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Ruth Franklin:

In the course of a writing life that has included five novels, collections of short stories and poetry, and numerous essays and lectures, Achebe has consistently argued for the right of Africans to tell their own story in their own way, and has attacked the representations of European writers. But he also did not reject European influence entirely, choosing to write not in his native Igbo but in English, a language that, as he once said, “history has forced down our throat.” In a country with several major languages and more than five hundred smaller ones, establishing a lingua franca was a practical and political necessity. For Achebe, it was also an artistic necessity—a way to give expression to the clash of civilizations that is his enduring theme.

Donaghue, the Henry James Professor of Letters at New York University, in 1981, summing views of Mary McCarthy with which he disagrees:

Mary McCarthy’s new book transcribes the Northcliffe Lectures she gave some months ago at University College, London. Her main argument is that the classic novel in the 19th century grew up and grew strong upon ideas and arguments provoked by public issues, politics, religion – the questions of Free Trade, Empire, women, Reform and so forth. It was assumed that a serious novel would deal with such questions in their bearing upon the themes of power, money, sex and class. The novelist’s relation to his readers was sustained by a shared assumption that these matters constituted reality. Miss McCarthy believes that this assumption was undermined by Henry James, and that James’s sense of the novel has dominated the general understanding of fiction from that day to this. She argues that in the typical Jamesian fiction ideas, concepts and public issues are mostly replaced by images, hints, guesses, sensations, nuances of sensibility. James’s characters, she says, are mostly interested in themselves and in one another, not in anything as external as Free Trade. They visit art galleries, but they never argue about the pictures they have seen.

According to Miss McCarthy, the damage James did in practice was given currency and respectability by T.S. Eliot’s theories: It was Eliot who praised James for having ”a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” Eliot’s influence was such that readers started thinking that ideas are crude things, good enough for journalism but not for a work of art. The serious novelist in our own day, Miss McCarthy argues, is discouraged from dealing with ideas or from making debate and argument an important part of his fiction.

Also see more cold war lit confrontation involving critic Maxwell Geismar and Henry James “a primary Cold War literary figure” at Books on Trial by Burial.

Palestinian News Network:

From 7 to 11 May, 16 International Authors visited Palestine in solidarity with the Palestinian People, in recognition of Palestine’s cultural contribution to the world, in affirmation of the power of the word and the responsibility of speaking it. The Palestine Festival of Literature was inspired by the call of the late great Palestinian thinker, Edward Said, to “reaffirm the power of culture over the culture of power.”

The Palestine Festival of Literature was held under the patronage of Chinua Achebe, John Berger, Mahmoud Darwish, Seamus Heaney and Harold Pinter.

In the sixtieth year since the Nakba sixteen international authors will hold the first International Literary Festival in Palestine. 

In partnership with the British Council, the Al-Qattan Foundation, Bethlehem University, Birzeit University, Dar an-Nadwa in Bethlehem and Yabous Productions. 

In recognition of the difficulties Palestinians face under military occupation in travelling around their own country, the Festival will travel to its audiences in the West Bank. It will tour from Jerusalem, to Ramallah, to Jenin, to Bethlehem. 

Anna Clark is a freelance journalist and fiction writer living in Detroit, MI. Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Utne Reader, Women’s eNews, Bitch Magazine, Writers’ Journal, RH Reality Check, and other publications. She maintains the literary and social justice website, Isak. From “Society of the Incarcerated“:

…a movement that challenges the prison industrial complex and acts from the belief that it’s real people inside those walls, and that real families are affected. The movement also acknowledges that victims of crimes are real people too, whose experiences deserve understanding, not media caricature or political exploitation.

Consider the Prison Creative Arts Project, a collaborative organization that facilitates writing, art, drama, and music workshops in prisons, detention centers and urban schools throughout Michigan. It’s produced 13 annual exhibitions of art by Michigan prisoners at the University of Michigan, facilitates one-on-one arts training with people who are incarcerated and supports artists who are released from prison by connecting them with working artists in the communities they return to.

Consider The Sentencing Project, a national organization that documents the disturbing trends in the prison industrial complex while agitating for viable alternatives to incarceration and current sentencing law.

Consider PEN America’s Prison Writing Program, which has provided mentoring, workshops, readings and publication to incarcerated writers since 1971.

Consider the Women’s Prison Association, which advocates for women with histories in the criminal justice system. It particularly supports a woman’s need for housing, employment and health care when she returns to her community.

Consider Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation, which challenges the death penalty through constant interaction with citizens, media and policy makers. Since 1976, MVFR has contended that legal executions lead to yet another family losing a loved one to violence, while capital trials absorb dollars that would be better put to victim services and law enforcement.

Most of all, consider yourself-and your own stake, intentional or not, in a system that will continually and quietly shape the direction of our country unless we agitate for an alternative.

 

In the Declaration of Emancipation I’ve recently rewritten the (US/13 Colonies) Declaration of Independence, by simply re-using much of its language, and making it applicable to the Americas as a whole, and changing the title to reflect the emancipation manifestos and legislation freeing the Russian serfs and US slaves.  

Because I incorporate so much of the original text, it’s in a sense co-authored with the Declaration of Independence signers, though modified, updated, expanded somewhat. 

A big factual text I’ve started on is the “U.S. Military Counterinsurgency Manual, December 2006” which I’ve begun to reconstrue ultimately in novelistic or epic imaginative form as a Field Guide to Revolution for defeating not a counterinsurgency (or COIN, in the military’s acronym) but for defeating counterrevolutionary (CORE) forces like corporations and states and so on, and for carrying out a liberatory revolution (LIBREV) by revolutionaries. 

Again, I simply incorporate very much of the actual counterinsurgency manual – minus the violence – including sentences, paragraph structure, ideas and information while modifying wherever necessary to produce a liberatory revolutionary approach, ironically co-written, in a sense, with the military and the outside scholars they involved.

In some ways it starts out sounding like the opening of an epic novel, so I note it as such. This nearly 300 page military manual could be rewritten to incorporate more novelistic features to render it more in depth a novel of ideas or an imaginative epic of some sort.

The broader implications of this are that there is an ever growing number of such state-corporate type documents being produced at local, national and international levels, everything from economic treatises, to sweeping health care legislation and documents, to environmental manifestos, corporate rights law documents and so on. Some NGO documents may be somewhat liberatory, plenty of documents are reactionary, all could be, maybe should be re-imagined, closely to or wholly out of their nonfiction form. Continue reading Rewriting, Revolutionizing the World

John Cusack’s War: The Actor Battles to Un-Embed Hollywood With His New Film, ‘War, Inc.’ – by Jeremy Scahill:

Back in 1989, in his smash hit “Say Anything,” John Cusack famously stood with a boom box above his head outside the home of the woman he loved blasting Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” With his latest films on the Iraq war, Cusack is standing outside Hollywood with a TV above his head broadcasting his political movies calling on the public to wake up and “Do Something.”

John Cusack began working on his new film “War, Inc.,” which premieres in LA and New York May 23, about a year into the US occupation of Iraq. From the moment US tanks rolled into Baghdad, Cusack was a voracious consumer of news about the war. He took it deadly seriously, regularly calling independent journalists and asking them questions as he sought as much independent information as he could. Watching the insanity of the erection of the Green Zone and the advent of the era of McWar, complete with tens of thousands of “private contractors,” Cusack set out to use the medium of film to unveil the madness. He wanted to do on the big screen what independent reporters like Naomi Klein, Nir Rosen and Dahr Jamail did in print. Over these years of war and occupation, Cusack has become one of the most insightful commentators on a far too seldom discussed aspect of the occupation: the corporate dominance of the US war machine.

Cusack is no parachute humanitarian. While he continues to do the Hollywood thing with big budget movies, he is simultaneously a fierce un-embedded actor/filmmaker who has been at the center of two of the best films to date dealing with the madness of the Iraq war.

“A candid conversation between the playwright of Over There/Over Here opening May 29th at Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro for its West Coast Premiere, and the Artistic Director of The Relevant Stage Theatre Company, Ray Buffer. Michael Reyes, Playwright.”  The Relevant Stage

An interesting lively example of mixing aesthetic criticism with ethical (or general normative) criticism is found in a review by Eileen Jones of the recent Iraq war film Stop-Loss, which she details as:

“a protest movie about the war that-follow me closely here-doesn’t actually protest the war. Because that would be a bummer, getting us into that whole thing again about Bush and Cheney and the WMDs that weren’t there and the no-exit-strategy. Not to mention the 4,000 dead Americans we’re sort of peeved about. We support our troops, you know! In this movie Peirce insists on supporting our troops so hard it’s impossible to figure out what’s ailing us, watching these fine boys with their fine parents all having fine values in this fine country of ours. Nagging questions hang over the whole project: if our Texas-style patriotism is so great, and our mission to defend America is so great, and we’ve got hordes of studly young guys leaping at the opportunity to go fight whoever they’re told, and they’re all great, too, and their families and communities are great, then uh … what’s the problem? Why isn’t everybody happy?

“Well, for one thing, it turns out that if you go fight in a war, you can get SHOT. Yeah! It’s true! Even a righteous American, with a big gun, and a Kevlar vest, and a Hummer! That’s the movie’s first-act revelation. We see our boys in Iraq, doing their jobs chasing insurgents into local people’s apartments, and those bastards start SHOOTING at ‘em!”

It may be difficult to separate out where the aesthetic criticism ends and the ethical/normative criticism begins here because in this case they are extremely intertwined, often co-dependent. The normative breakdown generates broken aesthetics; not much chance of satisfying rising climax and poignant moments (in terms of aesthetics) when the ethics or other normative features are impoverished/degraded… And when otherwise the aesthetics are well done but the underlying norms are bunk, well it’s lipstick on the poor pig, at best.

Historical Criticism and Social Change

In the excerpts below, Edmund Wilson presents his thoughts on what it means to understand literature in its “historical” aspects, that is “its social, economic and political aspects.”

He notes that this tradition of criticism began during the Enlightenment and developed during the subsequent centuries. He begins by describing other prominent traditions of criticism then focuses on the historical one, which is a key critical tradition, especially its more progressive and revolutionary elements, overviewed and explored by this site. Continue reading The Historical Interpretation of Literature – by Edmund Wilson

Some of the most thoughtful work I’ve seen regarding aesthetics and ethics, and the related, is by Kenneth Burke in The Philosophy of Literary Form (the 1941 date below is for the collection, not for the essays, most of which were written in the 1930s, I think):

(1941) Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” The Philosophy of Literary Form:

“Here I shall put down, as briefly as possible, a statement in behalf of what might be catalogued, with a fair degree of accuracy, as a sociological criticism of literature. Sociological criticism is certainly not new. I shall try to suggest what partially new elements or emphasis I think should be added to this old approach. And to make the ‘way in’ as easy as possible, I shall begin with a discussion of proverbs. Examine random specimens in The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs. You will note, I think, that there is no ‘pure’ literature here. Everything is ‘medicine.’ Proverbs are designed for consolation or vengeance, for admonition or exhortation, for foretelling” (253).

(1941) Kenneth Burke, “The Nature of Art Under Capitalism,” The Philosophy of Literary Form:

“The present article proposes to say something further on the subject of art and propaganda. It will attempt to set forth a line of reasoning as to why the contemporary emphasis must be placed largely upon propaganda, rather than upon ‘pure’ art…. Since pure art makes for acceptance, it tends to become a social menace in so far as it assists us in tolerating the intolerable. And if it leads us to a state of acquiescence at a time when the very basis of moral integration is in question, we get a paradox whereby the soundest adjunct to ethics, the aesthetic, threatens to uphold an unethical condition. For this reason it seems that under conditions of competitive capitalism there must necessarily be a large corrective or propaganda element in art. Art cannot safely confine itself to merely using the values which arise out of a given social texture and integrating their conflicts, as the soundest, ‘purest’ art will do. It must have a definite hortatory function, an educational element of suasion or inducement; it must be partially forensic. Such a quality we consider to be the essential work of propaganda. Hence we feel that the moral breach arising from vitiation of the work-patterns calls for a propaganda art. And incidentally, our distinction as so stated should make it apparent that much of the so-called ‘pure’ art of the nineteenth century was of a pronouncedly propagandist or corrective coloring. In proportion as the conditions of economic warfare grew in intensity throughout the ‘century of progress,’ and the church proper gradually adapted its doctrines to serve merely the protection of private gain and the upholding of manipulated law, the ‘priestly’ function was carried on by the ‘secular’ poets, often avowedly agnostic.  Continue reading Kenneth Burke on Aesthetics and Ethics

Preston C. Enright:

“Having recently seen author David Hajdu on C-SPAN, I was motivated to create this list of artists who are dealing with complex issues in a way that super-hero comics never did. Hajdu, the author of ‘The Ten-Cent Plague’ outlined the history of the repression of comics in America, including a decade (1945-1955) when comics were being publicly burned. Today, there is a renaissance of thoughtful illustrators who are thinking outside the box. There is also an increased interest in the ‘underground’ comics of the 60s and 70s. I’m looking forward to watching this field develop in the coming years.”

David Bacon:

I was disappointed that Daniel Day- Lewis won an Oscar for There Will Be Blood, not because he’s not a great actor (he is), but because the movie was such a betrayal of the book on which it was based. Movies don‘t have to follow books. Many don‘t. But in this case, what we missed were the things that made Upton Sinclair’s Oil! a politically courageous book for its time. For our time, it unearths a crucial part of the hidden history of our own working class movement. 

PEN asks: “…what novels were ever pointedly relevant to public and political life?”

No little bit of research and analysis on it. One could do worse than to recall Victor Hugo’s great novel of the people, Les Miserables. Biographer Graham Robb notes:

“One can see here the impact of Les Miserables on the Second Empire…. The State was trying to clear its name. The Emperor and Empress performed some public acts of charity and brought philanthropy back into fashion. There was a sudden surge of official interest in penal legislation, the industrial exploitation of women, the care of orphans, and the education of the poor. From his rock in the English Channel, Victor Hugo, who can more fairly be called ‘the French Dickens’ than Balzac, had set the parliamentary agenda for 1862.” 

Since it’s publication in 1957, Atlas Shrugged, the philosophical and artistic climax of Ayn Rand’s novels, has never been out of print. It continues to receive critical attention and is considered one of the most influential books ever published, impacting a variety of disciplines including philosophy, literature, economics, business and political science. Continue reading PEN and Public or Political Fiction

 – open letter –

Send us the money. We know what to do with it.

As reported in the Harvard Crimson, you noted that “many writers have been in a post-Sept. 11 malaise, and that it grew so severe that at one point [you] considered offering up [your] own money in order to urge writers to break through their writer’s block.”

You state, “I actually had an idea a couple of years ago – when six or seven people I knew were all in a similar place of frustration with the novel – of sponsoring a prize, of offering $10,000 of my own money who first delivered a novel.”

Within two or three years of 9-11 both Andre Vltchek and I had written geo-political novels that no publisher would touch – too progressive for the status quo literary world. We lacked the malaise but could have won your $10,000, which would have helped us greatly in starting up Mainstay Press and its journal Liberation Lit as a way of publishing our work and the accomplished literature and art of others that the status quo lit world shies from. $10,000 would still greatly help us publish the first print issue of our liberatory literature journal Liberation Lit, featuring several dozen authors. As it is we will be hard pressed just to get contributor’s copies to some of the contributors. So substantial financial help would be much appreciated. Our post 9-11, post Iraq war, post Hurricane Katrina novels and numerous other works both long and short show that we have surely and consistently produced, and know what to do with the money.

We do most everything. We write novels, plays, stories, and works of criticism, and we edit them and those by others, and we proof them, and format them, and design and create the covers, and publish them, and attempt to publicize them. And since we do it with next to no resources, you can trust that we know how to stretch a dollar. Continue reading Dear Jonathan Franzen

Robert Fisk:

I was in the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron once, in 2001, and the Palestinians had lynched three supposed collaborators. And they were hanging so terribly, almost naked, on the electricity pylons out of town, that I could not write in my notebook. Instead, I drew pictures of their bodies hanging from the pylons. Young boys – Palestinian boys – were stubbing out cigarettes on their near-naked bodies and they reminded me of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, all arrows and pain and forgiveness, and so all I could do was draw. I still have the pictures. They are ridiculous, stupid, the work of a reporter who suddenly couldn’t bring himself to write the details on the page.

But I understand Hoyland’s picture, even if it is not my picture. After I saw the oil fires burning in Kuwait in 1991, an Irish artist painted Fisk’s Fires – a title I could have done without – in which she very accurately portrayed the bleached desert with the rich, thick, chocolate-tasting oil we tasted in the aftermath of the war. Sometimes, I wish these painters were with us when we saw the war with our own eyes – and which they could then see with theirs. …