Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History and Literary Representation (review)

128 the minnesota review "distinguishes between modernists and a-g artists: latter more radical (51) "contrast of appeals to reason and the irrational as a contrast between the trade-union/commune nexus and the cultural movments (52); yet, bourgeois was the enemy of both (53) ""Wrong to equate nazis with Bolsheviks in their rejection of modernist forms (59); bolshevism as "most extreme political tendency" (88) "Dada, Shklovsky, Brecht, Surrealism, Expressionism, Voloshinov "the need, not only to summarize, but explore (70) On cultural studies — despite its parochialism (and even this is excusable because he writes by invitation for a British audience with a certain variant of c.s. in mind), these passages are the best explanation since Hall (and even better, because less stinging in erudition) of what is at stake "innovations always occur first outside the institutions. "a new syllabus - from adult education classes. —an underprivileged sector of education —an alternative to Leavis —attempt at majority democratic education —can't tell this story through texts. "the new syllabus ceases to be interesting when brought into an institutional setting with academic precendents around departments and disciplines Open University recognized this and tried, unsucessfully, to institutionalize it: Adult education had drawn up intellectual disciplines that form bodies of knowledge in contact with people's life-situations and life-experiences * How structuralism stepped in to rationalize the situation, and ended up killing it(157) ""serious bones to pick with his overview of Marxist cultural theory (170). ""And yet one of the strenghts of this book is the sharp wording it has for the "waste of time" the new idealist theories have had in culture, in part for failing to take what he calls the "Road from Vitebsk" (the Bakhtin school). 171, 173 The interview: dazzling, with unguarded insights into Williams' novels (his unwillingness to set them off from his criticism, for example); the threateningly relgious bluster of Cambridge in use of the Biblical term "canon" to refer to literature; the analysis of representation is itself a part of history, is active, contributes to the way force is distributed; the greater pressures to conformity on American intellectuals than upon British (as bad as those are); on why he believes he has not suppressed the category of gender "As a tv-critic: The fact is Williams is much more perceptive as a critic of TV than of drama. It's almost as if he still dabbles in theatre criticism because his appointment at Cambridge says he has to. (96) "tragedy as belonging to an old and dying order (99) ... a recognition that leads him to his best formulations, which occur on Brecht (100) TIM BRENNAN Socia/ Figures: George Eliot, Social History and Literary Representation by Daniel Cottom. University of Minnesota Press, 1987. xxiv + 216pp. Foreword by Terry Eagleton. Daniel Cottom's book is a richly nuanced account of various literary representations and their connection to the middle class's ideological mission in nineteenth-century England. Naming Eliot a "liberal intellectual" and using her work as a focal point of discussion, Cottom charts the depictions of various literary figurations and argues that these asserted social values held by England's bourgeoisie. By analyzing the rhetoric of liberal intellectuals Cottom reveals how discursive practices embody political systems of power. "[This approach] looks to explain any signifying practice in terms of the differences of power by which it is instituted and which the people involved in the practice maintain, develop, and contest, or transform in relation with others in society" (213). Cottom guides his approach with rigorous analysis and his book contains insight, and indeed, relevance; however, for this reader, the book remains, ultimately, limited . Reviews 129 The strength of this book lies in its arduous attempt to explicate how the major purpose of liberal intellectual discourse was to aid the English bourgeoisie in its transition "from the institutions of religious and political coercion to the apparatuses of moral-psychological consent" (Eagleton xii). Cottom carefully explains how this discourse appropriated social figures like the genüeman, education, ordinary human life, violence, the individual and re-defined them to fit its vision of social organization. A key term in this regard is sympathy. Eliot used the notion of sympathy...