It may well be an unconscious impulse but the writers are directly or indirectly influenced by their socio-political millieu, even when opposing it, and you don’t need to be a Marxist to acknowledge that.
As Edward Said showed in his examination of ‘Orientalism’, or recent works showcasing the overt or covert politics of such literary figures as William Wordsworth (Jonathan Bate’s "Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World") and Jane Austen, politics can intrude into the poetic realm or comedies of manners — or other forms of fiction, too. And this can span the entire gamut from literary classics to pulp fiction.
The Cold War is a fitting example. As two contrasting systems of social and political organisation vied for global influence, the conflict for influencing hearts and minds underpinned the diplomatic and military manoeuvres.
Duncan White’s "Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War" (2019) offers...
As Edward Said showed in his examination of ‘Orientalism’, or recent works showcasing the overt or covert politics of such literary figures as William Wordsworth (Jonathan Bate’s "Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World") and Jane Austen, politics can intrude into the poetic realm or comedies of manners — or other forms of fiction, too. And this can span the entire gamut from literary classics to pulp fiction.
The Cold War is a fitting example. As two contrasting systems of social and political organisation vied for global influence, the conflict for influencing hearts and minds underpinned the diplomatic and military manoeuvres.
Duncan White’s "Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War" (2019) offers...
- 9/4/2022
- by Glamsham Bureau
- GlamSham
Yesterday was Sylvia Plath’s 86th birthday, and over in London, the drama surrounding her life and death is still swirling. Fifty-two years on from her suicide, things have reached a rather unpoetic stage. At issue is a new biography of her widower, the poet Ted Hughes, by the scholar Jonathan Bate.The earliest questions didn’t have to do with Plath. The Hughes estate withdrew its cooperation from the project last year, and earlier this month sent its publisher, HarperCollins, a cease-and-desist letter, citing “18 factual errors or unsupported assertions in just 16 pages of the book.” These at first seemed not a matter of much significance, as first among them was the question of whether on the day of his death, along the way to Devon with Hughes’s body in a hearse, the procession stopped, “as Ted the gastronome would have wanted, for a good lunch.” Carol Hughes, his...
- 10/28/2015
- by Christian Lorentzen
- Vulture
Chicago – Risk-taking visionaries are always exciting to watch in action, even when their gambles don’t quite pay off. Yet while the recent projects tackled by Julie Taymor have sported great promise on paper, their externalized metaphors often work against the material she’s aiming to enhance. In her Beatles musical “Across the Universe,” soldiers were seen carrying the Statue of Liberty into Vietnam while singing, “She’s so heavy.”
That singular image would work great as a political cartoon, but as a live-action scenario in a musical montage, it just looked flat-out silly. Though “Universe” admittedly had its share of sublime scenes, they were always the most spare, minimalist moments of poignant visual poetry. The film’s chaotic effects-leaden second act didn’t work at all, and the same could be said of similar passages in Taymor’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” an exuberant hodgepodge of elements...
That singular image would work great as a political cartoon, but as a live-action scenario in a musical montage, it just looked flat-out silly. Though “Universe” admittedly had its share of sublime scenes, they were always the most spare, minimalist moments of poignant visual poetry. The film’s chaotic effects-leaden second act didn’t work at all, and the same could be said of similar passages in Taymor’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” an exuberant hodgepodge of elements...
- 9/29/2011
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
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