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Spectator
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
What we get wrong about modernism
In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera writes, witheringly: 'we must reckon with the modernism of fixed rules, the modernism of the university – establishment modernism, so to speak.' He is addressing the novels of Hermann Broch, which, he argues, don't fit the standardised mould. 'This establishment modernism, for instance, insists on the destruction of the novel form. In Broch's perspective, the possibilities of the novel form are far from being exhausted. Establishment modernism would have the novel do away with the artifice of character, which it claims is finally nothing but a mask pointlessly hiding the author's face. In Broch's characters, the author's self is undetectable.' Several comfortable, undisputed, widely accepted ideas about modernism are contradicted by the practice of leading modernists. Kundera is also sceptical about modernism's alleged clean break with the literature of the past. He is right. T.S. Eliot, too, has a more complicated view of the modern writer's relationship to the past: 'what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.' What does this imply? You can only modify the literature of the past if you issue out of the literature of the past – if you develop an aspect latent in the literature of the past. Another instance: fragmentation of form. Joyce's Ulysses has an intricate plan of Homeric parallels. These are spelled out in the Linati schema – along with an organ, an art, a colour, a theme for each episode – released by Joyce to help his readers appreciate the novel's complex structure. The most fragmented section is Molly Bloom's (virtually) unpunctuated soliloquy, but its formlessness is dictated by a Homeric parallel – Penelope unravelling her tapestry every night, to postpone making a choice between her suitors, a decision to be taken once her tapestry is complete. The first world war is commonly assumed to be the midwife of modernism – a four-year cataclysm that is bound to have had a significant effect on literature. Malcolm Bradbury's introduction to Catch-22: 'War shattered older notions of art, of form and representation; it had transformed older notions of reality, the rules of perception, the structures of artistic expression. It fragmented, hardened, modernised the voice of modern fiction…' Funny how the hundred years' war, say, had so little effect on art. Bradbury, of course, can anticipate the obvious objection – inconvenient chronology – and he does so, raising his voice: 'It is true that the real avant-garde revolt of the modern had begun earlier in the century… Thus the avant-garde experiments of modern painting, writing, architecture and philosophy, and the powerful movements and campaigns that developed them (cubism, expressionism, futurism and so on), mostly came before the war. They upset the classic orders of the arts, broke the frame of realism, rendered art neo-mechanical, fragmentary and abstract. But it took the war itself to ensure the inevitability of their revolt (my italics).' Good to know the first world war was multitasking – not just killing millions and redrawing the borders of Europe, but making a contribution to the arts in its spare time. Two points. Picasso's 'Les demoiselles d'Avignon' was painted in 1907. This is Ezra Pound writing to Harriet Monroe about Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock': 'He has actually trained himself and modernised himself on his own… It is such a comfort to meet a man and not to have to tell him to wash his face, wipe his feet, and remember the date (1914) on the calendar.' The war, then, is definitively late to the party. About 'Prufrock', E.M. Forster had this to say in 1928: 'Here was a protest, and a feeble one, and the more congenial for being feeble. For what, in that world of gigantic horror, was tolerable except for the slighter gestures of dissent? He who measured himself against the war, who drew himself to his full height, as it were, and said to Armadillo-Armageddon 'Avaunt!' collapsed at once into a pinch of dust. But he who could turn aside to complain of ladies and drawing rooms preserved a tiny drop of our self-respect, he carried on the human heritage.' The first world war comprehensively snubbed. Academics, from George Steiner to Helen Gardner, have a weakness for the ramped rhetoric of thought, for bigging things up. Gardner's reading of Prufrock's 'overwhelming question': 'The question that Mr Prufrock dare not ask is only superficially the kind of question which one 'pops'. There is another question all the time, which every other question depends on.' Which is? She doesn't tell us: 'we are aware of the 'sense of the abyss'. There is an 'overwhelming question', which is not being asked; which one dare not ask, for perhaps there is no answer or only such an answer as it would be better not to know…' A question so polyamorphous that, as Eric Morecambe used to say, 'There's no answer to that.'
Chicago Tribune
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘An Iliad' is back at Court Theatre, reminding us war never goes away
My personal history reviewing 'An Iliad,' the contemporary vernacular take on the Homeric epic penned by Lisa Peterson and Denis O'Hare, has become my reminder of the ubiquitousness of war and human suffering. If you know the 90-minute piece, as extraordinarily performed at Chicago's Court Theatre by Timothy Edward Kane under the direction of Charles Newell, you'll know that its signature moment comes when The Poet, the one and only character, recounts at breathtaking speed a greatest-hits list of all the human conflicts since antiquity, the writers having left instruction in their script that this section should be kept up to date. The conceit here is that although The Poet is telling Homer's story of the final weeks of the brutal 10-year siege of Troy at the hands of a coalition of Greek city-states, and himself comes from that era, he also knows modern life. More simply put, he's like the Ghost of Wars Past, coming to warn those who fail to learn from prior human experience. You will not be surprised to know it remains a Sisyphean task. When I first reviewed this show, with this same actor, in 2011, the final word out of The Poet's lips was 'Afghanistan.' Court staged 'An Iliad' again in 2013. That time, it was 'Libya.' Wednesday night on the campus of the University of Chicago, it was 'Gaza.' I picked up my pen to note that maybe The Poet was falling fast behind. Especially by the time you read this, the final word probably should be 'Iran.' Maybe they will make that change. The other difference, of course, is the age of the actor playing The Poet; it has, after all, been 12 years. I haven't asked, but I'd imagine that Kane thought twice before he came back to this character; the actor is deeper into parenting now, and it seemed to me that the recounting of the human price of war was born this time more intensely of personal experience. But that might be in my head; it has been 12 years for me, too. And it could well be that Kane has come to terms with this being a career-defining role (he was widely acclaimed the first two times and the third time around is even better) and one that can be accessed at various points in his life. There was a discernible gulp from the actor as The Poet came up from wherever he lives between shows, but then Kane roared his way through the entire show. This time, I was struck by how well he caught the gestalt of the aging warrior back from an agonizing war, finding the clarity of thought that comes only with age and experience while still embodying the grunting, macho ethos that caused all of this chaos in the first place. Newell's staging, of course, has always had much to do with Kane's success, as has Todd Rosenthal's timeless scenic design. I'd probably say this was the career-defining piece for Newell, Court Theatre's former artistic director, too, although it has formidable competition within that particular career in artistic Chicago. What matters most here, and what makes this show a candidate for the best solo show in Chicago theater history, is that the telling comes at great cost to the teller. In most single-character monologues, the actor merely tells the story. But the point of this inspired take on Homer's 'The Iliad' (the Robert Fagles translation was the basis) is that the very act of recounting the story is so fraught, it competes with the drama of the war narrative itself. And the further point is that every telling gets harder, because it is a reminder of how humans refuse to learn. But The Poet sees it as a moral imperative. And a curse. I've no idea if The Poet will be coming back in future years to lament the latest wars and count once again the cost of armed conflict, be it ancient or modern, in sons, daughters, fathers, mothers. So I'd catch him now, just in case. But if he does, I don't doubt for a second there will be a fresh end to that inglorious list of glories. Review: 'An Iliad' (4 stars) When: Through June 29 Where: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes Tickets: $100-$125 at 773-753-4472 and
Boston Globe
03-06-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
Alasdair MacIntyre, philosopher who saw a ‘new dark ages,' dies at 96
Advertisement MacIntyre belonged to a different moral universe. In his best-known book, 'After Virtue' (1981), he argued that thousands of years ago, the earliest Western philosophers and the Homeric myths generated 'the tradition of the virtues,' which was treated as objective truth. Value neutrality, to Mr. MacIntyre, was the goal of 'barbarians' and a sign of 'the new dark ages which are already upon us.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Such language might make Mr. MacIntyre seem like a wistful reactionary. In fact, his worldview was far less predictable. He never entirely disavowed his youthful Marxism, applauding Karl Marx's critique of the individualistic and acquisitive spirit of capitalism. He maintained a certain sort of modesty from his days as a self-appointed champion of the working class — he never earned a doctorate and disliked being called 'professor' — and he continued showing the dialectical passion of a Trotskyist, occasionally launching into what one colleague called 'MacIntyrades.' Advertisement His chief opponent was what he called 'modern liberal individualism,' a category in which he included not just supporters of the Democratic Party but also conventional conservatives, leftists, and even anarchists. All were guilty of 'emotivism': the belief that humanity was essentially a collection of autonomous individuals who selected their own principles based on inner thoughts or feelings. This starting point, Mr. MacIntyre argued, could lead only to eternal, unresolvable disagreement. He went so far as to suggest that every tradition of modern politics had come to 'exhaustion,' and he rejected many essential tools of modern moral philosophy: Thomas Hobbes' social contract, John Locke's natural rights, Jeremy Bentham's moral consequences, and Isaiah Berlin's pluralism. Instead, he valued storytelling, tradition, and rational debate, embedded within a shared moral community. He found these qualities in the thinking of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, who promoted 'a cosmic order which dictates the place of each virtue in a total harmonious scheme of human life,' he wrote in 'After Virtue.' Within such an order, moral truth was objective. 'After Virtue' gained extraordinary popularity for a work of late-20th-century moral theory, selling more than 100,000 copies, Compact magazine wrote in a piece published after Mr. MacIntyre's death, titled 'Postliberalism's Reluctant Godfather.' That was an apt label for someone who managed, in recent years, to earn multiple tributes from Jacobin, a journal on the socialist left, and First Things, which is on the religious right. Mr. MacIntyre seemed to grow increasingly uncomfortable with his influence as it came unavoidably into focus. Advertisement In 'After Virtue,' he wrote that morality arose out of a belief in human telos — the ancient Greek notion of purpose being intrinsic to existence. People of the modern world, he said, had two choices: Follow Friedrich Nietzsche in trying to honestly face a world without the traditional notion of a human telos, rendering moral thought baseless, or follow Aristotle and recover moral purpose by fostering a society dedicated to the cultivation of virtue. Mr. MacIntyre illustrated what that might look like with an analysis of what he called 'practices' — shared, skillful activities including chess, architecture, and musicianship — as examples of where virtue still had meaning. These pursuits, he said, intrinsically provide 'standards of excellence' and reward traits such as justice, courage, and honesty. In them, he saw a possible modern basis for virtue. 'After Virtue' was acclaimed by leading philosophers, including Bernard Williams, who in a 1981 review for The Sunday Times of London wrote that even Mr. MacIntyre's exaggerations were 'illuminating'; that his intellectual history of the moral self was a 'nostalgic fantasy' and yet also 'brilliant'; and that, whatever questions the book raised, 'the feeling is sustained that one's question would get an interesting answer.' In a subsequent book, 'Whose Justice? Which Rationality?' (1988), Mr. MacIntyre provoked sharper criticism. His argument now promoted Roman Catholicism with Aquinas, not Aristotle, as its paragon of moral thought. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote a memorable takedown in The New York Review of Books accusing Mr. MacIntyre of dropping some of his own principles — such as his devotion to local traditions — when discussing Aristotle, Augustine, and the pope. What really interested Mr. MacIntyre, she argued, was not reason but authority: the ability of the Catholic Church to secure wide agreement, and, by extension, order. Advertisement She was one of several distinguished thinkers to challenge Mr. MacIntyre's idealized view of the past, arguing that historical societies were not as unified as he claimed and that unanimity itself was not so great. In a review of 'Whose Justice? Which Rationality?' published in The Times Literary Supplement, Thomas Nagel wrote, 'MacIntyre professes to be freeing us from blindness, but he is really asking for the return of a blindness to the difficulty of moral thought that it has been one of the great achievements of ethical theory to escape.' Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was born on Jan. 12, 1929, in Glasgow, Scotland. His parents, John and Emily (Chalmers) MacIntyre, were both doctors. In the 1930s the family moved to London, where his parents treated patients in the working-class East End neighborhood. In 1949, he earned a bachelor's degree in classics from Queen Mary College at the University of London. In the 1950s and '60s, he earned master's degrees in philosophy from Manchester University and Oxford while holding several lectureships. As a student, he joined the Communist Party, but he also steered debates of Britain's Student Christian Movement as its chair. In about 1970 he moved to the United States, where he taught at Brandeis University and gradually left Marx for Aristotle. In the 1980s, he converted to Catholicism and took to seeing Aquinas as the master thinker of the Aristotelian tradition. He had a series of academic appointments but mostly taught at Notre Dame, where his wife, Lynn Joy, is also a philosophy professor. Advertisement His two previous marriages ended in divorce. In addition to Joy, his survivors include several children. He and Joy lived in Mishawaka, Ind., a city near Notre Dame. For decades, no single tendency seemed to define readers who took inspiration from Mr. MacIntyre's work. There were heterodox Marxists, the skeptic of liberalism Christopher Lasch, and former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum. But more recently, one constituency claimed Mr. MacIntyre's work most completely and prominently: the Trump-supporting, religious, anti-consumerist, and illiberal right. Two leading commentators of this world, Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher, have written books that pay tribute to Mr. MacIntyre. In 2017, the publication of one of these books, Dreher's 'The Benedict Option,' prompted an odd debate between Dreher and Mr. MacIntyre, with each man accusing the other of commenting on a book of his that he had not actually read. During a lecture at Notre Dame, Mr. MacIntyre deplored becoming part of an ideological battle of his own time. 'The moment you think of yourself as a liberal or a conservative,' he said, 'you're done for.' This article originally appeared in
New York Times
02-06-2025
- General
- New York Times
Alasdair MacIntyre, Philosopher Who Saw a ‘New Dark Ages,' Dies at 96
Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosopher who metamorphosed from a London Marxist into a Midwestern American Catholic during a decades-long quest to prove there was an objective foundation to moral virtue — a lonely project that struck many of his academic peers as anachronistic yet drew a large, varied and growing crowd of admirers — died on May 21. He was 96. His death was announced by the University of Notre Dame, where Mr. MacIntyre was a professor emeritus of philosophy. The announcement did not say where he died. Moral beliefs are widely considered matters of private conscience — up for debate, of course, but not resolvable in any sort of final consensus. That is why, for example, people generally think teachers should guide students toward self-realization, rather than proselytize their own beliefs. The same neutrality is expected of lawyers, therapists, government officials and others. Mr. MacIntyre belonged to a different moral universe. In his best-known book, 'After Virtue' (1981), he argued that thousands of years ago, the earliest Western philosophers and the Homeric myths generated 'the tradition of the virtues,' which was treated as objective truth. Value neutrality, to Mr. MacIntyre, was the goal of 'barbarians' and a sign of 'the new dark ages which are already upon us.' Such language might make Mr. MacIntyre seem like a wistful reactionary. In fact, his worldview was far less predictable. He never entirely disavowed his youthful Marxism, applauding Marx's critique of the individualistic and acquisitive spirit of capitalism. He maintained a certain sort of modesty from his days as a self-appointed champion of the working class — he never earned a Ph.D. and disliked being called 'professor' — and he continued showing the dialectical passion of a Trotskyist, occasionally launching into what one colleague called 'MacIntyrades.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Age
01-06-2025
- Politics
- The Age
Whip it good: ‘Devo' Bandt exits, but who will be the new Lord or Lady of the Crossbench?
As the final votes are recounted in Bradfield, and the Coalition parties promise to listen better and go to therapy after their brief separation, CBD's eyes are now turned to the latest position up for grabs in the upcoming 48th Parliament. We're talking about the semi-official role of crossbench whip, or the MP responsible for ensuring their crossbench colleagues all get their voices heard during the chaos of question time. In the past, this task fell to former Greens leader Adam Bandt, or rather, his office. And when the crossbench swelled to a record 16 MPs after the 2022 election, it took on an outsized role, particularly after Labor's leader of the house, Tony Burke, increased the amount of airtime crossbenchers got in question time. It made sense for Bandt to take on the role since, as leader of a designated political party, he had more staff. Unlike the teal independents, who were livid after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese slashed their staffing allocations after the 2022 election in a manner that made Scott Morrison seem like Santa. But then Bandt suffered a shock, losing his seat of Melbourne to Labor's Sarah Witty on what was a forgettable night for the Greens. So who will take on Bandt's old role as king (or queen) of the crossbench? Nationals leader David Littleproud's decision to come crawling back to the Coalition makes things a lot easier. And while Bob Katter, famed for his Homeric approach to question time, would be the most entertaining choice, we're not sure anyone else would ever get a word in edgeways. There's been some suggestion out of the teal universe that one of the posse who now occupy the Liberal Party's old leafy turf could step up, with Warringah MP Zali Steggall touted as a possibility. She's been around a bit longer, and has a sharp grasp of parliamentary procedure. But CBD understands that Steggall is yet to decide whether she wants to take on the role. Separately, there's been persistent chatter that some members of the teal movement would like to form a separate political party – perhaps headed up by Steggall – which would solve the staffing question, if anything. 'The notion of party has been thrown around but hasn't got beyond first base,' a teal source said.
