{"title":"‘Notebook Literature’: Virginia Woolf and Marion Milner","authors":"Helen Tyson","doi":"10.1111/criq.12784","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12784","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In February 1933, Virginia Woolf found herself ‘quivering’, ‘itching’ with anticipation at her next writing project, ‘the sequel’ to <i>A Room of One's Own</i>, for which she had ‘collected enough powder to blow up St Pauls’.<sup>1</sup> In three large notebooks compiled between 1931 and 1937, Woolf pasted newspaper clippings, letters, photographs, political pamphlets, handwritten and typewritten quotations, and other ephemera, testimonials of everyday life lived in early 20th-century Britain. The three now-crumbling scrapbooks that Woolf compiled in the 1930s speak eloquently to her methods. Covering her notebooks by hand with cloth and marbled paper, Woolf made detailed typed index pages for each volume and abbreviated handwritten indexes, which she pasted onto the top left-hand corner of each cover (see Figures 1 and 2). Inside these notebooks, clippings detailing university accounts appear side-by-side with letters asking for donations to women's colleges, while photographs of men in ceremonial and military garb jostle with quotations from ‘lectures by men’ on their ‘Hatred of w[omen]’, handwritten notes about women's access to abortion, men's opinions on women's smoking, nail polish and football, and newspaper cuttings quoting the speeches of Hitler, Goebbels and Goering.<sup>2</sup> Drawing on these ‘scrapbooks’ (as many scholars have come to call them) in <i>Three Guineas</i> (1938), Woolf would draw a line from the ‘tyrannies and servilities’ of the English private house to the toxic growth of fascism taking hold across both Europe and Britain in the 1930s, arguing that the germ of fascism could be found in British broadsheet newspapers as much as in the speeches of Hitler and Mussolini.<sup>3</sup> For Woolf, women's position as ‘outsiders’ gave them a unique vantage point from which to criticise the reigning structures of capitalist, patriarchal and fascist power.<sup>4</sup> For Woolf, keeping scrapbooks formed part of her own outsiders' experiment—an experiment not only in criticising capitalist, patriarchal and fascist power but also in imagining an alternative society freed from servility to (what she described as) the ‘manly satisfaction’ of war.<sup>5</sup></p><p>In the years that Woolf was compiling her scrapbooks, the writer, educationist and soon-to-be psychoanalyst, Marion Milner, was preoccupied with her own project of keeping notebooks and diaries. In her notebooks from the 1930s, Milner recorded thoughts, desires, doodles, drawings and quotations, gathering up the raw material for the books that she would publish under the penname Joanna Field as <i>A Life of One's Own</i> (1934) and <i>An Experiment in Leisure</i> (1937). In these books, Milner developed a ‘method’ for tracking her own wants, desires and interests, attempting to disentangle that vexed question of what a woman wants, from the pleasures imposed upon us by the outside world.<sup>6</sup> And yet, in the course of her experiments, Milner found herself strugg","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 3","pages":"4-37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12784","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141949422","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Crossing of Crossings","authors":"Adam Maric-Cleaver","doi":"10.1111/criq.12782","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12782","url":null,"abstract":"<p><i>Oxmardyke</i> is named for a now defunct Yorkshire rail crossing. In 2017, sound recordist Chris Watson set up microphones alongside the tracks of the Hull Line, initially to record a freight train. But Watson soon began making multiple recordings from around the site over several weeks. The late Philip Jeck, turntablist, composer, and artist, would twist these recordings into <i>Oxmardyke</i> during the final couple months of his life, dying in March 2022. Ranging for eerie to abrasive, melancholy to crushing, Jeck has morphed Watson's purposeful recordings of trains, bridges, and water into an array of cavernous and reverberating pieces which swallow up the landscape, railway, and cars alike. The resulting record is one about crossings, not only Oxmardyke crossing itself but also the crossing of Watson and Jeck, natural and industrial, high and low fidelities, signal and noise. <i>Oxmardyke</i> is a complex and intense sonic space, a testament to both of its creators' mastery, and, ultimately, a beautiful record about the forgotten places where nature and culture meet.</p><p>Bird song serves as a recurring motif, scattered across the album's nine tracks. Its deployment on the opener, ‘Oxmardyke’, is illustrative of the record's preoccupation with nature and society in dialogue, conflict, and collapse. A twittering bubbles across the stereo field, a mostly unaltered version of Watson's recording, before an alarm of some kind begins to beep, oscillating between notes, breaking the pastoral spell. First a car, then a train whoosh by. A thin and highly treated drone emerges beneath the bird song and trains, a sound not clearly assignable to the orders of vehicles, alarms, birds, and wind. This track and the penultimate ‘Salt End’ let Watson's recordings breathe and come to the forefront. Yet, Jeck's wiry undergrowth of clearly treated sound refuses a naturalisation of the scene. Unlike some of the work from Natasha Barrett's (also excellent) recent album of electronically altered field recordings, <i>Reconfiguring the Landscape</i> (2023), we can never be wholly ‘immersed’ in the location of Oxmardyke in the sense that the landscape of sounds can be picked out and spatialised. This disconnect, felt strongly on the dark and rumbling ‘Barn’ and ‘Drum’, complicates the narrative of environmental exploitation that the album seems to open up before us: the cars and trains drowning out the birds, society/humans/capital churning up the landscape, dark satanic mills, and so forth. There is, of course, a very real sense of anthropogenic environmental collapse, as when the metallic high-pitched ringing on ‘Coop’, a sound situated all too perfectly in the centre of the aural space, masks the soundscape of bird calls captured in dispersed stereo. But this binary of artificial/natural breaks down aurally as the track progresses. String-like swells rise, creeping in sinisterly; the birds drop out. When they re-emerge, the calls are as centred as the ringin","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 3","pages":"126-129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12782","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140835490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"That Funny Money-Man: A Hundred Years of Harmonium","authors":"Ben Philipps","doi":"10.1111/criq.12781","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12781","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 3","pages":"119-125"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140835485","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Entitled","authors":"Peter Womack","doi":"10.1111/criq.12780","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12780","url":null,"abstract":"<p>‘Entitled’, in the sense currently on everyone's lips (‘believing oneself to be inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment’<sup>1</sup>), is an adjective. A phrase such as ‘a group of older, rather entitled, people’, for example, makes this unmistakable both by placing it in front of the noun and by treating it as gradable (i.e. if you can be said to be ‘rather’ entitled, or ‘very’ entitled, or ‘less’ entitled than someone else, then ‘entitled’ is definitely an adjective).<sup>2</sup> So it is interesting to find that the <i>OED</i> mostly presents the word not as an adjective at all, but as a form of the verb ‘to entitle’. For example, I may be ‘entitled to compensation’, or I may read a periodical ‘entitled <i>Critical Quarterly</i>’, and in usages of this kind, the active verb is not far away: my circumstances <i>entitle</i> me to the compensation; Cox and Dyson founded a magazine and <i>entitled</i> it <i>Critical Quarterly</i>. When the word works in this verb-like fashion, it is formally incomplete until it arrives at its complement: the volume is entitled … what? the claimant is entitled … what to? The pure adjective, on the contrary, makes it possible to say that someone is entitled <i>tout court</i>.</p><p>In thus marginalising the word's adjectival potential, the <i>OED</i> is doing no more than reflecting its material. The verb can be traced back into Middle English and beyond; the adjective, with one or two technical exceptions, is not attested until the mid-twentieth century. Even now that it is fashionable, it is far from dominant. For instance, a recent searchable one-month run of <i>The Times</i> yields 50 occurrences of the word ‘entitled’, of which 31 are part of the phrase ‘entitled to’, 13 are synonymous with ‘named’, and only 6 are examples of the adjective.<sup>3</sup> It is, you could say, a niche meaning; it remains to be seen whether it will establish itself or start to sound dated.</p><p>The niche seems to have been originally carved out by a specific incident. The <i>OED</i>'s first citations, for the relevant sense of both ‘entitled’ and ‘entitlement’, are taken from the writings of the child psychologist Robert Coles, who in the 1960s and 1970s published <i>Children of Crisis</i>, a Pulitzer Prize-winning survey of the social and psychological condition of the USA's children.<sup>4</sup> He described the experience of childhood in various social groups and in the final volume turned his attention to the offspring of the rich. He insisted on the diversity of this class: like any other cross-section of kids, they displayed unpredictably varying values, characters and degrees of happiness and unhappiness. All the same, he identified a particular mindset which they seemed to him to share, and his chosen term for this was ‘entitlement’.<sup>5</sup></p><p>It came out of a conversation with a lawyer in New Orleans, who was reflecting on his daughter's confidence that she would be in the Mardi Gras parade; his","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 3","pages":"112-117"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12780","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140836009","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Art of Precarity","authors":"Julia Dallaway","doi":"10.1111/criq.12779","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12779","url":null,"abstract":"<p><i><b>The Precarious Writing of Ann Quin</b></i> <b>by Nonia Williams (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)</b></p><p>Interspersed between the chapters of literary criticism in Nonia Williams’s monograph <i>The Precarious Writing of Ann Quin</i> (2023) are brief ‘biographical vignettes’ that centre on distinct components of the life of British experimental writer Ann Quin (1936–1973).<sup>1</sup> One of these vignettes, entitled ‘A bedsit room of her own’, details Quin’s meagre education, poorly paid secretarial jobs and confined living spaces. Expanding on the Virginia Woolf reference in its title, 'A bedsit room of her own' contrasts Woolf’s 1920s feminist hope with Quin’s 1960s reality:</p><p>This passage invites us to reflect on the relationship between material precarity and literary creativity. Williams acknowledges Woolf’s belief that the two are inversely related—in other words, that material deprivation precludes creativity—while hinting that, in Quin’s case, the situation might be more complex.</p><p>In its Introduction, Williams’s monograph testifies to how Quin’s experimental novels resist the realist mode deemed acceptable for working-class writers in her time (p. 7). Williams quotes the novelist Claire-Louise Bennett’s intriguing claim that ‘growing up in a working-class environment may well engender an aesthetic sensibility that quite naturally produces work that is idiosyncratic, polyvocal, and apparently experimental’.<sup>2</sup> By claiming that Quin’s ‘living conditions […] were profoundly and inextricably bound up with and in the specific experimental forms of [her] writing’ (pp. 7–8), Williams likewise entertains the possibility that it was precisely Quin’s impoverished conditions that stimulated her literary experimentalism. This connection offers a compelling premise for Williams’s study of Quin.</p><p>The monograph's emphasis on the adjective ‘precarious’, which features in its title, further ties together a material experience and a literary aesthetic. Williams states that this key word ‘intentionally refers to […] both Quin’s lived experience—such as her volatile material conditions, sexual and emotional life, mental states and more—and the experimentalism of the writing’ (p. 6). In her focus on the concept of precarity, Williams is tapping into a salient cultural issue. In 2012, Noam Chomsky referred to the rise of the ‘precariat’: a new social demographic, composed of ‘people who live a precarious existence’, which he saw as ‘becoming a very substantial part of society in the United States and indeed elsewhere’.<sup>3</sup> <i>The Guardian</i> similarly reported, in 2019, that ‘a new “precariat” is forming across Europe: millions of people who have jobs but still can’t quite make ends meet’.<sup>4</sup> By centring her analysis on the term ‘precarious’, Williams reminds us that Quin—a writer who spent most of her literary career living from one pay cheque to the next, with occasional financial relief in the form of gr","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 2","pages":"126-132"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12779","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140663727","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"White","authors":"Seth Mehl","doi":"10.1111/criq.12775","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12775","url":null,"abstract":"<p>It is the ongoing malleability of <i>white</i> in reference to a category of human beings – and its propensity to be shiftingly employed for inclusion or exclusion, with deadly results – that renders it a keyword. <i>White</i> as a category of human beings has, over the centuries, been defined in practice in multiple, ever-changing ways, including a wide range of physical attributes well beyond (skin) colour; geography; (mythical or biological) lineage; simple habit or custom; or genetics. Often, these definitions have been at odds with each other.</p><p><i>White</i> has cognates across Indo-European languages, referring to light colour or brightness. <i>White</i> in this sense could be used absolutely – referring strictly to the colour of snow, for example – and as an absolute term did not have synonyms in OE.</p><p>From OE, <i>white</i> could describe light-coloured skin as a mark of illness or cowardice, alternating with <i>wan</i>, <i>blake</i>, <i>pale</i>, <i>dead</i>, and <i>bloodless</i> from ME (with no synonyms in OE). <i>White</i> alternated with <i>fair</i> from OE to indicate light-coloured skin as a mark of femininity and beauty; <i>white</i> could, in this sense, signify an unfavourable femininity in men. To describe a typical, healthy skin colour, <i>white</i> was uncommon: instead, <i>red</i> and <i>bright</i> were common from OE; <i>ruddy</i> from C13. Crucially, <i>red</i> in OE subsumed what we might now call purple, pink, red, orange, and brown.</p><p>When precisely <i>white</i> comes to be used as a category of human being – rather than as a relative descriptor – is contentious. The process certainly begins in EModE, and it is firmly in place by LModE in the pseudo-science of race. Today, the entrenchment of this meaning is reflected in corpus data insofar as descriptions of population demographics – by category – produce some of the most common collocations with <i>white</i>: <i>predominately white</i>, <i>overwhelmingly white</i>, <i>mostly white</i>, <i>disproportionately white</i>. In this sense, <i>white</i> no longer refers exclusively – or indeed, sometimes, at all – to colour. Blumenbach's 1795 dissertation, foundational to racial pseudo-science, introduces <i>Caucasian</i> – now a common synonym for <i>white</i> – but Blumenbach seemed less preoccupied with skin colour than with facial structure, geography, lineage, and ranked degrees of beauty. In C19 and C20 American writing, facial structure, hair texture, and lineage are commonly referenced as definitive characteristics of a category of <i>white</i> people – by that point, <i>white</i> has moved well beyond relative lightness of skin.</p><p>This element of the semantic development of <i>white</i> parallels – in reverse – that of <i>black</i>. <i>Black'</i>s negative senses and uses in OE were expanded and intensified in the early modern era, alongside Atlantic slavery. Similarly, <i>white'</i>s positive senses and uses seem to multiply and intensify from the ","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 3","pages":"106-111"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12775","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140117556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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