Bloomsbury Literary Studies

6 Lessons We Learned from the Object Lessons “Ask Us Anything!”

In less than 30,000 words, each book in the Object Lessons series opens our eyes to the buried meanings, uses, and significance of ordinary things. Last week, the authors and editors of Object Lessons came together on a Reddit AMA to answer questions about the series and the six new titles published last month. Here are some interesting facts we learned from the chat:

1. We’ve been storing tomatoes wrong all this time.
“Never refrigerate tomatoes. They give off ethylene gas that makes other produce spoil faster.”
—Jonathan Rees, Refrigerator

 

via GIPHY

 

2. Everything is waste once we stop using it.
“The immensity of waste and its ability to complicate our presentist feelings about time and desire can also have a productive, even optimistic function. It might force us to extract more from our time and our desires while we can.”
—Brian Thill, Waste

3. Phone booths really are emotional places.
“There's the famous scene in Anchorman when Ron Burgundy screams that he's in ‘a glass case of emotion.’ That scene says it all, in my opinion.”
—Ariana Kelly, Phone Booth

via GIPHY

 

4. That little voice in the back of your head actually does something.
“Five years ago, a man was found who has no inner voice. Even more surprising, his adult children have no inner voice, either. And they are all extremely dyslexic--inner silence makes it nearly impossible for them to read.”
—John Biguenet, Silence

5. There’s actually a reason so many films have swanky hotel scenes.
“In the early 20th Century, it seemed tempting to tell stories in hotels, because it was possible to bring together different sorts of characters, and it's easy and effective to recreate the clean-lined Art Deco hotel rooms, fashionable at the time, for shooting in black-and-white.”
—Joanna Walsh, Hotel

 

via GIPHY

 

6. Glass used to be a verb.
“In Shakespeare's time, to ‘glass’ something meant to showcase it, perhaps placing it in glass or in front of a mirror or just more broadly to turn our attention to it.”
—John Garrison, Glass

Learn more about Object Lessons at the Bloomsbury website or at objectsobjectsobjects.com.

John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Interview with Author Alec Marsh

John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic publishes this month. The book examines Pound’s correspondence with this militant far-right American activist who first came to prominence with his violent campaigns against desegregation in the Civil Rights era.  We asked author Alec Marsh a few questions about the book and his experiences researching the disturbing new light the book sheds on Pound and his work.

Your new book is about extensive correspondence between Ezra Pound and John Kasper. Ezra Pound is of course familiar as one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century, but Kasper might be a name fewer people are familiar with. Who was he?

Kasper was a Columbia University graduate who first contacted Pound regarding a prospective Ph.D. thesis. On meeting the poet, he became Pound’s most active agent in the world outside St. Elizabeths Hospital where Pound was confined as a political prisoner. As publisher (with David Horton) of the Square $ Press, as proprietor of two bookstores, one in Greenwich Village, NY, and later in Washington D.C. Kasper did his best to keep Pound’s books and the poet’s right-wing politics in front of the public. Kasper was a right-wing activist from a conservative evangelical Christian milieu. Until 1954-5 he might be best characterized as Neo-Nazi; like Pound, he was an avid supporter of Sen. McCarthy. After the BROWN decisions, of 1954, 1955, mandating the racial integration of public schools, Kasper took up the poet’s States’ Rights politics and agitated throughout the South against these federal mandates. Pound, Kasper and virtually all white Southerners were convinced that school integration was a Communist plot that would lead to race-mixing. They realized that these decisions implicitly surrendered the politically powerful myth of white supremacy. For Kasper and Pound the Communist conspiracy was simply the contemporary manifestation of the on-going Jewish conspiracy, a plot to degrade all races except their own “chosen” people.

In many ways this book is a political biography of Kasper. We see him evolve from an intellectual neo-Nazi to KKK style terrorist. He was responsible for fomenting riots in Clinton and Nashville, Tennessee. He was closely associated with dynamiters of schools and synagogues, although never charged.  Nonetheless, he served time in Federal prison, county and local jails for his activities.

When Pound was released in 1958 Kasper was in Federal Prison. He travelled to Italy to see Pound in 1962, but the poet would not meet with him. He was the candidate of the National States’ Rights Party for President of the US in 1964. He gave up political activism after that.  He died in 1998.

What does the relationship between Pound and Kasper tell us about Pound’s controversial political views in his later life?

An admirer of Thomas Jefferson from early on, it was natural for Pound to take a “southern;” point of view when it came to domestic American politics. That is, he believed in the rights of the states to resist unwelcome Federal mandates.  For personal reasons, given the indictment for treason hanging over his head, Pound needed to be a “strict constructionist” regarding the US Constitution, so like virtually all American conservatives Pound was bound to side with the South when the Brown decisions of 1954 (concerning principles) and 1955 (concerning implementation) came down.  

Pound’s “States’ Rights” position is perfectly consistent with his outlook all along.  So too is the radical approach Pound endorsed when he collaborated with Kasper and others to write “Virginians On Guard!~ --an attempt to influence the Constitutional Convention called in Virginia in an attempt to resist the Federal decision mandating  the integration of schools. The unhappy result is a vicious pamphlet joining some of Pound’s pet ideas with scurrilous KKK-style propaganda.

Do you think knowing more about his far right sympathies affects the way we approach Pound’s poetry? Can we enjoy his writings despite these sympathies?

This is difficult, because Pound’s later cantos by his own account were conceived as a “political weapon.” But that is not all they are, my book follows Pound’s earthly politics, but there is a cosmic agenda to Pound’s Cantos that is alive and vital. Most of all, Pound’s way of making poetry, his music, his ability to sense and assimilate the hints and glimpses he found in the ‘green world’ of Nature as well as in esoteric books, continues as a beacon light to those who wish to experience, understand, and above all, to write poetry that matters.     

What first inspired you to start looking into the relationship between Pound and Kasper?

The vast amount of correspondence at the Beinecke Library (Yale) intrigued me, although almost all of Pound’s side of it is missing. If Kasper was the fringy crank and loser most biographies portray him to be, how is it that he and the great poet exchanged hundreds and hundreds of letters—to say nothing of their close personal contact in the 1950s. It became clear that Kasper was no more a nut-case than Pound himself and that he had many good points. On the other hand, I did not guess the extent of Kasper’s involvement with right-wing segregationist violence when I started. I would have much preferred things to be otherwise.   
 
Is there anything that particularly surprised or shocked you when you were doing the research for this book?

Pound was quite aware of Kasper’s activities and supported them—that surprised me. Scholarship has painted Kasper as a marginal character, a lunatic groupie; in fact he was Pound’s best reader in the 1950s, someone he trusted to be his agent to the outside world.  I was surprised and dismayed that Pound had edited and vetted “Virginians On Guard!, the blue-print for a new, rigorously racially segregated Virginia that Kasper took south with him in 1956.  Finally, aside from Kasper, who represents the American racist right, two others in Pound’s circle had far-reaching influence on the American Right as it is constituted today. Although I can only touch on this in the current book, Dave Horton is an important ideologue behind the dispute over Federal Lands in the US Southwest today that led to the  “Sagebrush Wars” of the 1980s and more recently the Bundy Ranch incident—an event that brought 3000 armed militia to the Bundy Ranch in Nevada to oppose Federal forces just last year. And then there is Eustace Mullins, a fluent, pathological anti-Semite whose was Pound’s first biographer. His death in 2010 was widely mourned by people associated with the Tea Party Movement here in the US.  Thus, St. Elizabeths can be seen as a vortex of various rightist tendencies, all drawn to the charisma of Ezra Pound.
 
I should add that I do not regard John Kasper & Ezra Pound as an attack on the poet.  It was certainly not conceived in that spirit. Rather, it is an attempt to understand the man and to elucidate as faithfully as I can, Pound’s ideas regarding American racial politics in the 1950s, our “Civil Rights Era.”  As Pound scholars our job is not to wish away ideas we find unpleasant and wrong—we are not fans after all –but to understand those ideas and to put them in context. This is what I try to do here.  

See more information about John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic here

Preview the book online here

The New Human in Literature Author Interview and Review

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, author of The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900 was recently interviewed by Jutland Station. He discusses his book that addresses literature's changing ideas of mankind. Along with the the interview is a fantastic review:

In The New Human, a fine addition to this burgeoning field of research, Thomsen often invites the reader to play with such changing conceptions of humanity and the post-human. These ideas of improving mankind or even searching for immortality have been a large aspect of the current popular imagination. 

Check out the full video and review here.

Learn more about The New Human in Literature here.

 

 

Emma L. E. Rees Answers Our Questions About "The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History"

We asked author Emma L. E. Rees a few questions about her book, The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History, out now in hardcover.

Buy it here. 

Request an exam or desk copy here. 

Bloomsbury: Why write a serious book about The Vagina? What does it mean to you professionally? And personally?

Emma L. E. Rees: The vagina – not just as biological entity but as powerful cultural symbol – has become a hot topic in recent years. I owe an immense debt to Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues), of course, and although some aspects of her work come under fire in my book, I do acknowledge and respect her trailblazing bravery. We live in an age where pornography is more easily accessible than ever before and where, at the same time, it is utterly divorced from reality. Women face unprecedented physical and political attacks from legislators and spiritual leaders, as well as from men who quite simply hate women and girls. What struck me as I began to research the book was that the sometimes wilful misunderstandings of the vagina, and their resulting responses of fearful revulsion and hatred, were nothing new, but were in fact firmly rooted in deep-seated cultural assumptions. For example, in The Vagina, I draw pretty direct links between the sometimes brilliant satire of South Park and the explicit lyrics of 12^th-century itinerant European poet-musicians. I certainly never expected that to happen! I also demonstrate how the ancient myth of the vagina dentata (the ‘toothed vagina’) serves to justify some of the abhorrent practices being carried out against women, girls and transgendered people worldwide today. I’m pissed off by how powerful men cannot acknowledge the reality of the vagina, but instead want to control, demonise, or attack it. Being pissed off has always been a great motivator for me!

B: Describe the moment in which you realized you were writing a full length book about Vaginas?

ER: There’s a character in George Eliot’s Middlemarch called Casaubon – an awful, emotionally arid man – whose life’s work is a Key to All Mythologies. It’s – of course – a work he can never finish because of its vast scope. I set out with an unintentionally Casaubon-like aim: to write a history of all vaginas everywhere, ever. The total impossibility of that task very quickly dawned on me, of course, so, I tested the water by publishing a couple of vagina-related essays (on Shakespeare, and Charlotte Brontë). The responses were pretty positive and soon I began to see a clearer focus for a book. But it all started – as the book’s own narrative does – with an accidental visit to a remote parish church deep in the British countryside in the 1990s.*

*Explained in detail in Revealing the Vagina: Introduction

B: What was the most exhilarating aspect of your research for The Vagina?

ER: Realising that it was a book that could reach people; that could lead to activism beyond academia; realising that the zeitgeist was on my side – as senators debate women’s bodies and reproductive rights and as activists who reclaim the word ‘Pussy’ become the suffragettes of the 21^st century; and realising that I might be able to educate people and get them to look – really look – (metaphorically or – of course – literally) at the vagina and think about it in new, positive ways. 

B: What was the best reaction a friend or colleague had to the news of the subject of your forthcoming book?

ER: There isn’t one that stands out, really. People have been generally very supportive. The students I teach have been intrigued and, ultimately, enlightened. Family members have been supportive but won’t really see what I’m trying to do in the book until they read it. I think it’s fun telling people about the book and its uncompromisingly clear title. Reactions vary and nearly always make me laugh – I’ve learned to maintain eye-contact and say ‘My book is called The Vagina’, and watch as they sometimes blush, or, not being at all sure that they can have heard me correctly, ask me to repeat myself. Most often, though, there will be a long, drawn-out ‘Riiiiight …’ followed by – in the UK, at least – a quick change of topic to the weather or last night’s TV.

B: Can you describe some of the images in the book? How did you choose them?

ER: Several of the images are details from Judy Chicago’s momentous art installation, The Dinner Party. Judy was very generous and supportive in terms of giving permission. I just think it’s really important to be able to direct your reader to a visual image instead of increasing the interpretive distance by attempting to describe it. This is the case with the wonderful Artemisia Gentileschi painting I include, of Judith slaying Holofernes: the picture says so much more than I can say about it, so I really wanted it in there. An Italian friend was invaluable in terms of helping me negotiate the minefield of Italian bureaucracy in order to secure permission to use it. I only met official resistance in trying to get hold of two images which in the end I had to drop: one, a Frida Kahlo painting, is in the private collection of a globally-famous singer whose publicist tried to help out, but who ultimately couldn’t; the other was a painting by an artist best known for her large canvases which are, according to the Foundation and Museum who refused to give me permission to reproduce them in the book, of flowers – just flowers – and have no genital imagery in them at all. I just don’t buy that, and it’s a shame they’re not in the finished product.  I do think the book’s title and subject-matter scared some people off granting image reproduction permissions – but that just serves to underscore why there’s an urgent need for this very book!

B: What inspired you during the writing process? Any particular place, person, book or album?

ER: As with so much of what I do, I tend to write in an ‘all or nothing’ kind of way. Gladstone’s Library (a residential library in North Wales) was instrumental in getting the book finished. There, everything’s taken care of, and I can write flat out for, perhaps, 12 or more hours a day. Solidly. It’s a luxury that everyday life doesn’t afford. I have to work in silence, and am most productive on days when I’m not lecturing, when I can sit and read and write in the quiet of my home, preferably looking out at the garden, surrounded by my cats and dog. Walking Mitzvah, our Golden Retriever, is also a wonderful way to relax and to ponder the day’s work: her boundless joie de vivre takes me out of myself. Writing can be a pretty blissful existence. That sounds trite, I know, but my maternal grandmother was in service (she was a maid in a big house, very Downton Abbey style) and my paternal grandfather was almost killed in the Welsh coal pits (he trained as a teacher once he realised being a miner wasn’t for him), so I have little time for people who say that writing’s hard. It can be difficult and frustrating and all-consuming, but it’s not hard like working in a mine or lighting fires at 6am on a bitterly cold winter’s morning is hard. On a lighter note, watching DVD box sets with my husband is a perfect way to stop work: we’re just about to start Season 4 of Breaking Bad.

B: What are three incredible things you learned while writing this book?

ER: Two positive ones, and a negative. The first is a fact that’s always fascinated me, and that I could think more about for the book: it’s the idea of the reach of ideas. Anthropologically-speaking, before lines of communication were open between cultures, before any possibility of, if you like, intellectual contamination, very, very different and geographically isolated communities were coming up with their own stories about the vagina dentata. This suggests a remarkable pervasiveness of an almost primal misogyny and fear.

The second is that without language we cannot have meaning – a key plea in my book is to find a name for the unnameable. In other words, what does it mean that, in English-speaking culture, the single most abhorrent and taboo word is also the only accurate word for describing a woman’s sexual organs? Why is the ‘c-word’ not seen?

A third, more negative thing that has struck me is that there are an awful lot of people out there who are determined to be upset or affronted by this book without having read a page. And these haters, trolls and misogynists, who prowl the internet looking to make mischief, hurt feelings and cause emotional pain, are precisely the sort of people who make me confident that the time is right for The Vagina. The incredible fact is that for every lowlife hater there are many, many supporters. The lesson really is not to read the comments posted on articles online!

B: Why should people without vaginas read this book?

ER: Because they most likely know – and may even respect – some people with vaginas! Because they never previously realised how South Park or Sex and the City make important interventions into debates around the cultural centrality and paradox of the vagina. Because to be squeamish about the reality of women’s bodies is a ridiculous philosophical illogicality. And because not challenging one’s own prejudices perpetuates petty small-mindedness and conflict. In other words, why the hell shouldn’t they read it?!

B: What’s next? What comes after vaginas?

ER: The first and last words of The Vagina are the same – I’m not going to put a spoiler here, but the gist is that, in my writing, topics seem to find me, rather than me finding them. The next book is, to my mind, an entirely logical development from The Vagina, but to other people it will almost certainly look like a thematic departure. I’m not ready to share my thoughts and plans about it yet, but it’s safe to say that no other body parts are going to feature in quite the same way as they do in The Vagina!

Reading New India in the Pink City: Jaipur Literature Festival 2013

Emma Dawson Varughese, author of Reading New India: Post Millennial Indian Fiction in English talks about her new book and its recent launch at the inspiring Jaipur Literature Festival 2013.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you enter Diggi Palace, your eyes are awash with pink – pink banners, pink lanterns and swathes of pink cloth moving haplessly in the January breeze of the pink city, Jaipur. It’s not only the ‘pinkness’ of the Jaipur Literature Festival which proves mesmerising, the footfall at the biggest literature festival in Asia is also captivating, with various tents, rooms, stalls and bookshops, the Jaipur Literature Festival is certainly something to experience, especially if it involves your book launch...

Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian fiction in English was inaugurated at the literary festival at Diggi Palace to a Saturday afternoon audience. As a slice of ‘New India’ itself sat under the canopy of the ‘TATA Steel Front Lawns’, Namita Gokhale co-director of the festival presented a copy of Reading New India to the public, underscoring its importance in the contemporary literary scene of India.

The idea for Reading New India came as I flew out of Mumbai in stormy monsoon clouds in 2009. I had, once again been hit by the staggering development and construction each time I left the airport, be that in Mumbai, Bangalore, Cochin or Delhi. In tandem, the literary production of Indian fiction in English was equally staggering and I knew then, that this body of new writing deserved academic attention. Academics from both the UK and India have echoed this need, Prof Malashri Lal of the University of Delhi endorsing the publication, saying that: "it’s the first book to focus on fiction at the millennium, the crossroad for India’s globalization". There has been particular interest from universities in Hyderabad, Bangalore and from Rajasthan looking for a text to complement literary courses and postgraduate interests in contemporary Indian fiction.

Prof John Thieme of the University of East Anglia writes about Reading New India:

"A compelling introduction to the multitude of fresh voices to be found in the pages of twenty-first century Indian fiction. Putting its main emphasis on novels published within India itself, many of them unknown outside the country, it invites its readers to fasten their seatbelts for a journey into a land of call centres, reality shows, ‘‘Metro Reads’’, MTV and variant sexual behaviour."

Much of Reading New India is about young and aspirational, urban India, the narratives explored in the book suggest that postcolonial narratives belong to an erstwhile India and that post-millennial fiction in English from India captures and critiques a post-liberalised India of the noughties and beyond. Chick Lit, new waves of historical fiction, Crick Lit (my term) and the graphic novel are all manifest of this post-millennial literary feast and as the publishing scene in India keeps growing, offering affordable paperback books of these various and engaging narratives of life in 21^st century India, reading and understanding new India becomes ever more necessary. Indeed, evidence of  ‘new India’ is all around, malls in the metros push up, flyovers re-sculpt the urban landscape, cranes hang on the skyline, and as 2013 sees Jaipur’s autorickshaws fitted with inbuilt satnavs, one thing is for sure - more people will certainly make it to Diggi Palace in 2014.

E. Dawson Varughese is an independent scholar in literary and cultural studies. She is an experienced field researcher of world literature in English and is the author of Beyond The Postcolonial: World Englishes Literature (2012). See her work at: www.beyondthepostcolonial.com

Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian fiction in English is out now, RRP £19.99, available for just £17.99 from www.bloomsbury.com

How Literature Changes the Way We Think READ Podcast

Michael Mack, author of How Literature Changes the Way We Think, starts off the new READ: Research in English at Durham podcast series discussing how literature changes the way we think about ageing.

"Michael Mack, author of How Literature Changes the Way We Think, explains how literature can help us to respond to the changing demographic of an ageing society. Writers such as Charles Dickens or Philip Roth present positive images of the elderly, which compare with more naive celebration of youthfulness such as that seen in the TV series, Mad Men."

 Download the complete podcast here.

In Conversation with Michael Lackey: Studying Nazi Christianity

Described as the 'Richard Dawkins of Literary Criticism' by Christopher Douglas (Associate Professor of English, University of Victoria), Michael Lackey is the author of our fascinating new book The Modernist God State in which he looks at the religious basis of modernist political movements. In this interview he reveals his experience of studying Nazi texts and his discoveries surrounding Nazi Christianity. His findings may well surprise you.

What was the most exhilarating aspect of your research for The Modernist God State?

As a college and graduate student, I was repeatedly taught that western culture was either totally secular or in the grip of a rapid secularization process. But this interpretation of intellectual, political, and literary history never struck me as accurate.  Indeed, a casual glance at twentieth-century literature and politics led me to draw a very different conclusion, specifically that the West had become by the twentieth century religious in new and frightening ways.  The most exhilarating part of this project was finding a way to clearly articulate the degree to which religion and the God concept continued to inform and determine the nature of the modernist body politic. 

Few people read thousands of pages of the actual texts of Hitler and the Nazis, why did you and what did you learn?

When I was an undergraduate taking theology courses in preparation for the seminary (my goal was to become a Catholic Priest), I heard vague rumours suggesting that the Catholic Church was anti-Semitic and, therefore, complicit in the Holocaust.  To understand the nature of the critique and to defend my faith, I started reading Nazi texts, primarily to demonstrate, as I had heard, that their secular and humanist views were the basis for the Holocaust. But, to my horror, I made some unsettling discoveries: The Nazis declared themselves to be a Christian Party in Point 24 of their official Party program.  In his first wireless speech to the German people after he came to power in 1933, Hitler announced that his political party regards “Christianity as the foundation of our national morality.”  Just two weeks later, he boldly declared in another speech his theological allegiance to Christianity: “it is Christians and not international atheists who now stand at the head of Germany.”  In a 1934 speech, Hitler specified the nature of the Nazi Party’s Christian orientation by claiming that the “National Socialist State professes its allegiance to positive Christianity.”  Put simply, Hitler believed that, given its commitment to positive Christianity, the Nazi Party “stands on the ground of a real Christianity,” because it is based on “Christian principles.”  These are not anomalous claims. As I demonstrate throughout my book, Hitler and many prominent Nazis consistently defined themselves and their Party as Christian. 

What I learned from all this is that there is an overwhelming amount of empirical evidence to demonstrate that Hitler and the Nazis called themselves Christian and that there is virtually no evidence that they ever called or considered themselves secular, humanist, anti-Christian, or atheist. 

Hitler & the Nazis understood themselves to be unambiguously Christian, yet they're frequently portrayed as atheists, humanists or secularists. What evidence did your reading of the source documents uncover?

As I immersed myself in the scholarship about the Holocaust, I was able to figure out why so many capable scholars drew a faulty conclusion about the religious orientation of Hitler and the Nazis.  Erich Voegelin articulated in 1938 what would become the dominant approach when he made the following claim: “the secularisation of life, which the concept of humanism brought with it, is precisely the soil in which anti-Christian religious movements such as National Socialism  could grow.”  Well-regarded scholars such as Hannah Arendt, Berel Lang, Doris Bergen, Charles Taylor, and Theodore Ziolkowski, to name only a few, have uncritically accepted this view.  But it is important to note that there is considerable confusion about the claim.  When scholars say that Hitler and the Nazis are anti-Christian secularists, it would seem that they mean that Hitler and the Nazis called themselves secular and/or anti-Christian.  But since there are literally thousands of passages in which Hitler and the Nazis declare themselves Christian, it is impossible for them to justify such an assertion.  So how can we explain their insistent claim that Hitler and the Nazis were atheists, humanists, or secularists?  When scholars make such a claim, here’s what they mean: ‘Granted, Hitler and the Nazis consistently called themselves Christian.  But they adopted a faulty version of Christianity.  Therefore, they were not really Christian.  To the contrary, they were anti-Christian.  Indeed, they were unwitting humanists and atheists.’ 

Recent scholars have posed a serious challenge to this traditional approach to Hitler and the Nazis.  Indeed, Richard Steigmann-Gall and Robert Michael have written first-rate studies that have demonstrated that Hitler and the Nazis called and considered themselves Christian, and my book contributes to this conversation by using many of their findings to illuminate literary texts.  But what has made the work of all of us possible are developments within postmodernism.  Postmodernists reject the idea that there is something such as a true Christianity.  Postmodernists realize that there are many versions of Christianity, some tolerant and humane, some not.  So instead of claiming that Hitler and the Nazis adopted a faulty version of Christianity and are, therefore, anti-Christian atheists, postmodernists seek to understand the version of Christianity that Hitler and the Nazis adopted.  From a postmodernist perspective, the real questions that need to be answered are these: Did Hitler and the Nazis consider themselves Christian?  If so, what was the version of Christianity that they adopted?  These are the questions that I answer in my book. 

What originally inspired you to study in this area?  What does it mean to you professionally?  And personally? 

It is difficult for me to make a clear distinction between the professional and the personal.  As a scholar, what I value most are intellectual honesty and scholarly precision.  But these are the very things that I want my students to learn in my classes and to use in their personal lives.  As I was writing The Modernist God State, I found myself thinking about two separate audiences.  The first consists of traditional Christian writers, who have worked vigorously and passionately to demonstrate that Hitler and the Nazis were not Christian because—to their minds—they were most certainly atheists.  The second audience consists of anti-religious atheists, who frequently demonize all versions of Christianity because they note that Hitler and many Nazis referred to themselves as Christians.  As a scholar, I consider the work of both traditional Christians and anti-religious atheists dishonest and sloppy.  The traditional Christians are dishonest because they refuse to acknowledge that Hitler and the Nazis consistently referred to themselves as Christian.  This explains why I cite so many passages from Hitler and the Nazis calling themselves and the Party Christian.  The anti-religious atheists are sloppy because they draw a faulty conclusion from the evidence about Hitler and the Nazis calling themselves Christian.  Hitler and the Nazis adopted a very specific version of Christianity, which I define in the book.  Therefore, it is illogical to claim that, because Hitler and the Nazis considered themselves Christian, Christianity entails National Socialism.  What inspired me to do this project was a desire to bring rigor, discipline, and nuance to a highly charged and controversial topic.

How would you describe your contribution to the scholarship in this area?

There are three separate contributions I make to the scholarship.  First, I offer a nuanced approach to the secularization hypothesis.  By demonstrating that intellectuals were becoming secular while the majority of the population in the West was becoming more intensely religious, I have been able to clarify why it would be more accurate to refer to the twentieth-century polity as a God state rather than a secular nation.  Second, I clarify why the novelist can illuminate intellectual and political history with an unparalleled precision and accuracy.  Finally, my work adds some clarity and depth to our understanding of the specific version of Christianity that Hitler and the Nazis adopted.

Modernism is often seen as secularist and inimical to Christianity, why do you believe otherwise?

While it is certainly true that many modernist intellectuals were indifferent or opposed to religious belief and/or the God concept, thus confirming the secularization hypothesis, it is also true that many prominent political leaders and most average citizens in the West remained deeply committed to Christianity, especially in relation to the body politic.  By doing close analyses of the writings of political leaders from King Leopold II to Hitler and the Nazis (1890s through the 1940s), I have been able to demonstrate that their political agendas are simply incomprehensible without taking into account their specific understanding of and approach to Christianity.  So in my book, instead of rejecting the secularization hypothesis altogether, I develop a nuanced approach to it.  Most modernist intellectuals embraced and even endorsed a secular approach to life, the political, and the world, but most political leaders and ordinary citizens embraced and even endorsed a religious approach to life, the political, and the world.  Therefore, when many prominent twentieth-century writers portray the modernist body politic, they frequently underscore the degree to which it is religious and the role religion plays in the shaping of the polity. 

You argue that novelists can represent intellectual and political history in a way that no other intellectual can. Why do you think this is so?

There are two separate reasons why the novelists in my study claim that they can portray intellectual and political history in a superior way to other professional intellectuals.  The first is based on the multi-disciplinary nature of the novel.  Prominent twentieth-century novelists were well-versed in philosophy and sociology, history and psychology, economics and politics.  What set them apart from other professional intellectuals was their capacity to represent one form of disciplinary knowledge in relation to or in conflict with other forms of disciplinary knowledge.  From this vantage point, novelists are superior not because they are masters of any single body of knowledge but because they are masters of polarizing, juxtaposing, negotiating, and integrating multiple bodies of knowledge.  Furthermore, they insist that the novel, more than any other intellectual medium, can insightfully and accurately portray the complex dynamics of the modern polity. 

The second reason is based on the novelist’s two-tiered conception of the human.  Nietzsche articulates this view most clearly in The Case of Wagner when he says: “all of us have, unconsciously, involuntarily in our bodies values, words, formulas, moralities of opposite descent—we are, physiologically considered, false.”  There exist in our bodies words, values, formulas, and moralities that frequently conflict with our rational conception of ourselves.  For instance, on a conscious level, we might say to ourselves and others: I am not a racist.  But at the level of the subconscious, many of us have absorbed and internalized certain racist words and values, which make many of us ‘racist’ despite our intentions to the contrary.  Given the way words, values, moralities, and formulas of opposite descent invade our bodies without our consent (“unconsciously, involuntarily”), it is impossible for us to be physiologically true.  However, if we can identify some of the subconscious words and values that inhabit our bodies, we can become less false.  This is exactly what the novelist does.  According to E.M. Forster, the novelist’s biggest contribution to intellectual and political history is the capacity to picture the subconscious short-circuiting into action.  Ideas, beliefs, and ideologies—these are the things that inhabit the subconscious and determine human action.  The problem is that most people lack the capacity to plumb the depths of their own inner lives, which means that a person’s “secret life” can be secret not only from others but also from one’s self.  But for the novelists, if we want an accurate representation of the ideologies that determine the nature of the polity, we need to examine not what people consciously say about themselves but what they subconsciously believe, think, and feel.  Therefore, it is incumbent upon the novelist to identify and define the subconscious ideology that determines human action and to devise strategies and techniques for charting the way a subconscious ideology makes its way into specific forms of socio-political action.

What will your next book explore?

In the late 1930s, Georg Lukacs argued that the biographical novel could never rise to the level of a legitimate historical novel, because the focus on “the biography of the hero” leads authors to overlook or misrepresent significant historical events and truths, and thus “reveals the historical weakness of the biographical form of the novel.”  With just a few exceptions, American novelists subscribed to Lukacs’ view, that is, until 1987, when Bruce Duffy published The World As I Found It, a novel which features characters such as Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, D.H. Lawrence, and G.E. Moore.  After Duffy’s The World As I Found It, there was a veritable explosion of biographical novels, such as Jay Parini’s The Last Station (1990), a multi-perspective narrative account of Leo Tolstoy’s last year; Irvin D. Yalom’s When Nietzsche Wept (1992), an imaginative work featuring philosophical and psychological debates between Josef Breuer and Nietzsche; David Mamet’s The Old Religion (1997), a stream-of-consciousness narrative of Leo Frank coming to terms with his wrongful imprisonment for the rape and murder of a young white Southern factory girl; Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998), a work that alternately dramatizes Virginia Woolf’s life and references her novel Mrs. Dalloway in order to illuminate the stories of women in the 1950s and the 1990s; M. Allen Cunningham’s Lost Son (2008), a novelization of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetic development through his relationship with Auguste Rodin and Lou Andreas-Salomé; Parini’s The Passages of H.M. (2010), an expansive narrative of Herman Melville’s struggles as an unacknowledged writer and a closeted homosexual; and Duffy’s Disaster Was My God (2011), a comprehensive picture of Arthur Rimbaud’s tumultuous and contradictory life as first a poet and then a gun-runner.  How are we to account for this wave of biographical novels?  What intellectual forces gave birth to this aesthetic form?  What role does this novel play in illuminating history?  And how does it differ from the traditional historical novel?  These are questions that I intend to answer over the next few years as I work on a three-book project about the American biographical novel. 

The first project is a Conversations with Jay Parini book, a collection of Parini’s interviews that will be coming out next year.  The second project will be a collection of interviews with prominent novelists about the aesthetic form of and the usages of history in the biographical novel.  The final project will be a monograph about the American biographical novel. 

The Modernist God State by Michael Lackey is now available to buy. You can read an exclusive digital preview of the book by clicking on the preview button to the left.

Jenny Tighe

David Gooblar talks Philip Roth in the Quarterly Conversation

Everything you could want to know about Philip Roth (and writing about Philip Roth) is covered in this fascinating interview with David Gooblar (author of The Major Phases of Philip Roth) in the Quarterly Conversation. Highlights include:

How did you come to write about Philip Roth? What led you to do this book?

DG: I came to Roth late. I bought a used copy of The Counterlife in the summer before I began my Master’s in London, and by the time I had to start thinking about what to write about for my MA dissertation, I had read all of the Zuckerman books and quite a few of the others as well. I grew up Jewish in New Jersey, which may have something to do with why Roth’s voice on the page connected with me. I just found the books wonderful: funny, full of life, backed by the fiercest intelligence. And I fell in love with Roth’s books at the same time that I was discovering that academic research and writing was something I wanted to do for a living.

My MA dissertation was on The Counterlife as the pivot point in Roth’s career, and I enrolled in a PhD with the idea of writing about self-reflexivity in Roth (I was still drunk on The Counterlife, you see). Eventually I smartened up and dropped the postmodern angle; what resulted was a dissertation that eventually became this book.

What is the book about? How does it approach Roth differently from other critical approaches?

DG: The book is a chronological study of Roth’s career from its beginnings up to The Human Stain (2000). My guiding thesis is that Roth is a writer who refuses to be pinned down. Throughout his career, he has made a sport out of confounding expectations, producing enough kinds of books for a number of literary careers. Many other critics have attempted to define Roth as this or that, as an essentially comic writer, say, or as a writer primarily concerned with masculine subjectivity. I maintain—and I realize this can be seen as a cop-out—that any such limiting definitions of Roth can be met with at least a handful of counter-examples that prove the definition wrong. He has been seen as the scourge of the Jewish-American community as well as its literary ambassador to the world at large. He is often painted as one of the last of the old guard, stubbornly clinging to the exhausted shell of the démodé realist novel, but he has also produced some deeply experimental works, as attuned to the instability of language and identity as the staunchest postmodernist. I would say that he is now as equally known for American Pastoral, an almost entirely po-faced and self-consciously serious reflection on (in part) the failures of mid-century American idealism, as he is known for Portnoy’s Complaint, the obscene and hilarious sex-obsessed novel that made him a household name in 1969. So it’s nearly impossible to say, at this point, what Roth is.

In response to this occupational difficulty, I divided Roth’s oeuvre up into phases, or eras, of preoccupation, to show some of the ways in which he has evaded stasis over the years. This isn’t a perfect approach, and the book is obviously not meant to be definitive, but I wanted to give a sense of Roth’s progression over the years while at the same time showing that what he’s often doing is frustrating the very concept of “progression”. I also wanted to show how Roth—for all that he’s often portrayed as staring deep into his own belly button—has always been very open to the culture around him. And so the book has sections about mid-century American liberalism, the New York Intellectuals, psychoanalysis and its successors, and other historical narratives, because they’re a part of Roth’s story too.

Roth has been almost unanimously praised for every book he has released after American Pastoral. What do you make of this late career resurgence and its treatment in the press?

DG: As many have noted, it is highly unusual for an author to continue making great work into his sixties and seventies. So I understand that part of the equation. But I don’t buy the premise that Roth had reached some kind of dead end in the mid-90s that the American Trilogy saved him from. To have a resurgence you need to have had a low point, and I just don’t see where that was. I actually think the decade and a half or so that preceded American Pastoral, say, from The Ghost Writer through Sabbath’s Theater, is a much stronger period than the fifteen years since American Pastoral came out. That’s not to say that it’s unwelcome to see the press praising what are generally praiseworthy books; it’s just curious that the praise is always framed in this way that undervalues much of an extraordinary literary career.

I often joke that the literary establishment felt bad for writing Roth off after Operation Shylock (which was seen as a huge failure), and so is making up for it with this stretch of uncritical acclaim. But more seriously, I do think there’s a sort of “Lifetime Achievement Award” effect here. Critics generally see Roth as one of the last remaining survivors of what’s left of the American literary century, and so his books get a pat on the back as a sort of tribute to his role as exemplar of a dying world. The books deserve better, if sometimes harsher, treatment.

This is only an extract from the Quarterly Conversation - the complete interview can be read here.

The introduction to and first chapter of David Gooblar's book - The Major Phases of Philip Roth - are available to read, exclusively here, for free. Click on the preview button to the left.

Jenny Tighe