English 3554E Lecture 28: Virginia Woolf Between The Acts - Part 2
8 Feb 2017
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: in its exploration of a historical pageant, the text works to defy fascism: rejects enlightenment, reason, and rigors of truth. This becomes a crucial dimension of fascism"s domestic and foreign policy: exploits people"s frustrations to help meet their own ends. Takes social and economic frustrations and exploits them: subversive plot against nation. Contradictory structure: mockery and shunning and silencing, followed by violent elimination, speaks newspeak (orwell 1984), culture should be nothing more than passive entertainment or sentimental, thinly veiled, propaganda. They don"t want to allow puzzlement, questioning, or confusion. Such thoughts are dismissed as elitist and made up by twisted feminized minds : history is reduced to a vague selective nostalgia. Promises the impossible, the restoration of the past. When it never happens, violence is used to distract the population from that fact: fascism is a patchwork of contradictory impulses, held together by valorisation of domination over people.
