
Contents
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I. Good and Bad Stupidity I. Good and Bad Stupidity
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II. Intellectual Imbeciles II. Intellectual Imbeciles
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III. This Parrot House of Stupid Chatter III. This Parrot House of Stupid Chatter
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IV. Shakespeare and Stratford’s Village Idiot IV. Shakespeare and Stratford’s Village Idiot
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V. Too Simple to Be Interesting V. Too Simple to Be Interesting
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VI. A Small Caste of Experts VI. A Small Caste of Experts
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VII. Too Much Interested in Beauty VII. Too Much Interested in Beauty
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VIII. One Clever Man and Two Idiots VIII. One Clever Man and Two Idiots
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IX. Hierarchy of Idiocies IX. Hierarchy of Idiocies
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1 Hierarchies of Idiocy: Stupidity and Intelligence
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Published:July 2023
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Abstract
This chapter considers how hereditary and intellectual forms of aristocracy become associated with stupidity in the inter-war fiction of D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. These authors satirize what they see as the intellectual vacancy of the rich and titled and the vaunted expertise of the modern expert. They satirize each other in the process. But they also resist the idealization of stupidity in romantic and post-romantic poetry and philosophy. Dissolving some of the expected distinctions between rich and poor, high and low, stupid and intelligent, Lawrence and Huxley work in their distinctive ways against entrenched notions of social and intellectual hierarchy. Consequently, the chapter argues, these writers unravel some of the hierarchical thinking with which they are often identified in modernist studies.
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