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Revolt into Style: Graham Greene Meets the Sex Pistols

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Neil Nehring
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Abstract

Some relatively obscure citations of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock that appear in a 1978 work by older bohemian cohorts of the Sex Pistols, the most prominent punk-rock band, help considerably in dissolving the conventional hierarchy of literature and mass culture. A decade earlier, these elders had learned the theory of textual appropriation espoused by the Situationist International, and their subversion of elitist evaluative standards has much in common with the original theorists of the avant-garde —especially Bakhtin and Benjamin—and, more recently, with the field of cultural studies, specifically British subcultural sociology. Thus out of one minor moment a longer, continuous avant-garde tradition can be reconstructed, consisting of artists and critics, including Greene himself, who have sought to challenge the formation of common sense in both “high culture” and the mass media. These anarchists share in particular a materialist orientation toward literary and mass texts—as well as toward the social outcomes that the affective qualities of those texts enable in everyday life, ultimately the most crucial arena of avant-garde activity.

Type
Cluster on Modern Fiction
Information
PMLA , Volume 106 , Issue 2 , March 1991 , pp. 222 - 237
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1991

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