The limits of sympathetic imagination

What is it possible to imagine? Are specific extreme experiences, like war or rape, simply beyond us? Coetzee's fiction helps us think through these issues.

On capitalist realism and ‘Wolf Hall’

Marxist critics have a distinctive (that is, peculiar) perspective on how capitalism operates internally. In searching for aggressive metaphors to describe capitalist realism, they accentuate an alleged glamour, when better models may lie in Tudor England.

Wyndham Lewis and the ‘Laughing Woman’

Wyndham Lewis painted several important pictures of a laughing Kate Lechmere early in his career, probably during 1911. These are crucial early examples of Lewis’s developing Vorticist aesthetic prior to BLAST; however, their history – who owned what, where…

Edward Thomas, empathy, and reciprocity

Thomas's poetry may be best understood by considering the concept of reciprocity, rather than resorting to the contentious topic of empathy.

Orwell’s ‘crimestop’ and moral vegetarianism

A family owns a house in an idyllic rural location. The house's beauty frequently brings visitors to tears. It is so characteristic of its context that it is used on film sets. The interior has been professionally designed. There is no work to do, with…

Shell Shock and the Grotesque Overuse of the adjective ‘shell-shocked’ is careless; those suffering from shell shock used the grotesque not tropes associated with confusion to communicate their experience.

Shell Shock and the Grotesque

Overuse of the adjective ‘shell-shocked’ is careless; those suffering from shell shock used the grotesque not tropes associated with confusion to communicate their experience.

Recovered in Leicester: Lewis’s 1919 Arts League Lecture It is widely recorded that Wyndham Lewis gave a public lecture on 'Painting' in the Conference Hall of the Central Buildings in Westminster on 22 October 1919 (O'Keeffe 2000, 214). It was the opening lecture of a series arranged for the autumn by the Arts League of Service entitled 'The Modern Tendencies in Art'. Lewis would be followed by T.S. Eliot on poetry (29 October), Margaret Morris on dance (12 November), and Eugene Goossens on music (27 November).

Lewis's Oct. 1919 lecture for the Arts League 'Modern Tendencies in Art' series, believed lost to us, was given a second (and better) airing at the Leicester Museum in Nov. 1919. #WyndhamLewis

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Lewis's Lost 1919 'Cubist Exhibition' Preface. Local newspaper records suggest a previously unknown preface for a 1919 exhibition in Oxford. #WyndhamLewis #modernism

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Thomas, the Home Front Imagination, and Reciprocity Edward Thomas is a master of 20th-century English poetry. His entire poetic corpus spans the period from December 1914 to January 1917 and can be read as a profound and unique meditation on war.

Thomas, the Home Front Imagination, and Reciprocity
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On Capitalist Realism and 'Wolf Hall' Marxist-inflected accounts of what it feels like to be inside the whale of capitalism undermine the power (and beauty) of their core arguments

On Capitalist Realism and 'Wolf Hall'
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On the limits of imagination Are there limits to the imagination? Are some extremely physical or emotional experiences simply beyond the reach of the aesthetic?

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Wyndham Lewis's 'Laughing Women' Unpicking the history of Lewis's earliest Vorticist paintings

Wyndham Lewis's 'Laughing Women' #WyndhamLewis #Vorticism www.drjwood.com/p/wyndham-le...