{"title":"“It’s Fucking Obvious!”","authors":"Maria Horvei","doi":"10.1111/criq.12698","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12698","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Here’s a question: are the visual essays that make up almost half of <i>Ways of Seeing</i> important to <i>Ways of Seeing</i>? Fifty years ago, as the book was being made, only one person seemed to think so: Sven Blomberg, the ‘tall Swede’ brought in by John Berger as an ‘outside eye’ on the process.<sup>1</sup> An artist himself, Blomberg was the only one of the five people whom Berger credited with turning <i>Ways of Seeing</i> into a book who had neither worked on the television series nor had any experience in making books. Let’s tally the others. Mike Dibb had been the series producer and director, Chris Fox its script consultant. Richard Hollis, responsible for the book’s design (later made ‘horrible’, in Hollis’s own words, by its inclusion and redesign for the Penguin On Design series),<sup>2</sup> had recently worked with Berger on his novel <i>G,</i> and was recognised as one of the most daring graphic designers of his generation. And then there was Berger: writer and presenter of the television series and the one whose name was on the cover. As for Blomberg … Well, he certainly was close to Berger. Talking to Juliette Kristensen for an anniversary issue of the <i>Journal of Visual Design</i> dedicated to <i>Ways of Seeing,</i> Dibb described Blomberg as ‘a close friend of John’s, an impoverished artist whom John wanted to help and thought would add something fresh to the book’. Hollis recalled: ‘He was rather a confusion because he made these montages of various things. I remember Mike saying to him “Sven, I don’t quite understand what it is that this is trying to say.” And Sven just said, “It’s fucking obvious!” And then went and stood on the balcony.’<sup>3</sup></p><p>The montages were to become the book’s ‘purely pictorial essays’ <i>–</i> or as Dibb put it: ‘little visual essays that meant more, I think, to [Blomberg] than to everybody else’.<sup>4</sup> Later, Hollis said that Berger ‘more or less approved’ of Blomberg’s essays, which Blomberg brought in as large sheets of paper with reproductions pasted on them. Dibb and Hollis were then assigned the task of fitting them into the pages of the book, tidying them up and ‘maybe editing them’. But they always struggled to understand their relevance.<sup>5</sup></p><p>The pictorial essays certainly raised questions before publication. What happened next? The book’s fame and impact, taken along with the television series, grew to a level that makes it hard to measure. In the words of Berger’s biographer Joshua Sperling, <i>Ways of Seeing</i> became ‘so influential as to seem now, in retrospect, almost out of date – its influence disseminated, internalized, and since moved on from by the culture’,<sup>6</sup> but the pictorial essays tend to be acknowledged in passing rather than subjected to in-depth analysis in most discussions of the work. There is one possible explanation: while the pictorial essays were intended to raise ‘as many questions as the verbal essays’, they also raise","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":"89-95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12698","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46157785","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":"Passionate","authors":"Peter Womack","doi":"10.1111/criq.12716","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12716","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A packet of soft brown sugar informs us that ‘Since 1878 our passionate team have been making and packing high quality sugar on the banks of the River Thames.’ There is an inadvertent touch of grotesque comedy to this: Tate and Lyle's employees seem to be Dickensian monomaniacs, kept alive by their inexhaustible enthusiasm for making and packing sugar and their sentimental attachment to the banks of the River Thames. How does this bizarre sentence come to be distributed around the supermarkets of England?</p><p>The simple answer is that ‘passionate’ is a marketing cliché. Skimming a single month of <i>The Times</i> digital archive (January 2019), one encounters people who are passionate about pizza, about challenger brands, about holidays, about motorhomes, about training pastry chefs, about ‘meaningful’ alternatives to smoking cigarettes, and about active living as a way of recovering from spinal injuries. Not to mention Staffline, an expanding recruitment agency which is reportedly ‘buying Passionate About People’. The suspicion of bathos around some of these passions suggests that the usage is hyperbolic, and this is confirmed by its ready resort to adverbial amplification: it is not uncommon to be ‘deeply’ or ‘truly’ passionate about something, and a random search indicates that ‘hugely passionate’ is almost a fossilized phrase. When postgraduate students advertising for tutoring work describe themselves as hugely passionate about reading or mathematics, it is with a dizzying implication that merely to be passionate is, already, no longer enough.</p><p>Arguably, though, these observations do no more than move the enigma a step back. Historically, being ‘passionate’ has not been an unequivocally admirable quality, certainly not in the commercial and professional contexts where the word now thrives. ‘Passion’, much more than its near-synonyms ‘emotion’ or ‘feeling’, has often connoted a disorderly motive force, diametrically opposed to ‘reason’. People who are ‘passionate’ in this sense are impulsive, unstable, sometimes violent, driven in many instances by anger or sexual desire; they do not seem to be ideally qualified for manufacturing sugar or designing motorhomes. So the question remains: how did ‘passionate’ become something that everyone in the job market would like to be perceived as being?</p><p>The first of these quotations is the ending of the stanza about Synge from ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, and the other two are the last lines of ‘The Fisherman’ and ‘A Prayer for Old Age’ respectively.<sup>1</sup> That is, in all three of them ‘passionate’ has the character of a conclusion: a tangle of images and feelings <i>comes out</i> (as one says of an equation) in that charged adjective. <i>This</i>, finally, is how the poet wants to speak, who he wants to be. The word names an ideal.</p><p>Another source of suggestion is the word's surprisingly frequent appearance in obituaries. Something like a funerary convention makes it eas","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 2","pages":"123-127"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12716","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46675618","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":"‘We Talked about Solitude’: Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and Affective Bonding","authors":"Melissa Alexander","doi":"10.1111/criq.12715","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12715","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Before they met in 1917, Virginia Woolf envisioned a peculiar setting for her first encounter with Katherine Mansfield, the promising young writer who had ‘dogged [her] steps for three years’. Intriguingly, Woolf imagined she might glimpse Mansfield, not in the drawing-room of a mutual friend or at a literary soirée, but ‘on a rock or in the sea’ – there, ‘I shall accost her’.<sup>1</sup> Woolf pictures Mansfield in an attitude reminiscent of Frederic Leighton’s <i>Solitude</i> (1890), an allegorical painting of a ‘woman draped in white, sitting on a rock’ overlooking the sea, mentioned in Mansfield’s 1915 short story, ‘Autumns: II’.<sup>2</sup> This allusion reveals acute attention to Mansfield’s early work, as well as a tendency to imagine the New Zealand outsider in a liminal position, tricked out in classical trappings but on a promontory of her own. It seems that, for Woolf, Mansfield’s allure was mixed up with her air of solitude. Indeed, solitude would draw these writers together as a magnet, a fertile ground for ‘accost’. Woolf’s image proved strangely prescient as if, already attuned to the sound of ‘waves breaking’, she had somehow anticipated Mansfield’s declaration in her diary, ‘All that I write – all that I am – is on the border of the sea’.<sup>3</sup></p><p>If Woolf assumed she could identify Mansfield as a ‘sign’ of solitude (not merely the signature of her own work, but a citation of longstanding pictorial traditions), it is worth recognising that we, their readers, also approach these figures through the iconography of solitude developed by their contemporaries and cultural legatees. For instance, when Mansfield’s husband John Middleton Murry edited her journal for posthumous publication, he presented Mansfield as the female isolate <i>par excellence</i>, adding subheadings like ‘Femme Seule’, ‘Being Alone’, and ‘Living Alone’.<sup>4</sup> Similarly, in 1930, Cecil Beaton described Woolf as a fragile ‘sea-anemone’ that ‘curls up at contact with the outer world’, a marine image that influenced her popular representation for decades (despite her indignation), perhaps because it anticipated her suicide by drowning in 1941.<sup>5</sup></p><p>Such early depictions of the modernist isolate – embracing the deluge alone with tragic but heroic determination – seem like caricatures, especially in light of recent scholarship on modernists’ efforts to develop meaningful forms of intimacy and public engagement.<sup>6</sup> Nevertheless, in addition to complicating these stock images, we might consider how their crude outlines invite questions about the legibility and evasiveness of that ubiquitous affect we call ‘solitude’. The assumptions that colour Woolf’s imagined Mansfield – simultaneously, a distinctive body that can be recognised by virtue of her solitary position, and a generic <i>genius loci</i> – should alert us to how solitude is implicated in ‘the tension between personal expression and general convention’. Solitude is at onc","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 2","pages":"38-57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12715","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45113272","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":"Berger and the Dissapointment of Zoos","authors":"H. Mance","doi":"10.1111/criq.12699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12699","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48512746","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":"The London Consortium and Me: Memoir of an Experiment in Doctoral Education","authors":"Matthew Taunton","doi":"10.1111/criq.12694","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12694","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Like many Consortiumites of my generation, I joined the London Consortium under the spell of Steve Connor. I made my way down Malet Street from UCL, where I was studying for an MA in English Literature, to Steve’s office in Birkbeck College. It was Jane Lewty who had pointed me in Steve’s direction. ‘He’s a sound guy’, she said. I only later realised that she was referring to his interest in sound studies, but the warmth of her recommendation had made an impression on me.</p><p>The two immediately striking aspects of the London Consortium, as Steve described it to me during my admissions interview, were its commitment to interdisciplinarity and its unusual meta-institutional shape. Interdisciplinarity was not quite, in 2004, the near-mandatory AHRC and REF buzzword it has since become. It appealed to me as a student who loved novels and films and philosophy and history and sociological theories, and who was turned off by a strand of Eng. Lit. piety that made literature into a holy object. I had enjoyed my time at UCL, and the tutorial system gave me the freedom to write essays on Public Enemy, <i>Back to the Future</i>, Marxism and so on – though of course these were hardly the set texts on UCL’s BA in English Language and Literature. It was only during my PhD that my supervisor Colin MacCabe would introduce me to the work of Raymond Williams, but that ‘culture is ordinary’ I knew instinctively.<sup>1</sup> And at its best the Consortium lived out the promise of that ambiguous phrase.</p><p>The tone was set by the courses which each cohort of Consortium students took together, whether enrolled on the PhD or the MRes.<sup>2</sup> That was a group of somewhat over thirty students in my year. Each course was co-taught by (at least) two people, normally with different disciplinary formations. On ‘Metamorphosis from Ovid to Cronenberg’, taught by Steve and Colin, we’d study <i>A Midsummer Night’s Dream</i> one week (the Shakespeare play and the Britten opera), because culture – including the ‘high’ or difficult culture which English studies said was good for us, if approached with the appropriate degree of moral seriousness – was ordinary and available for analysis without the need for prior induction into Shakespeare Studies or opera criticism. Another week, we’d study <i>The Fly</i> because horror films are culture too and warrant attention. Now, you face obvious limitations, when you’re called to an analysis of Britten’s opera, if you know nothing about the history of opera and its criticism. But I remember Steve emphasising that this ignorance also gave you a special kind of epistemological advantage over opera specialists: someone trained in film studies would be able to see things that might pass a musicologist by. If this seems dilettantish, it wasn’t meant to be: the Consortium ethos was always to follow the defamiliarising effect of that initial encounter with a deeper engagement with specialised knowledge. Interdisciplinarity was too ofte","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 4","pages":"20-26"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12694","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41788898","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":"Parsing Time in the Lyric","authors":"David Nowell Smith","doi":"10.1111/criq.12689","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12689","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Some years ago, at a point when the category of ‘lyric’ had, as it spasmodically does, become a source of academic controversy, it became increasingly prevalent to define lyric by way of a distinctive form of temporality.<sup>1</sup> This started from the basic intuition that poems we call ‘lyrics’ tend to be short. Brevity seems a reassuringly neutral criterion, at once minimal and capacious; yet one can derive from this many of the qualities that have come to be considered characteristic, even definitive, of the genre. Goethe once wrote that ‘[t]he pull of a deep intuition demands the laconic’ [<i>Der Drang einer tiefen Anschauung fordert Lakonismus</i>].<sup>2</sup> That the history of lyric is replete with poems that do not fit the criterion of shortness – ‘lyrics’ have at times been said to encompass anything from <i>The Prelude</i> to <i>Citizen: An American Lyric</i> – need not discourage the lyric theorist unduly. Such an objection is anticipated in Edgar Allen Poe’s assertion that ‘what we call a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones – that is to say, of brief poetical effects.’<sup>3</sup> Wordsworth's ‘spots of time’ are characterised, after all, by moments where narrative progression gives way to the temporal condensation of an epiphany, just as Rankine's ‘American lyrics’ turn on particular instances where the microaggressions she documents expand to encompass and render legible a social totality.<sup>4</sup> ‘Laconic’ lyric incorporates a poem's condensation of linguistic materials, intensity of emotion, directness of address, resistance to narrative, memorability, and a programmatic desire to speak into eternity.</p><p>The purpose of the current essay is not to reopen the recent controversy with its own attempt at a definition, but rather to think through, and <i>parse</i>, the different modes of temporality at play in poems we habitually call ‘lyric’. It is striking that the definition of lyric that Jonathan Culler gives in his <i>Theory of the Lyric</i> – ‘a Western tradition of short, nonnarrative, highly rhythmic productions, often stanzaic, whose aural dimension is crucial’<sup>5</sup> – at each stage characterises lyric through temporal qualities.<sup>6</sup> Yet the temporalities to be parsed extend further. In addition to poems' prosodic, syntactic, and stanzaic organisation in time, their disruptions of and deviations from narrative time, and the temporalities of address, we will want to attend to the temporal dynamics of citation and allusion, of sonic and rhetorical effects of echo and repetition, or archaism and neologism as backward-looking and forward-looking attitudes towards diction. One can understand a lyric poem as a kind of textual object that interiorises so many different temporal vectors, yet poems are also experienced in time: whether performed or read and re-read, they unfold in and across time. As W. S. Graham once wrote, ‘the eye reads forward as the memory reads back:’<sup>7</sup> e","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 4","pages":"138-154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12689","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45179564","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":"So What: Musings about the Method","authors":"Bartek Dziadosz","doi":"10.1111/criq.12686","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12686","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 4","pages":"27-35"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43728615","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":"From The Far Side of Paradise","authors":"Sarah Joshi","doi":"10.1111/criq.12687","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12687","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 4","pages":"36-40"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48312955","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":"Deliver","authors":"Peter Womack","doi":"10.1111/criq.12690","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12690","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Towards the end of her short-lived premiership, Liz Truss did a sixteen-minute television interview in the course of which she said ‘deliver’ thirty-three times.<sup>1</sup> It was as if she believed that she could dispel the evidence of failure, and reassert a lost sense of business as usual, by merely uttering the word. It didn't work; the iterations became more frequent and desperate as the conversation went on. But it gave an otherwise bland performance a weird Gothic undertone; this was the part of the story when the elixir is losing its efficacy, and the luckless magician resorts to more and more swigs just to keep going. What is it about this rather colourless verb that suggests such a promise of power?</p><p>As well as the repeated incantation, this passage performs an interesting slippage. At first ‘deliver’ is, as in ordinary language, a solidly transitive verb: ‘I will deliver a plan’. Almost at once, however, this gives way to a more elusive construction: not to deliver something but to deliver <i>on</i> something. This is still a predicate of sorts, but its relationship with the verb is vague: the proposed delivery is in the general area indicated by the noun, but there is no way of telling what it contains. This attenuated transitivity is a halfway house; in the third stage the object vanishes altogether, so that we no longer deliver anything, or even deliver on anything, but simply deliver. Finally, in a twist which is as close as the speech comes to wit, the evaporated direct object suddenly returns: we will deliver victory in the 2024 general election. So it <i>was</i> a transitive verb, all along! The surprise gives the last sentence the character of pulling a semantic rabbit out of an increasingly empty-looking syntactic hat, and it got the round of applause the trick was evidently seeking.</p><p>Of course these transitions are not an original invention on the part of Truss's speechwriters. Rather, the speech is sleepwalking through some passages in the word's modern history. Its use in contemporary politics is essentially as a metaphor drawn from the sphere of business. A prospective government undertakes to deliver the policy you voted for in the same way that Amazon delivers the article you ordered. This basis in commercial practice is what then licenses the emergent preposition: through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as markets became more complex, and transactions more standardised, delivery became less commonly a simple face-to-face conveyance, and more often the execution of a contract – that is, the vendor was delivering ‘on’ a pre-existing agreement.</p><p>What might be called the moral dimension of this commercial usage is that it turned the handover of the physical item into the fulfilment of a promise. This principle then informed the colloquial metaphor ‘to deliver the goods’. <i>OED</i> traces this in US political discourse as far back as the 1870s, usually in a negative sense (that is, a public figure","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 4","pages":"155-159"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12690","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"137546322","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}