Why Leonard Bast Had To Be Killed

The misfortunes of the clerk Leonard Bast in E. M. Forster's Howards End have frequently been read as a symptom of modernism's disdain for the lower-middle classes and their aspirations for cultural education. But Howards End is better seen as an extended meditation on the relationship of art and labour, and a criticism of the aesthetic education that Bast receives from the wealthy Schlegel sisters. Using Jacques Rancière's idea that aesthetic form and social power alike distribute speaking and non-speaking roles, the article discerns in the foreclosure of Bast's life and experiences an educational and aesthetic failure which Forster's bourgeois narrator is too keen to reproduce. By offering the possibility of resisting its own narrator, Howards End opens up another form of modernist pedagogy which does not create the pupil in the image of the teacher

Aesthetics · Art · Bast fibre · Bourgeoisie · Criticism · Literature · Modernism (music · Political science · Sociology · Critical Theory and Political Philosophy · Law · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Theatre and Performance Studies