The Phonostate at the End of History: Language, Nation, and a Scheme for World Peace in Edwardian South Africa

This article tells the story of the eccentric and unknown writer Albert William Alderson (1880–1963), a British South African office clerk whose father had helped found the De Beers diamond mining corporation with Cecil Rhodes. Alderson, despite having no academic background, wrote two books and several pamphlets arguing that world peace could be achieved by eliminating all the languages in the world other than English; he buttressed this claim with an elaborate account of the causes of war taken from his reading in world history, but also with extraordinary statements on the relation of language to personal agency. Although Alderson's arguments cannot be taken seriously, they are illuminating as an example of “naïve” liberalism pushed to its limit; that is, as a case-study in heterodoxy comparable to Carlo Ginzburg's Menocchio. I conclude by suggesting that his work helped inspire one influential reader—C. K. Ogden, the founder of Basic English

Proust, Typical Novelist: Literary Context as Type

A decade ago Rita Felski argued that reliance on context shuts down a text's meaning by enclosing it in a restrictive historical “box” and alienating its individuality. This essay offers a rebuttal to Felski's critique, first by delineating the genealogy of her concerns in literary, philosophical, and architectural thought of the late nineteenth century, and second by exploring an alternative model of context as type, as revealed by a close reading of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust's novel repeatedly makes use of a notion of the type (a person, an artwork, a battle) that prioritizes the act of typifying, an act that does not sacrifice but discloses, or even constitutes, the individual. Like the Proustian type, context is best understood not as an alienation from, but as a route to, the particularity of the literary object

English architecture in 1963: A newly rediscovered view from Germany

This 'document' provides an English translation of an unpublished German typescript found in the archive of Julius Posener in the Akademie der Kunst, Berlin.1 Posener, a professor of architectural history at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HBK), travelled with a colleague and fifteen students to England for a fortnight in March 1963. They met several prominent architects, saw a wide selection of their current and recently completed works, and attended events at the Architectural Association school. The typescript is an account of the trip that he wrote up from notes in his diary on 29 March, two days after their return

Known Unknowns: Sir John Davies’ Nosce Teipsum in Conversation

This essay examines Sir John Davies’ long poem Nosce Teipsum in dialogue with an unpublished contemporary critique by the otherwise unknown Robert Chambers, written in the same verse form. Whereas Davies conveys a thoroughgoing ambivalence about the possibility of self-knowledge, an ambivalence rather obscured by his confident and polished iambic pentameter, Chambers explicitly and repetitively rejects that possibility. But whenever Chambers tries to engage with the details of Davies’ theological tenets—that every soul was created directly and individually by God, that man was made in the image of God, and that the soul exists entirely in every part of the body—he arrives at inarticulate and even nonsensical rival formulas. In other words, Chambers’ poem seems unwittingly to demonstrate his own argument that spiritual self-knowledge is impossible. I read these two poems together as a sort of parable about the potential value to readers of accidental inarticulacy, alongside the deliberate counterfeit sort of inarticulacy that we have long prized

John Taylor Retailored

The works of John Taylor the Water Poet (1578–1653) have in recent years been reappraised by scholars of early modern material culture for their expression of a working-class voice, for their inventive manipulation of the print market, and above all for their embodiment, in contrast to dominant Renaissance paradigms of literary worth, of a poetics of physical labour. In this article I revisit the figure of the tailor in Taylor’s defences of his own literary practice, showing that he cleaved to a simplistic distinction between originality and theft, identifying tailoring with the latter. I then examine three examples of his reworkings of previous poems—a micro-drama about the Thirty Years War, an anti-Papist dialogue, and an extended piece of nonsense verse—in an attempt to demonstrate that, despite Taylor’s critical assertions, they can after all best be thought of retailorings, neither properly original nor stolen. This category, however, is a modern one, and I conclude that we have no choice but to appreciate Taylor’s poems, or those of any other early modern writer, on our own terms