Stephen Spender

Incluido como "Novela" en Clases. Literatura y disidencia. Buenos Aires, Norma, 2005 [ISBN 987.545.233.5] El amor verdadero: apuntes sobre el melodrama (gay) Daniel Link UBA Un hombre quiere besar a otro hombre (o una mujer quiere besar a otra). De ese deseo (que muchos tipifican como deseo homosexual) se derivan las políticas de la identidad (más, o menos, progresistas) y las demandas de visibilidad. Lo que se discute es si ese beso y el deseo irreprimible del que nace son socialmente aceptables y si admiten, por lo tanto, una visibilidad libre de censuras: ¿pueden ser expuestos nuestros hijos al beso de dos hombres o dos mujeres con la misma libertad que están expuestos al beso, en general?

Il saggio si concentra su un articolo che Sciascia doveva scrivere sulla figura di Danilo Dolci per la rivista inglese «Encounter», diretta dal poeta Stephen Spender.  Ne abbiamo notizia grazie a due delle sei lettere che Nicola Chiaromonte, direttore con Ignazio Silone della rivista «Tempo presente», scrisse a Sciascia (le lettere sono conservate oggi presso la Fondazione Sciascia di Racalmuto). L’articolo di Sciascia non venne poi pubblicato, probabilmente per i suoi riferimenti al comunismo: «Encounter» apparteneva infatti alla rete del “Congress of Cultural Freedom”, organizzazione gestita dagli USA in funzione antisovietica. Il saggio ricostruisce brevemente le attività del CCF e i suoi rapporti con Silone e Chiaromonte. Le lettere di Chiaromonte a Sciascia vengono pubblicate in appendice all’articolo.

This paper explores the possibility of looking back favourably on the 1930s without dismissing the anti-Communist arguments of those like George Orwell and Stephen Spender. The representation and reception of John Cornford's participation and death in the Spanish Civil War are treated as a case study for examining the differences and similarities in outlook between Orwell, Spender and their rather less anti-Communist contemporary, John Sommerfield. The analysis suggests that all four shared the aims of defeating Fascism and opening up a transformed future society that characterised a 1930s intersubjective constellation, which is best understood by moving beyond the Communist/anti-Communist binary that has structured the period's reception.

Publisher's catalogue copy:

This monograph investigates in depth the tension between Woolf and the generation of male poets who first came to public attention in the 1930s, a generation that included W.H. Auden, Julian Bell, Cecil Day-Lewis, John Lehmann, Louis MacNeice, Peter Quennell, and Stephen Spender. While the poets’ youth, gender, homosociality and manner of turning politics into poetics irritated Woolf, their favoured genre especially prompted her criticism. In her two essays on the younger poets, the 1932 "A Letter to a Young Poet" and the 1940 "The Leaning Tower," Woolf argues that lyric poetry no longer reflects contemporary life and that more powerful vehicles might be mixed-genre modes, the novel, and autobiography (forms she herself pursued). Far from antagonistic in turn, many of the young poets accommodated Woolf’s combative argument by claiming her novels as, in fact, poetry, and expressing appreciation of Woolf’s prose through their verse, both during her lifetime and after. This important study traces allusions exchanged between Woolf and the 1930s poets to reveal mutual engagement and influence. Further, this essay draws in part on lesser-known published documents and on unpublished archival material to clarify a major cross-generational debate about literary form.

Bloomsbury Heritage series No. 60, perfectbound paperback, 76pp., incl. illustrations,ISBN 978-1-907286-20-9, price £10.50

Early in his treatise On the Sublime, Longinus recounts three faults ofwriting that “militate against sublimity”: tumidity, or misplaced grandeur; puerility, or pedantic frigidity in elaborating an idea; and false sentiment (102–3). He goes on in his chapter on “the ...

Louis MacNeice is increasingly recognised as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his work has been a defining influence upon a generation of Irish poets that includes Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon. "The Selected Letters" is indispensable as a resource for an understanding of the intellectual culture of the mid-twentieth century. A Classics don, poet, playwright and globetrotting BBC producer, the medley and blend of MacNeice's cultural influences seems exemplary in its modernity. He kept up a significant correspondence with E. R. Dodds, Anthony Blunt and T. S. Eliot, to name but three prominent figures of the time. During his time at the BBC MacNeice witnessed many key events, including the partition of India in 1947 and the independence of the Gold Coast from Britain in 1957, and these are recorded in two long sequences to his wife, the singer Hedli Anderson. His complex relationship to Ireland and to his Irish heritages speak resonantly to contemporary debates about Irish and Northern Irish cultural identity. Finally, the Letters will do much to broaden our understanding of a vivid and often enigmatic personality whose varied life and individual charisma have often resisted explanation.