Schmitt & the Comintern

There's an interesting paper to be written on the relation between Carl Schmitt's conception of the Catholic Church's political role in his Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form and the actual political operations of the Comintern. Political institutions (or jurisdictions) which transcend nations and hence can play dirty Machievellian games in national politics.

Democratic tragedy

It's taken me a while since I have been writing my paper on E.M. Forster's Howards End off and on for six months, but at last (after giving it at Yale) I realise that the key to the novel is a perceived opposition between the spirit and the letter of democracy, which in literary terms can be regarded as tragic. Democratic will relies on feelings and connections that political democracy undermines. In political and social terms that is the tragedy to which the fiction reverts.

Politics and the desire for literature

Is it true that the huge state investment in literary education (in all Western nation-states) from the late 19thc on can be read as part of the movement towards social democracy? And that much art-literature itself can be regarded as part of the resistance to that movement?

More Elizabeth Bowen: British literary conservatism and National Socialism

As far as I am concerned, The Heat of the Day poses a revealing interpretative challenge: what is its attitude to Robert's treachery. The novel tells a story of a woman (Stella) who is in love with an army officer (Robert) whom, as it turns out, is spying for Nazi Germany. The critics read the novel as rejecting this betrayal, almost as a knee-jerk reaction. But that's less clear to me, especially after having read Bridehead Revisted for class last week, which explicitly endorses the politics of appeasement and well into the war too. Robert's defense of his actions to Stella is not repudiated by her, and while there's no real question of actual endorsement of his giving secrets to the Germans, there is a question about whether his betrayal is actually repudiated.
In the end it may be that the novel points towards an argument that the social conditions for its own literary/ethical project (late Bloomsbury modernism with a Conservative twist) require a polity closer to National Socialism than to liberal democracy.
Of course, in France, Vichyism was regarded by many (including for a while people like Simone Weil) as necessary to protect Frenchness itself. And there were English versions of this.
I need to read Angus Calder on WW2.

Elizabeth Bowen

Heat of the Day marks an important moment in the progress of British literary modernism. It demonstrates that the Jamesian mode cannot be effectively used to describe contemporary society. It's a mode that demands a reflective sensitivity to the world that the novel is determined to show has disappeared from the world, at least (but not only?) under wartime conditions.