and also trap that subject springs to ensnare itself in industrial modernity's iron cage. (See Horkeimer, Adorno, and Jay.) Here twentieth-century subjects' rational thinking leaves them dependent cogs in encompassing machine of modernity. …

MICHAEL O'NEILL, The All Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900.

MICHAEL O’NEILL's new book contributes to an imposing, proliferating field of studies in influence and allusion. Among his precursors in examining the legacies of Romanticism in modern and post-modern poetry are Frank Kermode (The Romantic Image, 1957), Northrop Frye (Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, 1957), and, more recently, Fiona Stafford (Starting Lines in Scottish, Irish and English Poetry: From Burns to Heaney, 2004). But inevitably, the greatest shadow is cast by Harold Bloom, whose work on Shelley and Yeats informs an early chapter, and whose anxiety theory is a precursor provides O’Neill his own model of guidance and resistance. For a slim book, this is a study of remarkable latitude, and the ambitious range provides The All Sustaining Air its major distinction; O’Neill draws together a diverse spectrum of subjects from Yeats, including Eliot, Stevens, Spender, Heaney, Hill, and Fisher, taking the notion of ‘post-Romantic’ into the twenty-first century. In conceiving of influence, O’Neill finds his path of individuation, like those he locates in his subjects. Rather than the bleak, ‘quasi-Freudian’ tussle between egos of Bloom's 1973 work, the present author offers a more optimistic account of various, nourishing dialogues between his twentieth-century subjects and their romantic predecessors, the performance of ‘an interplay between indebtedness and individuation’.

Making New Connections in Vernacular Architecture

Research Article| September 01 1999 Making New Connections in Vernacular Architecture Paul Groth Paul Groth Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (1999) 58 (3): 444–451. https://doi.org/10.2307/991538 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Paul Groth; Making New Connections in Vernacular Architecture. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 September 1999; 58 (3): 444–451. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/991538 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1999 The Society of Architectural Historians Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Making Light Work: Practices and Practitioners of Photometry

Light measurement, a hybrid subject straddling science and technology, was shaped by, and in turn shaped, its cultural environment and disparate communities of investigators. This orphan subject, while not the success story commonly singled out for historical analysis, had developmental features that may be common to other twentieth-century subjects.

Beyond the Last Frontier: Toward a New Approach to Western American History

n a recent address to the Western History Association, Howard Lamar, of Yale University, noted the remarkable progress made over the past quarter-century in advancing the scholarship of western history. Traditional frontier topics have been treated with impressive new conceptualizations and methodologies; and long-neglected social, ethnic, female, and twentieth-century subjects are now being addressed fully and with greater sophistication. Indeed there is, as Lamar put it, to celebrate.1 Yet most of us who labor in western studies still bear the onus, as heavy as it was twenty-five years ago, of working in a field that is deemed by many to be intellectually barren and cluttered with trivia. Our own Walter Prescott Webb said as much three decades ago; and a number of our colleagues say so today. Many historians still confuse the West as a defunct frontier process with the West as a geographical region of the United States, and this garbled terminology serves to hinder serious study of the region's modern past and to nudge western history toward antiquarianism. Several leading universities of the West have deemphasized the study of their own region, as if to say that it has no significant history, or at least that its history is less relevant than, say, that of old Byzantium or of Central Asia.2 In demonstrating their cosmopolitanism these universities default their responsibility as cultural leaders of their own communities and puzzle citizens who harbor the quaint notion that their homeland has a significant history.

Voices and Visions of the American West by Barney Nelson

Reviews 169 Under the Sun: Myth and Realism in Western American Literature. Intro­ duced and edited by Barbara Howard Meldrum (Troy, New York: Whitston, 1985. 230 pages, $22.50.) The “ultimate unity of myths and realism” as reflected in their interrela­ tions (“Introduction,” p. 7) is the overall topic of this research collection. It assembles 13 essays (original publications except for 2) that range from theoretical considerations to practical criticism on nineteenth and twentieth century subjects. The volume is divided into four parts, with Parts II and III overlapping. In Part I—“Reality, Myth, and the West”—Max Westbrook addresses problems of defining “myth” and “reality” as applied to the frontier. Taking his cue from William Everson’s Archetype West (1976), Harold P. Simonson focuses on the role of primitivism and pantheism in shaping the image of the West as American archetype. Part II discusses “writing about the West: History, Realism, and Myth.” To Stephen Tatum, the “creative imagination” (p. 46) marks the difference between historical “authenticity” and human “reality” in western fiction. June O. Underwood juxtaposes fictional versus factual presentations of mad­ ness among men and women pioneering on the plains. L. L. Lee examines the novelist’sdilemma in depicting Mormon society; and Madelon Heatherington pointedly argues that the typical male hero of western romance lacks selffulfillment and fails the community by being denied a true relationship with a female counterpart. In Part III, devoted to “Mythologizing in the West,” close readings pre­ dominate: Anne Moseley on O Pioneers!, James R. Saucerman on Thomas Hornsby Ferril, both Chester L. Wolford and Michael J. Collins on Stephen Crane. Particularly interesting is Shelley Armitage’s study on Mary Hallock Foote. Central to Foote’s development as illustrator and writer was an indig­ enous perception grounded in her experience of the West, the visual technique of “reportage” profitably carrying over into her reminiscences and fiction. Fnally, Jack Brenner’s interpretation of Winter in the Blood— constitut­ ing Part IV—convincingly places Welch’s novel “Beyond Myth.” The scholarly standard of the contributions is uniformly high. Professor Meldrum has put forth a stimulating book on a central theme in western literary studies. LUDWIG DERINGER Catholic University of Eichstatt (West Germany) Voices and Visions of the American West. By Barney Nelson. (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1986. 204 pages, $35.00.) For those interested in the cowboy comes a fresh and perceptive look at the contemporary men and women who make their living working cattle from the back of a horse. Barney Nelson, a free-lance photographer and writer with 170 Western American Literature numerous credits in both media, has created a remarkably attractive and informative collection of color photographs and an informed text that makes a definitive statement on the life of today’scowboys across the American West. Nelson, the wife of a cowboy, has one other book to her credit, The Last Campfire (Texas A&M University Press, 1984) and will likely produce more work on the subject because she has both the perception and the contacts to continue her work as a cowhand and a writer/photographer. Voices and Visions is organized in chapters dealing with various facets of cowboy life. The first addresses the romance of range life; the second deals with the heritage of the West. One of the most revealing is the third, “The Cowboy,” subtitled “How They Look to the World and How They Look at It.” Here Nelson points out that the cowboy’s “outfit,” his appearance, is an integral part of his image and that he sees the world at large with his own particular kind of existence as a referent. The fourth chapter, on the work the men do, helps define the folk group by making it clear that the cowboy is what he is because of the work he does. Chapter Five deals with the folk artists who make the gear these men and women use in the work, and the utilitarian nature of the objects. A particu­ larly perceptive and timely pair of chapters comments on women who work alongside or lead in the work, and on the future cowboys and cowgirls, young­ sters who have set out to follow the life of a cowboy...

Under the Sun: Myth and Realism in Western American Literature ed. by Barbara Howard Meldrum

Reviews 169 Under the Sun: Myth and Realism in Western American Literature. Intro­ duced and edited by Barbara Howard Meldrum (Troy, New York: Whitston, 1985. 230 pages, $22.50.) The “ultimate unity of myths and realism” as reflected in their interrela­ tions (“Introduction,” p. 7) is the overall topic of this research collection. It assembles 13 essays (original publications except for 2) that range from theoretical considerations to practical criticism on nineteenth and twentieth century subjects. The volume is divided into four parts, with Parts II and III overlapping. In Part I—“Reality, Myth, and the West”—Max Westbrook addresses problems of defining “myth” and “reality” as applied to the frontier. Taking his cue from William Everson’s Archetype West (1976), Harold P. Simonson focuses on the role of primitivism and pantheism in shaping the image of the West as American archetype. Part II discusses “writing about the West: History, Realism, and Myth.” To Stephen Tatum, the “creative imagination” (p. 46) marks the difference between historical “authenticity” and human “reality” in western fiction. June O. Underwood juxtaposes fictional versus factual presentations of mad­ ness among men and women pioneering on the plains. L. L. Lee examines the novelist’sdilemma in depicting Mormon society; and Madelon Heatherington pointedly argues that the typical male hero of western romance lacks selffulfillment and fails the community by being denied a true relationship with a female counterpart. In Part III, devoted to “Mythologizing in the West,” close readings pre­ dominate: Anne Moseley on O Pioneers!, James R. Saucerman on Thomas Hornsby Ferril, both Chester L. Wolford and Michael J. Collins on Stephen Crane. Particularly interesting is Shelley Armitage’s study on Mary Hallock Foote. Central to Foote’s development as illustrator and writer was an indig­ enous perception grounded in her experience of the West, the visual technique of “reportage” profitably carrying over into her reminiscences and fiction. Fnally, Jack Brenner’s interpretation of Winter in the Blood— constitut­ ing Part IV—convincingly places Welch’s novel “Beyond Myth.” The scholarly standard of the contributions is uniformly high. Professor Meldrum has put forth a stimulating book on a central theme in western literary studies. LUDWIG DERINGER Catholic University of Eichstatt (West Germany) Voices and Visions of the American West. By Barney Nelson. (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1986. 204 pages, $35.00.) For those interested in the cowboy comes a fresh and perceptive look at the contemporary men and women who make their living working cattle from the back of a horse. Barney Nelson, a free-lance photographer and writer with ...

Eighteenth century writers on twentieth century subjects

(1946). Eighteenth century writers on twentieth century subjects. Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy: Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 168-182.