Cultura, civilización y progreso: sobre el legado de las políticas culturales de la Transición española

El artículo examina y evalúa cómo ciertas nociones de cultura entendidas como excelencia y progreso tiñeron las políticas culturales del Estado español durante la Transición democrática. Revisando el legado de Matthew Arnold y la idea de cultura como elemento para disipar conflictos, se presenta un recorrido que va desde los debates en torno a la importancia de democratizar el acceso a la cultura y a la educación que tuvieron lugar en el siglo XIX en el Reino Unido, nacidas como reacción a las demandas de sufragio universal, a prestar atención a cómo se articuló la noción de cultura como elemento de emancipación y progreso durante la Transición democrática española.

DEATH AS THE “REAL”: A PSYCHOANALYTIC READING OF MATTHEW ARNOLD’S YOUTH AND CALM

Matthew Arnold was one of the poets who paid special attention to youth and the dynamics of youth culture in the Victorian era. Living in an era that stimulated modern times, Arnold produced writings that can be classified as historical records, although not factual, of society's reactions to the fundamental social and cultural changes of the time. The literary arena was particularly affected, as the Victorian era marked the beginning for poets and artists alike to shed the romantic spirit that they had breathed into their works and adapt to the technological and industrial realities around them. This article explores Matthew Arnold's poem entitled “Youth and Calm”. The poem explores a stream of consciousness that contemplates “the youth" and their dreams. This study aims to uncover the meaning of the poem based on its textual composition without correlating it with Arnold's other works. Using theoretical phenomenology tools to dissect language phenomena and the Freudo-Lacanian method in interpreting the theme, this study led to the revelation that the poem talks of “death” as a symbolically repressed object. Matthew Arnold merupakan salah satu penulis puisi yang menaruh atensi lebih pada pemuda dan juga dinamika kebudayaan muda-mudi pada era Victoria. Hidup di dalam yang era mendasari kultur modern, Arnold menghasilkan karya-karya yang dapat diklasifikasikan sebagai catatan historis, meskipun tidak faktual secara absolut, terkait reaksi masyarakat dalam menghadapi perubahan sosial dan kultural yang begitu mendasar di kala itu. Terlebih dalam arena literatur, kehadiran era Victorian merupakan awal penanda bagi penyair dan produser seni lainnya untuk mulai menanggalkan jiwa romantisme yang mereka hembuskan pada tiap karya dan beralih pada realita teknologi dan industri di sekitar mereka. Dalam artikel ini, puisi Matthew Arnold yang ditelaah secara mendalam berjudul “Youth and Calm”. Puisi tersebut mengeksplorasi arus pemikiran yang berisikan kontemplasi terhadap figur “pemuda” dan apa yang mereka impikan. Penulisan ini bertujuan untuk menggali makna puisi berdasarkan komposisi tekstualnya dan tanpa menghubungkannya dengan karya Arnold lainnya. Menggunakan paradigma fenomenologi untuk membedah struktur kebahasaan serta Freudo-Lacanian dalam menginterpretasi tema menghasilkan sebuah makna bahwa “Death” atau kematian merupakan objek yang secara simbolis dipendam oleh subjek youth yang dibahas pada puisi ini.

“The Chalk Wall Falls to the Foam”: Reimagining Littoral Space in the Poetry of the Dover Cliffs

Where beaches and harbors have frequently been taken to signify openness and intermingling, a different coastal setting, the cliffs of Dover, overtly bespeaks opposition and closure. Demarcating the British coast at its closest point to continental Europe, the cliffs often stand for Britain’s supposedly elemental insularity. However, the chalk composing the cliffs makes them, in their own way, as malleable and permeable as a beach. I argue that poems by Matthew Arnold, W. H. Auden, and Daljit Nagra contest the cliffs’ association with an exclusive Britishness by focusing on their material composition. In these poems, the cliffs’ chalk—formed by fossilized marine microorganisms at a time when what would become Britain was at the bottom of a prehistoric sea—attests to Britain’s geohistorical contingency. Arnold, Auden, and Nagra use this chalk geology to develop a new model of British identity as contingent, permeable, and linked with the wider world. In these poems, that is, Dover’s cliffs collapse oppositions rather than enforcing them: they blur the lines between Britain and the world, past and present, organic and inorganic, human history and geological history. The literature of the Dover cliffs thus highlights the revisionary potential of this distinctive kind of littoral space.

Universal White: Discrimination and Selection in James’s American Scene

Chapter 4 reads James’s 1898 essays on American Letters, The American Scene, ‘The Question of Our Speech’, and ‘Charles Eliot Norton’, alongside writing by Charles Eliot Norton and Charles William Eliot, among others. During the early years of the twentieth century, Harvard thinkers address questions about the political responsibilities and powers of the 'college-bred'; this chapter argues that James responds to this discussion about the cultivated elite (or what Matthew Arnold calls 'the remnant') by directing attention to that elite's private pleasures rather than its public responsibilities. Tracing across multiple texts James's articulation of an aesthetic that prizes difference, discrimination, delimitation, and exclusion, the chapter shows that he, like Edith Wharton, associates these desirable qualities with the social hierarchies of the Old World. Although his celebration of intricately shaded heterogeneity has been hailed as anti-nativist or progressive, his critical portrayal of white homogeneity can function to criticise not racism or nativism but rather the egalitarian democracy with which such whiteness was closely associated. In contrasting his own practice of culture against that of Norton's 'Puritan' type, James distances himself from that type's commitments to asceticism and moralizing, and also its lingering associations with radicalism, antislavery sentiment, and democracy.

Matthew Arnold and the Institutional Imagination of Liberalism

I first took up Matthew Arnold's essays as a dissertation writer circa 2008. Although I had not read much of Arnold's prose beyond the commonly anthologized pieces (“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” “The Study of Poetry,” bits of Culture and Anarchy), he was a figure very much out of favor, and I brought to the table a strong preconception of his polemic. Arnold, I had learned, was a kind of cultural nationalist trying to fight class divisions within Britain by prescribing a narrow canon of books that could shore up a common language for his compatriots. His main claim was that there was a singular tradition of great books called “culture” that embodied “the best that is known and thought in the world.” Everyone in Britain needed to keep reading these books if the nation were to retain a shared identity and not fall into chaos. Furthermore, as I understood it, Arnold thought that to experience culture you needed to remain “disinterested” and “aloof from what is called ‘the practical view of things’” (5:252). Arnold was a Victorian Mortimer Adler who sought to defend the authority of traditional literary canons as well as a Victorian Wimsatt-and-Beardsley who upheld disinterested close reading against hyperpolitical Theory.