Kenneth Womack

The Beatles as zeitgeist

The sixties and cultural politics In July 2006, I was invited to take part in a day of national and regional press interviews. The topic was “The 60s: The Beatles Decade,” a five-part series by UKTV History which explored the influence of music on the 1960s. The series was accompanied by a survey which compared the experiences of those growing up in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and revealed that over a third (34 percent of the 3,000 adults interviewed) conceded that at one time or another they have embroidered their past in order to gain the respect of their family and friends. A quarter of these claimed that they were flexible with the truth in order to appear “cool” to their children. Yet only 15 percent of those growing up in the seventies, and a mere 5 percent of those growing up in the eighties, admitted to lying about their past. In particular, those growing up in the sixties were most likely to exaggerate their “beat generation” credentials – with a quarter claiming that they were a part of or had associations with the hippy movement, when in reality a mere 6 percent could really lay claim to this being true. One in five admitted lying about the drugs they had taken. Twenty-two percent of those questioned admitted that they had used the line, “I was too stoned to remember the sixties,” whereas in reality a mere 8 percent had tried cannabis and only 1 percent had tried acid.

Bruce Springsteen, Cultural Studies, and the Runaway American Dream

Bruce Springsteen, Cultural Studies, and the Runaway American Dream Kenneth Womack, Jerry Zolten & Mark Bernhard Farnham, Surry: Ashgate, 2012 ISBN: 9781409404972

Six boys, six Beatles: the formative years, 1950–1962

The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory. antonio gramsci Introduction The chapter deals with the formative years of both the Beatles and the six youths who were group members in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best, who left the band in 1961 and 1962 respectively. Although it cannot claim to be a complete inventory (to borrow a term from Gramsci in the quotation above), it is intended to present the boys and the band as products of the historical process in the England of the 1950s through the presentation of some of the “infinity of traces” deposited in them by that historical period. In this account of the dual formation of the group and the six individuals, I will discuss first the various networks within which the six were enmeshed as children, adolescents and young men: those of the family and social class, of the school and youth culture peer group. The second part of the chapter describes and analyses the musical factors and features that coalesced to form first the Quarrymen skiffle group and then the early Beatles. The data upon which this chapter is based are drawn from published biographies and autobiographies. These publications are of three types: authorized biographies such as those of Shepherd, Davies, Miles, and the Beatles “themselves”; unauthorized biographies such as Goldmans, Connollys, and Sullivans psychoanalytical volume; and the memoirs of colleagues, friends, and family such as Epstein, Cynthia Lennon, and Pauline Sutcliffe. The overall quality of this material is uneven, with a number of errors and discrepancies that have confused the general understanding of the early years of the Beatles.

DAVID MAMET’S ALTERED ETHICS: FINDING FORGIVENESS, OR SOMETHING LIKE IT, IN HOUSE OF GAMES, THE SPANISH PRISONER, AND STATE AND MAIN

In this essay, Davis and Womack explore ethical conceptions of forgiveness and empathy—especially in terms of their relationship to Levinasian alterity. Davis and Womack discuss David Mamet‘s films as fora for discussing alterity and the evolving place of forgiveness in continental philosophy. They assert that the films provide us with a timely study of emotional violence that refuses a deontological ethics and underlines humankind’s enduring need for embracing a genuinely altered ethics.

Reading the “Heavy Industry of the Mind”: Ethical Criticism and the Anglo-American Academic Novel

The academic novel, through its express desire to critique, by means of satire, the unethical sensibilities that it ascribes to university life, seems a particularly meaningful arena for testing ethical criticism’s capacity to produce socially relevant literary interpretations. As the chapters that follow this brief introduction to the genre of academic fiction will reveal, ethical criticism proves especially revelatory when employed as a means for examining the satires of academic life propounded by the authors of university fiction. The very nature of their craft - through their deliberately derisive fabulation of story and character - underscores the ethical choices that practitioners of the academic novel confront as they construct their critiques of the academy and the hegemony of its institutions, the questionable morality of its denizens, and the fractured philosophical underpinnings of its mission.

Negotiating the University Community: Lucky Jim and the Politics of Academe

In addition to its widely acknowledged place as the quintessential campus novel of the twentieth century, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) illustrates the peculiar dilemmas endured by young scholars in their efforts to achieve selfhood and fnd acceptance within the larger academic community. Often characterized as an unabashedly comic novel, Lucky Jm in fact offers a moral landscape that confronts the novel’s protagonist, Jim Dixon, with a variety of ethical predicaments. For this reason, a few astute critics such as John McDermott refer to Amis as a “serious comic novelist” (1).

The Professoriate in Love: David Lodge’s Academic Trilogy and the Ethics of Romance

In addition to affording readers with the critical machinery for exploring the function of concepts such as truth and goodness in narratives, ethical criticism provides us with a useful rhetoric for examining the depiction of love in literary works. “Contemporary philosophers frequently connect consciousness with virtue,” Iris Murdoch observes in The Sovereignty of Good, “and although they constantly talk of freedom they rarely talk of love” (2). Because of its abiding interest in establishing vital interconnections between the reader and the text, ethical criticism devotes particular attention to highlighting the emotional transactions through which literary characters indulge their desires to give and receive affection. The investigation of their intimate motives and experiences likewise illuminates our own conceptions of the impulse for love and its role in the interpersonal fabric of the human community.

Jane Smiley’s Academic Carnival: Rooting for Ethics at Moo U.

In Moo (1995), Jane Smiley focuses a sharp, satiric eye upon the political machinations and ambitions of the administration and faculty of Moo U., a large midwestern university well known for its agricultural department. Rife with social and scholarly intrigue, Smiley’s narrative admonishes the bankrupt value systems of a powerful institution of higher learning obsessed with its agenda for technological and financial superiority. Smiley allots conspicuous attention to all of the competing voices that comprise Moo U.’s political maelstrom - from the contentious professoriate in the Horticulture and English departments to the institution’s dubious administration, an often bemused and vacant student population, and a giant hog named Earl Butz who resides in an abandoned building in the middle of Moo U.’s campus.

Introduction: Ethical Criticism and Postwar Literary Theory

How do academic fictions create meaning and value through their satirical narratives in a critical era that bemoans the cultural relevance of poststructuralist hermeneutics and proclaims the death of literature in a postmodern world? As scholars engage in debate over the social and pedagogical value of critical projects such as deconstruction to contemporary institutions of higher learning, academic novels enjoy frequent publication during the latter half of this century, an era marked by the increasing accessibility of postsecondary education. Academic novels often satirize and problematize the contradictions and sociological nuances of campus life, yet critics of academic fiction - despite the remarkable growth and evolution of the Anglo-American academic novel as a literary genre since the 1950s - neglect to address the satiric ethos that undergirds the genre’s thematic landscape. The scathing representation of professors and institutions alike in these fictions as figures of deceit, duplicity, and falsehood, moreover, remains unexamined in the scholarly monographs devoted to the study of the academic novel.

Scholar Adventurers in Exile: Nabokov’s Dr. Kinbote and Professor Pnin

Ethical criticism presupposes that works of art necessarily implore us, through their depictions of so many morally disparate heroes and villains, to render value judgments based upon our experiences as readers and members of the larger human community. Yet in his published essays, interviews, and correspondence, Vladimir Nabokov consistently reminds us of the dangers inherent in the application of unexamined moral philosophies to works of literature. In a letter of 24 October 1945 to Professor George R. Noyes, for example, Nabokov notes that only an “uninhibited art” offers the possibility of registering a moral impact upon the reader. “Deliberate moralizing,” he cautions, “does violence to the very notion of art” (56–7).1 Although he maintains that writers must distance themselves from the influence of socially constructed moral imperatives during the production of their texts, he ultimately manufactures characters in novels such as Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962) who often suffer tangible consequences for their morally reprehensible actions. In the latter two volumes, Nabokov employs the novel as a forum for illustrating the capacity of academic characters to act with cruelty and emotional negligence in their dealings with their peers, and, in some instances, with their students.