A Village Tragedy by Margaret L. Woods (1889)

 The most distinctive thing about this is the voice of the author. Where a lot of female authors of this period conformed to various entrenched stereotypes - the wit, the romantic, and so on - Woods has a more forthright tenor. This story of a young woman 'rescued' by family in Oxfordshire from a grim London tenement after her father dies benefits from the author's unflinching directness. She seems to me to be typifiable as a midpoint between Hardy and Kipling, to use male exemplars (as there are far fewer female ones). More stripped out than Hardy, more fated and rural than Kipling. Annie soon realises that her uncle and aunt are not going to be an easy ride, though on the whole she's still happy. A growing feeling for one of the other workers on the farm, an ex-workhouse boy named Jesse, is what brings the climax. Despite complete innocence of all wrongdoing, she is seen entering his house alone and staying a good while. The proverbial ton of bricks descends. Turfed out, she is alone in the world, and lacking all resources. In the end, with the promise of marriage at some unspecified time, she is persuaded by Jesse to come and live with him. Her indignation at the unfair accusations of misconduct has been emphasized. So it is quite a strange move on Woods' part to silently drop this angle and have her suddenly get pregnant. This hoop jumped, we are party to the difficulties Annie and Jesse face in obtaining information about the legal necessaries for marriage and permission to start the process. But things look up, and the pregnancy continues healthily. Jesse returns on the train from going to buy the ring, and is crossing the line to return home when he is wiped out by an express. From this grim point it is only a matter of time until heartbroken and undermined Annie, having just given birth, and panicking about the baby being sent to the ever-threatening workhouse, wanders away from the house in a drastically weakened state and collapses to her death on the riverbank. There are moments when Woods' strong voice shrieks a little - descriptions of characters which are too jagged or oversimplified. But on the whole this is that dangerous thing, a promising beginning. 

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany (1999)

 Delany is at pains to point out, at certain points in this, that though his stated views could be interpreted as nostalgic, they are not so. What I'm about to say could have the same quality. I feel a great sense of loss in thinking about the social sciences academic world before the Second World War (approximately), from one particular point of view. It is that of language and its correlatives. It seemed a world which had a contribution to make which was discernible by a majority in society; that, though one did have to be relatively intelligent to take on its complexities, they were not unattainable, due to the fact of being couched in standard and lively language, albeit taken to a higher level. Because the decoding (such as it was) was in the way of the capacities of a good number of us, and the concepts likewise, change was possible because readers could be energized - via accessibility. This is a book with two sections, represented by the colours in the title. The beginning is the blue one, which is mainly a recounting of his life as a frequenter of the porn theaters of old Times Square, where gay men like Delany had pleasurable sex, even when the film being shown was a straight one. He decries the loss of this outlet, and initiates a discussion of some of the reasons why the "clean up" (and wholesale re-formation) of Times Square took place, many of which had publicised moral background which was overt, and much more nefarious economic background which remained hidden. He then expands upon this in the red one. This red one is the academic one in a formal sense, though some of its terms have already been introduced with the blue. The blue is quietly entertaining and its heart is in the right place, wanting not to have too much of a conservative-run schema for how people relate; understanding the value of sexuality as a connector between people, including people of differing backgrounds, and how that feeds into understandings that underpin democracy. So far so good. The red one is meant as an academic through-threading of the concepts begun in the blue, where they are given basis and proper argument. This is where my nostalgia-that-isn't comes in. We end up with sentences like this: "Like all social practices they make/generate/create/sediment discourses, even as discourses create, individuate, and inform with value the material and social objects that facilitate and form the institutions that both support and contour these practices". I'm not saying this is unintelligible at all - it can be decoded. I think I am saying it's decidedly unoptimal communication if you're looking for change. No-one's going to be thrilled and inspired. It is this that I decry about postwar academia - the dead language and its resulting lack of effect. There is also I think an inescapable conclusion which can be reached looking at this type of talk: we are witnessing a postwar voguing-club. Any given academic's capabilities in wielding this kind of language is what gets them status in the club. I guess I want academia to be part of us all again, rather than this exclusivized and possibly over-egotistic territory, because we see the value of not only expressing things in plain language, but of conceptualizing them that way too. After all, there's nothing inherent in this subject which requires this language or conceptualization, so why is it being employed? In other circumstances this kind of unnecessary obfuscation would be highly suspect, a red warning light would go on in our heads - what are they trying to hide? I'd better say this to be fair - I don't think Delany's trying to hide anything. He's just an exemplar of current academic malaise. He's very possibly just had to play "the game", as it is so often now typified in academic circles. And this typification and state of affairs has been building for over half a century. Some of its originators appear to be people whom Delany admires: Lacan, Foucault, Barthes and so on, where perhaps the motivating factor for obscurantism was quite cloudy and trickster-like, almost the wish to perpetrate a joke. If Delany has toed the line because he wanted to get on, we can hardly blame him - we've all done it at one point or another in our lives. And those things can become habitual and ingrained. He does give the impression that he's still thinking quite independently and with reforming fervour, if one pays attention, which is heartening. But I'd like to see the goalposts shifted on this one, so that he doesn't 'need' to depower and befog, and can convince.