Ten Great Writers Seminar with Melvyn Bragg, Anthony Burgess, Malcolm Bradbury and others (1987)

In this lively round-table discussion, moderator Melvyn Bragg; the late writer and critic Anthony Burgess; Professor George Steiner, author of Language and Silence; literary critic Hermione Lee; and writer and series consultant Professor Malcolm Bradbury debate what constitutes modernist writing.
Check out our Patreon! / manufacturingintellect
»»﴿───► See more on the Authors Playlist: • Authors and Literature
This is part of the Ten Great Writers of the Modern World series:
Ten Great Writers Seminar: • Ten Great Writers Semi...
Franz Kafka: • Franz Kafka's "The Tri...
Fyodor Dostoevksy: • Video
Henrik Ibsen: • Henrik Ibsen: The Mast...
James Joyce: • James Joyce's "Ulysses...
Luigi Pirandello: • Luigi Pirandello: In S...
T.S. Eliot: • T.S. Eliot's "The Wast...
Joseph Conrad: • Joseph Conrad's "The S...
Virginia Woolf: • Virginia Woolf and Mrs...
Thomas Mann: • Thomas Mann's "The Mag...
New literary themes generated by the era’s political and social upheavals are also discussed, including time, the unconscious mind, alienation, the changing role of women, and the consequences of two world wars. In addition, the panel suggests that the atrocities of the post-modern world led writers to reject modernist narrative techniques and seek a new syntax and vocabulary.

[@ManufacturingIntellect]

See the description for the other parts in this series. Join us on Patreon! www.patreon.com/ManufacturingIntellect Donate Crypto! commerce.coinbase.com/checkout/868d67d2-1628-44a8-b8dc-8f9616d62259 Share this video!

[@nickstoli]

Thanks for the upload! Only downside, I thought I was well-read, but after watching this, I feel semi-literate..

[@litherskew]

Well Done uploading all the Modern World - Ten Great Writers videos. I have been looking for these on KZbin for at least 10 years after watching them when they were first aired on TV 32 years ago. BRAVO!

[@jwja]

Watched this on Canadian TV years ago and realize I have had many of Burgess's ripostes to Steiner rattling around my head all this time. Thank you for posting.

[@vidyakara]

Thanks for uploading. I saw this series when it was first broadcast. What a lineup for the discussion. I couldn't imagine such a programme on TV now. KZbin is a better option for encountering intelligent discussion. For example Iain McGilchrist..

[@brotherbuzz1070]

Christ, you wouldn't get anything this cerebral on British TV today!

[@adude9882]

They are all white and share a culture. That wouldn't be allowed now. Now it would be, 'Here's a list of reasons why your culture is evil and you should all be ashamed. And you must listen to me, an ousider, telling you. Don't interrupt.'

[@summess5567]

As you say - indeed not. Now it's under the Tory's thumb, the crusade to enfranchise the working class (and everyione else) has been abandoned. The Tories want us stupid.

[@sattarabus]

George Steiner and Hermione Lee lodge a little longer in your mind because of their ease and lucidity of presentation. I have more books in my library by the other two, but they speak from the shelf like established critics rather than interested conversationalists. Melvyn takes the cake, if not the whole bakery, for a very deft anchoring.

[@smartgenes1]

What did Hermione Lee say of note?

[@edmund184]

@@smartgenes1 I'll bet Bradbury's Creative Writing course was the most overblown waist of time. Did he understand the mecanics of writing, he just blurts out cultural platitudes. Ask him why great novels are great novels and how they were created.

[@edmund184]

incidentally Kafka and Lawrence were indifferent to the Great War.

[@danstewart8218]

Thanks so much for the upload. 👍

[@arieldovlindgren]

Inspiring! I'm going to study this rich discussion; so much to learn and hopefully, it'll result in better insight concerning "Modernism" from my point of view. The host, Melvyn Bragg does here a marvellous work. It's not an easy task to "organise" such a discussion as comprehensively as he does. Melvyn Bragg has the sensitivity and the knowledge and he knows how to balance these great participants so that they all can say what they want to say while he keeps it all in a firm hand.

[@coreyscott9590]

Absolutely. A wonderful slice of "modern" history here. I felt at times, though, it was the kind of intellectual sparring match that would have inspired a good Monty Python sketch.

[@brianmcguire8605]

Brilliant series. Thanks very much for sharing it with us. Love your channel.

[@vinm300]

17:20 Bradbury is explaining his interpretation of modernism, and using Dostoyevsky as an example, he then adds a progressive thread from Ibsen - the liberation of women. Seamlessly Melvyn jumps in with "Men will lose guilt" and everyone has a good laugh. This is all very enjoyable.

[@karaamundson3964]

One of the profoundest modern woman writers is Doris Lessing, whose first novel, The Grass Is Singing, shattered South African society. It was published in 1950 when the author was 31 and she never stopped breaking forms until she died a few years ago.

[@stevenalvin167]

Kara I pray to God to give you a lot of beautiful days, and I hope God bless you to have a great day today, i'm Steven from from Overbrook and where are you from ?

[@Mitch93]

South African society is definitely shattered, alright...

[@BALBIRSINGH-qf5ft]

Welcome to this program.

[@dexblue]

So interesting to hear intelligent people speaking out a page of two of a well-written essay....speaking!

[@lotemps3042]

" A book is eternally modern when censorship hunts it down."

[@FrancisF23]

Excellent upload, many thanks, and broadcast quality, too! Just one addition to the long list of subtitle corrections below: at 7:00, Burgess is quoting a fictional Joycean pun from Burgess's own work: "My craft is ebbing, I am YUNG and easily FREUDENED".

[@tianyinjia]

Thanks for that, good takedown

[@Omulosi]

Krafft-Ebbing - Burgess punning.

[@Omulosi]

Jung

[@jonharrison9222]

He was being modest, crediting it to Joyce.

[@kurisensei]

Great channel, Manufacturing Intellect

[@michaelboylan5308]

Maybe,,but the 2 words are meaningless, And why use a gerund

[@howardkussman881]

Thank you to the producers for packaging this high octane intellectualism so I may hear it. Barely understood a word - I might as well go back and read the Hardy Boys!

[@drivingmusic5923]

Excellent!

[@terrapinalive8686]

Thanks..A New Year great present

[@smartgenes1]

Burgess seems to say at 20:26 that this seminar was in 1988.

[@markwatkins8309]

Impressive opening from Malcolm Bradbury displaying high intellect indeed.

[@johnholmes912]

his novels are crap

[@nickwyatt9498]

The History Man? Crap? Really? I think not.

[@wgaule]

Oh shut up!

[@arthurfrancisd.murphy1643]

We have nothing comparable today.........sad to say.

[@abooswalehmosafeer173]

Whenever Malcolm speaks my attention gets anchored and I follow his train of thoughts smoothly.In the others my attention gets painfully zigzagged and wandered....

[@johnholmes912]

pretentious wankery to my ears

[@coreyscott9590]

He's a master at anchoring, isn't he?

[@nathanielgrant3909]

4:40 '...television hour'. We know that after this they all went to a tastefully expensive bistro to continue the wonderful discussuion.

[@doreekaplan2589]

Define "tastefully expensive ".

[@carstenschale6833]

Important!

[@Zarakendog]

Steiner is an absolute boss!

[@jD-P8g3s]

I've only just watched this. Amazing, isn't it?

[@vaclavmiller8032]

He's a complete fake. Every sweeping statement he makes falls apart with exposure to obvious counterexamples.

[@martydav9475]

@@vaclavmiller8032 Certainly his hair is fake. Even Burgess's renowned comb-over looks better. It's bittersweet seeing this now, knowing that Burgess is dead, Bradbury is dead ("A desolating day" as Andrew Motion put it on the day of Bradbury's death) and Lee - still so young and vibrant here - and Bragg now sound so frail.

[@jesuispeanut264]

what did you accomplish, vaclav miller?

[@jonharrison9222]

@@jesuispeanut264 Not being pretentious on television. Next.

[@Neuroneos]

I wonder why Steiner doesn't think highly of Woolf's work? It's very surprising to me. Also, haven't they forgotten french female writers? Yourcenar, Colette?

[@michaelboylan5308]

I think Steiner thought Woolf was overvalued by English critics because she was the ONLY English modernist writer,I agree with this,Compared with D,H, Lawrence her novels are not significant, I think the NZ Katherine Mansfield the Australian HH/Ethel Richardson the Irish Elizabeth Bowen,,,all contemporaries of Woolf,,were better writers than Woolf,As for Gertrude Stein being great,,,she tried to simplify English by leaving the words out,, she wrote babylanguage,I agree with you about Yourcenar,,not so sure about Colette, Maybe literary opinions are an argument without end,Why do you use a pseudonym I think it dishonest,Yourcenar did,,but she was Yourcenar

[@Neuroneos]

@@michaelboylan5308 I use a pseudonym because this is the internet, and the internet is full of malevolent creatures. Comparing authors seems to me completely fruitless. Steiner's claim is lapidary and unargumentative, and is unworthy of a professor of his qualiber...

[@lynnsmithershubbard1896]

@@michaelboylan5308 why are you not sire about Colette?

[@lynnsmithershubbard1896]

@@michaelboylan5308 typo---sure

[@alisonarmstrong8421]

TS Eliot became "more English than the English," V. Woolf quipped but she was right; he was an Engish modernist. So was Pound when he got into Europe and UK with Imagism; and Burgess is correct in saying that America never really became or understood Modernism--in fact was hostile to it, as I discovered (1980...) after 7 years in England and Europe.

[@reaganwiles_art]

As a side note to this commentary on modernism referring to women modernist authors, it is interesting to draw attention to the subjects whom TS Eliot supported by writing prefaces or four words or introductions to books. I think he said he only wrote three prefaces in his whole life. I happen to know that at least two of those were for books by women, Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, and the poems of Marianne Moore. And I know that he wrote a preface/intro (?) to Bubu of Montparnasse by Charles-Louis Philippe, a book about the Parisian prostitute and her pimp. All of these are great works of art.

[@arrystophanes7909]

Monumental shoulder-pads those, love. Or is that just where you keep your copies of Ulysses & Finnegans Wake ? Either way, I'm sure we're all suitably intimidated.

[@sreehari_nair_rediff]

The fallacy of George Steiner's theory is revealed in the following detail. These five eminent names are sitting in 1987 and making their pronouncements. In 1989, the Berlin Wall falls. Nobody in this quintet has anticipated the event, an event which, if you were to follow Steiner's thesis, should have given Orwell the top billing among the writers of the last century. My point is you don't judge writers' pedigree on the basis of their ability to be prophets. You judge it on the basis of how well they have been able to make people and things come alive on the page. Predicting history is ultimately a mug's game -- and Kafka himself didn't write his stories with an intention of "predicting the oncoming fascism" or something in that range. Kafka used to laugh loudly in his room while writing those tales of people being unknowingly cruel to one another.

[@jonharrison9222]

The Trial doesn’t take place in some concrete and piss hellhole either. The backdrop was Edwardian - cubby holes and bustles.

[@mrlondon1278]

If Steiner was right then wouldn’t Philip K Dick be considered greater than say Proust?

[@benedictcowell6547]

I am interested in the problem of trying to communicate the utmost horror of the Holocaust. I was interested in the reason which a lady gave for not able to persist in the rehearsals of St. Mathews Passion by Bachbecause she found the last section [The Crucifixion] because she found it too terrifying. As for great children's books, I would argue that one of the great accounts of experience of a child being seized by an ethical conscience (interesstingly when seized by love of a girl] is Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn' and Twain considered L.M. Montgomery's ' 'Anne of Greengables'. I am afraid this discussion an example of Intellectualism run riot, and self-conscious obsccurantism. I think it is a a chimera to seek 'Modernism' rather than the continuity of the great tradition extended to the contemporary situation and to Europe. I would mention Siegfried Lenz's 'Deutschestunde' as a great modern European Novel.

[@benedictcowell6547]

​@UCmoR8XFx_mi5wYXcZ1KXmsA ​An interesting stream of consciousness. Would it mean something, I might reply but it is jargon. In retrospect I might have mentioned Cesare Pavese and Camus. 'I falo et la luna,' La Peste' or Primo Levi ' Their meaning is not self consciously obscure and they retrieve language from the abys of Fascism, and the ideological turgidity of Russian Nationalism masquerading as Communism.

[@coreyscott9590]

This entire panel discussion is of a bygone era, isn't it? What a splendid showcase of British erudition... and name-dropping. Today, the panel would be entirely different. There would be mandatory racial-gender diversity through the "post-Modernist" victim-victor narrative agenda now gone global. It is interesting how American writers are only half-begrudgingly included near the end, and Hemingway's name is not even dropped until 48:45. As Burgess says so succinctly, "Hemingway was the one who put into readable practice what Gertrude Stein promulgated experimentally." While watching this, I also wondered how many of these utterances were made off-the-cuff, and how many rehearsed for TV, and why the concept of "stream-of-consciousness" was at no point brought up. Was that for lack of time, or was "stream-of-consciousness" less of a Modernist element than I had been led to believe?

[@martinmichalek]

How bizarre to hear Melvyn Bragg's voice and see him...young

[@brianmcguire8605]

Here is the missing Proust episode.: m.kzbin.info/www/bejne/hZmaeXxsrb2Gm7c

[@sibengerard1856]

NO TIME FOR SILENCE=NO TIME FOR THE NOVEL..

[@gregoryberrycone]

it was too early to say at the time this was written but id definitely argue gravitas rainbow has a place in the top 10 novels of the 20th century

[@lynnsmithershubbard1896]

thanks so much for acknowledging American writers' contribution--and no, it is not particular to European writers

[@stevenalvin167]

Lynn I pray to God to give you a lot of beautiful days, and I hope God bless you to have a great day today, i'm Steven from from Overbrook and where are you from ?

[@BertoniBertone]

Do you think ITV will have enough room in their enormously erudite and busy schedule these days to insert a programme like this between ‘I’m a Celebrity’ and ‘The Chase’ ? Somehow I doubt it, reflected in their stellar share price, of course🤔….

[@TomorrowWeLive]

It's really buggering my head how Melvyn looks so different but has exactly the same voice he has now

[@wgaule]

You'll get over it.

[@jonharrison9222]

Never realised Bradbury looked so like Harold Steptoe.

[@sibengerard1856]

41:00...he has said it/Tolstoy saw this towards in the end of his life.

[@stephensharp3033]

I think the subtitles say 'young' when 'Jung' might have been better.

[@QXZJX]

Love Melvyn

[@anuradhainamdar8967]

Scholarship at its best.

[@TheEleatic]

Expert textperts searching printed word.

[@okaytoletgo]

Panjandrum. But those brits turned it into a weapon's name. Jeez!

[@stephensharp3033]

Bradbury is correct to call Burgess an 'interpreter' rather than a writer.

[@mark000888]

British television used to be the best in the world, bar none. Now, it's just like American television, how sad and pathetic. And people describe this as 'progress', well I would much rather be alive then than now.

[@Dazbog373]

Steiner is a real fuddy duddy

[@Allen1029]

George Steiner was right about everything.

[@Althom1990]

Really? It seems everything he says is easily refuted by a quip from Burgess.

[@Allen1029]

@@Althom1990 Burgess was a great artist, to be sure. My favorite of his books is Earthly Powers. But I guess we’ll need to examine the quip in question to move the convo forward.

[@Allen1029]

@@Althom1990 I agree about the rose business.

[@jonharrison9222]

@@Allen1029 Burgess seems to have known better.

[@abooswalehmosafeer173]

Woman Child Ecology The frog in the well Only gazing at the sky at the top of the well

[@vladpewt5896]

Mann Huysmans Eliot Pound Burroughs Houellebecq Christie Pinter Beckett Sartre Conrad Musil Proust Joyce Nabokov Amiss the son Borges HP Lovecraft Crowley

[@vladpewt5896]

When you had proper intellectuals on TV. Steiner one of the craftyest the end of the history man ( he voted Conservative 1979) hysterical - the campus novel now totally dead. Really who could even discuss such a list today? Houellebecq and Dugin are the last two intellectuals in Europe throw in Zizek make up the numbers.

[@jonharrison9222]

Houellebecq is Camus minus charm, wit or warmth.

[@wgaule]

Bragg seems very dismissive of Burgess throughout

[@nickwyatt9498]

@wgaule : Bragg was actually a great admirer of Burgess’s work and had him on as a guest on his BBC Radio 4 show Start The Week pretty much every time Burgess had a new book out.

[@allisterwhitehead]

I wondered when the feminist perspective would rear its head....Female writers are every bit as commercial or well liked as their male counterpart, or rather their literature is. When Hermione Lee did 'her bit for women speech' I was reminded of James Baldwin's comment that (paraphrase) "white supremacy's greatest victory was in getting black men to believe all his problems are down to racism and state oppression. It is in that state of oppression that activists thrive and but all too often thus wish to remain.

[@jonharrison9222]

You have problems. Lee was also right about the modernists’ disturbing politics which John Carey took apart in The Intellectuals and the Masses.

[@furiosaningveryserious7104]

Great show but really dislike this Steiner. Don’t know what he is talking about !!! Jarring !!

[@pjom4191]

Yea. Kinda sounds like a pretentious teenager

[@tianyinjia]

You don't know what you are saying. Truly. He is a master expositor.

[@louduva9849]

Steiner insufferable as always.

[@tianyinjia]

I find his pronouncements unparalleled in their concision, precision and compression. Whether he is correct is another argument. Tone, delivery and conviction play an important part in any discussion. As a teacher, I admire him immensely. I know that sounds like he is merely a propagandist and marketing genius but he has thought deeply like few other critics. He has a right to sound insufferable if you cannot counter with a legitimate argument. Personal attacks are not valid criticism.

[@thumbprint7150]

Nine great male writers and one great female writer... Could do better.

[@TomorrowWeLive]

I don't know if women could, actually

[@performanceexchange4676]

Yes indeed and no Asian, African, North or South American writers. Eurocentric to the last!

[@glowmentor]

Hermione Lee is out of her depth. (edit: way way way out of her depth)

[@WinnipegTouristDept]

Just a woman

[@Oceanmachine27]

Doesn't seem like it to me. She pulls her weight just fine.