babble home
rabble.ca - news for the rest of us
today's active topics


Post New Topic  Post A Reply
FAQ | Forum Home
  next oldest topic   next newest topic
» babble   » right brain babble   » humanities & science   » Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Email this thread to someone!    
Author Topic: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
audra trower williams
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2

posted 14 August 2002 11:49 PM      Profile for audra trower williams   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Not this dude. He says:

quote:

The Cambridge Guide to English Literature describes Three Guineas as an established classic—but a classic of what genre exactly? Of political philosophy? Contemporary history? Sociological analysis? No: it is a locus classicus of self-pity and victimhood as a genre in itself. In this, it was certainly ahead of its time, and it deserves to be on the syllabus of every department of women’s studies at every third-rate establishment of higher education. Never were the personal and the political worse confounded.

From: And I'm a look you in the eye for every bar of the chorus | Registered: Apr 2001  |  IP: Logged
Trespasser
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 1204

posted 15 August 2002 01:45 PM      Profile for Trespasser   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
[I-get-all-dreamy-mode] Ah good old conservative frustration. Good ol' conservative City Journal and the Spectator. Some of the drivel is actually worth reading in the New Criterion, a great occasion to sharpen your own position. But this Darlymple hysteria over VW is in the AbFab category, something of the same quality as his "Socialism and anti-Semitism are closely related worldviews" produce. [/I-get-all-dreamy-mode].
From: maritimes | Registered: Aug 2001  |  IP: Logged
'lance
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 1064

posted 15 August 2002 02:56 PM      Profile for 'lance     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Yikes! I admit I haven't read much Woolf, but guys like Mr. Theodore Dalrymple, Esq., I feel I know in my very blood...

quote:
Along with the other members of the Bloomsbury group—that influential and endlessly chronicled little band of British aesthetes of which she was a moving spirit—she was dedicated to the proposition that beings as sensitive as they to the music of life ought not to be bound by gross social conventions, and that it was their duty (as well as their pleasure) to act solely upon the promptings of the sympathetic vibrations of their souls. In a demotic age, however, their justification for personal license could not long be confined to socially superior types such as themselves. Before very long, what was permissible for the elite became mandatory for hoi polloi; and when the predictable social disaster occurred, in the form of a growing underclass devoid of moral bearings, the elite that had absorbed (indeed, reveled in) Bloomsbury’s influence took the growth of the underclass as evidence that their original grudge against society and its conventions had been justified all along. The philosophy brought about the disaster, and the disaster justified the philosophy.

At least he makes himself plain straight away. "Underclass devoid of moral bearings," hey? I'd like to ask him just where this "underclass" is, and what it looks like. But I suspect his answer would simply make me grit my teeth, and my dentist has warned me about this.

You're right, Tres. This would be at home in the New Criterion. Does he write for ol' Hiltie's rag, do you suppose?

Edited to add:

Every paragraph brings vistas new and startling. On a new women's college, Woolf took the view that

quote:
“It must be built not of carved stone and stained glass, but of some cheap, easily combustible material which does not hoard dust and perpetrate traditions.” This is surely an odd architectural position for an aesthete to take: a position whose baleful practical consequences are, alas, visible throughout the whole island of Great Britain, where hardly a townscape has escaped being ruined by it.

So Virginia Woolf is even partly responsible for shoddy modern architecture? Seems a heavy burden to place on the shoulders of one depressive and eventually suicidal writer. Surely she suffered enough while alive.

[ August 15, 2002: Message edited by: 'lance ]


From: that enchanted place on the top of the Forest | Registered: Jul 2001  |  IP: Logged
Arch Stanton
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2356

posted 15 August 2002 10:18 PM      Profile for Arch Stanton     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
A few years back an English major in Saskatoon killed himself by filling his pockets with stones and jumping into the South Saskatchewan.

Really.


From: Borrioboola-Gha | Registered: Mar 2002  |  IP: Logged
Trespasser
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 1204

posted 16 August 2002 02:21 PM      Profile for Trespasser   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
What really gets me is when the conservatives bash some radical lefties for not being grassroots-left enough or in the right way... Honestly...

Or get this sentence:

quote:
Might the revelation by the war of the utter frivolity of her previous attitudinizing have contributed to her decision to commit suicide?

Darlymple (doesn't that name sound Rabelais-esque?) I believe writes for the NCriterion - oh, about the decline of the Western culture and true virtue undoubtedly.


From: maritimes | Registered: Aug 2001  |  IP: Logged
Arch Stanton
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2356

posted 16 August 2002 02:36 PM      Profile for Arch Stanton     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
My copy of the book is a slightly battered first edition that was once in the library of
Michel Leiris, the French writer and anthropologist who knew all the best-worst (or
worst-best) people, such as Sartre and de Beauvoir. Leiris’s annotations consist only of a
list of three pages of special impact to him, written in the elegant hand of a bygone era,
and small crosses on the top outside corners of the pages themselves—pages 62, 63,
and 64.

Geez, if he wants to name-drop, can't he just get it over with?

quote:
...a woman of such languorous, highly strung, thoroughbred equine beauty as she...

Hmm. A lesser wit would have made do with "horse-faced."

His comments on the distress of the priveledged do hit the mark, though:

quote:
The Cambridge Guide to English Literature describes Three Guineas as an established
classic—but a classic of what genre exactly? Of political philosophy? Contemporary
history? Sociological analysis? No: it is a locus classicus of self-pity and victimhood as a
genre in itself...The book might be better titled: How to Be Privileged and Yet Feel Extremely Aggrieved.

From: Borrioboola-Gha | Registered: Mar 2002  |  IP: Logged

All times are Pacific Time  

Post New Topic  Post A Reply Close Topic    Move Topic    Delete Topic next oldest topic   next newest topic
Hop To:

Contact Us | rabble.ca | Policy Statement

Copyright 2001-2008 rabble.ca