Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-62

BRITISH WRITING FROM 1945 to 1970

SPRING TERM 2014

Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-62

[Q3165: British Writing 1945-70]

Course Tutor: Alistair Davies

Office: School of English B331

Email Address:

British Writing 1945-1970: Ruin, Catastrophe, Transformation

Course Outline

This course will explore the writing of a number of major British writers in poetry, drama and fiction who worked in the wake of the Second World War and in the inaugurating decades of the transformations of the post-war era: the era of the growth of mass consumption, the development of cinema and television, the development of feminism and the women’s movement, the processes of decolonisation. This is a period rich in literary achievement, the writing of the period made complex by its engagement with philosophy, theology and politics and its interaction with developments in the visual arts: painting, photography, sculpture and architecture.

The course will examine the complex and sustaining legacies of modernism, the dialogue between new writing and the established writing of the pre-war period and reflect on the achievement of those thinking through the consequences for the individual and for the collective of the mass violence and destruction of the Second World War and the threat during the Cold War of nuclear war and totalitarian domination.

This complex and rewarding period – where three generations overlap - remains the foundation of contemporary literature, art and culture. Had modernism been discredited by Ezra Pound’s support for Mussolini’s fascism (and the proto-fascism of many of his modernist contemporaries from W.B. Yeats to Wyndham Lewis). Arrested as a collaborator in 1945, Pound escaped trial for treason by virtue of being judged mentally unfit. Or were there progressive left-wing forms of modernism to be found in the continental avant-garde? Or was realism, in drama and the novel, still the progressive form it had been in the nineteenth century? What was an appropriate realism or an appropriate cultural idiom for the post-war period? These are the literary questions in a period unusually rich in debate about literary modes as new generations defined their sense of difference from their predecessors.

Teaching Method

One two hour seminar per week, with formal student presentations, and one two-hour lecture and discussion session per week. The seminar will address primary and secondary texts and offer the opportunity for close textual analysis.

Assessment

The course is assessed by one 3000 word essay submitted mid-term, one formal presentation and by one three hour unseen where candidates will be expected to answer questions on topics discussed in the course and in the lectures of the ancillary two hour lecture and discussion session. Sussex Direct will give you the weighting of each unit of assessment.

Resources

All items are marked with an asterisk* are available in digitised form via this reading-list on the Library Web site. EJ stands for electronic journals.

There are a number of general studies of the post-war period you will find useful to consult during the course:

Bernard Bergonzi: Wartime and Aftermath: English Literature and Its Social Background

Steven Connor: The English Novel in History 1950-1995

Neil Corcoran: English Poetry since 1940

Patrick Deer: Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern British Literature

AndrezejGasiorek: Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After

Robert Hewison: In Anger: Culture in the Cold War 1945-60

Adam Piette: Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry 1939-1945

Dan Rebetallo: 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama

Alan Sinfield (ed.): Society and Literature 1945-1970

Alan Sinfield: Literature, Culture and Politics in Postwar Britain

Lyndsey Stonebridge and Marina Mackay (eds.): British Fiction After Modernism: the Novel at Mid-Century

Patricia Waugh: Harvest of the Sixties

Key Studies for Reading the Postwar Period

Perry Anderson: English Questions

Anderson remains a key figure of the New Left in British thinking. In the 1960s, he wrote two key articles which queried why it was that Britain had failed to become modern and dynamic, attributing this to the failure of Britain to complete its bourgeois revolution. Its intellectual life remained provincial and empirical and closed off from the revolutionary ideas of the twentieth century.

Alistair Davies and Alan Sinfield (eds.): British Culture of the Postwar

A collection of essays which suggest that post-war British culture was not a culture of decline as others have suggested but one marked by the richness of cultural difference and an international outlook.

Jed Esty: A Shrinking Island: Modernism and the National Culture in England

Echoing Hugh Kenner’s acerbic study of twentieth century British literary culture A Sinking Island,

Esty argues that the work of T.S.Eliot as a cultural critic was an important antidote to the provincialism and lack of ambition of British writing in the period.

Alan Sinfield: Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain

This provocative study is the single most important reading of English literature and politics of the post-war period. It is immensely helpful in distinguishing the different social and class groups who controlled cultural production in the period and who wrote and published in the period.

Martin J.Wiener: English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980

Few academic texts have had greater effect on British culture and politics. A key source for the right-wing transformation in policy to universities and cultural provision, it mirrors many of the positions taken by Anderson on the New Left. Wiener argued that elite English culture was anti-entrepreneurial.

Week 1: European Culture in the Ruins

T.S.Eliot: Four Quartets (1942) and ‘The Unity of European Culture’ (1948) [Study Direct]

Course compendium: Dylan Thomas, Lynette Roberts, W.S.Graham: Celtic Modernism

The area around St Paul’s after the war-time blitz.

Eliot’s four poems – three of which were written during the Blitz of London when Eliot acted as a fire-warden – produce one the most sustained reflections in English poetry on the crisis of civilisation posed by war in Europe. Eliot had lived in London during the First World War and produced the greatest poem of the period, The Waste Land (1922); he lived in London during the Second World War and again produced the greatest poem of the period.

We will read Four Quartets in the light of Eliot’s earlier response to the First World War, The WasteLand (1922) and we will focus on the critical essays Eliot wrote during and after the war when he addresses questions of poetics and ethics, poetics and culture. Eliot’s poem has been read by some as a celebration of Englishness through its most conservative traditions and institutions; by others as a poem (in so far as it is an autobiography) as a poem about the inevitability mixed identity of cultures in modernity.

We will consider Eliot’s poem through the frame of a critique of the aesthetic and theological principles underlying his work. Does high culture prevent barbarism?Was it barbaric, as Theodor Adorno argued, to write poetry after Auschwitz? Is violence endemic to western culture? How do we respond to the grief of ruin in cities destroyed by the mass aerial bombing of the Second World War which devastated some of the architecturally finest cities in Europe? Was the British bombing of German cities, as the British philosopher A.C.Grayling and a number of German writers have argued recently, a war crime? We will also set Eliot in context by reading alongside his Quartetscontemporary poems by Dylan Thomas, Lynette Roberts and W.S.Graham.

Eliot’s unwillingness to address the Holocaust or reflect on the anti-Semitism of his writings before 1945 became a focus of discussion in the 1950s and subsequently – even though Eliot was clear in his statement that western culture, called into question by the war, was a composite culture made up of Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian, medieval and Renaissance cultures. It is important to see how profoundly scholars and writers in the aftermath of the war thought about such questions and how that thinking informed the curriculum of the new universities. Was there an unbroken continuity? Was there something contaminating in western origins? What was European culture and how was it threatened by an increasingly American-style mass civilisation? Eliot was central to these discussions as he was to discussions about culture, regionalism and rootedness; topics we will see repeated in the poetry of Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill.

The first phase of the University of Sussex was designed by one of the most celebrated architects of the post-war period, Basil Spence. In 1955, he won the competition to design the new Coventry Cathedral to replace the medieval Cathedral destroyed in the mass bombing of Coventry in 1940. For the consecration of the new building in 1962, Benjamin Britten was commissioned to write The War Requiem which, using the Latin requiem mass and poems by Wilfred Owen, remains one of the greatest achievements of modern music. You will, as preparation for the course, make a tour of Falmer House to read Basil Spence’s architecture, shaped as it was by the discussions about inheritance, legacy, transmission and the function of culture conducted in the period 1945-1965. The building was a key element of a utopian, post-war space: the new university. So why was it such a complex historical intertext? Why does it echo the Coliseum in Rome? Why does the moat, the defensive feature of medieval and Renaissance castles, run round the inner court, a decorative rather than an architectural feature? Why is the façade overlooking the main campus square built in the form of a camera? What processes of memory, remembrance and recollection are involved in the act of walking through Falmer House? What are the tensions at play in the movement from ruin to reconstruction? You will note the art works in Falmer House and consider the implication of the University’s motto: ‘Be Still and Know’.

Stefan Muthesius: The Postwar University: Utopianist Campus and College

Louise Campbell: Basil Spence: Buildings and Projects

Louise Campbell: Coventry Cathedral: Art and Architecture in Postwar Britain

Bryan Appleyard: The Pleasures of Peace: Art and Imagination in Post-War Britain

Audio-visual resource: Arena: T.S.Eliot (BBC2 6th June 2009)

This is one of the best documentaries about a writer and is exceptionally interesting in presenting Eliot’s somewhat enigmatic life from his childhood to his marriage to his second wife in the 1950s. Eliot was as a writer an important public figure and one of the leading world writers in the post-war period. He was awarded the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize in 1948.

*David-Antoine Williams: ‘Ethics, Literature and the Place of Poetry’ in Defending Poetry: Art and Ethics in Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill, pp. 1-52

*Jed Esty: ‘Insular Time: T.S.Eliot and Modernism’s English End’ in A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England, pp. 108-162

*Genevieve Abravanel: ‘Make It Old: Inventing Englishness in Four Quartets’ in Americanizing Britain: The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire, pp. 131-156.

Marina MacKay: ‘The Situational Politics of Four Quartets’ in Modernism and World War

*Raphael Ingelbien: ‘The Uses of Symbolism, Larkin and Eliot’ in Misreading England:Poetry and Nationhood since the Second World War,’ pp. 13-28.

Jason Harding (ed.): T.S.Eliot in Context

A.D.Moody:’Four Quartets: music, word, meaning and value,’ in A.D.Moody (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to T.S.Eliot, pp.142-157

A.D.Moody: ‘’1939-1945 Apocalypse’, T.S.Eliot, Poet, pp.203-264.

Jean-Michel Rabaté: ‘Tradition and T.S.Eliot’ in A.D.Moody (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to T.S.Eliot, pp.210-222

Anthony Julius: ‘Making Amends, Making Amendments,’ T.S.Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, pp. 177-218

Steve Ellis: The English Eliot: Dream, Language and Landscape in Four Quartets

David Gervais: Literary Englands: Versions of Englishness in Modern Writing

A.D.Moody: Thomas Stearns Eliot, Poet

Bernard Bergonzi (ed): T.S.Eliot’s Four Quartets

Lucy McDiarmid: Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot and Auden between the Wars

Martin Warner: A Philosophical Study of Eliot’s Four Quartets

John Xiros Cooper: T.S.Eliot and the Ideology of the Four Quartets

H.Blamires: Word Unheard: a Guide Through Eliot’s Four Quartets

Patrick Deer: ‘The Empire of the Air’ in Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern British Literature.

Peter Stansky: London’s Burning: Death and Art in the Second World War

Peter Stansky: The First Day of the Blitz: September 7, 1940.

Adam Piette: Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry 1939-46.

Marina MacKay (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War 2

Sebastian Knowles: A Purgatorial Flame: Seven British Writers in the Second World War

Craig Raine: ‘Four Quartets’ in T.S.Eliot, pp. 95-114.

2. Melancholy and Mourning: after the War[s]

Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Waugh’s writing, with its lushness and indulgence, seemed at the time to some to be a deliberate response to the new welfare state, the democratisation of British politics which had taken place during the war and the period of intense austerity after it. As we can see from his Put Out More Flags (1941), he placed himself firmly against the notion of ‘a people’s war,’ the term by which the collective efforts of 1939-45 were described. Death duties, the high rate of taxation and the economic crises of the 1940s saw many country-houses fall into ruin and suffer demolition. Waugh’s novel expresses his sense of the decay of the old order. To what extent did Waugh represent the high point of the culture of the English leisure class which, since the 1920s, had been the dominant force in British culture? Waugh’s horror at the increasing power of the state – and of the intervention of the state in the production of culture – will enable us to consider the conditions of freedom for the writer and explore in detail the debate in the 1940s about state supervision of the arts. John Maynard Keynes was the first chairman of the Arts Council, set up to promote the high arts with government funding. We will examine two instances of importance in this debate in the 1940s – the founding of the state-supported Edinburgh Festival and the development of Glyndebourne as a privately funded opera house. Waugh’s post-war fiction included comic novels concerned with American popular culture (The Loved One, 1947) and the esteem in which continental modernism was held in post-war British culture (The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, 1958).

Madresfield Court: the model for Brideshead

Waugh’s comic masterpiece is at once a pastoral evocation of a vanished world and a satire on the social changes brought about during the Second World War. But it is also a study in loss and melancholy, its vision of England a place destroyed twice within the period of twenty years, first on the fields of Flanders, then in the course of the Second War. We will reflect on the reasons for the use of the comic mode in the some of the finest and most important writing of the post-war period from Anthony Powell to the Ealing Comedies and Kingsley Amis. Waugh’s conversion to Catholicism in the 1930s made him one of a number of prominent Catholic converts in post-war British culture (Muriel Spark and Grahame Greene were others) and placed the reading of his and other texts much more explicitly within a religious discourse. Waugh supported traditionalism; Greene supported a liberation theology. The growth of consumer society, generational change and social mobility all led to a decline in formal religious attendance in Britain in the post-war period but the writing of the period is in many instances haunted by theological questions and by questions of being and nothingness.

Audio-Visual Resource: The Waugh Trilogy: Mayfair BBC 4 (via Box of Broadcasts)

Waugh’s post-war public persona was one of ill-tempered rudeness, emphasised in his later interviews by the use of a large Victorian ear-trumpet. He began his career in the 1920s era of celebrity and of the gossip columns and his performances were to some extent staged to create an effect – he was a serious but best-selling writer and his success enabled him to maintain the large house of an aristocratic country-gentleman. His origins were those of the professional upper middle classes – his father was a publisher – and he was ridiculed by some for his social pretensions. This programme will give you some sense of Waugh as a post-war public personality. There is also a celebrated Face to Face BBC interview with Waugh you can find on Youtube.

*Patrick Deer: ‘Simplify Me When I’m Dead’ in Culture and Camouflage: War, Empire and ModernBritish Literature, pp. 192-234.

Bernard Bergonzi: ‘Writers on an Island’ in Wartime and Aftermath, pp. 18-53

Alan Sinfield: ‘Class, Culture, welfare’ and ‘Queers, Treachery and the Literary Establishment’ in Literature, Culture and Politics in Postwar Britain, pp. 39-59; pp. 60-85.

Alistair Davies: ‘Class, consumption and cultural institutions’ in Alistair Davies and Alan Sinfield (eds.) British Culture of the Post-War, pp. 139-145.

A.Sinclair: Arts and Cultures: The History of the 50 Years of the Arts Council of Great Britain

Ian Littlewood: The Writings of Evelyn Waugh

David Wykes: Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life

George McCartney: Confused Roaring: Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition

William Myers: Evelyn Waugh and the Problem of Evil

Jacqueline McDonnell: Evelyn Waugh

Martin Green: Children of the Sun: A Narrative of ‘Decadence’ in England after 1918