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Though often defined as having opposite aims, means, and effects, modernism and modern propaganda developed at the same time and influenced each other in surprising ways. The professional propagandist emerged as one kind of information specialist, the modernist writer as another. Britain was particularly important to this double history. By secretly hiring well-known writers and intellectuals to write for the government and by exploiting their control of new global information systems, the British in World War I invented a new template for the manipulation of information that remains with us to this day. Making a persuasive case for the importance of understanding modernism in the context of the history of modern propaganda, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda also helps explain the origins of today's highly propagandized world. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda integrates new archival research with fresh interpretations of British fiction and film to provide a comprehensive cultural history of the relationship between modernism and propaganda in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. From works by Joseph Conrad to propaganda films by Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, Mark Wollaeger traces the transition from literary to cinematic propaganda while offering compelling close readings of major fiction by Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce.

George Orwell'sNineteen Eighty-Fouris among the most widely read books in the world. For more than 50 years, it has been regarded as a morality tale for the possible future of modern society, a future involving nothing less than extinction of humanity itself. DoesNineteen Eighty-Fourremain relevant in our new century? The editors of this book assembled a distinguished group of philosophers, literary specialists, political commentators, historians, and lawyers and asked them to take a wide-ranging and uninhibited look at that question. The editors deliberately avoided Orwell scholars in an effort to call forth a fresh and diverse range of responses to the major work of one of the most durable literary figures among twentieth-century English writers. AsNineteen Eighty-Fourprotagonist Winston Smith has admirers on the right, in the center, and on the left, the contributors similarly represent a wide range of political, literary, and moral viewpoints. The Cold War that has so often been linked to Orwell's novel ended with more of a whimper than a bang, but most of the issues of concern to him remain alive in some form today: censorship, scientific surveillance, power worship, the autonomy of art, the meaning of democracy, relations between men and women, and many others. The contributors bring a variety of insightful and contemporary perspectives to bear on these questions.

Notes on Sontag is a frank, witty, and entertaining reflection on the work, influence, and personality of one of the \"foremost interpreters of . . . our recent contemporary moment.\" Adopting Sontag's favorite form, a set of brief essays or notes that circle around a topic from different perspectives, renowned essayist Phillip Lopate considers the achievements and limitations of his tantalizing, daunting subject through what is fundamentally a conversation between two writers. Reactions to Sontag tend to be polarized, but Lopate's account of Sontag's significance to him and to the culture over which she loomed is neither hagiography nor hatchet job. Despite admiring and being inspired by her essays, he admits a persistent ambivalence about Sontag. Lopate also describes the figure she cut in person through a series of wry personal anecdotes of his encounters with her over the years. Setting out from middle-class California to invent herself as a European-style intellectual, Sontag raised the bar of critical discourse and offered up a model of a freethinking, imaginative, and sensual woman. But while crediting her successes, Lopate also looks at how her taste for aphorism and the radical high ground led her into exaggerations that could do violence to her own common sense, and how her ambition to be seen primarily as a novelist made her undervalue her brilliant essays. Honest yet sympathetic, Lopate's engaging evaluation reveals a Sontag who was both an original and very much a person of her time.

It’s good that people can’t hear me when I edit their writing. “Blah blah blah.” “Is this a garbled translation from the Cyrolean?” “Did you actually read your writing?” “I’m not your mother.” “Urrrh.” It wouldn’t be polite. I’ve done a good bit of editing over the past twenty years, of the critical journal,minnesota review, of several book collections, and of students’ writing, and sometimes it seems like I pay more attention to other people’s words than they do. Of course, some writing is as elegant as the drape of Armani, and one cannot expect everyone to write as

This book shows how American literary culture in the first half of the twentieth century saw \"irony'\" emerge as a term to describe intersections between aesthetic and political practices. Against conventional associations of irony with political withdrawal, Stratton shows how the term circulated widely in literary and popular culture to describe politically engaged forms of writing. It is a critical commonplace to acknowledge the difficulty of defining irony before stipulating a particular definition as a stable point of departure for literary, cultural, and political analysis. This book, by contrast, is the first to derive definitions of \"irony\" inductively, showing how writers employed it as a keyword both before and in opposition to the institutionalization of New Criticism. It focuses on writers who not only composed ironic texts but talked about irony and satire to situate their work politically: Randolph Bourne, Benjamin De Casseres, Ellen Glasgow, John Dos Passos, Ralph Ellison, and many others.

This book examines the relationship between the White House, in the person of its press secretary, and the press corps through a linguistic analysis of the language used by both sides. A corpus was compiled of around fifty press briefings from the late Clinton years. A wide range of topics are discussed from the Kosovo crisis to the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. This work is highly original in demonstrating how concordance technology and the detailed linguistic evidence available in corpora can be used to study discourse features of text and the communicative strategies of speakers. It will be of vital interest to all linguists interested in corpus-based linguistics and pragmatics, as well as sociolinguists and students and scholars of communications, politics and the media. Alan Partington is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Faculty of Political Science, Camerino University (Italy). He has published in the fields of phonetics, CALL, lexicology and corpus linguistics, and is the author of Patterns and Meanings: Using corpora for English language research and teaching (1998, Benjamins). He is currently researching ways in which corpus techniques can be used to study features of discourse. Foreword: The spin-doctor and the wolf-pack Introduction: Corpora, discourse, politics and the press 1. Briefings as a type of discourse 2. Footing: Who says what to whom 3. Voices of the press 4. Voices of the podium 5. Footing shift for attribution: 'According to the New York Times this morning' 6. 'Rules of Engagement': The interpersonal relationship between the podium and the press 7. Politics, power and politeness 8. Conflict talk 9. The form of words 10. Metaphors of the world 11. Rhetoric, bluster and on-line gaffes 12. Evasion and pursuit 13. General Conclusions

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: Renaissance Origins The Problem of the Dictionary The Invention of “Standard Language” and “Standard English” “Standard English” and the Politics of Language “Standard English” and the Education Debates References and Further Reading

This book argues that the British government's repression of the 1790s rivals the French Revolution as the most important historical event for our understanding the development of Romantic literature. Romanticism has long been associated with both rebellion and escapism, and much Romantic historicism traces an arc from the outburst of democratic energy in British culture triggered by the French Revolution to a dwindling of enthusiasm later in the 1790s, when things in France turned violent. Writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge can then be seen as \"apostates\" who turned from radical politics to a poetics of transcendence. Bugg argues instead for a poetics of silence, and his book is set against the backdrop of the so-called Gagging Acts and other legislation of William Pitt, which in literature manifests itself stylistically as silence, stuttering, fragmentation, and encoding. Mining archives of unpublished documents, including manuscripts, diaries, and letters, where authors were more candid, as well as rereading the work of both major and minor figures, a number of whom were subject to prison sentences, Five Long Winters offers a new way of approaching the literature of the Romantic era.

Utopian Generationsdevelops a powerful interpretive matrix for understanding world literature--one that renders modernism and postcolonial African literature comprehensible in a single framework, within which neither will ever look the same. African literature has commonly been seen as representationally naïve vis-à-vis modernism, and canonical modernism as reactionary vis-à-vis postcolonial literature. What brings these two bodies of work together, argues Nicholas Brown, is their disposition toward Utopia or \"the horizon of a radical reconfiguration of social relations.\" Grounded in a profound rethinking of the Hegelian Marxist tradition, this fluently written book takes as its point of departure the partial displacement during the twentieth century of capitalism's \"internal limit\" (classically conceived as the conflict between labor and capital) onto ageographicdivision of labor and wealth. Dispensing with whole genres of commonplace contemporary pieties, Brown examines works from both sides of this division to create a dialectical mapping of different modes of Utopian aesthetic practice. The theory of world literature developed in the introduction grounds the subtle and powerful readings at the heart of the book--focusing on works by James Joyce, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ford Madox Ford, Chinua Achebe, Wyndham Lewis, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Pepetela. A final chapter, arguing that this literary dialectic has reached a point of exhaustion, suggests that a radically reconceived notion of musical practice may be required to discern the Utopian desire immanent in the products of contemporary culture.

Various studies have been done on shifting toward technology-based second language (L2) education. However, the influence of psycho-emotional factors on students’ technology acceptance is overlooked. To fill this gap, the present quantitative study examined the role of students’ achievement emotions and technological self-efficacy in predicting their technology acceptance in China. To this end, 380 Chinese students were invited to complete three questionnaires. The results of structural equation modeling revealed that Chinese L2 students’ achievement emotions and technological self-efficacy are significant predictors of their technology acceptance; technological self-efficacy uniquely could explain 59% of its variance and students’ achievement emotions could explain 75% of its variance. The study also draws some conclusions and offers implications for L2 teachers, students, and school managers to foster the acceptance of technology in L2 education.