Resident Aliens: R. S. Thomas and the Anti-Modern Movement
Publication Type |
Journal Article |
Year of Publication |
2001 |
Author |
|
Journal |
Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays |
Volume |
7 |
Pages |
50-77 |
Language |
English |
Keywords |
antisemitism |
Annotation |
Davies argues in this essay that if one wants to understand an individual living in the late nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century, one must consider him or her within the context of the tremendous changes occurring at that time. Many of the intellectuals and artists of this period faced with “the mechanization, industrialization, urbanization and the massification of society” came to take a defiantly anti-modern stance characterizing modernity as bent on destroying previous values and ways of living (p. 51). For many such thinkers Davies argues, such destruction constituted a crisis of meaning to which they responded with a “conservative reaction and mystical withdrawal’. It is thus necessary, he maintains to consider the life and work of any of these individuals in comparison to others living at the time. Davies thus goes on to compare the work of the Welsh writer and poet R. S. Thomas to that of Simone Weil, T.S. Eliot and Saunders Lewis all of whom he sees as sharing a distrust of, and opposition to the modern period. The two pages devoted to Weil briefly touch on her religious belief, her paradoxical anti-Jewish stance and most of all her critique of modernity in The Need for Roots. |