Modern Culture

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.6 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 1999

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests debate the state of Modern Culture in the 20th century. Culture used to be a word we mocked, a concept too foreign for the stout empiricists of Britain, a species of foreign flummery. Now it is all around us. We have a ministry for it and a newspaper section boldly called Culture.Is contemporary culture evidence of a moral and aesthetic decline in our civilisation this century? Or does it show a society richer and more diverse than it has ever been?Will Self is one of the best known writers of his generation - celebrated as much for his erudite vocabulary as the shocking subject matter of some of his novels and short stories. Roger Scruton is one of the most celebrated philosophers of our age - known as much for his right -wing politics as for the passion with which he defends the past as a way of looking at the future. His latest book is An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, and he prefaces it by saying: “You don’t have to be familiar with the entire canon of western literature and full range of artistic masterpieces but you should have some familiarity with TS Eliot, Baudelaire, Mozart, Wagner, Monet, Poussin, Tennyson, Schoenberg, George Herbert, Goethe, Nietsche, and Marx.”With Will Self, writer and novelist; Roger Scruton, novelist, philosopher and Former Professor at Birkbeck College, London.

Transcript

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0:41.0	UK forward slash Radio4. I hope you enjoy the program
0:45.3	Hello in the week in which Charles Sache launches his new invention a school of contemporary British artists he calls the young
0:52.0	Eurotics and James Joyce's Ulysses has been voted this
0:55.8	century's classic novel in a national poll I'm joined by the philosopher
0:59.4	Roger Scrutin and the writer Will Self to debate the state of modern
1:02.4	culture in the 20th century.
1:04.7	Is contemporary culture evidence of a moral and aesthetic decline in our civilization this
1:08.7	century or does it show a society richer and more diverse than it's ever been.
1:13.8	Wilself is a writer whose ability to provoke, whether through his use of language or his drug-taking
1:18.6	past, has led him to being linked with the shock tactics of young Brits like his friend
	...

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