In a TLS essay on the Welsh poet David Jones, A.N. Wilson traces Jones’s poetic impulses back to World War I: “The First World War in general, the Battle of the Somme in particular, became Jones’s imaginative habitation for the rest of his life, as a visual artist and as a poet. In a prescient note to his Somme poem, In Parenthesis, he describes how, even in 1917, he and a friend (Leslie Poulter) imagined tourists traipsing over the battlefield—‘I... Read more
In a TLS essay on the Welsh poet David Jones, A.N. Wilson traces Jones’s poetic impulses back to World War I: “The First World War in general, the Battle of the Somme in particular, became Jones’s imaginative habitation for the rest of his life, as a visual artist and as a poet. In a prescient note to his Somme poem, In Parenthesis, he describes how, even in 1917, he and a friend (Leslie Poulter) imagined tourists traipsing over the battlefield—‘I... Read more
It’s tempting, Ivan Illich admits (Gender), to think that “gender” is tribal and primitive, and that “social sex” inevitably arises in advanced, complex social and economic settings. He offers the gendered world of the Middle Ages as a counter-example. Tenants and freeholders paid rent to the lord, and these payments were done in “a gender-specific way”: “A large number of contracts carefully determined not only the amount of rent due for the land but also the gender from whom it... Read more
It’s tempting, Ivan Illich admits (Gender), to think that “gender” is tribal and primitive, and that “social sex” inevitably arises in advanced, complex social and economic settings. He offers the gendered world of the Middle Ages as a counter-example. Tenants and freeholders paid rent to the lord, and these payments were done in “a gender-specific way”: “A large number of contracts carefully determined not only the amount of rent due for the land but also the gender from whom it... Read more
Ivan Illich (Gender) points to the differences between the activities of a modern housewife and those of her grandmother. They are practically and economically quite distinct. “When a modern housewife goes to the market, picks up the eggs, drives them home in her car, takes the elevator to the seventh floor, turns on the stove, takes butter from the refrigerator, and fries the eggs, she adds value to the commodity with each one of these steps. This is not what... Read more
Ivan Illich (Gender) points to the differences between the activities of a modern housewife and those of her grandmother. They are practically and economically quite distinct. “When a modern housewife goes to the market, picks up the eggs, drives them home in her car, takes the elevator to the seventh floor, turns on the stove, takes butter from the refrigerator, and fries the eggs, she adds value to the commodity with each one of these steps. This is not what... Read more
In his provocative essay on Gender, Ivan Illich describes a shift from “vernacular gender” to “social sex.” By the former, he meant “a distinction in behavior, a distinction universal in vernacular cultures. It distinguishes places, times, tools, tasks, forms of speech, gestures, and perceptions that are associated with men from those associated with women. This association constitutes social gender because it is specific to a time and place. I call it vernacular gender because this set of associations is as... Read more
Janet Adelman (Blood Relations) devotes an interesting chapter to analyzing Lancelot’s departure from Shylock’s house, and his strange reunion with his father Gobbo, in Merchant of Venice. Lancelot has been Shylock’s servant, but he has had enough and, like Shylock’s daughter Jessica, he leaves for the home of a Christian. Shakespeare devotes what seems to be inordinate space to this odd, comic side plot. Adelman thinks, as usual, there’s method. For starters, Lancelot’s departure is a virtual conversion: “since Lancelot... Read more
In an essay on the notion of “cosmopolitanism,” Wayne Cristaudo presents Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy as thinkers who propose an unphilosophical cosmopolitanism. That un- is critical, Crustaudo thinks, to a genuine recognition of and reckoning with difference: Both Rosenzweig and Rosenstock oppose “the more typical philosophical approach which frequently invokes ‘difference’ in the abstract only to surreptitiously slide all really decisive differences under some greater unity or identity of philosophy’s devising. The identity then reintroduces difference into moral-political binaries... Read more
Terrence Rafferty calls filmmaker Guillermo del Toro the “Master of Highbrow Horror” (The Atlantic). He traces del Toro’s aesthetic to a childlike mix of fear and fascination: “Toro’s work isn’t simply the something’s-out-to-get-you feeling of conventional scare pictures. It’s fear mixed with fascination, a childlike wonder at the strange shapes reality can take. In the poem ‘Children Selecting Books in a Library,’ Randall Jarrell writes, ‘Their tales are full of sorcerers and ogres / Because their lives are: the capricious... Read more
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