| 书目名称 | Re-reading B. S. Johnson | | 编辑 | Philip Tew (Professor of English and fellow of the | | 视频video | http://file.papertrans.cn/822/821786/821786.mp4 | | 图书封面 |  | | 描述 | Growing academic interest and the republication of B.S. Johnson‘s major works have been reinforced by Coe‘s award-winning biography Like A Fiery Elephant (2004). With a preface by Coe, this collection, co-edited by two leading Johnson scholars, offers an annotated bibliography, a chronology and readings of the author and his work. | | 出版日期 | Book 2007 | | 关键词 | bibliography; biography; chronology; coloniality; embryo; knowledge; literature; mind; modernism; novel; pedag | | 版次 | 1 | | doi | https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286122 | | isbn_softcover | 978-1-349-35736-9 | | isbn_ebook | 978-0-230-28612-2 | | copyright | Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2007 |
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Front Matter |
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Introduction: Re-reading B. S. Johnson |
Glyn White,Philip Tew |
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In 2006 writing about B. S. Johnson and his work is a much different matter to so doing a decade ago when both editors were first undertaking projects concerned with his oeuvre and life. At that point in time Johnson’s work was out of print in his home country. He remained a marginal figure, virtually forgotten, and only occasionally referred to by those writing about British literature of the 1960s and 70s, very much in passing, as a representative of ‘the experimental novel’. Since the publication of Jonathan Coe’s award-winning biography, . (2004), and the republication of the majority of Johnson’s novels by Picador, there is now a much greater awareness of both the author and his work and its significance. To memorialise a new era in critical interpretation of this intriguing author we entitle this present volume ..
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Chronology: Concerning Bryan Stanley Johnson |
Philip Tew |
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5th February: Bryan Stanley William Johnson born; he lives with both parents, Stanley and Emily, in Hammersmith until his first wartime evacuation with his mother.
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The (W)hole Affect: Creative Reading and Typographic Immersion in , |
David James |
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How, and why, readers behave in the ways they do towards the novel as a form prompted B. S. Johnson into some of his most resolute contentions about writing and response, creativity and cognition. Such contentions are brought instantly to the fore in his parodic attempt at writing his ‘memoirs’:
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Pentonville Modernism: Fate and Resentment in , |
Robert Bond |
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Commentators on B. S. Johnson’s semi-autobiographical 1964 novel . have returned repeatedly to Johnson’s investigation into the tension between lived urban experience and fictional constructions. Philip Tew, in . (2001: 21), notes that the competing claims of autobiographical ‘authenticity’ and fictional ‘artifice’ are raised most explicitly, and explosively, within the novel’s fourth section, ‘Disintegration’. Here the writer intrudes into the narrative in vivid vernacular, asserting ‘im my hero’ even while metafictionally ‘trying to say something about writing’..The fictive conversion of Bryan Johnson into Albert Albert is held up as a depersonalising veil; a mirage of ‘lies’ (167) which is soon rent, further on in ‘Disintegration’, by the inclusion of personal family details: ‘my parents used to live in Hammersmith but now live in Barnes’ (172).
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: Hypertext, Linearity and the Act of Reading |
Kaye Mitchell |
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On 20 February 1969, Panther Books (in association with Secker and Warburg) published B. S. Johnson’s new novel, .. This ‘book in a box’, as it would become known, featured twenty-seven individually bound and paginated chapters collected in a box, with only the first and last chapters identified as such; the intervening sections could thus be rearranged by the reader and read in any order they chose. Such formal experimentation was not unique—as several writers on Johnson, including Jonathan Coe, have acknowledged, the author was almost certainly aware of Marc Saporta’s entirely loose-leaved novel, . (translated from French into English in 1963)—nevertheless, the format of . has afforded it no little notoriety, acclaim and commentary over the years.
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‘From Embryo to Embryan’: ,—A Problematic Birth? |
Richard Leigh Harris |
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. is, and will probably always remain, something of a problematic book in a variety of different ways. First and foremost, it is known (when it is known at all) as B. S. Johnson’s last work, yet was intended as the first volume of a projected trilogy, which remained tantalisingly incomplete. The basis of the core material is itself fairly straightforward: events, both actual and imaginary in the lives of Johnson’s own parents in the years and months that lead up to his birth, and additionally the decay and death of both his mother and of his mother country, culminating in an eventual and hard won sense of regeneration and renewal. The authorial deployment of these events, however, is far from straightforward, while the manner in which Johnson chose to order and reveal his narrative (or non-linear narrative) is commendably courageous and personal in its attempts to progress beyond the merely chronological and sequential, the well-trodden path of convention.
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‘The Mind Has Fuses’: Detonating B. S. Johnson |
Carol Watts |
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The phrase ‘the mind has fuses’, which sparks the following reflection about the particular nature of B. S. Johnson’s writing, is taken from a moment in . (‘Then they had moved’: 5). Johnson is recalling his friend Tony Tillinghast, encountering the feeling of his loss, the sudden irruption of memories of his early death, triggered during a journey to Nottingham to report on a football match. ‘I fail to remember, the mind has fuses’, he writes, in a simple line, its own paragraph. This is a registering not simply of the inability to remember, but of a short-circuiting, as if the mind, faced with something traumatic, will blow, like a fuse box. That something in this particular incidence is a hazily recalled report of his friend’s distress at the fact that he would not live to see his son grow up, a source of pain that Johnson’s mind can’t bring near. And yet he will return to it again and again. If one of the qualities of Johnson’s writing is a sometimes irascible sense of impasse, of the discovery of sometimes incontrovertible limits, it would seem that it is always charged with this sense of affective overload, a fusing that might make the lights go out altogether: cutting throug
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In the Net: B. S. Johnson, the Biography and , |
Rod Mengham |
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The main focus of this essay is a close reading of ., conducted partly in response to Jonathan Coe’s biography, ., published in 2004. Coe’s text presents a combination of different kinds of information conveyed in different ways in its different sections. The first section consists of critical readings of all the novels, employing fairly traditional kinds of analysis and concentrating on plot summaries. Where the analysis goes beyond this modest scope is in relating Johnson’s statements of intent to the evolving narrative strategies of his seven novels. There are no systematic readings of the dominant imagery, or of the rhetorical structure, of the novels; nor should this be expected as a matter of course in biographical writing. What is somewhat odd is that Coe’s critical discussions of the novels do not avail themselves of much of the relevant biographical data that he assembles in the rest of the text; they use the biographical evidence much less than one can imagine other critics doing. From a certain angle, this can be seen as part of the overall plan. The large central section of the biography consists of quotations from Johnson’s texts and from interviews, all woven together
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Strange Intercessions: Contraventions of the Muse in the Writings of B. S. Johnson |
Gerard Barrett |
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About two-thirds of the way through B. S. Johnson’s first novel, . (1963), the protagonist, Henry Henry, finds himself in unwilling attendance at an orgiastic party in the Welsh country club where he has a summer job as a barman. As he instinctively recoils from the ‘debauch’ at the . Club, the narrator explains that Henry has no interest in casual sex:.Although Henry’s contempt for the revellers is lucidly delineated, there is something opaque about the way this scene develops, something the narrator neither comments on nor explains. Having inadvertently walked in on a couple having sex in his chalet, Henry retreats ‘in extreme disgust’ ? (172) to the prelapsarian space of an orchard until the offending couple have left. When he returns, he finds something that should, one would suppose, increase his rancour even further:
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Institutional Negotiations: B. S. Johnson and the BBC (1959-73) |
Valerie Butler |
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B. S. Johnson recognised the significant impact the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) could have on his literary career as a potential platform for his writing. During the 1950s and 60s it was a hugely influential cultural institution, maintaining its radio monopoly throughout, though it was forced to restructure its radio provision in 1967 (adding Radio 1 once the popular offshore pirate stations had been forced to close by Government legislation), and gaining a second television channel (BBC2 in 1967). The BBC’s institutional inclinations were, however, artistically and politically conservative and Johnson’s relationship with the Corporation was destined to be a volatile one.
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B. S. Johnson’s ‘Introduction’ to ,: The Memoir between Life and Literature |
Jared McGeough |
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Written in its final form six months before his suicide, B. S. Johnson’s ‘Introduction’ to his collection of short prose . is a composite; a manifesto and a memoir of his literary experimentation. It is a hybrid text in which Johnson attempts to compress his literary output into a single essay. Taut with desperation and a desire to be understood, it makes formal demands for an open-minded reading public and offers a methodological treatise. The very existence of this introduction complicates Johnson’s claim that he writes to ‘exorcise … the burden of having to bear some pain, the hurt of some experience: in order that it may be over there, in a book’ and not in his mind (. 19). I read Johnson’s memorial exorcism as a performative moment in which he undertakes an analysis of his own work, a radical movement, a turning over and turning back. Johnson uses the ‘Introduction’ in such a way that it ‘will not let us shelter in the interiority of a psycho-biographical approach’ (Rajan 2002: 172).
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‘An Evacuee for ever’: B. S. Johnson versus Ego Psychology |
Nick Hubble |
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Johnson edited . (1968), a collection of accounts of evacuation written by former wartime evacuees such as himself, following the completion of . (published 1969) in the Autumn of 1967. According to Jonathan Coe’s deservedly award-winning biography, . (2004), Johnson actually did much of the work during his two-month spell in Paris over the turn of 1967 into 1968 (246). As such it falls into the period between the writing of . and . (1971) and can usefully be considered as part of that transition in Johnson’s novels from the autobiographical into what Patricia Waugh has described in . (1995) as the ‘ostentatiously fantastic and darkly Jacobean’ (131). Indeed, we can already see some sort of transition within Johnson’s introduction to ., in the way that Johnson uses personal experience to legitimise a role as public spokesman. In . (1964), for example, Johnson chiefly articulates a private sense of melancholy, which in a rare moment of paternal intimacy is shared between Albert and his father: ‘Chelsea lose three—two after leading two—nil at one point. Satisfied with our dissatisfaction, I and my father and the crowd squirm away from Stamford Bridge’ (. 25). By ., this desire for di
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Exemplary B. S.: B. S. Johnson and the Toronto Research Group |
Bradley Buchanan |
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In . (1992), their manifesto-like study of experimental postmodern approaches to narrative, the Canadian writers bpNichol and Steve McCaffery (known collectively as ‘The Toronto Research Group’, TRG) discuss B. S. Johnson’s work at length. In fact, for the TRG’s purposes, Johnson was the pre-eminent experimental novelist of his age; they were fascinated by his disruption of conventional narrative sequence, his self-referentiality as a writer and his unorthodox use of textual space. In this paper I will trace what I see as Johnson’s influence on the TRG’s project and suggest that we can learn something about Johnson by applying some of the TRG’s insights to his texts, primarily . and .’.
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B. S. Johnson’s , and the Consequences of London |
Lawrence Phillips |
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The history of post-war London emphasises both the persisting fragments of destruction that would linger into the 1970s, and a largely triumphant reconstruction that would be both celebrated in newly reformulated locations like the South Bank, and rued with the rise of buildings fuelled by an unholy alliance between greedy property speculators and town planners desperate for a quick fix traffic or housing solution. Yet this combination of the Blitz and often ill-planned and illdesigned redevelopment fanned the gentle flames of a new fascination with London’s history particularly as represented in its architecture. The publication of John Summerson’s . in 1945 is an important landmark of this emerging consciousness charting what survived and what had been lost of one era of London’s fabric. Yet this interest was a class specific phenomenon:
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‘He Would be Working at the Welsh Books’: B. S. Johnson and the Two Literatures of Wales |
Nicholas Jones |
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In 1974, the Welsh nationalist poet Harri Webb described B. S. Johnson as ‘the only English . writer of any consequence’ (Webb 1998: 202), and lamented his suicide as a profound loss to both England and Wales. Although Johnson was born in London and was very much an English writer, the politics, culture and literature of Wales (in both of the nation’s languages) had a profound effect on his own writing, particularly in the years leading up to his death. In the long poem ‘.’, Johnson describes the results of this particular influence:.Inspired by what he saw as Welsh resistance to English colonial rule, Johnson’s Welsh experiences affected his later writing, a process seen in his poetry (most notably in ‘. and his translations from the Welsh language poet Gwenallt), and also in his prose, particularly in the novel ..
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