Wollaeger Modernism, Media, and Propaganda

British Narrative from 1900 to 1945
Course Book
ISBN: 978-1-4008-2862-3
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten

Though often defined as having opposite aims, means, and effects, modernism and modern propaganda developed at the same time and influenced each other in surprising ways. The professional propagandist emerged as one kind of information specialist, the modernist writer as another. Britain was particularly important to this double history. By secretly hiring well-known writers and intellectuals to write for the government and by exploiting their control of new global information systems, the British in World War I invented a new template for the manipulation of information that remains with us to this day. Making a persuasive case for the importance of understanding modernism in the context of the history of modern propaganda, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda also helps explain the origins of today's highly propagandized world.

Modernism, Media, and Propaganda integrates new archival research with fresh interpretations of British fiction and film to provide a comprehensive cultural history of the relationship between modernism and propaganda in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. From works by Joseph Conrad to propaganda films by Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, Mark Wollaeger traces the transition from literary to cinematic propaganda while offering compelling close readings of major fiction by Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wollaeger, Mark

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations ix

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xxiii

INTRODUCTION: Modernism and the Information-Propaganda Matrix 1

Making Sense of Propaganda: From Orwell and Woolf to Bernays and Ellul 2

Propagating Fictions: Wellington House, Modernism, and the Invention of Modern Propaganda 13

Modernism and the Media of Propaganda: Heart of Darkness and "The Unlighted Coast" 26

CHAPTER ONE: From Conrad to Hitchcock: Modernism, Film, and the

Art of Propaganda 38

Manipulation and Mastery: Film, Novel, Advertising 42

From Novel to Theater to Film to Hollywood: In Search of an Audience 48

Killing Stevie: Death by Literalization/Death by Cinematography 55

Picking up the Pieces: Modernism, Propaganda, and Film 62

CHAPTER TWO: The Woolfs, Picture Postcards, and the Propaganda of Everyday Life 71

Postcards, Exhibitions, and Empire 77

Woolf and the Culture of Exhibition 84

Education as Propaganda: Bildungsroman, Sex, and Empire 88

Scripting the Body: Colonial Postcards and the Journey Upriver 93

Leonard's Jungle, Conrad's Trees 105

In Virginia's Jungle 111

Destabilizing the Ethnographic Frame and the Returned Stare 117

Empire, Race, and the Emancipation of Women 120

From Male Propaganda to Female Modernism 123

CHAPTER THREE: Impressionism and Propaganda: Ford's Wellington House Books and The Good Soldier 128

Ford and Wellington House 130

Ford's Critical Writings: Propagating the Impression 135

Impressing Facts: When Blood Is Their Argument and
Between St. Dennis and St. George 145

Navigating the Pseudo-Environment in The Good Soldier 151

CHAPTER FOUR: Joyce and the Limits of Political Propaganda 164

Recruitment and the Art of the Poster 166

Reading Posters/Reading Ulysses 176

Maeve, Bloom, and the Limits of Propaganda 192

Identification, Cultural Predication, and Narrative Structure 200

Carnivalizing Propaganda: Bloom and Stephen in Nighttown 203

Reinventing Ireland: Ulysses and the Art of Dislocation 213

CHAPTER FIVE: From the Thirties to World War II: Negotiating Modernism and Propaganda in Hitchcock and Welles 217

War, Propaganda, and Film: Pairing Hitchcock and Welles 222

Orson Welles: Theater, Film, and the Art of Propaganda 229

Autonomy and Innovation: From the Studio to the
MoI and CIAA 239

Citizen Kane and It's All True: Documentary and Propaganda 242

Bon Voyage, Aventure Malgache, and the Materiality of Communication 251

Coda 261

Notes 269

Index 323

Über Autor(innen)

Mark Wollaeger is professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism, the editor of James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man": A Casebook, and coeditor of Joyce and the Subject of History.