Sublime

In the new world order, capital and property were protected by the death penalty. Human labour was left unprotected. The working man and woman had to manage low pay, hateful conditions, and insecurity of employment. For them, there was neither progress nor improvement.

Then the pendulum swung away from the frivolous notion that art is merely technique, but it swung a very long distance, to the point of asserting that a book can only be “good” if it is founded on a “true” vision of life. Naturally the people who believe this also believe that they are in possession of the truth themselves. Catholic critics, for in

This endless, mindless diversion is a necessity in a society that prizes entertainment above substance. Intellectual or philosophical ideas require too much effort and work to absorb. Classical theater, newspapers, and books are pushed to the margins of cultural life, remnants of a bygone literate age. They are dismissed as inaccessible and elitist

thesis meets antithesis and they fight it out, only for the antithesis to be refuted.

What was missing from the traditionalist world of English literary study, as I encountered it, was a rich and paradoxical engagement with the pertinence of what lay in an oblique or alien relation to the forces of centering.

In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.

recent TV detectives embodying cultural shifts to digital media ("the hero for electrate culture" 2009, 915) often conceal an old-fashioned defense of

This particular compromise between contempt and hope was an accident of Tennyson’s time, and, like his liberal conservatism, will probably never be found again.