Guy Stevenson | Goldsmiths College, University of London (original) (raw)
Uploads
Articles and Chapters by Guy Stevenson
Textual Practice, 2020
This essay explores the paradox between progressive and reactionary forces in inter-war European ... more This essay explores the paradox between progressive and reactionary forces in inter-war European modernism through parallels between the London-based writers T.E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, and between Pound and Lewis’ avant-garde art group the Vorticists and the American pre-Beatnik Henry Miller. How did the artistic quest to respect and delineate difference lead writers like Pound and Louis-Ferdinand Céline towards a fascist politics that abhorred it? At the other end of the political spectrum, how do the utopian, radically humanist ideals of a writer like Henry Miller find expression through confrontationally anti-humanist language? The answers to these questions, I argue, shed unexpected light on the politics of the American counterculture after World War Two, a moment that is too often understood in unquestioningly progressive terms.
Textual Practice, 2020
In 1919 the painter-novelist Wyndham Lewis reflected on a major stylistic sea change. ‘The Victor... more In 1919 the painter-novelist Wyndham Lewis reflected on a major stylistic sea change. ‘The Victorian age’ he wrote, ‘produced a morass of sugary comfort and amiableness, indulged men so much that they became guys of sentiment – or sentimental guys. Against this “sentimentality” people of course reacted. So the brutal tap was turned on. For fifty years it will be the thing to be brutal, “unemotional.” The aim of this special issue is to investigate that ‘brutal’, “unemotional” turn in literary production from 1900 onwards and to place it in the context of a larger rebellion against Enlightenment humanist ideals. Through essays on writers as diverse as Djuna Barnes and Michel Houellebecq, the contributors will consider the roots and results of anti-humanist thought in the experimental literature of the twentieth century. How did repulsion at Enlightenment certitudes affect literary and artistic innovation in the early twentieth century? What political implications did this have? How was that repulsion used, paradoxically, to socially humanistic ends? Finally, in what ways has religion been repurposed by writers, artists and composers in search - like their nineteenth century Romantic counterparts - for an antidote to Reason? By asking such questions, the authors in Anti-Humanist Modernisms aim to historicise a contemporary moment in which humanist assumptions face renewed attacks from both the right and the left, and sentimental aesthetics and politics are at once ubiquitous and widely mistrusted.
A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Economics, 2019
This essay examines Ezra Pound’s idiosyncratic economic theories through his surprising admiratio... more This essay examines Ezra Pound’s idiosyncratic economic theories through his surprising admiration for the proto-Beatnik, ostensibly amoral Henry Miller. Sent a copy by Miller of his debut novel Tropic of Cancer, Pound replied enthusiastically, congratulating him for understanding ‘the force of money AS destiny’ and encouraging further pursuit of the subject: ‘The one question you haven’t asked yourself.’ he wrote, ‘is What IS money? who makes it/ how does it get that way?’. Although Miller was typically blasé about the attention, responding by publishing a spoof pamphlet entitled Money and How it Gets that Way, their brief exchange sheds intriguing light on serious previously misunderstood aspects of Pound’s vision. Pound’s transition from literary to economic critic – and his faith in the curative power of Social Credit economics and Italian fascism – are ordinarily read through his rejection of writers he had previously championed; men like James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis and Ernest Hemingway. As well as the letter to Miller, this essay uses a little known review by Pound of Tropic of Cancer to show and explain why he viewed him as a writer of the ‘prospect’, able to understand and reflect ‘the economic process’ at a time when he regarded his more obvious literary allies as ‘retrospective’.
European Journal of English Studies, 21.1, 2017
This essay compares the unorthodox literary economic theories espoused by Ezra Pound and Georges ... more This essay compares the unorthodox literary economic theories espoused by Ezra Pound and Georges Bataille in the 1930s and 1940s, and explores the connections that these politically and stylistically divergent writers made between monetary and sexual circulation, wealth and natural growth. Interrogating their respective primitivist approaches to pre-capitalist cultural systems (Pound’s to a medieval arcadia before usury and Bataille’s to ancient Aztec and North American tribal societies), it draws attention to unexpected convergences between the writers’ political and economic ideas. The author demonstrates that Pound – a supporter of Mussolini’s fascist state – was, by the use-value basis of his economics, in many ways closer to Marx than the expressly Marxist Bataille. Although Pound shared Bataille’s preference for pagan and Catholic ‘splendour’ over Protestant thrift, as well as his belief that sexual repression and puritanical fear were contributors to a blockage in the system, his economic approach ultimately abhorred the Nietzschean ‘squander’ celebrated in Bataille’s The Accursed Share. The essay ends by using the two writers to shed light on the literary-philosophical conditions that incubated fascism, as well as the perversely depoliticising and dangerous effects of interpreting the economy according to metaphysical ‘truths’. In so doing it warns against such tempting conflations in the present day.
Henry Miller: New Perspectives ed. Louis Renza; James Decker and Indrek Manniste (Bloomsbury, 2015), 2015
Cultural Criticism by Guy Stevenson
Los Angeles Review of Books, 2018
This article discusses the fascinating rise of Canadian psychologist cum self-help guru Jordan Pe... more This article discusses the fascinating rise of Canadian psychologist cum self-help guru Jordan Peterson: first in relation to the problems with identity politics that have helped facilitate it; second as an improbable Nietzschean and Jungian revival sixty years after the hippies made these two figures fashionable; and third, as a reductive and dangerously evangelical response to serious, pressing cultural problems. If the culture wars are back on - as Peterson keeps saying and his enormous popularity at least partly suggests - and the youth are turning en masse against the discourse of equal rights begun in the sixties, then it's vital he be called out for harnessing that rebellion in reductive, aggressive and quasi-religious terms. Rather than Peterson's charismatic and proselytising brand of PC-bashing, I suggest, curious and disillusioned young people need exposure to calm thinkers on this subject – people like the English philosopher John Gray, who for twenty years has been critiquing liberal humanist complacency but through careful application of Arthur Schopenhauer's saner reflections and sensible caution about the myth-intoxicated visions in Nietzsche and Jung.
The Times Literary Supplement, Aug 2016
The Times Literary Supplement, Jan 2016
The Times Literary Supplement, Jan 2016
The Times Literary Supplement, Jun 2015
The Times Literary Supplement, Dec 2014
The Times Literary Supplement, Jul 2014
Conferences Organised by Guy Stevenson
Textual Practice, 2020
This essay explores the paradox between progressive and reactionary forces in inter-war European ... more This essay explores the paradox between progressive and reactionary forces in inter-war European modernism through parallels between the London-based writers T.E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, and between Pound and Lewis’ avant-garde art group the Vorticists and the American pre-Beatnik Henry Miller. How did the artistic quest to respect and delineate difference lead writers like Pound and Louis-Ferdinand Céline towards a fascist politics that abhorred it? At the other end of the political spectrum, how do the utopian, radically humanist ideals of a writer like Henry Miller find expression through confrontationally anti-humanist language? The answers to these questions, I argue, shed unexpected light on the politics of the American counterculture after World War Two, a moment that is too often understood in unquestioningly progressive terms.
Textual Practice, 2020
In 1919 the painter-novelist Wyndham Lewis reflected on a major stylistic sea change. ‘The Victor... more In 1919 the painter-novelist Wyndham Lewis reflected on a major stylistic sea change. ‘The Victorian age’ he wrote, ‘produced a morass of sugary comfort and amiableness, indulged men so much that they became guys of sentiment – or sentimental guys. Against this “sentimentality” people of course reacted. So the brutal tap was turned on. For fifty years it will be the thing to be brutal, “unemotional.” The aim of this special issue is to investigate that ‘brutal’, “unemotional” turn in literary production from 1900 onwards and to place it in the context of a larger rebellion against Enlightenment humanist ideals. Through essays on writers as diverse as Djuna Barnes and Michel Houellebecq, the contributors will consider the roots and results of anti-humanist thought in the experimental literature of the twentieth century. How did repulsion at Enlightenment certitudes affect literary and artistic innovation in the early twentieth century? What political implications did this have? How was that repulsion used, paradoxically, to socially humanistic ends? Finally, in what ways has religion been repurposed by writers, artists and composers in search - like their nineteenth century Romantic counterparts - for an antidote to Reason? By asking such questions, the authors in Anti-Humanist Modernisms aim to historicise a contemporary moment in which humanist assumptions face renewed attacks from both the right and the left, and sentimental aesthetics and politics are at once ubiquitous and widely mistrusted.
A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Economics, 2019
This essay examines Ezra Pound’s idiosyncratic economic theories through his surprising admiratio... more This essay examines Ezra Pound’s idiosyncratic economic theories through his surprising admiration for the proto-Beatnik, ostensibly amoral Henry Miller. Sent a copy by Miller of his debut novel Tropic of Cancer, Pound replied enthusiastically, congratulating him for understanding ‘the force of money AS destiny’ and encouraging further pursuit of the subject: ‘The one question you haven’t asked yourself.’ he wrote, ‘is What IS money? who makes it/ how does it get that way?’. Although Miller was typically blasé about the attention, responding by publishing a spoof pamphlet entitled Money and How it Gets that Way, their brief exchange sheds intriguing light on serious previously misunderstood aspects of Pound’s vision. Pound’s transition from literary to economic critic – and his faith in the curative power of Social Credit economics and Italian fascism – are ordinarily read through his rejection of writers he had previously championed; men like James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis and Ernest Hemingway. As well as the letter to Miller, this essay uses a little known review by Pound of Tropic of Cancer to show and explain why he viewed him as a writer of the ‘prospect’, able to understand and reflect ‘the economic process’ at a time when he regarded his more obvious literary allies as ‘retrospective’.
European Journal of English Studies, 21.1, 2017
This essay compares the unorthodox literary economic theories espoused by Ezra Pound and Georges ... more This essay compares the unorthodox literary economic theories espoused by Ezra Pound and Georges Bataille in the 1930s and 1940s, and explores the connections that these politically and stylistically divergent writers made between monetary and sexual circulation, wealth and natural growth. Interrogating their respective primitivist approaches to pre-capitalist cultural systems (Pound’s to a medieval arcadia before usury and Bataille’s to ancient Aztec and North American tribal societies), it draws attention to unexpected convergences between the writers’ political and economic ideas. The author demonstrates that Pound – a supporter of Mussolini’s fascist state – was, by the use-value basis of his economics, in many ways closer to Marx than the expressly Marxist Bataille. Although Pound shared Bataille’s preference for pagan and Catholic ‘splendour’ over Protestant thrift, as well as his belief that sexual repression and puritanical fear were contributors to a blockage in the system, his economic approach ultimately abhorred the Nietzschean ‘squander’ celebrated in Bataille’s The Accursed Share. The essay ends by using the two writers to shed light on the literary-philosophical conditions that incubated fascism, as well as the perversely depoliticising and dangerous effects of interpreting the economy according to metaphysical ‘truths’. In so doing it warns against such tempting conflations in the present day.
Henry Miller: New Perspectives ed. Louis Renza; James Decker and Indrek Manniste (Bloomsbury, 2015), 2015
Los Angeles Review of Books, 2018
This article discusses the fascinating rise of Canadian psychologist cum self-help guru Jordan Pe... more This article discusses the fascinating rise of Canadian psychologist cum self-help guru Jordan Peterson: first in relation to the problems with identity politics that have helped facilitate it; second as an improbable Nietzschean and Jungian revival sixty years after the hippies made these two figures fashionable; and third, as a reductive and dangerously evangelical response to serious, pressing cultural problems. If the culture wars are back on - as Peterson keeps saying and his enormous popularity at least partly suggests - and the youth are turning en masse against the discourse of equal rights begun in the sixties, then it's vital he be called out for harnessing that rebellion in reductive, aggressive and quasi-religious terms. Rather than Peterson's charismatic and proselytising brand of PC-bashing, I suggest, curious and disillusioned young people need exposure to calm thinkers on this subject – people like the English philosopher John Gray, who for twenty years has been critiquing liberal humanist complacency but through careful application of Arthur Schopenhauer's saner reflections and sensible caution about the myth-intoxicated visions in Nietzsche and Jung.
The Times Literary Supplement, Aug 2016
The Times Literary Supplement, Jan 2016
The Times Literary Supplement, Jan 2016
The Times Literary Supplement, Jun 2015
The Times Literary Supplement, Dec 2014
The Times Literary Supplement, Jul 2014
Review of In America: Travels with Steinbeck by Geert Mak As Geert Mak concedes a third of the wa... more Review of In America: Travels with Steinbeck by Geert Mak As Geert Mak concedes a third of the way through In America: Travels with John Steinbeck, he was one of three journalists to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley with his own trans-American journey. Realizing that his expedition is “not unique”, he avoids the..
In 1919 the painter-novelist Wyndham Lewis reflected on a major stylistic sea change. ‘The Victor... more In 1919 the painter-novelist Wyndham Lewis reflected on a major stylistic sea change. ‘The Victorian age’ he wrote, ‘produced a morass of sugary comfort and amiableness, indulged men so much that they became guys of sentiment – or sentimental guys. Against this “sentimentality” people of course reacted. So the brutal tap was turned on. For fifty years it will be the thing to be brutal, “unemotional.” The aim of this special issue is to investigate that ‘brutal’, “unemotional” turn in literary production from 1900 onwards and to place it in the context of a larger rebellion against Enlightenment humanist ideals. Through essays on writers as diverse as Djuna Barnes and Michel Houellebecq, the contributors will consider the roots and results of anti-humanist thought in the experimental literature of the twentieth century. How did repulsion at Enlightenment certitudes affect literary and artistic innovation in the early twentieth century? What political implications did this have? How w...
Literary Review & Quarto, Jun 1, 2018
This short mixed media piece considers the influence of spiritualism on the history of media and ... more This short mixed media piece considers the influence of spiritualism on the history of media and those who theorise it. It takes as its starting point Marshall McLuhan – founding father of North American media theory – and follows up on a comment by his friend the journalist Tom Wolfe that he spoke and wrote like a performing medium. This aesthetic, I suggest, has impacted the language and tone of the media scholars who have come after McLuhan, from Vilém Flusser through to Siegfried Zielinski. By riffing around Zielinski’s celebration of ‘illusion’ as dissemblance but also the willingness to risk one’s reputation and ideological moorings, I discuss the media scholar as pioneering trickster figure – deep digging, prophesying and engaged at all times in play
Times Newspapers Ltd, Jan 8, 2016
Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture, 2020
According to its architect and chief spokesman Richard Spencer, the Alt-Right movement in America... more According to its architect and chief spokesman Richard Spencer, the Alt-Right movement in America is "the only new show in town" in the face of what he calls "lame, goofball equal rights schtick". By styling themselves as a 'counterculture' like that of the 1960s, Spencer and a group of anti-liberal internet personalities have rebranded radical right wing politics as the 'cool' rebellious option in an age dominated by the “tyranny of the left". During this Facebook live session I discuss Alt Right tactics of 'trolling' and 'red pilling' as similar to and informed by those used by various avant-garde art and literature movements of the 20th Century. By understanding online shock tactics in the context of these earlier countercultures, I argue, we can devise more productive ways of responding to them
Review of The Unknown Henry Miller by Arthur Hoyle This comprehensive biography captures Henry Mi... more Review of The Unknown Henry Miller by Arthur Hoyle This comprehensive biography captures Henry Miller in various poses that will be familiar to readers of his autobiographical novels: Miller the expatriate “artist-outsider” tramping the streets of Paris in the 1930s; Miller the contraband author, lauded in Europe by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and...
This essay examines Ezra Pound’s idiosyncratic economic theories through his surprising admiratio... more This essay examines Ezra Pound’s idiosyncratic economic theories through his surprising admiration for the proto-Beatnik, ostensibly amoral Henry Miller. Sent a copy by Miller of his debut novel Tropic of Cancer, Pound replied enthusiastically, congratulating him for understanding ‘the force of money AS destiny’ and encouraging further pursuit of the subject: ‘The one question you haven’t asked yourself.’ he wrote, ‘is What IS money? who makes it/ how does it get that way?’. Although Miller was typically blasé about the attention, responding by publishing a spoof pamphlet entitled Money and How it Gets that Way, their brief exchange sheds intriguing light on serious previously misunderstood aspects of Pound’s vision. Pound’s transition from literary to economic critic – and his faith in the curative power of Social Credit economics and Italian fascism – are ordinarily read through his rejection of writers he had previously championed; men like James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis and Ernest Hemingway. As well as the letter to Miller, this essay uses a little known review by Pound of Tropic of Cancer to show and explain why he viewed him as a writer of the ‘prospect’, able to understand and reflect ‘the economic process’ at a time when he regarded his more obvious literary allies as ‘retrospective’.
The Beat Generation, a literary movement with unprecedented popular cultural impact, is easily an... more The Beat Generation, a literary movement with unprecedented popular cultural impact, is easily and usually understood as Romantic and humanistic. Beginning with a statement of affinity by its main progenitor Allen Ginsberg for the modernist fascist-sympathising poet Ezra Pound, this chapter introduces a challenge to that assumption. It complicates the Beats’ self-presentation as Romantic revival to match Ralph Waldo Emerson’s and Walt Whitman’s in the nineteenth century by connecting them to anti-Romantic modernists like Pound and his allies in 1910s’ London: T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme and Wyndham Lewis. That intellectual project—an extension of Arthur Schopenhauer’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s in the nineteenth century and extended into post-1945 Europe by Existentialists and postmodernists—attacked Romanticism and humanism together as naively, insidiously convinced of humankind’s perfectibility. Sketching the Beats as both the kind of perfectionists Pound and his allies abhorred, and un...
This article discusses the fascinating rise of Canadian psychologist cum self-help guru Jordan Pe... more This article discusses the fascinating rise of Canadian psychologist cum self-help guru Jordan Peterson: first in relation to the problems with identity politics that have helped facilitate it; second as an improbable Nietzschean and Jungian revival sixty years after the hippies made these two figures fashionable; and third, as a reductive and dangerously evangelical response to serious, pressing cultural problems. If the culture wars are back on - as Peterson keeps saying and his enormous popularity at least partly suggests - and the youth are turning en masse against the discourse of equal rights begun in the sixties, then it's vital he be called out for harnessing that rebellion in reductive, aggressive and quasi-religious terms. Rather than Peterson's charismatic and proselytising brand of PC-bashing, I'll suggest, curious and disillusioned young people need exposure to calm thinkers on this subject - people like the English philosopher John Gray, who for twenty year...
Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism, 2022
This essay compares two seminal twentieth century media theorists, Marshall McLuhan and Vilem Flu... more This essay compares two seminal twentieth century media theorists, Marshall McLuhan and Vilem Flusser and reads them as inheritors of different modernist traditions – the one appalled by the damage new media could wreak but exhilarated by its humanistic potential, the other quietly amused at the cruel global village he envisioned. Thinking back to McLuhan’s beginnings as a scholar of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, Guy Stevenson places him in an early twentieth century conservative modernist tradition far removed from the politically progressive ideas Flusser used his work to reach. By extension, he considers the mid century and contemporary implications of these differences. What can Flusser’s negative critique of McLuhan teach us about the sixties counterculture the latter helped guide? What impact has this had – politically, socially, culturally - on our interaction with and through new emerging media?
Scholarly responses to Henry Miller's works have never been numerous and for many years Mille... more Scholarly responses to Henry Miller's works have never been numerous and for many years Miller was not a fashionable writer for literary studies. In fact, there exist only three collections of essays concerning Henry Miller's oeuvre. Since these books appeared, a new generation of international Miller scholars has emerged, one that is re-energizing critical readings of this important American Modernist. Henry Miller: New Perspectives presents new essays on carefully chosen themes within Miller and his intellectual heritage to form the most authoritative collection ever published on this author.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Textual Practice, 2020
ABSTRACT This essay explores the paradox between progressive and reactionary forces in inter-war ... more ABSTRACT This essay explores the paradox between progressive and reactionary forces in inter-war European modernism through parallels between the London-based writers T.E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, and between Pound and Lewis’ avant-garde art group The Vorticists and the American pre-Beatnik Henry Miller. How did the artistic quest to respect and delineate difference lead writers like Pound and Louis-Ferdinand Céline towards a fascist politics that abhorred it? At the other end of the political spectrum, how do the utopian, radically humanist ideals of a writer like Henry Miller find expression through confrontationally anti-humanist language? The answers to these questions, I argue, shed unexpected light on the politics of the American counterculture after World War Two, a moment that is too often understood in unquestioningly progressive terms.