About the Book
From works by Joseph Conrad to propaganda films by Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, this work traces the transition from literary to cinematic propaganda while offering readings of major fiction by Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce. It provides a cultural history of the relationship between modernism and propaganda in Britain.
Table of Contents:
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
About the Author :
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".
Review :
Highly recommended... [This] book is well planned, carefully constructed, and assiduously substantiated. -- D. G. Izzo, Choice Wollaeger gives [the debate about art's relationship to propaganda] new purchase by stressing the emergence of modern propaganda ... and by showing how the last century's propaganda outlets served as both a testing ground and a charger, a model, and a spur, for modernist innovation... Modernism can help us resist propaganda today, Wollaeger suggests smartly, not because it has always kept its distance but because, from the beginning, it absorbed propaganda's tricks. -- Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Modernism/Modernity Mark Wollaeger's sophisticated new book adds to the recent reshaping of our understanding of modernist-period media culture... While one would expect such tours de force from Wollaeger, who is known for his work on Conrad and Joyce, it is his chapter on Ford Madox Ford that proves to be the volume's intellectual center. -- Debra Rae Cohen, Clio While many critical studies of British literary modernism promise to reveal new ways to contextualize modernism, few deliver with such accomplished originality as Mark Wollaeger's Modernism, Media, and Propaganda... Wollaeger's book is a model of exemplary scholarship that ... aptly speaks to our historical moment. -- Lissa Schneider, James Joyce Literary Supplement Mark Wollaeger's Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 is written in an approachable style with an engaging and often amusing personal voice... This is a book in which the historical contextualising so in trend at the present time is allowed to sit comfortably and rewardingly beside more 'traditional' close readings of canonical works. -- Yoshino Ayako, Studies in English Literature A carefully researched monograph, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda will likely appeal to those interested in historicist and close textual analyses, and perhaps less to those seeking more theoretical treatments of modernist prose and film. -- David Tomkins, European Legacy Modernism, Media, and Propaganda is a rich and nuanced study of how modernism and propaganda were formed symbiotically as much as defined by difference. -- Elizabeth F. Evans, Woolf Studies Annual
