Ten Great Writers Seminar with Melvyn Bragg, Anthony Burgess, Malcolm Bradbury and others (1987)

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  • Опубликовано: 22 ноя 2024

Комментарии • 126

  • @ManufacturingIntellect
    @ManufacturingIntellect  6 лет назад +7

    See the description for the other parts in this series.
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  • @panteliskaras2333
    @panteliskaras2333 27 дней назад +1

    24:42 probably Hermann Broch's "The spell" ("Die Verzauberung"), a novel Steiner regarded as one of the most important novels of the twentieth century (in his words "perhaps an even greater achievement than Thomas Mann's 'Doctor Faustus' ")

  • @nickstoli
    @nickstoli 4 года назад +39

    Thanks for the upload! Only downside, I thought I was well-read, but after watching this, I feel semi-literate..

    • @SMacCuUladh
      @SMacCuUladh Месяц назад

      It's in the nature of public intellectuals to make the rest of us feel this way, it elevates themselves. I would note how totally myopic they all are to the horrors of communism in the 20th century despite having read the most important works of the 19th century. It seems being well read is not a an antidote to stupidity.

  • @sattarabus
    @sattarabus 2 года назад +14

    George Steiner and Hermione Lee lodge a little longer in your mind because of their ease and lucidity of presentation. I have more books in my library by the other two, but they speak from the shelf like established critics rather than interested conversationalists. Melvyn takes the cake, if not the whole bakery, for a very deft anchoring.

    • @smartgenes1
      @smartgenes1 2 года назад

      What did Hermione Lee say of note?

    • @edmund184
      @edmund184 6 месяцев назад

      @@smartgenes1 I'll bet Bradbury's Creative Writing course was the most overblown waist of time. Did he understand the mecanics of writing, he just blurts out cultural platitudes. Ask him why great novels are great novels and how they were created.

    • @edmund184
      @edmund184 6 месяцев назад

      incidentally Kafka and Lawrence were indifferent to the Great War.

  • @arieldovlindgren
    @arieldovlindgren 3 года назад +9

    Inspiring! I'm going to study this rich discussion; so much to learn and hopefully, it'll result in better insight concerning "Modernism" from my point of view. The host, Melvyn Bragg does here a marvellous work. It's not an easy task to "organise" such a discussion as comprehensively as he does. Melvyn Bragg has the sensitivity and the knowledge and he knows how to balance these great participants so that they all can say what they want to say while he keeps it all in a firm hand.

    • @coreyscott9590
      @coreyscott9590 11 месяцев назад

      Absolutely. A wonderful slice of "modern" history here. I felt at times, though, it was the kind of intellectual sparring match that would have inspired a good Monty Python sketch.

  • @litherskew
    @litherskew 5 лет назад +11

    Well Done uploading all the Modern World - Ten Great Writers videos. I have been looking for these on RUclips for at least 10 years after watching them when they were first aired on TV 32 years ago. BRAVO!

  • @vidyakara
    @vidyakara 2 года назад +5

    Thanks for uploading. I saw this series when it was first broadcast. What a lineup for the discussion. I couldn't imagine such a programme on TV now. RUclips is a better option for encountering intelligent discussion. For example Iain McGilchrist..

  • @jwja
    @jwja 6 лет назад +9

    Watched this on Canadian TV years ago and realize I have had many of Burgess's ripostes to Steiner rattling around my head all this time. Thank you for posting.

  • @brotherbuzz1070
    @brotherbuzz1070 2 года назад +9

    Christ, you wouldn't get anything this cerebral on British TV today!

    • @adude9882
      @adude9882 5 месяцев назад

      They are all white and share a culture. That wouldn't be allowed now. Now it would be, 'Here's a list of reasons why your culture is evil and you should all be ashamed. And you must listen to me, an ousider, telling you. Don't interrupt.'

    • @summess5567
      @summess5567 5 месяцев назад

      As you say - indeed not.
      Now it's under the Tory's thumb, the crusade to enfranchise the working class (and everyione else) has been abandoned.
      The Tories want us stupid.

  • @danstewart8218
    @danstewart8218 7 месяцев назад +2

    Thanks so much for the upload. 👍

  • @vinm300
    @vinm300 3 года назад +4

    17:20 Bradbury is explaining his interpretation of modernism,
    and using Dostoyevsky as an example, he then adds a progressive thread from Ibsen - the liberation of women.
    Seamlessly Melvyn jumps in with "Men will lose guilt" and everyone has a good laugh.
    This is all very enjoyable.

  • @lotemps3042
    @lotemps3042 5 лет назад +18

    " A book is eternally modern when censorship hunts it down."

  • @karaamundson3964
    @karaamundson3964 2 года назад +12

    One of the profoundest modern woman writers is Doris Lessing, whose first novel, The Grass Is Singing, shattered South African society. It was published in 1950 when the author was 31 and she never stopped breaking forms until she died a few years ago.

    • @stevenalvin167
      @stevenalvin167 2 года назад

      Kara I pray to God to give you a lot of beautiful days, and I hope God bless you to have a great day today, i'm Steven from from Overbrook and where are you from ?

    • @Mitch93
      @Mitch93 Год назад

      South African society is definitely shattered, alright...

    • @HkFinn83
      @HkFinn83 2 месяца назад

      Shattered South African society so much it embarked upon one of the most brutally repressive racist regimes in modern history?
      Btw if this talk happened today, there’d be all sorts of inanity about minor female and ethnic writers and ‘bearing witness’. To be fair to somebody like Lessing she herself proclaimed this kind of thing as so much nonsense, to the annoyance of the feminists.

  • @coreyscott9590
    @coreyscott9590 11 месяцев назад +1

    This entire panel discussion is of a bygone era, isn't it? What a splendid showcase of British erudition... and name-dropping. Today, the panel would be entirely different. There would be mandatory racial-gender diversity through the "post-Modernist" victim-victor narrative agenda now gone global. It is interesting how American writers are only half-begrudgingly included near the end, and Hemingway's name is not even dropped until 48:45. As Burgess says so succinctly, "Hemingway was the one who put into readable practice what Gertrude Stein promulgated experimentally." While watching this, I also wondered how many of these utterances were made off-the-cuff, and how many rehearsed for TV, and why the concept of "stream-of-consciousness" was at no point brought up. Was that for lack of time, or was "stream-of-consciousness" less of a Modernist element than I had been led to believe?

  • @dexblue
    @dexblue 4 года назад +5

    So interesting to hear intelligent people speaking out a page of two of a well-written essay....speaking!

  • @brianmcguire8605
    @brianmcguire8605 4 года назад +4

    Brilliant series. Thanks very much for sharing it with us. Love your channel.

  • @howardkussman881
    @howardkussman881 2 года назад +1

    Thank you to the producers for packaging this high octane intellectualism so I may hear it. Barely understood a word - I might as well go back and read the Hardy Boys!

  • @FrancisF23
    @FrancisF23 5 лет назад +9

    Excellent upload, many thanks, and broadcast quality, too!
    Just one addition to the long list of subtitle corrections below: at 7:00, Burgess is quoting a fictional Joycean pun from Burgess's own work: "My craft is ebbing, I am YUNG and easily FREUDENED".

    • @tianyinjia
      @tianyinjia 2 года назад

      Thanks for that, good takedown

    • @Omulosi
      @Omulosi Год назад

      Krafft-Ebbing - Burgess punning.

    • @Omulosi
      @Omulosi Год назад

      Jung

    • @jonharrison9222
      @jonharrison9222 11 месяцев назад

      He was being modest, crediting it to Joyce.

  • @BALBIRSINGH-qf5ft
    @BALBIRSINGH-qf5ft 6 лет назад +1

    Welcome to this program.

  • @alisonarmstrong8421
    @alisonarmstrong8421 3 года назад +3

    TS Eliot became "more English than the English," V. Woolf quipped but she was right; he was an Engish modernist. So was Pound when he got into Europe and UK with Imagism; and Burgess is correct in saying that America never really became or understood Modernism--in fact was hostile to it, as I discovered (1980...) after 7 years in England and Europe.

  • @arthurfrancisd.murphy1643
    @arthurfrancisd.murphy1643 3 года назад +3

    We have nothing comparable today.........sad to say.

  • @nathanielgrant3909
    @nathanielgrant3909 4 года назад +3

    4:40 '...television hour'. We know that after this they all went to a tastefully expensive bistro to continue the wonderful discussuion.

  • @smartgenes1
    @smartgenes1 2 года назад

    Burgess seems to say at 20:26 that this seminar was in 1988.

  • @reaganwiles_art
    @reaganwiles_art 2 года назад

    As a side note to this commentary on modernism referring to women modernist authors, it is interesting to draw attention to the subjects whom TS Eliot supported by writing prefaces or four words or introductions to books. I think he said he only wrote three prefaces in his whole life. I happen to know that at least two of those were for books by women, Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, and the poems of Marianne Moore. And I know that he wrote a preface/intro (?) to Bubu of Montparnasse by Charles-Louis Philippe, a book about the Parisian prostitute and her pimp. All of these are great works of art.

  • @Zarakendog
    @Zarakendog 3 года назад +7

    Steiner is an absolute boss!

    • @jD-P8g3s
      @jD-P8g3s 3 года назад

      I've only just watched this. Amazing, isn't it?

    • @vaclavmiller8032
      @vaclavmiller8032 2 года назад +1

      He's a complete fake. Every sweeping statement he makes falls apart with exposure to obvious counterexamples.

    • @martydav9475
      @martydav9475 2 года назад +1

      @@vaclavmiller8032 Certainly his hair is fake. Even Burgess's renowned comb-over looks better. It's bittersweet seeing this now, knowing that Burgess is dead, Bradbury is dead ("A desolating day" as Andrew Motion put it on the day of Bradbury's death) and Lee - still so young and vibrant here - and Bragg now sound so frail.

    • @jesuispeanut264
      @jesuispeanut264 Год назад

      what did you accomplish, vaclav miller?

    • @jonharrison9222
      @jonharrison9222 11 месяцев назад

      @@jesuispeanut264
      Not being pretentious on television.
      Next.

  • @rayobrien1161
    @rayobrien1161 Месяц назад

    Seems to be some criticism of George Steiner here that I don't think is justified. Despite my initial preference for Bradbury, on going through it again (to try and get a grip on what they're saying) Steiner stands out for me - especially his thoughts on your typical novel reader's diminished capacity for appreciating novels in "contemporary" times (40:50 to 42:00 - I think it's a minute of prescient brilliance). His reflections were nearly 40 years ago and seem even more relevant now.
    *Edit* AND he disagrees with Melvyn's response (along the lines of something Bradbury said, who nods on enthusiastically) and, IMO, Steiner is right because he has the much more convincing argument that appreciation for Joyce has always been niche (on the scale of everyone who enjoys literature), and always will be. It's as true now as it was 40 years ago.
    Plus I added two new words to my list of "What was that word?" - Adumbrate and Panjandrum.
    Excellent. I'll go check out the episodes now.

  • @gregoryberrycone
    @gregoryberrycone Год назад

    it was too early to say at the time this was written but id definitely argue gravitas rainbow has a place in the top 10 novels of the 20th century

  • @abooswalehmosafeer173
    @abooswalehmosafeer173 4 года назад +2

    Whenever Malcolm speaks my attention gets anchored and I follow his train of thoughts smoothly.In the others my attention gets painfully zigzagged and wandered....

    • @johnholmes912
      @johnholmes912 4 года назад

      pretentious wankery to my ears

    • @coreyscott9590
      @coreyscott9590 11 месяцев назад

      He's a master at anchoring, isn't he?

  • @kurisensei
    @kurisensei 5 лет назад +2

    Great channel, Manufacturing Intellect

    • @michaelboylan5308
      @michaelboylan5308 5 лет назад

      Maybe,,but the 2 words are meaningless, And why use a gerund

  • @markwatkins8309
    @markwatkins8309 4 года назад +1

    Impressive opening from Malcolm Bradbury displaying high intellect indeed.

    • @johnholmes912
      @johnholmes912 4 года назад

      his novels are crap

    • @nickwyatt9498
      @nickwyatt9498 3 года назад +2

      The History Man? Crap? Really? I think not.

    • @wgaule
      @wgaule 3 года назад

      Oh shut up!

  • @arrystophanes7909
    @arrystophanes7909 Год назад

    Monumental shoulder-pads those, love. Or is that just where you keep your copies of Ulysses & Finnegans Wake ? Either way, I'm sure we're all suitably intimidated.

  • @benedictcowell6547
    @benedictcowell6547 2 года назад +1

    I am interested in the problem of trying to communicate the utmost horror of the Holocaust. I was interested in the reason which a lady gave for not able to persist in the rehearsals of St. Mathews Passion by Bachbecause she found the last section [The Crucifixion] because she found it too terrifying. As for great children's books, I would argue that one of the great accounts of experience of a child being seized by an ethical conscience (interesstingly when seized by love of a girl] is Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn' and Twain considered L.M. Montgomery's ' 'Anne of Greengables'. I am afraid this discussion an example of Intellectualism run riot, and self-conscious obsccurantism. I think it is a a chimera to seek 'Modernism' rather than the continuity of the great tradition extended to the contemporary situation and to Europe. I would mention Siegfried Lenz's 'Deutschestunde' as a great modern European Novel.

    • @benedictcowell6547
      @benedictcowell6547 2 года назад

      ​@UCmoR8XFx_mi5wYXcZ1KXmsA ​An interesting stream of consciousness. Would it mean something, I might reply but it is jargon. In retrospect I might have mentioned Cesare Pavese and Camus. 'I falo et la luna,' La Peste' or Primo Levi ' Their meaning is not self consciously obscure and they retrieve language from the abys of Fascism, and the ideological turgidity of Russian Nationalism masquerading as Communism.

  • @brianmcguire8605
    @brianmcguire8605 4 года назад +3

    Here is the missing Proust episode.:
    m.ruclips.net/video/Oh7HI6xXSeU/видео.html

  • @Neuroneos
    @Neuroneos 5 лет назад +5

    I wonder why Steiner doesn't think highly of Woolf's work? It's very surprising to me. Also, haven't they forgotten french female writers? Yourcenar, Colette?

    • @michaelboylan5308
      @michaelboylan5308 5 лет назад +1

      I think Steiner thought Woolf was overvalued by English critics because she was the ONLY English modernist writer,I agree with this,Compared with D,H, Lawrence her novels are not significant, I think the NZ Katherine Mansfield the Australian HH/Ethel Richardson the Irish Elizabeth Bowen,,,all contemporaries of Woolf,,were better writers than Woolf,As for Gertrude Stein being great,,,she tried to simplify English by leaving the words out,, she wrote babylanguage,I agree with you about Yourcenar,,not so sure about Colette, Maybe literary opinions are an argument without end,Why do you use a pseudonym I think it dishonest,Yourcenar did,,but she was Yourcenar

    • @Neuroneos
      @Neuroneos 5 лет назад +2

      @@michaelboylan5308 I use a pseudonym because this is the internet, and the internet is full of malevolent creatures.
      Comparing authors seems to me completely fruitless. Steiner's claim is lapidary and unargumentative, and is unworthy of a professor of his qualiber...

    • @lynnsmithershubbard1896
      @lynnsmithershubbard1896 4 года назад

      @@michaelboylan5308 why are you not sire about Colette?

    • @lynnsmithershubbard1896
      @lynnsmithershubbard1896 4 года назад

      @@michaelboylan5308 typo---sure

  • @lynnsmithershubbard1896
    @lynnsmithershubbard1896 4 года назад +2

    thanks so much for acknowledging American writers' contribution--and no, it is not particular to European writers

    • @stevenalvin167
      @stevenalvin167 2 года назад

      Lynn I pray to God to give you a lot of beautiful days, and I hope God bless you to have a great day today, i'm Steven from from Overbrook and where are you from ?

  • @BertoniBertone
    @BertoniBertone 11 месяцев назад

    Do you think ITV will have enough room in their enormously erudite and busy schedule these days to insert a programme like this between ‘I’m a Celebrity’ and ‘The Chase’ ? Somehow I doubt it, reflected in their stellar share price, of course🤔….

  • @sibengerard1856
    @sibengerard1856 5 лет назад +3

    NO TIME FOR SILENCE=NO TIME FOR THE NOVEL..

  • @drivingmusic5923
    @drivingmusic5923 4 года назад

    Excellent!

  • @martinmichalek
    @martinmichalek 3 года назад +4

    How bizarre to hear Melvyn Bragg's voice and see him...young

  • @terrapinalive8686
    @terrapinalive8686 5 лет назад

    Thanks..A New Year great present

  • @carstenschale6833
    @carstenschale6833 5 лет назад

    Important!

  • @mark000888
    @mark000888 Год назад +3

    British television used to be the best in the world, bar none. Now, it's just like American television, how sad and pathetic. And people describe this as 'progress', well I would much rather be alive then than now.

  • @sreehari_nair_rediff
    @sreehari_nair_rediff Год назад +11

    The fallacy of George Steiner's theory is revealed in the following detail. These five eminent names are sitting in 1987 and making their pronouncements. In 1989, the Berlin Wall falls. Nobody in this quintet has anticipated the event, an event which, if you were to follow Steiner's thesis, should have given Orwell the top billing among the writers of the last century. My point is you don't judge writers' pedigree on the basis of their ability to be prophets. You judge it on the basis of how well they have been able to make people and things come alive on the page. Predicting history is ultimately a mug's game -- and Kafka himself didn't write his stories with an intention of "predicting the oncoming fascism" or something in that range. Kafka used to laugh loudly in his room while writing those tales of people being unknowingly cruel to one another.

    • @jonharrison9222
      @jonharrison9222 11 месяцев назад +1

      The Trial doesn’t take place in some concrete and piss hellhole either. The backdrop was Edwardian - cubby holes and bustles.

    • @mrlondon1278
      @mrlondon1278 4 месяца назад

      If Steiner was right then wouldn’t Philip K Dick be considered greater than say Proust?

    • @HkFinn83
      @HkFinn83 2 месяца назад +1

      I think you’re deeply oversimplifying (to the point of misunderstanding) what he actually said. It sounds like you think he was saying an artists role is to predict politics. He certainly didn’t say that. What he said, correctly, is many of the modernists seemed quite unaware of what was happening around them - and to them - in terms of the profound changes in western culture in terms of loss of meaning in religion, the rise of sciences, in particular things like cognitive science, and social and cultural changes that were a part of the rise of things like the politically barbaric tendencies of the twentieth century. Many modernists are increasingly inward and (at worst) onanistic, but are written in a world that was profoundly different.

  • @stephensharp3033
    @stephensharp3033 8 месяцев назад

    I think the subtitles say 'young' when 'Jung' might have been better.

  • @QXZJX
    @QXZJX Год назад

    Love Melvyn

  • @sibengerard1856
    @sibengerard1856 4 года назад

    41:00...he has said it/Tolstoy saw this towards in the end of his life.

  • @jonharrison9222
    @jonharrison9222 11 месяцев назад

    Never realised Bradbury looked so like Harold Steptoe.

    • @dreamsbyte
      @dreamsbyte Месяц назад

      And you overlooked the character named Hermoine?

  • @anuradhainamdar8967
    @anuradhainamdar8967 2 года назад

    Scholarship at its best.

  • @stephensharp3033
    @stephensharp3033 8 месяцев назад

    Bradbury is correct to call Burgess an 'interpreter' rather than a writer.

  • @Allen1029
    @Allen1029 3 года назад +3

    George Steiner was right about everything.

    • @Althom1990
      @Althom1990 2 года назад +1

      Really? It seems everything he says is easily refuted by a quip from Burgess.

    • @Allen1029
      @Allen1029 2 года назад

      @@Althom1990 Burgess was a great artist, to be sure. My favorite of his books is Earthly Powers. But I guess we’ll need to examine the quip in question to move the convo forward.

    • @Allen1029
      @Allen1029 2 года назад

      @@Althom1990 I agree about the rose business.

    • @jonharrison9222
      @jonharrison9222 11 месяцев назад

      @@Allen1029
      Burgess seems to have known better.

  • @rogerpenfold117
    @rogerpenfold117 Месяц назад

    Broadcast this instead of Love Island and try and educate this thick society.

  • @TomorrowWeLive
    @TomorrowWeLive 3 года назад +4

    It's really buggering my head how Melvyn looks so different but has exactly the same voice he has now

    • @wgaule
      @wgaule 3 года назад

      You'll get over it.

  • @okaytoletgo
    @okaytoletgo 2 года назад

    Panjandrum. But those brits turned it into a weapon's name. Jeez!

  • @TheMakersRage
    @TheMakersRage 2 года назад

    Steiner is a real fuddy duddy

  • @TheEleatic
    @TheEleatic 5 лет назад

    Expert textperts searching printed word.

  • @abooswalehmosafeer173
    @abooswalehmosafeer173 4 года назад

    Woman Child Ecology
    The frog in the well
    Only gazing at the sky at the top of the well

  • @vladpewt5896
    @vladpewt5896 Год назад

    Mann
    Huysmans
    Eliot
    Pound
    Burroughs
    Houellebecq
    Christie
    Pinter
    Beckett
    Sartre
    Conrad
    Musil
    Proust
    Joyce
    Nabokov
    Amiss the son
    Borges
    HP Lovecraft
    Crowley

  • @wgaule
    @wgaule 3 года назад

    Bragg seems very dismissive of Burgess throughout

    • @nickwyatt9498
      @nickwyatt9498 10 месяцев назад

      @wgaule : Bragg was actually a great admirer of Burgess’s work and had him on as a guest on his BBC Radio 4 show Start The Week pretty much every time Burgess had a new book out.

  • @vladpewt5896
    @vladpewt5896 Год назад

    When you had proper intellectuals on TV. Steiner one of the craftyest the end of the history man ( he voted Conservative 1979) hysterical - the campus novel now totally dead. Really who could even discuss such a list today? Houellebecq and Dugin are the last two intellectuals in Europe throw in Zizek make up the numbers.

    • @jonharrison9222
      @jonharrison9222 11 месяцев назад

      Houellebecq is Camus minus charm, wit or warmth.

  • @louduva9849
    @louduva9849 4 года назад +4

    Steiner insufferable as always.

    • @tianyinjia
      @tianyinjia 2 года назад +1

      I find his pronouncements unparalleled in their concision, precision and compression. Whether he is correct is another argument. Tone, delivery and conviction play an important part in any discussion. As a teacher, I admire him immensely. I know that sounds like he is merely a propagandist and marketing genius but he has thought deeply like few other critics. He has a right to sound insufferable if you cannot counter with a legitimate argument. Personal attacks are not valid criticism.

  • @allisterwhitehead
    @allisterwhitehead Год назад

    I wondered when the feminist perspective would rear its head....Female writers are every bit as commercial or well liked as their male counterpart, or rather their literature is. When Hermione Lee did 'her bit for women speech' I was reminded of James Baldwin's comment that (paraphrase) "white supremacy's greatest victory was in getting black men to believe all his problems are down to racism and state oppression. It is in that state of oppression that activists thrive and but all too often thus wish to remain.

    • @jonharrison9222
      @jonharrison9222 11 месяцев назад

      You have problems.
      Lee was also right about the modernists’ disturbing politics which John Carey took apart in The Intellectuals and the Masses.

  • @thumbprint7150
    @thumbprint7150 4 года назад +3

    Nine great male writers and one great female writer... Could do better.

    • @TomorrowWeLive
      @TomorrowWeLive 3 года назад

      I don't know if women could, actually

    • @performanceexchange4676
      @performanceexchange4676 2 года назад +1

      Yes indeed and no Asian, African, North or South American writers. Eurocentric to the last!

  • @furiosaningveryserious7104
    @furiosaningveryserious7104 4 года назад

    Great show but really dislike this Steiner. Don’t know what he is talking about !!!
    Jarring !!

    • @pjom4191
      @pjom4191 3 года назад

      Yea. Kinda sounds like a pretentious teenager

    • @tianyinjia
      @tianyinjia 2 года назад +2

      You don't know what you are saying. Truly. He is a master expositor.

  • @glowmentor
    @glowmentor 2 года назад

    Hermione Lee is out of her depth. (edit: way way way out of her depth)