(1974). History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 167-170.

History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics

The Road to Wigan Pier

T HE PURPOSE OF THIS GUIDE is to help you write critical essays about books or other literary works. When you write literary criticism, you combine reasoned analysis with your personal evaluation of the work. Literary analysis and book reviews differ from the standard book reports you were assigned in earlier grades. A book report is a mere summary of a work that describes what happened in a text and when. However, in literary criticism and book reviews, you must bring your own critical skills to bear as you analyze a text. Your instructor will be asking you to evaluate and critique the work, not just summarize it. One of the exciting things about writing literary criticism is that you can share with others what you have learned and experienced while reading a poem, play, or novel. This personal experience is just that—personal—and is an essential ingredient for effective criticism and reviews. Nevertheless, although your work will reflect your individuality, there are some general approaches and techniques that can assist you in organizing your thoughts and creating your final report. The sections of this guide provide hints and strategies that will save you time and help you create a more thoughtful, well-written document. How to read texts critically How to locate and use outside sources of information to gain additional perspectives on a literary work How to organize and write the report How to write reports on nonfiction texts

I. Literary Criticism

Professors of Desire@@@A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature@@@The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess

Signal and noise

Introduction 1. 'Responsible Propagandists': I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, and Cambridge Experiment 2. An Honest Decade: William Empson and the Uses of Poetry 3. Between Communism and 'Purity' of Style: The Revolutions of English Surrealism 4. Social Facts and Poetic Authority: The Political Aesthetic of Mass-Observation 5. Bad Dreams: Edward Upward and Marxist Prophecy Coda Bibliography

Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s

A History of 1930s British Literature

Introduction: the Long 1930s

Uncanny Cities: Urban Geographies and Metropolitan Life in the 1930s

The modernist privileging of irony and detached contemplation frequently combined with a recognition of the social and artistic significance of affect. The relation between melodramatic structures of feeling and modernist innovation is evident in two plays of the interwar years: Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann’s Happy End and W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s On the Frontier. Scholars need to develop a vocabulary that complements the customary critical emphasis on modernist “irony,” “estrangement,” and “difficulty” and that can be used to reconstruct the full force of the modernist uses of affect. Instead of estranging melodrama to make it palatable to an audience trained in high modernism, the negotiations between sentimentality and avant-garde aesthetics in Happy End and On the Frontier trigger a backward dialectical movement in which the modernist rallying call to “make it new” blurs into the established patterns of melodrama. (BK)

Benjamin Kohlmann

Papers

Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s

A History of 1930s British Literature

Introduction: the Long 1930s

Uncanny Cities: Urban Geographies and Metropolitan Life in the 1930s

Awkward Moments: Melodrama, Modernism, and the Politics of Affect