Roy Sellars

The Fawlty Rhetoric of National Character

While the connection between English humour and national character continues to be debated nostalgically or critically in England, several examples of ‘English humour’ have meanwhile been exported, adopted, and adapted by other nations. In this article, we trace a few examples of the specific uses (national as well as trans-national) to which the shared knowledge and enjoyment of a key scene in the situation comedy Fawlty Towers has been put by Danish TV viewers. A mélange of prejudice, politics, parody, and farce surrounding a young Danish MPs public behaviour in April 2007, while under the influence, was interpreted and made popularly intelligible (or was it?) through the familiar prism provided by John Cleese in the role of Mr. Basil Fawlty pretending to be Adolf Hitler in order to entertain an unfortunate group of German hotel guests. We conclude with some methodological reflections on stereotype and humour.

Reading, writing and the influence of Harold Bloom; The saving lie: Harold Bloom and deconstruction

assumptions about travellers’ intentions and their ability to assimilate the Other’s point of view. Rounding out this section, Barker discusses how holidays can reveal tensions in relationships, before leading the reader on an enjoyable expedition through four macabre literary texts and their cinematic adaptations which portray Venice as a site of death, while Marius-Mircea Crişan eulogizes Romania’s touristic potential by quoting female British travel writers, but does not make the case that they exhibit greater cultural openness than their male counterparts. The final section explores Portugal’s dependence on tourist revenue for case studies to illustrate several of the issues already raised. ‘Mythical Moors’ moulds intangible cultural heritage into a viable tourist experience, while a lively study of how Oporto and its fortified wine are commodified and consumed references everything from geology to easyJet to show that culture is a product of intercultural contact. Danuta Gabryś-Barker promotes the idea that awareness of cultural differences can promote better cross-cultural understanding (and tourist services) through an engaging analysis of Polish and Portuguese perceptions of space, although her concluding interpretations would benefit from the inclusion of quantitative data. Finally, we return to the idea that identity is an assimilation of influences, even if, as Susan Howcroft shows, this does not make presenting one’s culinary credentials to visitors any less of an intercultural minefield. Her entertaining excursion around Portugal’s menus and gastronomic history highlights the problems for translators before setting out a detailed review of available resources and advising that, as for Portugal’s sea-faring entrepreneurs of yore, commercial success lies in intercultural experience.

Spend, Spend, Spend: Expenditure and Waste in Hegel, Bataille, Derrida

For much of his adult life, G. W. F. Hegel complained of lacking funds. Disdainful as he was of Brotgelehrte, students preoccupied by the merely vocational and remunerative (Pinkard 2000, 364 and 504), Hegel himself was not free of the necessity to earn his own bread. As if subject to all the contingencies of the wage slave, he associates working with cursing: ‘To work is to destroy or to curse [fluchen] the world,’ he writes, cursing, in one of the fragments labelled by his editors as being from Hegel’s ‘Wastebook’ (in German) since the fragments fall extravagantly outside his work production as such (Hegel 2002, 247; Hegel 1969–79, 2: 547, 591–2). Given this concept of labour as a postlapsarian, violent and sweaty process, resentment was bound to be a risk. At times he seemed to fear that his ‘whole work’ would be ‘begun, continued, and ended, under… a great want of money’, as the hack narrator of Swift’s Tale of a Tub puts it (Swift 1984, 81; though unlike the hack, Hegel does not insist that his reader duplicate such penurious conditions in order to be able to read his work). Hegel’s wife was 21 years younger than he, and as he got older, he worried increasingly about pension funds (see Pinkard 2000, 413–14, on the terms of his move to Berlin).

Wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance

Thomas Love Peacock, in his essay ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’, opposes ‘the progress of knowledge’, as accelerated by historians and philosophers, to ‘the rubbish of departed ignorance’, as wallowed in by poets. This opposition seems categorical, and invites resistance from poets and those supporting the cognitive claims of poetry; P. B. Shelley duly obliged. However, what happens if one does indeed wallow in the specific kind of ‘rubbish’ designated, ironically, by Peacock? This essay aims to find out, with reference to Wordsworths poem ‘The Danish Boy’ (rubbished by Peacock) and to Theodor Adorno, German connoisseur of rubbish. In Wordsworth, Peacock and Adorno, we can sense the shadow of knowledge in the form of its determinate negation. Poetry is haunted by the particular knowledge it lacks, and this study argues thus for a kind of negative poetic knowledge. By returning to the rubbish of departed and not yet departed ignorance, this essay hopes to trope a heap of commodities into something else.

Educational Remains: Back to School with Hegel (and Adorno)

The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright [...] But because our understanding cannot in this body found it selfe but on sensible things, nor arrive so cleerly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be follow’d in all discreet teaching. John Milton

Free Association Revisited: Freud, Adorno and the Gift of the Gab

Think of free association, even if you have not read Freud, and the chances are that something will spring to mind: it is well known that you are supposed to speak, saying whatever springs to mind, and thereby reveal to the analyst what you are thinking, even if you did not know it yourself. Gab away. Anything goes. Connections can then always be made on the basis of what you say or do not say, and anything and everything may be taken down and used in evidence against you – all in your best interests, of course. It would be quite possible to construct an entire essay out of such associations to the concept of free association; and given the speed at which associations can be produced, the concept may indeed become vital for the survival of academics increasingly obliged to participate in the acceleration and commodification of academic writing. Free association – now displacing rhetorical invention – is a very useful writers’ tool for the construction of what Theodor Adorno calls “organized tautology” (Minima 66). This essay has nothing to say about the scientific or therapeutic value of free association as a method, and little to say to practising psychoanalysts as such. The essay would merely like to check in to the Free Association suite of Hotel Psychoanalysis, if there is a vacancy, and to organise a connection with Adorno, who is reputed to be staying over at Grand Hotel Abyss. • • • In order to begin, the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams has to rely on a peculiar discursive breaching as it attempts to unblock intertextual movements. In order to escape the impasse of hypnotism, suggestion and other conventional psychotherapeutic techniques, Freud in his formative years as an analyst began an experiment with his patients that was to lead him to nothing less than “the fundamental rule [Grundregel] of psycho-analysis” (“Dynamics” 107; “Dynamik” 167), as he often calls it. The manifest text of the dream as remembered by the dreamer, whatever its intrinsic interest, has to be set aside for the time being, and conscious reflection has to be suspended, so that a kind of communication can be expressed and interpreted