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Shawna Diss

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Proposal Meeting (Friday, February 13)
Archives Ahoy
Stuff Read

List of Raw Topics

• Types of work: productive, unproductive; homework, awaywork
• Waste/luxury versus efficiency
• Monk economy, alternative economies, sub-economies, w/handmade ethos v mechanical reproduction
• Catalog

Waste and the Labor Question

Ideas

• The balance of luxury and poverty, waste and want, inefficiency and efficiency, overabundance/overproduction versus underproduction
• Maps up with ideas about labor and leisure through definitions of work (Marx)
• Certain art philosophies as ethics of waste: excess
• Fear of overproduction
• General assumption: that we can watch the debates about the rise of modern consumer society, concerning the exploitation of labor, manifesting themselves as themes and forms in literature about waste and the nature of work

Possible Chapter Topics

• Introduction: Victorian and Modernist Debates around Waste (D&G;on antiproduction; overproduction debate worries of Owen, Proudhon, Ricardo, James Mill, Keynes, et al)
• Some Purely Victorian Topic, Perhaps Dickens, to Set Up Critique of Waste Theme
• Aestheticism, the Dandy, and Marx’s Concept of Labor in the 1844 Manuscripts
  • Marx: labor is the way man makes meaning in his life; he lives to work, not works to live; should be unconnected with any peripheral goal such as morality (unalienated labor)
  • Aesthetics: art for art’s sake (unalienated aesthetic labor)
    • Hooked up to an aesthetics of sensuous indulgence and excess (but even that is seen as labor for art, as type of research)
  • The Dandy as an economic figure
• Varieties of Commodity Fetishism in Modernism (?)
• Alternative Forms of Labor: Domestic Work as Antiproduction
• Pearls of Great Price: Homoerotic Waste in Woolf and Mansfield
  • Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Mrs. Dalloway; Mansfield, Journals, “Bliss”
    • Shared “treasure” language expressing woman-woman relationship
  • Mansfield’s bourgeois home-life, the practical life against waste (her father wouldn’t even give her extra allowance), epitomized in the waste of the non-productive, ie non-reproductive, bisexual liaisons
  • Jewelry and female relationships are both excessive

Catalog

Chapters

• Introduction: On the Evolution of the Catalog Form
• 1) Rules of Possession: James, Dickens, and the Realist Catalog
• 2) The Didactic Decadent: Huysmans, Wilde, and Learning the Catalogic
• 3) Feminist Theories of History: Hall, Woolf, Macauley, and the Registry of Ancestors
• 4) Style and the City: Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, and the Catalog as Sentence
• 5) Objects Under Erasure: Pound and the Imagists
• Epilogue: Victorian Inheritance, Modernist Metrology

Victorian

Social/cultural documents

• Actual catalogs
  • Global: Hudson’s Bay – Winnipeg; Gostiny Dvor – St. Petersburg; Le Bon Marche and La Samaritaine – Paris
  • UK: Austin’s, New Mart, Clerys, and Arnotts – Dublin; Bainbridges – Newcastle; Kendals – Manchester;
  • London: Selfridges, Harrods, Peter Jones, John Lewis, Barkers, and Whitleys
  • America: Marble Palace, Macy’s, and Lord & Taylor – NYC; Marshall Fields – Minneapolis; Zion’s – Salt Lake City; Sears & Roebuck
• Taxonomies (Dictionary of National Bio, Darwin, Spencer, Varieties of Religious Experience…)
• New systems of categorizing and measurement
  • Great Exhibition, 1851
• Henry Mayhew (London Labour and the London Poor)
  • Note: Larkin referenced it in his poem “Deceptions”

Literature

• Dickens’ London (with reference to Christmas Carol, Bleak House, Pickwick, Oliver Twist)
• James’ The Spoils of Poynton (with reference to Ambassadors, Outcry, Golden Bowl)
• Wharton’s Old New York
  • chapters are the Forties, the Fifties, the Sixties, the Seventies
• Stoker’s //Dracula
  • shuffling and organization of documents = the real hero

Transition

• Huysman and Wilde (from A rebours to Picture of Dorian Gray)
  • Huysman’s text as something Wilde as “bought” and included in his text
  • Provides a formal break with rest of narrative style
• Rose Macauley’s Told By an Idiot

Modernist

Social/cultural documents

• Simmel, Baudelaire, Benjamin on modernity
• Benjamin’s Arcades Project

Literature

• Joyce’s Ulysses
• Virginia Woolf’s The Years (with reference to Waves, Dalloway, Acts, Orlando)
• Imagism
  • The thing itself: immanence; substitute words for thing
  • Anti-consumption: no waste of words, economy
  • The search for “exact equivalent” (Marsden, “The Art of the Future”) or “objective correlative” (Eliot, “Tradish & the I T”) – exiting surplus economy
  • Is the image shy of capitalism or not?
• Pound’s Cantos; “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (“engaged in the perfection of the catalogue,” pp 66)
• Radclyffe Hall’s A Saturday Life
• Blast (the list of blasts)

Justification

• Relationship between Victorian and Modernism
  • Continuity and progress, not disjunction
  • What Victorians engage with at level of content, Modernists do on level of style
    • Not meant as typical “Victorian Content / Modernism Style” dichotomy
    • Modernism merely intensified what Victorians had already used
  • Victorian interest in measuring, categorizing, and organizing, in antiques and collecting, still persists in Modernism
• Mayhew = Dickens = Ulysses = Mrs. Dalloway
  • Cityscapes continually understood as collection
  • Tool of realism turns into representation of consciousness
  • Documentation of objects turns into documentation of city, consciousness
• Modernist interest in categorization and organization
  • Project to record fleeting, ephemeral modern life (inheritance from Aesthetes, Pater) needs some kind of organizational tool
    • ”...there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune to change and shines out (she glanced out the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby….”—To the Lighthouse (Vintage ed, 97)
  • Catalog replaces typical mode of representing personal chronological process (from biography to historical periodization or spatial mapping)
• Adjustment or revision of “encyclopedic novel” genre
• Catalogic as a theory of history (taxonomy, categorizing: Darwin, Spencer, Stephen, Yeats too)
  • Allows periodization as mechanism for understanding history
• Illustrates responses to capitalism
  • capitalist dialectics: plenitude/order, text/space, lists/categories, object/image, variety/abstraction
  • Relationship to economizing or luxuriating: exact equivalent (socialist “fair trade”) or surplus value (decadent excess)
  • Asceticism (poverty), Bourgeois (sufficiency), Aestheticism (luxury)

Spas, Hotels, Ships, (Train Stations?)

Victorian

• Spas
  • Jane Austen (Persuasion, Northanger Abbey)
  • Charles Dickens fiction (Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield)
• Hotels
  • W. M. Thackeray (Vanity Fair)
  • Henry James (Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, almost everything)
• Ships
  • Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth, travel memoirs)
  • Charles Dickens nonfiction (from Household Words, in //Selected Journalism, 1850-1870)

Transition

• Forster’s early work (short stories, Room with a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread)

Modernism

• Spas
  • Ford Madox Ford The Good Soldier
  • Katherine Mansfield (In a German Pension, “At the Baths”)
  • Thomas Mann (Death in Venice)
• Hotels
  • Andre Gide (The Immoralist)
  • Somerset Maugham (travel stories, Razor’s Edge)
  • Jean Rhys (pretty much anything, novels and short stories)
  • Elizabeth Bowen (The Death of the Heart, The House in Paris)
    • Private domestic spaces become travel spaces for the main character
• Ships
  • Virginia Woolf (The Voyage Out, To the Lighthouse)
  • E. Arnot Robertson (//Ordinary Families)
  • Vita Sackville-West (No Signposts in the Sea)

Justification

• Theorization of the modernist pastoral
• Adds to travel theory: “The Spaces of Travel”
  • Not about moving, distance, Others
  • Focuses on representations of temporarily inhabited spaces
  • What kinds of relations, situations can author show b/c it’s a temp space?
• New ideas about the “transitory” nature of modernist consciousness
  • Material basis for apparently abstract concept
  • Temporary spaces used as figures to experiment with nature of modernity
    • ie, You want to investigate the fleeting? Try the train stations!
• Answer, “What types of formal changes are required by or inspired by these spaces?”
• Different take on the issue of “bildung” (cf Jed Esty) and development
  • ie, some spaces of leisure are literally about being sick

Cafes, Bars, and Tea-Shops

• As represented in books
• As a place of writing
• As a player in the development of art movements, journals
• As a new type of space, public yet made for oddly private uses
  • Halfway house between public and private

Work versus Leisure

• Leisure as a type of work
  • Barry Lyndon 118: the business of leisure
• Ideal of labor according to Marx

Utopian Spaces: Garden Cities, Sociology, Architecture, Philosophy, and Economics Working Together

• Letchworth Garden City, Welwyn Garden City (early Edwardian)
  • Arts-and-crafts inspired
  • Famous for having yoga, theosophy, libraries, no alcohol, and factory
• Model villages: Bornville, Saltaire, Port Sunshine (started in 18th century, but best ones in Victorian era – Edwardian)
• Lewis Mumford
• Patrick Geddes
• Ebenezer Howard
• Ruskin, Carlyle, Marx, Shaw
• Texts: Bellamy’s Looking Backward; Lewis Mumford, Modern Housing and City in History; Sir Ebenezer Howard and the Town Planning Movement; “Sociological Effects of Garden Cities” (anti communist!) 1938; Walter Wilkinson of _Punch making fun of it and John Betjeman’s poem (cf Jonathan Glancey in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2003/dec/01/architecture.regeneration

Leisure Spaces

• Places
  • Comestibles: bars, cafes, pubs, restaurants
  • Moveables: trains, cruise ships, yachts
    • Get beyond the commonplace that with these developments the journey itself becomes a destination, that the trip is in the getting there
  • Liveables: seaside resorts, spas, hotels, model villages, garden cities
• Themes
  • Work versus leisure
  • Accelerating the social: you don’t escape from it but rather experience an intensified version
  • Private versus public
    • We all know now that the private/public distinction was largely rhetoric, both back then and now, and these spaces are one NEW way to come to terms with this lack of technical distinction and yet retain some interesting sense of difference b/c the illusion of difference was quite the order of the day. And the illusion therefore was real.
  • “Escape:” you could choose your measure of escape (its intensity) as well as choose a reason (health, relaxation, mating)
• Categorizing
  • Travel
  • Organized/planned spaces

Modernism and Leisure Spaces

• During modernism, an astonishing number of new leisure spaces were established. Space was experimented upon.
• Representational spaces were significant in the creation of paradigms within which to understand these new spaces.
• Movie, A Brief Vacation