Search

The current paper explores Wyndham Lewis's critique of left-wing ideologies in his 1936 work Left Wings Over Europe: Or, How to Make a War About Nothing, through the analysis of Richard Hofstadter's concept of "the paranoid style in politics." Hofstadter's theoretical framework provides a practical structure for understanding Lewis's vehement opposition to socialism and communism. In Left Wings Over Europe, Lewis represents leftist ideologies as destabilizing forces responsible for inciting conflict and navigating Europe toward needless war, particularly in the context of rising tensions leading to World War II. Not only does this research analyze how Lewis's paranoid narrative aligns with Hofstadter's insights, highlighting how Lewis's portrayal of leftist movements reflects broader fears of subversion and ideological warfare in 1930s Europe. but also explores how Lewis's personal experiences and political anxieties shaped his critique, offering insight into the role of political paranoia in shaping intellectual and cultural discourse during times of upheaval. Ultimately, the paper contributes to a deeper understanding of how paranoia influences political thought, particularly in moments of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The present paper delves into the political and fascist ideologies embedded in Wyndham Lewis's Hitler (1931) through a descriptive and literary analysis informed by the fascist theories of Nathan Waddell and Alan Munton. Lewis, a key figure in early 20th-century modernism, presents a complex portrayal of Adolf Hitler in his novel) his alignment with fascist ideals and his early support for Adolf Hitler(, which has sparked significant debate among scholars regarding its ideological underpinnings. By examining the text through Waddell's and Munton's critical frameworks (The discourse of fascist literary criticism), this research seeks to unpack the ambivalence and contradictions in Lewis's depiction of Hitler and fascism. Waddell's analysis highlights Lewis's conflicted fascination with fascism as both a response to and critique of the failures of liberal democracy, while Munton offers a nuanced understanding of Lewis's engagement with authoritarianism, emphasizing the artistic and intellectual tensions in his work. Through this combined lens, the study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the political and literary dimensions of Hitler (1931), situating Lewis's novel within the broader context of modernist literature and the ideological struggles of the early twentieth century. Background of Study: Wyndham Lewis's Hitler (1931) occupies a contentious position in literary and political discourse, as it engages with the rising tide of fascism in Europe during the early 20th century. As a modernist writer and artist, Wyndham Lewis was both fascinated and repelled by the political currents of his time, particularly the authoritarianism embodied by figures like Adolf Hitler. This ambivalence is reflected in his novel, which has been interpreted variously as an endorsement, critique, or complex exploration of fascist ideology. In this fashion, Nathan Waddell's and Alan Munton's fascist theories provide critical frameworks for analyzing Lewis's work, each offering unique insights into how Hitler (1931) grapples with themes of power, authority, and individual freedom. Methodology: This study employs a descriptive and literary analytical approach to examine the political and fascist ideologies presented in Wyndham Lewis's Hitler (1931), utilizing the theoretical frameworks of Nathan Waddell and Alan Munton. The research begins with a close reading of Hitler (1931), identifying key themes, motifs, and narrative strategies that reflect Lewis's engagement with fascist ideology. Waddell's theoretical perspective is applied to assess Lewis's complex relationship with fascism, focusing on the tension between his attraction to authoritarian order and his critical stance on its extremes. Munton's analysis is employed to explore the artistic and ideological contradictions within the novel, highlighting how Lewis's modernist sensibilities intersect with his political views. The methodology involves a comparative analysis of the novel's content with Waddell's and Munton's interpretations, aiming to uncover how Lewis's portrayal of Hitler and fascism contributes to broader discussions on modernism and political ideology based on the discourse of fascist literary criticism. Conclusion: The examination of Wyndham Lewis's Hitler (1931) through the lenses of Nathan Waddell's and Alan Munton's fascist theories has revealed a nuanced interplay between political ideology and literary expression in Lewis's work. Waddell's framework highlights Lewis's conflicted engagement with fascism, portraying his ambivalence towards authoritarianism as a response to the perceived failures of liberal democracy and his search for a new social order. Munton's analysis further elucidates the internal contradictions within Lewis's portrayal of Hitler, showcasing how the novel has reflected modernist concerns about power, authority, and the artist's role in society. Together, these theoretical perspectives underscore that Hitler (1931) is not merely a political critique but a complex literary artifact that grapples with the broader discourse on modernism and fascism/literature and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This scholarly inquiry delves into Wyndham Lewis's The Jews Are They Human? (1939), a pro-Semitic book through the lens of Nathan Waddell's ideologies, which focuses on the intersection of literature, politics, and cultural criticism during the rise of fascism. Waddell's scholarship highlights how Lewis's work navigates the complex terrain of fascist literary discourse, engaging critically with the ways in which literary criticism was employed as a tool of propaganda and ideological control. Drawing on Waddell's insights, this analysis explores how Lewis's satirical critique targets the absurdities of anti-Semitic rhetoric and the broader manipulations of fascist cultural criticism. In a broader sense, this paper argues that, as articulated by Waddell, Lewis's approach is not just a rejection of fascist ideology but a deeper engagement with the mechanisms of literary criticism that fascism sought to exploit. Lewis's work uses irony, parody, and counter-narratives to expose the pseudo-scientific racism and myth-making central to fascist criticism, revealing the ethical failings of intellectual complicity. By scrutinizing how Lewis subverts the language and tactics of fascist critics, this analysis illuminates his broader project of reclaiming literary criticism as a space for resistance against oppressive ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore what Lisa Tickner calls a 'dissentient position' in Modernism that assumes dehumanisation as a value of a new and brutal subjectivity and places the machine as a totemic deity. My understanding of this draws from the aesthetic language of Vorticism, particularly representations of women in the work of Wyndham Lewis. Moreover, I argue that this 'machinic-modernism' as Hal Foster describes it, which emerged in the early 20th century as a reaction to industrialised modernity, corporatisation, Taylorism, and Fordism, has a powerful and unacknowledged inheritor in the contemporary Palme d'Or winning film Titane (2021) written and directed by the auteur Julia Ducournau. I argue that the figure of Alexia in Titane, portrayed by actress and model Agathe Rousselle, is a celebration of dehumanisation that follows an anti-humanist path – sexually-combative femininity purged to become a hyper-masculine recruit, emerging as a biomechanical self – I claim that, while the modernism of Lewis and the creative intentions of Ducournau may have stemmed from different motivations, their utmost horizon for the subject and society is the same one, the swapping out of the tension of masculine and feminine for a machinic-self defined by ferocity, abjection, and trauma. I will also refer to the text Filibusters in Barbary from 1932 which is a reflective account of travels in North Africa including revealing attitudes of Lewis's regarding machines which are, in common with the themes of Titane, anthropomorphised and presented as magical, violent, more frightening than monsters, and as having replaced gods. Ducournau and Lewis are reactive to the same social forces and rebarbative to so-called bourgeois conceptions of femininity in favour of a subjectivity that exists in a highly stratified social organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between Wyndham Lewis's Vorticism movement and Shakespeare, focusing on Lewis's appropriation of Shakespeare's play Timon of Athens and its impact on Vorticism's visual aesthetics. In analysing Wyndham Lewis's avant-garde approach, this article contrasts it with other artistic movements of the time --namely, Futurism and Cubism-- and explores Lewis's interest in the "automaton" and the "machine", and how this fascination is linked to his reading of Shakespeare and his views on World War I. Overall, the paper demonstrates how Shakespeare's work played a significant role in the development of Vorticism's unique aesthetic vision during a time of great social and political upheaval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contextualizes H. R. Giger's influential alien designs and the extended Alien mythos, represented by the popular films, with what has been called machinic modernism. That twentieth-century aesthetic is examined here in fine artworks and related literature by artists with distinct relations to so-called desired dehumanization, including Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein and Michael Ayrton. The research outlines the ways in which particular social forces cohere to influence common aesthetic decisions evidenced in the art practices discussed. The analysis indicates that an anti-humanist position is incubated in the alien designs and in the extended mythos, and how this is politicized in relation to ideas of heroism, leadership and social organization as proto-fascistic. The designation 'proto-fascist' in this article is not intended to defame the creatives involved in the creation of the Alien mythos, or the audiences that have enjoyed and engaged with it – of which the author is a part – rather, it is used to describe a common world-view, and a type of fantasy operational in many nationalistic narratives and aesthetics, and widely consumed by the public. It is an aim of the research, in exploring the problematic but compelling aspects of the Alien mythos, that what is later described as fealty to primitive and atavistic patterns in popular culture can be resisted in the name of a reflexive and complex subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his essay 'An American Utopia' (2016) Fredric Jameson advances a reflexive usage of the manifesto genre. Rather than simply announcing a new political agenda, Jameson uses rhetoric familiar from twentieth-century socialism to deliberately elicit a negative response from his readers. Using his writing to provoke and then point to a widespread aversion to group membership, Jameson situates himself in the aftermath of so many failed twentieth-century revolutionary traditions, and demonstrates, through his textual experiment, the coercive workings of an alternative strategy. In a play of manifestation, the manifesto manifests a reaction that it harnesses to illustrate its point. Rather than focusing on the universal army itself, I am interested in Jameson's reflexive rhetorical strategy, a game of stimuli-and-response that itself has an artistic and political genealogy. From this perspective 'An American Utopia' is less like The Communist Manifesto, and rather more like Wyndham Lewis's 1914 'Vorticist Manifesto', a modernist precursor both to Jameson's reflexive usage of the genre and its positing of a widespread, violent anti-sociality. I use this comparison between Jameson and Lewis as a vantage point from which some of the problems with Jameson's innovative strategy can more clearly be discerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the ways in which the writings of Le Corbusier interacted with modernist architectural thought in Britain. It focusses on Frederick Etchells, who translated Vers une architecture in 1927, and analyses key influences upon his intellectual development and approach to design, namely Roger Fry, Wyndham Lewis, W.R. Lethaby, Christopher Hussey, and John Rodker. It suggests that dedicated study of Etchells as a connective figure in this network aids our understanding of modernism's fraught integration into British culture; that architectural ideas are central to vorticism's engagement with the artist's relationship to society; and that Fry and Lewis deserve recognition for establishing a mature conception of architectural modernity in Britain, alongside Le Corbusier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wyndham Lewis's anecdotal, amused approach to narrating his war experience in Blasting and Bombardiering parodies the style of service-author stories, the tales published by servicemen during the Great War that are often characterized by levity and breeziness. With the outbreak of the conflict, longstanding associations between Britishness and cheerful, amused stoicism gave rise to the idea that maintaining a sense of humor was a valuable, even war-winning asset. Similar to Lewis's Tyro paintings, Blasting satirizes the persistence of a culture of stiff-upper-lip humor, portraying its endurance as a denial of the conflict's enormity, including the war's traumatic legacy. Far from making the memoir insignificant, the flippancy in Blasting mounts a complex critique of British wartime humor and its effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marshall McLuhan claimed his ideas came from Wyndham Lewis, but criticised Lewis for his ambitions for art as a total new environment. He claimed Lewis was a Gnostic Manichee. His annotations to Lewis's books, his remarks in correspondence and his review(s) of Hugh Kenner's book on Lewis show his reading was mistaken, however. McLuhan's model of communication denied meaning or the aesthetic and led him to the same 'nihilism' he wrongly attributed to Lewis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins by considering Duncan’s Stein writings as a criticism of highly invested modernist suppositions regarding originality and mastery, these latter exemplified by Wyndham Lewis’s view of Hemingway as castrated and belittled by his inability not to imitate Gertrude Stein. It continues to examine Duncan’s mobilisation of syllepsis in his Stein writings, and to relate this figure to the Poundian conception of logopoeia, first elaborated in relation to the writings of Mina Loy and Marianne Moore. This allows for a recontextualisation of Stein within the history of Anglo-American modernist poetry by women, and a consideration of its consequences. The paper ends with a brief examination of the relationship of Duncan and Spicer in their shared but distinct projects of challenging essential tenets of modernist lyric ideology, a project for which Stein proves a crucial resource to Duncan, not least in offering a form of “permission” for the exploration of certain forms of “bad” writing.

К началу ХХ века Лондон был одним из самых развитых промышленных городов в мире, но в британском искусстве того времени жанр городского пейзажа и индустриальные мотивы не находили особого отклика. К 1910-м годам ситуация изменилась, художники разных поколений стали изображать улицы крупных городов, находить сюжеты в работе фабрик и облике индустриальных районов, развивать жанр портрета в городской среде. Этот момент возникновения и развития интереса к городским сюжетам, эволюция образа города в работах лондонских художников 1910-х годов показаны в статье через срез художественной жизни Великобритании (от жанровых сцен У. Сикерта до геометрических абстракций У. Льюиса).

Prompted by Wyndham Lewis's call in BLAST for a 'USEFUL LITTLE CHEMIST' to 'restore to us the necessary BLIZZARDS', this paper considers the conceptions of climate and climatic change – natural and anthropogenic – that were in circulation in the early twentieth century. Engaging with the writing of scientists, journalists, novelists, and avant-garde polemicists, it examines early twentieth-century iterations of the notion that climate determines culture, the period's awareness of past climatic changes, the theories advanced to explain these changes, and the attitudes taken towards the possibility of human-induced climatic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Wyndham Lewis's experience of the First World War, and its influence on his varied artistic output. It interrogates how Lewis's initial ambivalence towards an emergent technological society shifted through direct encounters with mechanized warfare, and speculates on the effect of these upon his post-war writing and criticism. By contrasting Lewis's thought against that of his Italian Futurist contemporaries, I will demonstrate the centrality of their divergent conceptions of masculinity in accounting for this opposition – and how Lewis's critique of technological society prefigures contemporary opposition towards the post-humanist philosophy of Accelerationism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper attempts to fill a void in literary criticism on Lewis’s conception of satire by providing a systematic account of his satiric theory and practice, because his discursive and creative satirical writings are as miscellaneous as the nature of the satirical mode. Here I apply Griffin’s (1994) conception of satiric discourse (1994) based on a rhetoric of inquiry, a rhetoric of provocation, a rhetoric of display and a rhetoric of play. In this regard, the study attempts to illuminate the broad semantic nature of Lewis’s lampoon. Resumen: Este artículo pretende cubrir una laguna en la investigación sobre la concepción de la sátira de Lewis, proporcionando una explicación sistemática de su teoría y práctica, ya que sus obras discursivas y creativas son de carácter tan misceláneo como la propia naturaleza del modo satírico. Para ello se aplica la concepción del discurso satírico de Griffin (1994) que se basa en la interrogación retórica, la retórica de la provocación, la retórica de la exposición y la retórica de la representación. De este modo, el trabajo trata de arrojar luz nueva sobre la naturaleza tan diversa de la sátira Lewisiana.

The collection BLAST at 100 makes an admirable attempt to read Wyndham Lewis's BLAST as a single and self-contained text, but ultimately falls short of its ambitions. Essays cover the magazine's two issues as a whole; its individual texts; its connections to other texts, artists, and movements; and practical responses to it, with varying success. The essays on BLAST that fit into the growing field of periodical studies are most useful, and those that analyze individual texts like Rebecca West's "Indissoluble Matrimony" in terms of the magazine as a whole offer a productive model for further work on the magazine. The bulk of the essays, however, do not meet this model's standards and are either too narrow or too broad in scope to adequately address BLAST in itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background The author argues for a reconsideration of Robert Smithson's relationship to the spatial discourse and proto-media studies of Wyndham Lewis and his Canadian protégé Marshall McLuhan. Analysis Through a comparative reading of a lesser-known Lewis text and Smithson's photoessays and related earthworks, the article sets out to re-evaluate the American artist's mock- Platonic "earth maps" as mobilizing cinematic and spatial metaphors deployed by Lewis' satirical travel writings; in particular, Lewis' exploration of Atlantean images of postnational space as an alternative to a time-obsessed modernity in Filibusters in Barbary (1932). Conclusion and implications The cinematic geographies of Smithson, Lewis, and McLuhan emerge as allied responses to, and radical reworkings of, Bergson's discourse on time and media that materialize a shared critical optics and quest for utopia propelled by the lingering spectre of global conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring the philosophical influence exercised by the works of Wyndham Lewis over Marshall McLuhan, this article contends that these two figures both sought to capture a momentary stillness through the figure of the vortex, first established in Lewis's early contributions to the Vorticist art movement, a stillness that necessarily endures within the tumult of a world of electric media. What Lewis hoped to achieve through painting, McLuhan sought likewise in the study of media, foregrounding the need to identify what remains fixed within the seemingly ever-accelerating tempo of modern life, viewing this task as crucial for resisting the determinative powers of media technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aside from the familiar story of Vorticists and Imagists before the war, no detailed analysis of manifestos in Britain (or Ireland) exists. It is true that, by 1914, there had been such an upsurge in manifesto writing that a review of BLAST in The Times (1 July 1914) began: 'The art of the present day seems to be exhausting its energies in 'manifestoes.'' But after the brief fire ignited by the arrival of Italian Futurism died out, Britain again became a manifesto-free zone. Or did it? While a mania for the militant genre did not take hold in Britain and Ireland the same way it did in France, Italy, Germany, or Russia, the manifesto did enjoy a small but dedicated following that included Whistler, Wilde, and Yeats; Patrick Geddes and Hugh MacDiarmid; Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound; Dora Marsden and Virginia Woolf; and Auden, MacNeice, and Spender. Through these and other figures it is possible to trace the development of a manifesto tradition specific to Britain and Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Broadly accepting of the greater tolerance and visibility of gay men in artistic circles in interwar London, Wyndham Lewis nonetheless frequently wrote of this phenomenon with misgivings, even anxiety. Judith Butler's suggestion that such anxiety may be a form of melancholia-blocked mourning for the loss of a love that cannot be acknowledged - and Lewis's estrangement at an early age from his father may together account for his feelings about male homosexuality. His polemical and critical works of the interwar period (The Art of Being Ruled, The Doom of Youth, The Lion and the Fox)link homosexuality with violence against fathers, and his early play Enemy of the Starscan be read as an erotically-inflected agon between a father and a son. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the archives of publishers and individuals, this article analyses the space of the study and the marketplace in a series of interviews by American journalist Louise Morgan, published in the London-based middlebrow Everyman magazine in the early 1930s. A form largely unstudied by literary scholars, the interview offers an important space for exploring issues of publicity and privacy, representations of literary labour and the profession of authorship in this period. In the moment before Q.D. Leavis published Fiction and the Reading Public, before literary studies began to be institutionalised, before New Critical distaste for authorial intention, personae and study of the marketplace largely excluded the interview and the middlebrow from critical study, Morgan's series offers a productive site from which to consider the space of production, the marketplace and, indeed, the work of writing itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece explores the multitude of animal figures in Joyce, especially with regards to his engagement with the classical moral mode of the beast fable. Drawing from a number of texts throughout Joyce's corpus - from his early essays on Dante and Defoe to the fables in Finnegans Wake - I show how a young Joyce's poetics of boredom (as derived from Giordano Bruno) informs his later work through the figure of the animal. Granting his animal figures a certain amount of agency, Joyce uses them to subvert the didacticism of fables, the colonial instrumentalization associated with this didacticism, and even the cultural authority of modernism itself, his own work included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many accounts of the formative years of English modernism rely on Futurism's own questionable record of F. T. Marinetti's visit to London in the spring of 1910 as the catalyst for an avant-garde revolution in Anglo-American literature that led through Roger Fry's revolutionary Post-Impressionist exhibition to Imagism, and onto Vorticism. New evidence presented here, however, supports the position advanced by a number of scholars that Marinetti did not visit until after Fry's exhibition. We can now quite precisely date Marinetti's important 'Futurist Speech to the English' to Tuesday 13 December 1910, rather than to the spring of that year as previously thought. Close examination of the content and context of this lecture, to an audience of Suffragettes at the Lyceum Club for Women, highlights the sheer extent of Marinetti's propaganda drive between 1908 and 1910, as he attempted to garner support for his movement and neutralise the satirical attitude of the mainstream English press. Moreover, Futurism, it appears, actively altered the historical record in order to genealogically prioritise itself. Such a process finds itself recursively working back into modernist studies, through a process in which theories of British historical and cultural decline or inferiority, alongside a presupposition of the continental avant-garde's guiding influence, tend to unconsciously take root in studies of literature of this period. In contrast and as illustration, we can find in one of Wyndham Lewis's early essays - previously considered imitative of, but now clearly an influence upon, Marinetti - the extent to which 'on or about December 1910' British society and culture was already in the process of radicalizing itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]