Two things struck me while reading the first few chapters of this novel: the prevalence of different forms of violence and commercial media. Aside from the obvious outward violence of misogyny and general aggression, John Self is constantly doing violent actions to his own body. He continuously assaults his body with alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, sleep deprivation, fast food, etc. There is never a moment in the novel where he is not undergoing some form of pain; even in moments when he appears comfortable he is subjected to the persistent ringing of his tinnitus. I believe that there is a link between the violence done to John’s body and the overwhelming prevalence of commercial media and its related technologies. The postmodern world is a world of high commercialization, where people are constantly bombarded by advertisements in different forms and through new technologies. From radio, movies, and television commercials, to bill boards and massive commercial signs in cities, the postmodern citizen cannot escape the daily imposition of commercialism. Similar to how John lives through various self-inflicted pain throughout the novel, the commercial elements of our life always appear to merge into a type of white noise, a noise that, like John’s tinnitus, is always present but not always noticeable. For example, most commodities that surround you in your room probably possess a corporate logo of some kind. We don’t stop to recognize this logo when we use the item, but it may have played a factor in your decision to purchase it. All these commercial items contribute to create a type of commercial white noise, one that now exists in the private home due to purchased commodities. If one were to think of John Self’s last name as a type of allegory, Amis may be stating that the prevalence of commercial media is a form of assault on our “Selves”, one that contributes to a collective pain which could lead to a societal degeneration that mirrors John’s bodily harm. Amis appears to support this degeneration when he writes about the loss of a family Italian restaurant to make way for multiple fast food burger places. There appears to be a loss of authenticity that is implied to be a product of commercialism. However, similar to how John continues to engage in undisciplined self-abuse, we continue to support and spread the influence of commercialism, regardless of the losses this action entails.

This idea comes directly from Elizabeth Outka’s article “Buying Time: Howards End and Commodified Nostalgia” but I think it adds to some of the recent discussion on this blog as well as the Weihl article we have read. In her article, Outka explains that one of the popular trends that emerged out of England’s growing commercialism was the appeal of commodified nostalgia. At the turn of the century, there was a boom in the desirability for country houses that represented Englands’s agricultural past. These houses were aggressively marketed all throughout Forster’s time, so he would have been highly aware, while writing Howards End, about how England’s past was being commodified in the form of country houses. Although the houses represented history, they were inauthentic and merely a simulacrum of the English agricultural country house. According to Outka, the most popular architect at the turn of the century who built houses in this style was Edwin Lutyens. As you can see, his houses look like traditional country houses but were actually built around 1900, and also incorporate various different eras from the English past into one house.

How commodified nostalgia relates to the house Howards End is similar to the arguments in Weihl’s article criticizing Howards End’s authenticity. Howards End is merely an illusion of the purified past; its possession by the Schlegel sister’s at the end of the novel does not represent a triumph of the pastoral over the modern. As Outka states in her article, the appeal of commodified nostalgia is paradoxical: it is rooted in the public’s genuine desire for a purified past, while simultaneously the forces of commercialism heavily drive and sustain this desire. Oniton Grange represents commercialized commodified nostalgia; to Henry Wilcox there is a great novelty in owning a traditional English country home. The house also demonstrates the liquidity of commodities as he is able to sell it off quickly when its novelty wears off. Margaret Schlegel’s desire for Howards End is awakened by her experience at Oniton Grange; she starts to imagine more frequently how satisfying life in the country would be. She begins to desire Howards End, a desire sustained by the attraction of nostalgia. However, the nostalgia represented by Howards End does not belong to the half-German Schlegel’s; their history is not the same as Howards End’s history, they merely possess it as a commodity that represents, to them, the idealized English past. This possession is not a triumph, since the novel ends with the idea of a “creeping London”, a city which will eventually assimilate Howards End and the land around it. The possession of the house only delays the unstoppable march of modernization.

I hope that kind of made sense. I’m interested to hear what others think about the idea of commodified nostalgia and how it relates to the novel!

Citation:

Outka, Elizabeth. “Buying Time: Howards End and Commodified Nostalgia.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 36.3 (2003): 330-50. JSTOR. Web. 27 Feb. 2016.

While reading The Mill on the Floss, I encountered one problem regarding education that I believe is still relevant today. That would be the idea that young people are being inadequately prepared for future jobs, some of which possibly don’t even exist yet. Eliot first presents this problem in the novel when Tom is being taught Latin and Euclid by Mr. Stelling, topics that are “academic” and interesting but do not prepare him for the money-centric business world of book-keeping and accounting. Some of you have probably seen this video before, but it does a nice job of illustrating the problems regarding education and employment from the 19th to the 21st century (His distinction between the economic and intellectual pillars of education I believe is quite relevant to the novel):

I think it’s interesting to see this issue appear in The Mill on the Floss since it testifies to the prevalence of this problem throughout history. I believe that with the incredible reliance on computer technology in the 21st century, our job economy is going through a radical transformation similar to the one that occurred during the dawn of the British credit economy. In fact, there’s a strong push in American public schools to begin teaching kids coding skills to prepare them for future jobs, with organizations such as Code.org are at the forefront of this movement. More recently, Obama has announced an initiative to fund and teach computer science to students throughout America, stating that computer skills will become “basic skills”. In December, Arkansas passed a law requiring computer science courses to be available in all public and charter schools.

I think that this problem of future job security is quite interesting, one that I grapple with myself as an English Literature major. I was wondering what anyone else thought about this problem as it appears in the 21st century? Also, does the novel present it as an issue that can be overcome, or is it an issue that is a natural product of a modernizing world?

Regarding the video, do you agree with his observations and opinions?

We spoke about the advances Austen made in character dialogue a little bit last Thursday and I wanted to take this opportunity to comment on what was being said. A moment that interested me appears on pages 185-186 and features Miss Bates talking to Emma about Frank Churchill repairing Mrs Bates’ glasses. In this passage, Miss Bates invites Emma over to her house, reports to Emma her earlier conversation with Frank Churchill, and includes many hyphenated breaks in the dialogue. What interests me about this moment is the different techniques Austen incorporates within one set of quotation marks: there is the initial layer of Miss Bates’ direct speech to Emma, followed be her indirect report of what Frank Churchill had told her, and followed by the implied questions Emma asks her, signified by the hyphenated breaks, and their subsequent answer. Thinking in terms of novelization, this technique of dialogue features two relationships based on confidence: between Emma and Miss Bates and between the reader and the novel. In the former, Emma has to trust Miss Bates in what Frank Churchill has said to her, and have confidence that what she said is true. In the latter, the reader has to fill in the implied questions Emma asks Miss Bates so that they match Miss Bates’ answers. By incorporating these two relationships within her dialogue, Austen succeeds in including the readers themselves into the dialogue, therefore increasing the self-awareness of the amount of confidence between the reader and the novel.

I was wondering what anyone else thought about the dialogue in Emma, and if there is a way to compare it to Roxana? Is there a way to read the dialogue of this novel more economically?