![]() The novel was immediately and widely received as a ‘ Brave New World for our brave new world’, a warning as ‘important for us now as Nineteen Eighty-Four’ was then. It uses a third-person narrator, deadpan, detailed, detached, to tell a story of the dismantling of privacy and consequently of individuality, autonomy and freedom, in a dystopia of the near future. footnote 4 It has none of the narrative energy and ironic joie de vivre of the memoir for which Eggers first became widely known, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). footnote 3 Here I want to consider not a political manifestation of the return of ‘the masses’ but a sister ‘allegory of crowd control’, one in literature where the returning figure is that of a specifically modernist mass, Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle, from 2013. Such a resurgence should have its heaviest contemporary investment in the field of politics, in reactions to what is posited as the undoing of thought, of fact and reflection in the perceived populisms that succeeded the financial crisis of 2007–08. Today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is possible to see a resurgence of the older, non-quantitative languages of anxiety about and scorn for ‘the masses’, a return to the tone and conceptual dichotomies, if not the vocabulary, marking out again the ‘ mob and idiot multitude’ from the individuality they simultaneously lack and threaten. blur the boundaries between the two where modernism’s great wall once kept the barbarians out and safeguarded the culture within, there is now only slippery ground which may prove fertile for some and treacherous for others.’ footnote 2 footnote 1 Over a decade later, Andreas Huyssen argued that the era of a consciously high-cultural modernism defining itself against ‘mass culture’ was over, shifted into the past by a complex array of political and cultural practices, not the least of which was postmodernism’s appetite for the forms and genres of popular culture: ‘The uses high art makes of certain forms of mass culture. Raymond Williams noted that whilst ‘in the right circles and in protected situations, the mob and idiot multitude tones’ could still be heard, usage had by and large moved away from ‘the older simplicities of contempt’ to the ‘sense of a very large number’. B y the mid-1970s, it appeared, the predominant usage of the terms ‘mass’ and ‘masses’ had shifted to largely quantitative meanings. ![]()
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