EN264: Explorations in Critical Theory, 2012-13
Assessed Essay Questions
1st paper, 2,500/5,000 words
Answer ONE of the following questions, or develop your own question in consultation with me.
Essays are due on Tuesday, Week 1, Term 2 (8th January 2013)
1. ‘[The] struggle for and against selective traditions is understandably a major part of all
contemporary cultural activity’ (Marxism and Literature, p. 117). Discuss this statement through
reference to modernism as Williams presents it in his essay, ‘Metropolitan Perceptions and the
Emergence of Modernism’.
2. ‘From several angles, within a social perspective, the figure of the author becomes
problematic’ (Marxism and Literature, p. 192). What do you think Williams gains, and what (if
anything) do you think he loses, by his suggestion that we focus more on the categories of
‘project’, ‘movement’ and ‘formation’ than on the category of ‘author’ in literary scholarship?
3. ‘By my educational history I belong with the literate and the literary. But by inheritance and
still by affiliation I belong with an illiterate and relatively illiterate majority’ (‘Beyond
Cambridge English’, p. 212). How does the opposition specified here, between ‘educational
history’ and ‘inheritance’ and ‘affiliation’, play itself out in Williams’s literary criticism?
4. ‘[C]an radically different work still be carried on under a single heading or department when
there is not just diversity of approach but more serious and fundamental differences about the
object of knowledge (despite overlapping of the actual material of study)? Or must there be
some wider reorganization of the received divisions of the humanities, the human sciences,
into newly defined and newly collaborative arrangements’? (‘Crisis in English Studies’, p. 211).
Why does mainstream ‘English Studies’ seem to Williams (writing in 1981) to stand in need of
radical renewal and overhaul? Is his call for a reconceptualisation of the field still relevant
today?
5. ‘We use the word culture in… two senses: to mean a whole way of life – the common
meanings; to mean the arts and learning – the special processes of discovery and creative
effort. Some writers reserve the word for one or other of these senses; I insist on both, and on
the significance of their conjunction’ (‘Culture is Ordinary’, p. 4). Discuss.
6. Discuss the significance of class in Williams’s treatment of some (say, two or three) of the
major English writers.
7. ‘If we are to understand… [the] significance [of the concept of literature], and the complicated
facts it partially reveals and partially obscures, we must turn to examining the development of
the concept itself’ (Marxism and Literature, p. 46). Examine Williams’s ‘examination of the
development of the concept of literature’, by way of making explicit and commenting upon
‘the complicated facts it partially reveals and partially obscures’.
8. Williams and Adorno differ from one another most significantly, perhaps, in their assessments
of modernism. Adorno celebrates modernism for its last-ditch refusal of (capitalist) modernity;
Williams criticises modernism for its false universalism. Compare, contrast and evaluate the
arguments of the two critics in this regard.
9. Discuss the relation between literature (or, more generally, culture) and society in Williams
and/or Adorno.
10. ‘After the Second World War, everything, including a resurrected culture, has been destroyed
without realizing it; humankind continues to vegetate, creeping along after events that even
the survivors cannot survive, on a rubbish heap that has made even reflection on one’s own
damaged state useless’ (‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, p. 244). Adorno speaks, here, of a
post-catastrophe situation so bleak that, in it, ‘even the survivors cannot survive’. On his
reading, Beckett’s play dramatises this ground-zero situation. But surely Adorno values
Beckett’s work precisely because it might in these terms be said to refuse the very situation that
it names? (Isn’t this refusing just what Adorno says that culture – and criticism – does in
general?) Discuss the apparent – or actual – paradox here.
11. ‘We are also familiar with the readiness today to deny or minimize what happened – no matter
how difficult it is to comprehend that people feel no shame in arguing that it was at most only
five and not six million Jews who were gassed. Furthermore, the quite common move of
drawing up a balance sheet of guilt is irrational, as though Dresden compensated for
Auschwitz. Drawing up such calculations, the haste to produce counter-arguments in order to
exempt oneself from self-reflection, already contain something inhuman, and military actions
in the war, the examples of which, moreover, are called “Coventry” and “Rotterdam,” are
scarcely comparable to the administrative murder of millions of innocent people. Even their
innocence, which cannot be more simple and plausible, is contested. The enormity of what
was perpetrated works to justify this: a lax consciousness consoles itself with the thought that
such a thing surely could not have happened unless the victims had in some way or another
furnished some kind of instigation, and this “some kind of” may then be multiplied at will.
The blindness disregards the flagrant disproportion between an extremely fictitious guilt and
an extremely real punishment. At times the victors themselves are made responsible for what
the vanquished did when they themselves were still beyond reach, and responsibility for the
atrocities of Hitler is shifted onto those who tolerated his seizure of power and not to the ones
who cheered him on. The idiocy of all this is truly a sign of something that psychologically has
not been mastered, a wound, although the idea of wounds would be rather more appropriate
for the victims’ (‘The Meaning of Working through the Past’, pp. 90-91). Attempt a close
reading of this passage, explaining and elucidating it, and exploring what if any implications it
holds for us in today’s political culture.
12. ‘The individual himself is revealed to be a historical category, both the outcome of the
capitalist process of alienation and a defiant protest against it, something transient himself’
(‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, p. 249). Discuss this proposition, either in the context of an
analysis of Adorno’s reading of Beckett’s play or more generally, as an historico-philosophical
statement.
13. ‘The essay is both more open and more closed than traditional thought would like’ (‘The Essay
as Form’, p. 17). Write an essay on the form of the essay, as Adorno conceives it.
14. ‘This is not the time for political works of art; rather, politics has migrated into the
autonomous work of art, and it has penetrated most deeply into works that present themselves
as politically dead…’ (‘Commitment’, pp. 93-94). Do you agree with Adorno on the subject of
‘commitment’ in art? Why/why not?
15. ‘The feminine character, and the ideal of femininity on which it is modelled, are products of
masculine society… Glorification of the feminine character implies the humiliation of all who
bear it’. Attempt a close reading of Fragment 59 of Adorno’s Minima Moralia (‘Since I set eyes
on him’), by way of elucidating and evaluating its meaning, and linking it to Adorno’s thought
as a whole.
16. ‘The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt
to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of
redemption.’ What meaning can we give to this evocation of redemption in Adorno’s work?