{"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":"Poetic Licentiousness and the Destitutions of High Culture","authors":"Rick de Villiers","doi":"10.1111/criq.12786","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12786","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In his primer for chroniclers of the African condition, the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina makes a modest proposal: exploit the poor.<sup>1</sup> Protruding ribs, fly-tormented eyelids and the potbellies of skeletal children are key. Other essentials include careful descriptions of crumbling infrastructure and rotting (black) corpses. The same depth and detail should not extend to the characters themselves. ‘The Starving African can have no past, no history …. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering.’<sup>2</sup> However ugly, such stereotypes are means to a greater end—winning the observer's pity, perhaps even their charity.</p><p>Wainaina's ‘How to Write About Africa’ is clearly not an <i>ars poetica</i> but a parody. And like all good parody, it magnifies things that never move quite below the threshold of our perception. We see in the parodist's crosshairs those authors who perpetuate market-ready exoticism, but also those readers whose leering sympathy sustains the trend, which is to say we recognise the trappings of poverty porn. And we recognise poverty porn when we see it, as it too trades in hyperbole and caricature: oversaturated images, blunt realism, morbidity and pathos crudely mixed. Poverty porn caters to low tastes and base desires on the one hand, to disingenuously altruistic sentiments on the other. Yet such a definition neglects how poverty can be differently fetishised. It ignores a type of writing that turns abjection into artistic ideals; it passes over works that appear to insist that something will indeed come of nothing. Standing notions of poverty porn do not therefore trouble the destitutions of high culture—not Beckett's tramps, Shakespeare's beggars, Baudelaire's wretches, nor the shepherds of the pastoral tradition whose humility is the ground for their exaltation.</p><p>What follows is not an attempt to make poverty porn a more capacious category. Already, the term is used to dismiss writing whose context allows for little separation between fictive and documentary modes, or whose authors deliberately pursue the conflation of these modes.<sup>3</sup> By the same token, crying ‘poverty porn’ is a kind of apotropaic act. It not only declares a work to be aesthetically suspect but also uses this suspicion to ward off any affective or ethical demands, any possibility that the reader might somehow be implicated by the representation of inequality. My concern, instead, is to define the features of another type of poverty fiction: an overtly literary type that fails to trigger moral-aesthetic outrage precisely because of this emphatic literariness—a type that doesn't tug at the heart but excites the imagination.<sup>4</sup> The word <i>imagination</i> will be key, as it suggests that poverty can be the object of poesis as much as mimesis, the stuff of dubious fantasy and not just dubious reality.<sup>5</sup> Where poverty porn tends to let poverty speak","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"67 1","pages":"50-71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12786","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140966335","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":"A Surface Reading of Vladimir Nabokov","authors":"Aleksandra Violana","doi":"10.1111/criq.12783","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12783","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Within Vladimir Nabokov’s repertory of elaborate trickery, <i>Transparent Things</i><sup>1</sup> stands out as an unusually slim, schematic volume, in the words of the <i>New York Times Book Review</i> ‘a small mock replica’ of a grander, life-long architectural enterprise.<sup>2</sup> Nabokov first published the 104-page novella in 1972, to little critical consensus. If some described it as the work of an author ‘at the height of his style, and the full complexity of his artistic understanding’,<sup>3</sup> others received it as ‘a mere fragment’, ‘black humour its only attraction’.<sup>4</sup> Among those who read it favourably enough to hazard an interpretation, attention was as likely to be paid to Nabokov’s construction of a schematic ‘X-ray of a novel’,<sup>5</sup> as to the ‘grotesque comic’ of a ‘hero’, who is, ‘like <i>Lolita</i>’s Humbert Humbert, entranced by a creature preposterously inadequate to the adoration’<sup>6</sup> — an interpretation less likely to offer insight into <i>Transparent Things</i> than evidence a tradition of readings of <i>Lolita</i> for which the novel itself has often been panned.<sup>7</sup> Nabokov’s own diary entry from 1972 documents ‘Reviews oscillating between hopeless adoration and helpless hatred. Very amusing’.<sup>8</sup> It may be this which prompted him to uncharacteristically offer an interpretation, if with tongue held firmly in cheek: in an interview with an unnamed New York newspaper stylised on the pages of 1973’s <i>Strong Opinions</i>, Nabokov frames <i>Transparent Things</i>’ as ‘merely a beyond-the-cypress inquiry into a tangle of random destinies’, creating a ‘structural knot’.<sup>9</sup> As Eric Jarosinski would later remark, this in fact also functions as a ‘structural <i>not</i>’:<sup>10</sup> a skein of briefly glimpsed, tangled and matted moments presented out of order, precluding the easy extraction of any central thread teased by the author.</p><p>Of course, Nabokov’s fictions have always been prone to inviting a measure of detective work on the part of his readers. It has become customary to read his novels as structurally indebted to games, riddles and puzzles, especially following the publication of his <i>Lectures on Literature</i> in the 1980s.<sup>11</sup> Extending the logic of Nabokov’s earlier <i>Poems and Problems</i>, which placed literary texts alongside invented chess scenarios with a presumed single solution,<sup>12</sup> Nabokov’s lectures posit an even more general affinity between textual and tactical games by reading authors from Dostoevsky to Austen as grandmasters of strategy games of their own invention.<sup>13</sup> What distinguishes <i>Transparent Things</i>, published five years before the author’s death in 1977 and well into his repertoire of play, however, is that it from the first frames its activities as the matter of a game played between the literal figures of author and reader. That is, the text is unfailingly ‘transparent’ about its existence as","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"67 1","pages":"4-29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12783","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140981642","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":"Mrs Gulliver's Travels: Minor-Character Elaboration in Theory and Practice","authors":"Daniel Cook","doi":"10.1111/criq.12785","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12785","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Mary Burton, a hosier's daughter from London, married a 20-something seafaring surgeon from Nottinghamshire in 1688. Eleven years later, her husband undertook the first of four voyages to several remote nations that later became the basis of bestselling memoirs. This book is Jonathan Swift's <i>Gulliver's Travels</i> (1726), a prose satire that has been abridged, adapted and reworked for different audiences ever since. Mary barely features in <i>Travels</i>, and even then Lemuel mostly refers to her in passing as ‘my Wife’ (on nineteen occasions). A faint paranarrative can be salvaged from such asides. By the third voyage, we detect marital conflict in the casual remark that the ‘only' difficulty Lemuel faces in undertaking the latest journey entails securing his wife's consent.<sup>1</sup> For each voyage, the narratorial imperative demanded Gulliver's wanderlust over familial dutifulness: ‘I stayed but two Months with my Wife and Family; for my insatiable Desire of seeing foreign Countries would suffer me to continue no longer’.<sup>2</sup> In moments of despair, Gulliver can engage our empathy: ‘I slept about two Hours, and dreamed I was at home with my Wife and Children, which aggravated my Sorrows when I awaked and found my self alone in a vast Room’.<sup>3</sup> More often, Swift's characters service comedy: ‘My Wife ran out to embrace me, but I stooped lower than her Knees, thinking she could otherwise never be able to reach my Mouth’.<sup>4</sup> And finally, after living with the Houyhnhnms he so greatly admired, Lemuel rejects his kin and kind: ‘During the first Year I could not endure my Wife or Children in my Presence, the very Smell of them was intolerable’.<sup>5</sup> Here, the satire darkens into a misanthropic comment on the hypocrisies of civilised society. When brought to the surface, the paranarrative of the domestic lives of the Gullivers undermines critical assumptions about the extent to which <i>Travels</i> can be understood in the formal context of ‘the novel’. In that specific context, Gulliver fulfils a narrative function that anchors the prose satire and is not what John Frow calls a quasi-person.<sup>6</sup> Novelistic elements nevertheless haunt the pages of the mock-memoirs. To unravel the puzzle of the novelistic non-novel, we should turn our attention to other aspects of form or genre, such as secondary characters.</p><p>Even though she does not appear in <i>Travels</i> as such, Mary Gulliver's quasi-personhood is more readily assured by the coherence of her implicit role as the loyal wife and mother waiting in London. And yet the gendered limitation of such a specific archetype, in subservience to a neglectful male protagonist, has enticed secondary authors to round out the character more fully in recent reworkings. What is <i>post scriptum</i> fulness of character, and how is it achieved? Not only is Mary given direct speech in modern novels and short stories, she also revises the fantastical voyaging that ha","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"67 1","pages":"30-49"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12785","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140978531","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}
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