Then You Are Them
Fredric Jameson: Margaret Atwood’s Dystopia
Margaret Atwood’s new novel, The Year of the Flood, is set in the same dystopian future as her earlier book Oryx and Crake, a future in which, in Fredric Jameson’s words, capitalist society has broken down ‘into the various private contractors to whom social needs are outsourced’. Atwood’s dystopia isn’t like Orwell’s in 1984: its colours ‘have a loathsome pastel quality, like drugstores; its bunny suits and fluffy fabrics reflect the bad taste of infantile mass production; the bloody physical violence is that of cartoons rather than Hitler.’ It is, in other words, American. The Year of the Flood, Jameson argues, can be read as ‘the expression of an ideological doctrine’: it’s important to remember that Atwood is Canadian, and ‘no little of her imaginative power comes from her privileged position above the border of the lower 48.’
/////////////////INHERENT VICE
//////////////////LOWER UPPER CLASS
/////////////////ANOTHER SELF
////////////////////For all the self-deprecation there was scant self-pity. As time and illness overtook him and many of his friends he was impatient with those who fussed over the inevitable. ‘It’s just death let’s face it.’ In 1994 death came for Alvilde, to whom, in their last years, he had grown close once more. His grief was recorded like everything else and with painful economy: ‘The evenings alone are agony, and the nights frightening.’ He survived his wife by four years and outlived his diary by less than two months, the last entry, written in hospital, a final comment on his own inadequacy: ‘My handwriting is very shaky. Damn it.’
Rosemary Hill’s biography of Pugin, God’s Architect,
////////////////Modern celebrities are often in the habit of making their staff sign confidentiality agreements.
////////////////Inside the Barrel
Brent Hayes Edwards
The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade by Christopher Miller Buy this book
In May 2001, the French National Assembly passed a law, the Loi Taubira (named after Christiane Taubira, the Socialist deputy who sponsored the bill), recognising the Atlantic slave trade as a ‘crime against humanity’. France is, as a result, the only country in the world that has condemned slavery in the name of human rights. The law was controversial not only for its seeming admission of national ‘guilt’, as some critics put it, but also because it appeared to prescribe a state policy on the presentation of the past: Article Two required that the slave trade and slavery be taken into account in education policy and research funding. The law was vague as to what exactly would be required, but in 2004 the government formed a Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage to devise a programme for use in schools. At the same time, planning began for a Centre national pour la mémoire des esclavages et de leurs abolitions, conceived as a research centre, an archive and a memorial.
=LRB
/////////////////////GLOOMY SUNDAY AFTERNOONS
//////////////////SUCCESS AND EXCESS
//////////////YSR 1949-2009-RIP
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