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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 185 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 185, April 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
If the two replies to my article are anything to go by, I must have written a fairly incomprehensible article on Disney (December SR). To Howard Medwell (February SR) I would say this: I wasn’t suggesting Disney was ‘progressive’ – it’s not a word I use – nor was I suggesting that Disney films are ‘opposed to middle class culture’. I was saying, as John Parrington (March SR) pointed out, that Disney dabbles in contradictory material.
I did not claim that Alice in Wonderland et al. ‘represent a uniform political and cultural entity’. I was trying to point out that within the continuity of the British middle class (economically and institutionally undeniable) these children’s books are ‘liberal’ and, in their own way, subversive and self-mocking. I described Alice as a ‘pre-suffragette’ and said that Rabbit and Owl in Winnie the Pooh are ‘parodies of self-important middle class adults’.
I was talking about Disney and English children’s literary classics in the same breath not because it was me who was ‘counterposing’ them (Parrington) but because I was looking at the way that these two cultural types are used and opposed by critics. Of course I think that both types are ‘contradictory’. It was the superior, anti-American tone of the liberal intelligentsia towards Disney that I was having a go at. But then I am happy to concede that writing an article that is really ‘criticism of criticism’ is a bit of a naff thing to do.
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Michael Rosen |
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