Wandering lost: Searching for the end in Auden and Isherwood's 'Journey to a War'.

摘要

This dissertation offers a multifaceted reading of the final collaboration of W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. It shows their neglected Journey to a War to be a complex pivotal work, announcing turning points in the careers of Auden and Isherwood usually dated to their move to the United States; and registering turning points in twentieth-century political, social, literary, and ideological history. Situating Journey in the history of the 1930s, the argument shows that Journey turns away from Communism while attempting to establish a viable antifascist position. The argument presents Journey as a key moment in the definition of Auden's poetics and rhetoric, in his exploration of the problem of freedom, and in Isherwood's attentiveness to the political situation of modern homosexuals. Through its encounter with war-torn China, the book attains a critical perspective on the colonial world and a messianic perspective from within overwhelming geopolitical crises. Journey announces Auden and Isherwood's imminent religious reorientations.; Attentive to the book's poetic, political, sexual, and religious dimensions, this dissertation adopts critical approaches appropriate to Journey 's different aspects. It illuminates the text using archival and biographical material and the history of critical responses to the book, and uses the work of each author to gloss that of the other. The discussion examines the relationship of the authors' homosexuality to Journey's formal, moral, and political features and the book's implication in interdiscursive, ideological, and historical contexts. Close readings of crucial passages reveal complex interrelations of formal and thematic features. A recurrent focus is a series of pivotal passages problematizing the issues of endings and closure. Another concern is Journey's insistence on irony, reflexivity, and the figure of the mise en abyme. The discussion emphasizes the significance of the cultural and inter-civilizational encounter with China. Journey is revealed as an anticipation of subsequent ideological and political developments and as a late-modern, late-colonialist precursor of postmodern and postcolonial literary concerns.; Key words. Auden, Isherwood, 1930s, homosexuality, sonnets, communism, messianism, Sino-Japanese War.