Christopher Caudwell

Christopher Caudwell (actually: Christopher St. John Sprigg, born October 20, 1907 in Putney in London, † February 12, 1937 in Jarama, Spain) was an English author and Marxist theorist.

Life

Born 1907 in Putney in London, he broke the age of sixteen, his school career at Benedictine School of Ealing from and worked three years as a reporter at the " Yorkshire Observer". According to the journalist in a provincial newspaper Caudwell entered a London publisher for aviation services, as an editor, but soon he became its director. Besides his work as an aeronautical engineer and editor of books and the magazine " Aircraft Engineer" he wrote seven crime novels, short stories and poems. In May 1935 appeared under the pseudonym " Caudwell " the novel " This my hand ."

Since the summer of 1935, Caudwell employed ( in Cornwall) in detail with the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin. In the same year he began in London, working on his book " Illusion and Reality - A Study of the Sources of Poetry" and joined the Communist Party.

After a trip to Paris and touch with the left " popular front movement " in France, he returned to London, revised " bourgeois illusion and reality " and began work on "The Crisis in the Physics". Caudwell was a disciplined writer who rushed to his working one minute; next he campaigned for the Communist Party.

After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he went to Spain and joined the British Battalion of the International Brigades on 11 December 1936. On February 12, 1937 Christopher Caudwell, died in the battle of Jarama.

Reception

Christopher Caudwell was a lifelong outsider who has not taken a significant role both in the English literary world as well as in the party hierarchy of the Communist Party. So he got after his death into oblivion. It was only in the fifties began the Communist Party, to discuss his positions.

In England and Germany the study of his writings is still rather marginal; in the U.S., but René Wellek and Peter Demetz referred to him as "the only serious heir Mehring and Plekhanov ." They " looked his attempt to" Marxism and Anthropology " to unite to a new theory of the origins of poetry, succeeded as absolute. " The most thorough study of Caudwell published Samuel Hynes.

The German composer Helmut Lachenmann wrote in 1977 his piece Salut für Caudwell, in the two guitarists, among others reciting a text from Caudwell.

Civil illusion and reality

The work " Civil illusion and reality " is an attempt, the emergence of poetry to interpret their rationale from the economic realities of the societies and their historical development of the field of view of a materialist aesthetics.

Theses

  • The life of the original tribes brings forth the poetry as a collective act of worship. Through the poetry of a world is imagined; a real object, a destination, e.g., the harvest, a fantastic object is:
  • Poetry ( resulting religion) and magic ( and resulting science ) arising out of the economic necessity of designing the environment and are also an expression of common social experiences.
  • With the increasing division of labor and the emergence of classes to separate a world of " workers " and the " enjoyer "; Art and religion are decoupled from the original social context and thus alienated.
  • The poetry is .. to a world of wishful thinking that loses its connection to the real change in social conditions
  • With the emergence of the bourgeoisie, the art is an expression of this class. Caudwell speaks of the bourgeoisie a revolutionary impetus to: " This class gradually came to rule, but their condition of existence is the ongoing revolution in the means of production, hence the relations of production and also the entire social relations. "
  • Capitalism caused the increasing confrontation between art and life; simultaneously unfold through the force of circumstances, the artistic expression of poetry. Caudwell provides a broad historical overview of the features of the bourgeois poetry with reference to their historical conditions from 1550 to 1930.
  • In Chapter X. " The dream-work of poetry " pulls Caudwell connections between dream and poetry. The poetry takes, like the dream, an emotional attitude to the world, but always reflected the social conditions of their emergence:
  • In the XII. Chapter " The Future of Poetry" recapitulates Caudwell his theses and represents the conditional by the class society increasing alienation and specialization of cultural expressions:
Order of Saint Benedict Vladimir Lenin Materialism Social alienation Communism Integrated Authority File
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