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"Kohlmann, Benjamin"
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A history of 1930s British literature
\"The 1930s are again en vogue. Over the past fifteen years political commentators have repeatedly invoked the decade as a resonant backdrop to current historical events ranging from the financial crash of 2008 and the surge of populist political movements to the apparent crisis of democratic institutions in Europe and elsewhere\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Liberal
This short keyword essay begins by turning to the socially progressive “New Liberalism” of the decades around 1900 in order to think about the eclipse of certain traditions of liberal thought from the Cold War onward (this part of the essay takes its cue from Sam Moyn's recent Carlyle lectures on Cold War liberalism). The piece then considers how the (literary, political, social) legacies of this reconstituted liberalism might speak to our own current (“neoliberal” rather than “New Liberal”) moment when, in Bonnie Honig's words, “efficiency is no longer one value among others. . . . It has become rationality itself, and it is the standard by which everything is assessed.”
Journal Article
Keep the aspidistra flying
'Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success.' Gordon Comstock decides to live in poverty rather than compromise with the 'money god'. Disgusted by society's materialism, he leaves his job in advertising to pursue an ill-fated career as a poet. 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying' is widely viewed as a key transitional text in Orwell's career.
Book
Slow Politics: H. G. Wells, Reform, and the Idea of the Welfare State
This essay homes in on a set of neglected political and literary debates about institutional reform and the (emerging) welfare state around 1900. In doing so, I reclaim a reformist idiom that is both more ethically substantive and more politically ambitious than the languages of reform currently available to critics on the Left. Taking up Tony Judt’s provocative assertion that current defenses of the welfare state on the left are marred by a profound “discursive disability” (Ill Fares the Land 34), I reconstruct an important part of the history of the reformist literary mode by turning to the Edwardian works of H. G. Wells.
Journal Article
Proletarian Modernism
This article identifies a body of work—films, literary texts, and theories of the aesthetic—that can help us reopen the question of what it means for an artwork to project a vision of classlessness. The article begins by focusing on early-twentieth-century proletarian modernism, in particular in the cinematic work of Sergey Eisenstein and in British literary works that repurposed Woolfian and Joycean styles during the later interwar years. Proletarian modernism, I argue, highlights an alternative route taken by modernist literature and art: unlike the late modernists feted in much recent scholarship, proletarian modernists aimed to retool modernism, opening up new and global political futures for it rather than anticipating its end. The article concludes by showing that the cultural genealogy of proletarian modernism mapped out here doubles as a prehistory of contemporary aesthetic theory: it enables us to recognize the significant political and theoretical erasures that structure recent accounts of art’s democratic potential.
Journal Article
SOUNDING THE PRESENT
This article explores the relationship between socio-economic crisis and collective voice in GB84 (2004), David Peace's novel about the 1984-85 miners' strike in Thatcherite Britain. Peace's novel, I argue, asks us to think about the formation of collectives not primarily in terms of shared and socially allocated positions of ontological precariousness but by returning us to a more fully collectivist politics. The commitments of Peace's formally experimental novel can be situated in relation to the artistic tradition of \"proletarian modernism,\" but GB84 also usefully defamiliarizes recent theorizations of collective agency in aesthetic and political theory, including work by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (on the multitude) and by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (on the possibility of a left populism).
Journal Article
Toward a History and Theory of the Socialist Bildungsroman
This essay identifies the socialist bildungsroman as a distinct transnational genre of the twentieth-century novel. Contrary to recent theorizations of the bildungsroman that stress the link between narratives of individual formation and the organicist idea of the nation, socialist bildungsromane sought to provide the traditional form of the bildungsroman with a genuinely internationalist horizon. The genre of the socialist bildungsroman encodes the checkered history of socialism, in particular the problematic of a revolutionary temporality as well as the fraught relationship between socialism's internationalist aspirations and the resurgence of the nation and nationalism around the mid-century. The article draws on Georg Lukács's fragmentary theorization of the genre to explore an exemplary range of novels, from Fyodor Gladkov's Soviet
(1925) and Jean-Paul Sartre's unfinished tetralogy
(1945–49) to
(1962) and Peter Weiss's trilogy
(1975–81). Building on Alain Badiou's understanding of the militant subject's “fidelity” to the revolution, the article describes the dialectical nature of the relationship between subjectivity and the historical truth event. It concludes that in the socialist bildungsroman the protagonist's formation is imagined as an open-ended process centering on the individual's participation in the revolutionary movement rather than as a fixed (national) telos or a redemptive moment of plenitude.
Journal Article