Bøger af John Hoyles

Here's a thing. How could John Donne, one of our greatest poets, be equally, and often simultaneously, obsessed with those two radical three-letter words and things, Sex and God? This book addresses the whole of Donne's life and works, from the early Songs and Sonnets to the late Sermons, in the form of a critical conversation, to tease out the relationship between Jack Donne, Monarch of Wit, and Dr Donne, Dean of St Pauls. Central to this study is a close analysis of the poet's Third Satire, Donne's formative essay on religion and doubt. Donne enjoyed the thrills and dangers of doubt. Caught between the categorical imperatives of Sex and God, he made creative use of the obscene and the blasphemous. Relativity and relationship (with the world, the flesh and the devil) were his themes. His visionary discourse is couched in the language of mad love. He interrogates us and pushes us to interrogate our world.

Sex-Pol = Freud plus Marx. This book is composed in the spirit of heretical paintings such as "Throwing Back the Apple" and "The Good News of Original Sin". It operates under the twin signs of Wilhelm Reich's Sex-Pol Essays and the scurrilous French cartoons in Charlie-Hebdo. You will find full length studies of Marvell, Rousseau, Lawrence and Bataille; substantial dossiers on Cinema, Censorship, Mysticism, Literary Theory, Anais Nin, Bakhtin and Mayakovsky; close attention to works as diverse as The Coy Mistress, The Cromwell Ode, Women in Love, Story of the Eye and The Piano Teacher; and as a bonus some sparkling reviews of Robbe-Grillet films by Malcolm Watson. Sex and politics meet in heady brew. Works of film and literature are subject to the scrutiny of Marxist, Formalist and Feminist approaches. It's all serious fun.

Literature as sizzle marks the spirit of this book. And handouts as pedagogic devices mark its form. In his life and work as a lecturer in English Literature at Hull University, John Hoyles used the handout as propaganda, student liberation, worker's control, against the formalism of Cleanth Brook's well-wrought urn, and against the managerialism of the questionnaire. John discovered the handout as a democratic tool with the arrival of a new English teacher at boarding school around 1953, with his dating and practical criticism classes, which he later found out were the products of a Leavisite mission to humanise the teaching of literature. This foundation was refined with the first actual lecture handouts issued by a Mr Broadbent on Milton in King's College Cambridge 1961. The sizzle lasted a lifetime, through John's first lectures on Dryden, through the Hull 1968 Sit In, through the Essex Marxist conferences, to the later development from teaching literature to teaching cinema. Let all the world in every corner sing - and sizzle.

It is not always easy to maintain a proper balance between the delineation of cultural development within a given literary field and the claims of practical criticism.

It has recently been argued that the 18th century can no longer be 1 seen as gripped in the strait-jacket of Augustanism and Neoclassicism. Such labels are seen as doing less than justice to the rich variety of individual talents and intellectual trends which collectively constitute 18th century culture.