Alan Sinfield

Alan Sinfield is convenor of the English MA programme ‘Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change’ at Sussex University. Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-War Britain was published in 1989.

Letter

Handling the straightgeist

20 October 1994

I am grateful to Richard Rorty for his principled good sense on ‘multiculturalism’ (LRB, 20 October), but would nonetheless offer two reasons why cultivating a distinctive subculture is a worthwhile move for subordinated groups – as opposed, for instance, to seeking a ‘share in the mythic America imagined by the Founders’.First, subculture is good for morale. Considered as a model for the...
Letter

Marriage of Souls

22 July 1993

E.E. Duncan-Jones’s thoughts on same-sex love in Donne’s poem ‘The Anniversarie’ (Letters, 7 October) find some confirmation in an essay published last year in Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England, edited by Claude Summers (Harrington Park Press). George Klawitter draws attention to the verse epistles written in 1592-4, perhaps six years before ‘The Anniversarie’, between...
Letter

Nationalising English

28 January 1993

Thanks for Patrick Parrinder’s valuable contextualising of the education debate (LRB, 28 January). May I attempt one crucial re-focusing? The Government hopes to gain support by pretending that the issue is whether or not school students will gain a worthwhile appreciation of Shakespeare. We all know – don’t we? – that most students will fail to attain that. And they will be seen as failing,...
Letter

Old Literature and its Enemies

25 April 1991

Claude Rawson’s response to Alvin Kernan’s proposition that ‘the old literature is stone dead’ (LRB, 25 April) seems paradoxical: he denies that it is true, and asserts that literature is being killed off by Stanley Fish and a Marxist-feminist-multiculturalist ‘thought police’. Professor Rawson conflates diverse matters.We should distinguish ‘literature’ as a. a body of texts and b....
Letter

Bardbiz

22 February 1990

What was Anthony Pratt’s bland and confused mockery for (Letters, 7 February)? He says I have been looking for an enemy, as if it was wrong of me to write objecting to, and attempting to correct, James Wood’s unprovoked misrepresentations of cultural materialists. I had thought that just the kind of thing the letters page of an intellectual paper is for. And why do the same misconceptions keep...

Pieces about Alan Sinfield in the LRB

It’s Only Fashion

James Davidson, 24 November 1994

The newspapers covering the trial in 1895 found it difficult to put the hideous words into print. Most hoped that those who needed to know would know enough already. Others assumed that a lacuna...

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Differences

Frank Kermode, 22 October 1992

Anti-semitism is so disgusting a disease that timid laypersons might prefer to leave its pathology to the experts, but it is pandemic and they cannot wash their hands of it. Sander Gilman’s...

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Shakespeares

David Norbrook, 18 July 1985

‘Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman’s constitution.’ Henry Crawford’s comment in Mansfield Park is a reminder that...

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