Philip Tew

Alexithymia and a broken plastic umbrella: contemporary culture and Martin Amis's Money

This article seeks to reread Martin Amiss creation John Self as a figure afflicted by alexithymia. The essay draws on psychological accounts to explain this condition and argue that Selfs character displays its symptoms. It further argues that this is not merely an individual matter but a historical and political one.

Survey on Teaching Contemporary British Fiction

The teaching of contemporary British fiction in English departments in the United Kingdom is reviewed. The study primarily focuses upon evaluative engagement with current teaching. The literary and theoretical texts taught on courses are considered, as are the use and availability of different kinds of supplementary literary‐critical materials. Data collection was through semi‐structured interviews and a survey of online material. The periodisation and focus of general contemporary British fiction teaching is emerging from a more diffuse field where postmodern, gendered and post‐colonial readings still tend to shape courses and modules. A new post‐1970s idea of the contemporary is rapidly emerging.

Martin Amis and Late-twentieth-century Working-class Masculinity: Money and London Fields

According to Berthold Schoene-Harwood: “Under patriarchy a man’s reticence and silence constitute insidious imperatives that safeguard and control his masculine authenticity. For a man to speak about his gender in a critical self-conscious manner already indicates that he has failed to live up to the patriarchal ideal and that, consequently, his masculinity is ‘in trouble’” (viii). In both Money (1984) and London Fields (1989), Martin Amis intensifies the satirical and comic mode found in his previous work, and centers his texts on the exaggerated vulgarities, the demotic impulses, and the literal and verbal frenzy of patriarchal masculinity. In contrast to Schoene-Harwood, such self-consciousness is explicit in Amis’s work, not insidious. This self-reflection relentlessly considers the masculine in terms of action, events, and underlying desires, helping to evoke the heterogeneity of elements that impact individuals or groups. In this essay I intend to critique the class perspective inherent in the protagonists of these novels, Amis’s crowning achievements of the 1980s. In so doing I do not intend to summarize their plots, indicate overall textual characteristics, or annotate major themes and motifs, because these have been more than adequately represented by James Diedrick, Gavin Keulks, and Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournes.

(Re)-acknowledging B. S. Johnson's Radical Realism, or Re-publishing The Unfortunates

B. S. Johnson (1933-1973) committed suicide after a short career as a novelist marked both by literary experimentation and critical controversy.2 Subsequently, in Britain his work is available only second-hand; the substance and texture of his work lost to later generations by his continued absence from British bookshops. Autumn 1999 brought the republication by Picador of The Unfortunates (1969), Johnsons so-called book-in-a-box, with further plans to retrieve most of his work. This re-emergence provides a new potential co-ordinate for English studies, with an opportunity to re-inscribe a strand of the intellectual history of the post-war period. In Johnson one can perceive traces of a range of sociologically-inspired and late modernist formal experiments in both the arts and literature, the vestiges of a Zeitgeist quite different from that purveyed as a rejection of modernism by the Angry Young Men. Johnsons writing contains parallel elements to the work of the Independent group at the ICA, gendered readings of a postcolonial awareness like that of Doris Lessing, and even the ersatz existentialism of John Fowles, but there remain essential differences often elided. Those disparities noted are commonly ones detrimental to Johnsons overall reputation. Patricia Waugh, in

J. G. Ballard’s Traumatised and Traumatising Englishness

This chapter considers how, shaped by trauma and traumatising forces, J. G. Ballard’s fiction reconfigures versions of white, middle-class, masculine Englishness, and how his work charts a generational flux that responds to centripetal illusions of power and nationality. Ballard interrogates England’s capacity to define itself, attracted by centrifugal cultural forces that defy a concept of social and political cohesion, and does so from a very specific class perspective. Much of Ballard’s writing — fiction, cultural and journalistic commentary, and autobiography — concerns itself with English identity in transition, identifying often oblique investigations of national character in a culture facing imperial diminishment, a fundamental crisis of belonging and unbecoming. While briefly considering one early novel, The Drowned World (1963), this chapter mainly draws upon two other key periods in Ballard’s oeuvre: firstly, selected novels from the 1970s, specifically Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), High Rise (1975), and The Unlimited Dream Company (1979); secondly, his two post-millennial novels, Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006). These phases offer differently nuanced reimaginings of the English bourgeois self.

Trauma, Negativities, and the City in Trezza Azzopardi’s Remember Me

This chapter explores how the Norvician protagonist of Trezza Azzopardi’s novel Remember Me, who has been displaced by circumstances throughout her life, haunts various urban coordinates of past traumas. Urban poverty has allowed transgressors to marginalize and exploit Winnie, both for profit and sexual gratification. The chapter examines how Winnie has coped with the emotional weight of her grim childhood by escaping memories. A single moment breaches her overarching avoidance of the past, however, so that she is confronted by a cascade of uncomfortable memories: a mother plagued by ghosts and madness; bullying at school; her pregnancy while evacuated; various manipulations; and incarceration. Indeed, the city successively evokes overwhelming cartographies of past pain and finally guilt, as her fragmentary recollections mirror the antagonisms and traumas she has suffered.

Early Influences and Aesthetic Emergence: Travelling People (1961), Albert Angelo (1964), Trawl (1966) and The Unfortunates (1969)

below I will offer a cartography of B.S. Johnson’s early work and its origins, but my initial starting point will not feature such experiential and literary influences (some highly personal in nature), which I will move toward later. Rather this mapping starts with an example of the writer’s aesthetic doubts. This may help explain or at least contextualise the concepts concerning the form and function of the novel that initially animated his aesthetic exploration, and about which later he seemed to harbour some uncertainties.

Samad, Hancock, the Suburbs, and Englishness: Re-reading Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

In’ speaking in Tongues’ a recent address given by Zadie Smith in New York, in part concerned with the election of Barack Obama as President, Smith identifies and locates herself in terms of accent and class, thereby exhibiting, as she admits in this essay, a characteristically English obsession. Smith notes that she left university with a changed ‘posher’ accent adopted so that she might feel confident about being regarded by others as intellectually credible. Although initially she sustained two voice registers, she admits that her re-voiced accent has subsumed her earlier more working class one. ‘Recently my double voice has deserted me for a single one, reflecting the smaller world into which my work has led me. Willesden was a big, colorful, working-class sea; Cambridge was a smaller, posher pond, and almost univocal; the literary world is a puddle.’ Clearly there is suggested here a transitional set of affiliations, even a shift of identity perhaps, both of a particularly English kind. In revisiting Smith’s White Teeth (2000), I want to reconsider and develop a broad theme I touched on and certain material that I used in preparing the first full-length study of her fiction, published as Zadie Smith (2010). In so doing, part of my focus will be Smith’s evocations of Englishness, both cultural and literary aspects, as expressed in her writing generally and in certain specific ruminations about her life. It maybe deceptive to be guided by initial critical responses to her first novel, for as I explain in Zadie Smith it appeared at a particular time and place just after the millennium (a short phase pre-9/11 that a decade on feels very distant and hard to recuperate).

The Specific Attitudes of Writers to Ageing

This chapter complements the previous one by examining how some of the authors of novels on the reading list represent ageing, and how on further critical reflection they consider the issue of representation of age and ageing in their own work. In one case this closer examination is undertaken by reconsidering a text in depth and its critical reception specifically in terms of ageing, as is the case with Norah Hoult’s novel later; and with other cases the process was more active, part of a revisiting of interpretative possibilities which took place after these writers were interviewed as part of the project and had participated in public ‘author events’ attended by reading group members. Such events gave rise to experiential exchanges and narrative processing that were part of the larger set of exchanges and interrelations, many of which were incorporated into the reading groups and the diary responses. These public events led to significant reflection on behalf of the authors themselves with the idea arising from these encounters and their discussions that it was in some sense their duty to explore the deeper and potentially darker aspects of life while, at the same time, as later publically admitted by Will Self (2011), who was not one of the reading list authors but took part in a connected event, it was also incumbent on them to be more positive ontologically in their depictions of older people: ‘As for portraying older people in an unkind light, I’m not sure I’ll be doing that any more from now on.’ How such apparently opposed objectives can be met and reconciled depends perhaps on further investigating the intersubjective exchange of ideas that happens both literally and through the processes of critical response when one draws together readers, writers and researchers.

The Reading Diaries: Four Case Studies

The reading diaries kept by the FCMAP participants in the London U3A district groups reflect upon not only their common experience of reading and discussing extended narratives (fiction) but also on the directly experiential, and as such were both self-analytical and longitudinal in terms of covering ten months of life experience. All such activities entailed in the production of the diaries constitute different subsets of the ongoing narrative processing by which individuals understand social relations and shape agency. Many of the respondents proved both highly committed and well organized in their task. Take NOL006, for example, who records of her approach to the very first novel, David Lodge’s Deaf Sentence: ‘I wrote my impressions on Post-its as I read the novel and highlighted key passages as I have my own copy of the novel. When I had finished reading it, I wrote this account. I go to my first group meeting on Monday and shall record my impressions of that meeting on my return.’ The simple request that respondents might consider reflecting upon group discussion provided a great deal of thought and therefore additional data. This chapter examines four selected case studies in order to demonstrate and analyse how the diaries inevitably draw upon, and partake of an already existing, ongoing and changing complex of intersecting narratives that exist in all our lives as central and fundamental aspects to identity, agency, intersubjectivity, social interaction, historical change and so forth, all of which can be taken as implicit to life even if rarely acknowledged as such.