FRINK Linked Data Fragments server

Matches in SemOpenAlex for { <https://semopenalex.org/work/W3149984369> ?p ?o ?g. }

• W3149984369 endingPage "278" @default.
• W3149984369 startingPage "278" @default.
• W3149984369 abstract "Professor Elizabeth Miller's SLOW PRINT is a brilliantly conceived book and the sort of deeply researched study in brick-and-mortar libraries that today's digitizing of documents is replacing. Up to a point, and that's the point. To her credit, Miller cites many documents that are likely candidates for not being digitized before they disintegrate, as some of that sort already have, documents that reveal a major historical reversal, the development in the nineteenth century of an at first approving, then ambivalent, and eventually hostile attitude by “literary radicals” toward the industrialization and commercializing of printing. This development accompanied a change in the meaning of the word “radical,” which early in the century referred to political thinking that was anti- or limited-government, but that later evolved to viewing capitalism rather than government as the root cause of social injustice; and so whatever commonality the often disagreeing radical groups had by the end of the century was largely in this change of heart toward mass print as a capitalist tool (while yet being envious of its accomplishments).First, we're reminded that the word “radical” covers a broad spectrum of reformist or revolutionary-minded people, the socialists among them, and the variety of disagreements among them on many fronts naturally included debate as well on the issue of how radicals involved in the use and dissemination of liberating and enlightening information should feel about the modernizing of print and presses. And that is why while Shaw figures prominently in two chapters (2 and 3), in the others he mainly just provides occasional context for and comparison to other kinds of radicals; for this book is not about Shaw, primarily, but about a fascinating cultural transformation the entire late Victorian world underwent. And in which, as usual, Shaw was anomalous in some ways, often in ways that were innovative and mediating as well.One of this book's most valuable features is its providing an historical overview demonstrating the changes in attitudes toward print. Many radicals were, in the first half of the nineteenth century, accepting of and encouraged by the explosion of what might be called “fast printing” (think “fast food” and McDonald's “Over a zillion sold!”), the sort of industrialized printing in which larger and larger and faster and faster presses turned out more and cheaper books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, and so on, which was generally thought admirable then because such publishing made such items more widely available for the education and enlightenment of the exploited masses. But the tide turned against this general approval when it began to strike many radicals in the latter decades of the century that such printing for the masses was actually serving capitalist ends a lot more than reformist or revolutionary causes. Because such print was characterized by counterreform advertising, excessive profit making to the benefit of the privileged few, standardization at the lowest level of quality, degradation of aesthetic values, commodification of life, and political manipulation of the masses, among other reasons. Many radicals became downright unfriendly toward the profit-oriented capitalist press, and thus my ironic title, “The Unsocialist Socialists,” refers to Miller's principal point that many socialists, in turning away from the democratizing, mass-marketing capitalist press, became elitists, seemingly an “unsocialist” thing to do. Quite a joke, in fact, which was made richer because their elitism put them in bed with the elitist modernists who wrote not for the masses but for each other, the knowing class! The modernists may have been as anticapitalist as the political radicals, but they were also largely antidemocratic, so discovering themselves in bed with the modernists brought consternation to some of the socialists.Miller makes the point that “the radical literary countermove to print mass production was as much about scale as it was about speed. The print community that emerged in British radical circles during these years directed itself … to a small-scale audience, a political and aesthetic counterculture, a public that defined itself against a mass-oriented, mainstream print culture” (3). Leaders of the developing anticapitalist “coterie” movement were, of course, John Ruskin and William Morris, with the latter's Kelmscott Press providing a model of how to “slow print” beautiful (but expensive) books. The irony of course is that the very people who were most passionate about democratizing their society felt forced to reject one of the most democratizing forces of the time: the mass marketing print devices attendant upon the growth of capitalism.Miller finds testimony to the gradual development of this irony in a host of late Victorian radicals, with Anarchists, Theosophists, Aesthetes, Gay Rights–Birth Control–Free Love advocates (to name a few) mixed in with socialists. The questions facing them all were principally these: “Did print function as a synecdoche for capitalism, wordlessly conveying the values of mass production, homogeneity, and invisible labor? Could this capitalist technology—which in its very form implies standardization and the mechanization of manual labor (handwriting)—be used to produce anticapitalist political effects?” (6). The answers were various, but generally it was “yes” to the first question and “no” to the second, saving that there were always individuals who tried to have it both ways by inventing media strategies and literary modes that would accommodate both elitist radical and democratizing capitalist ideas, G. B. Shaw perhaps first among them.Shaw's anomaly as an elitist is that he was always the teacher and ever explanatory, to whoever had ears to hear. Elitists of the modernist sort did not explain themselves or their works except to those fellow elitists who already understood. Shaw compensated for his elitism, as a Fabian, say, by being interminable in his speeches (given mostly by long-winded characters who have lessons to teach but also by himself on soapboxes in parks) and prefatory to his plays, explaining and explaining and explaining to anyone who would listen, whether they were situated in the “Stalls” of life or in the peanut gallery. One of his characters, a Member of the Idle Rich Class named Jack Tanner, directed most of his argument to his own class in an effort to reform from the top down, à la Fabian, but there is plenty of Shavian argument elsewhere directed to every level of understanding, from the groundlings on up, for a lot of it is “fun” as well as instructive (and instructive because it's fun).After a chapter that introduces the sort of coterie, aesthetically oriented, and utopian-minded publishing illustrated by William Morris (disdained by Marx and Engels as a sentimental dreamer), Miller's second chapter spends most of its time with Shaw, partly on his own but also compared with other socialist writers of his time, particularly novelists because he began his publishing career under his own name with five novels, one a year from 1879 to 1883. Titled “The Black and White Veil: Shaw, Mass Print Culture, and the Antinovel Turn,” this chapter begins with Shaw's striking reference to black print on white paper as “the black and white veil,” suggesting that “the print interface is a medium of obfuscation” because “the business and marketing of print generates (and obscures) its subjects of representation” (85). With such a view, it's no surprise to see Shaw from the very beginning trying to rend the veil by calling attention to the way the conventions of the novel compelled him to use formulaic patterns and representations that contradicted (by obscuring) the reality he sees and his revolutionary intent towards it. As he proceeded through the writing of his novels, we find him often satirizing and parodying the very genre he was using and more and more unmasking the author as author and revealing the artifice of the authorial voice. His last novel, An Unsocial Socialist, concludes with a letter from the novel's antihero Sidney Trefusis scolding the author for the falsifications of his life and urging him to take up a more worthwhile trade.Like playwriting? Miller's third chapter, titled “Living Language: Print Drama, Live Drama, and the Socialist Theatrical Turn,” examines the idea that Shaw's turn to playwriting was perhaps the thing needed to make the socialist case “more real.” Of course one can find plenty of instances in which Shaw ridiculed the Victorian stage as the last refuge of unreality, which is the most likely reason why he tried the novel first. But Miller's argument is that the turn away from the novel and toward the drama was perhaps justified because staged drama replaces print with sights and sounds, the senses are more directly engaged and thus less is “veiled” in the act of communication, and the whole experience is in addition a communal act among the members of the theater audience that is “socialist” in spirit. As Miller writes, “To many socialists, liberalism, like the novel, was grounded in the idea of the independent rational subject, who would read and absorb print alone in a state of coherent subjectivity, whereas the theater appeared to offer an oral, live, mutual experience, less mass-oriented but more communal than print” (122). And if like Shaw and Ibsen the playwright practiced “a terrible art of sharp-shooting at the audience” (as Shaw said in The Quintessence of Ibsenism), “the dramatist knows that as long as he is teaching and saving his audience, he is as sure of their strained attention as a dentist is, or the Angel of the Annunciation.”1 All well and good in theory, but Miller points out that, as with the novel, the audiences for such plays tended to be dominated not by the working-class but by upper-middle-class Bohemians, those expected to lead the revolution from the top down, and Shaw himself asserted his desire for an audience of philosophers.Every move the radicals made toward a more authentic connection between themselves and the proletariat they wished to save seemed to have the same alienating effect of producing elitism among the leaders, but Shaw was undismayed because he never had any hope of a revolution originating from a proletarian uprising, for he knew that such crushed, demoralized, undereducated people had no interest in or capability for a revolution. And that is also why, partly, soon after becoming a playwright he hedged his bet on the theater by editing his plays for print, famously using narrative-like stage directions to give readers the sense that they were reading a novel, a scheme to make the plays a lot more likely to be read than most play scripts while also providing a cheaper way to go to the theater, so to speak. Shaw's novelizing of his plays may not be the regression it may seem, in that the innovations of form in his particular novelizing of drama did as much to make his work accessible to as many as possible as such high octane drama could manage.As Miller sums up Shaw's achievement and innovation, “Shaw's turn from print to the theater was really not so much a turn as an amalgamation, a bringing together of the two media” (128), which combined their virtues to create a more effective voice for social change. And when you add Shaw's own voice as a speaker (The Quintessence was originally a lecture delivered to the Fabians), you have a very powerful amalgamation of three different media: print, theater, and live voice. Of course how much more powerful would that have been with the addition of television, the Internet, and other post-Victorian inventions, and Miller notes that as well, with hints at the impact starting to be felt from arrivals of new media such as the telephone, phonograph, and moving pictures, which reinforced the turn to theater by suggesting that perhaps a return to an oral and visual rather than textual society would serve radical causes better. But Shaw still preferred an amalgamation rather than a choosing.Of course this historical battle among media preferences in the nineteenth century looks quaint to us now, but this debate presaged the current battle between a more egalitarian SLOW NET and an elitist FAST NET for the financially privileged. (A DARK NET versus a LIGHTED NET is another subject of increasing debate, which is less about speed than about transparency versus hidden control). The current debate now ironically finds today's egalitarians in the position of radicals in the first half of the nineteenth century who supported the democratizing effect of “FAST PRINT” (today's “SLOW NET” having that sort of egalitarianism in common with yesterday's “FAST PRINT”), and it will be interesting to see if there is the same movement toward disillusionment and a return to elitism in “progressive” ranks (we don't call them “radicals” anymore because the only true radicals these days are “conservatives”) as the twenty-first century moves on.Miller's book continues with three more chapters and a conclusion, from which Shaw is largely absent. The chapter titles themselves suggest why: Chapter 4, “Measured Revolution: Poetry and the Late Victorian Radical Press,” Chapter 5, “Enlightenment Beyond Reason: Theosophical Socialism and Radical Print Culture,” and Chapter 6, “Free Love, Free Print: Sex Radicalism, Censorship, and the Biopolitical Turn.” But the conclusion finds him making an auspicious return. The conclusion is less a summing up than a venture into rather new territory, as Miller shows how her arguments lead to the realization that these late Victorian literary radicals who have been considered not modernist or even antimodernist were in fact precursors to the modernists or even already modernist in certain respects, and here Shaw's novel, An Unsocial Socialist, along with Morris's News from Nowhere, are cited as modernist in the way they “ironize the ‘realism’ of Victorian novels as a decidedly unrealistic, bourgeois fantasy” (302). This conclusion is worth reading by itself as an excellent summary of the current debates over the need to expand the definition of modernism.I was rather taken aback by this book at first. Among my generation of Shaw scholars, much effort has gone into trying to rescue Shaw from some of the unfortunate implications of his being a socialist and self-proclaimed propagandist and didact, for the chief implication, that this meant he was “no artist,” as sometimes claimed or implied by Yeats and some modernists, was one of the principal reasons for his being undervalued as a writer of literature, and SLOW PRINT seems to plunge us back into an argument we thought had been won in Shaw Studies and was causing a rethinking of Shaw elsewhere. But the book's subtitle, Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture, alleviates this somewhat by confining this to the early Shaw, and it turns out that whether Shaw was an artist or not is not really under discussion here, although it may mislead on that subject by not discussing it. But this is just one defect amid a splendor of enlightening argument, some of which suggests that modernism had deep roots in Shaw's works.Elizabeth Miller is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and her book won the 2014 NAVSA Best Book of the Year Award, sponsored by the North American Victorian Studies Association, and received an Honorable Mention in the 2014 Modernist Studies Book Prize, sponsored by the Modernist Studies Association.As there is much more enlightenment to be found in this book, I highly recommend purchasing it at www.sup.org/books/title/?id=22344." @default.
• W3149984369 created "2021-04-13" @default.
• W3149984369 creator A5014764259 @default.
• W3149984369 date "2015-01-01" @default.
• W3149984369 modified "2023-09-28" @default.
• W3149984369 title "The Unsocialist Socialists" @default.
• W3149984369 doi "https://doi.org/10.5325/shaw.35.2.0278" @default.
• W3149984369 hasPublicationYear "2015" @default.
• W3149984369 type Work @default.
• W3149984369 sameAs 3149984369 @default.
• W3149984369 citedByCount "0" @default.
• W3149984369 crossrefType "journal-article" @default.
• W3149984369 hasAuthorship W3149984369A5014764259 @default.
• W3149984369 hasConcept C41008148 @default.
• W3149984369 hasConceptScore W3149984369C41008148 @default.
• W3149984369 hasIssue "2" @default.
• W3149984369 hasLocation W31499843691 @default.
• W3149984369 hasOpenAccess W3149984369 @default.
• W3149984369 hasPrimaryLocation W31499843691 @default.
• W3149984369 hasRelatedWork W2093578348 @default.
• W3149984369 hasRelatedWork W2096946506 @default.
• W3149984369 hasRelatedWork W2350741829 @default.
• W3149984369 hasRelatedWork W2358668433 @default.
• W3149984369 hasRelatedWork W2376932109 @default.
• W3149984369 hasRelatedWork W2382290278 @default.
• W3149984369 hasRelatedWork W2390279801 @default.
• W3149984369 hasRelatedWork W2748952813 @default.
• W3149984369 hasRelatedWork W2766271392 @default.
• W3149984369 hasRelatedWork W2899084033 @default.
• W3149984369 hasVolume "35" @default.
• W3149984369 isParatext "false" @default.
• W3149984369 isRetracted "false" @default.
• W3149984369 magId "3149984369" @default.
• W3149984369 workType "article" @default.