Breezy Whistles from the subway .sx By GEORGE WATSON .sx MOST HISTORIANS who deal with intellectual flirtations with the totalitarian idea concentrate on the inter-war years and the rival camps of Fascism and Communism , earnestly sorting out their camp-followers and fellow-travellers .sx John Hoyles of the University of Hull , who has been giving a course there on the matter , starts a lot further back , with Rosseau sic !sx and Dostoevsky ; and the last third of his book is dominated by Franz Kafka who ( like Lenin ) died in 1924 .sx He does not even mention Nazi sympathisers like Wyndham Lewis , which seems odd , or 1930s Marxists like Auden and Co , which seems odder .sx So perhaps the book is meant as a source-study , though much of the critical comment is post-war .sx An eccentric shape is matched by tone .sx Mr Hoyles casually calls himself a humanist and surrealist in his introduction , which suggests a sense of strain but apparently isn't meant to , adding engagingly that he pays " lip-service to critical Marxism " , though it remains unclear whether critical here means literary or sceptical ; and he plainly admires Adorno , Andr e Breton and Walter Benjamin a lot .sx Lip-service commonly implies hypocrisy , but something else must be meant since nobody accuses himself of that , and one is left wondering what it might be .sx Much of the book is likely to have been written before the death of Communism in 1989 , or it could hardly declare that Communism " embodies the birth-pangs of the new " .sx The mystery occasionally clarifies .sx At one point , for example , in a rare burst of conviction , he remarks that " the Greenham Common women have succeeded in dramatising the reality of American occupation of this island " , which situates the author firmly on the political map .sx Reality is a highly committal word .sx But it is only a passing phrase .sx For the rest , the book is whimsical , marked by a sort of bucket-and-spade intellectualism that makes one begin to guess what lip-service might mean .sx Where truth is despaired of , there is nothing left , as of the Cheshire Cat , but the grin .sx Jesting Pilate asked " What is truth ?sx " , and the tag might have been made for the book ; and one imagines that Hoyles , like Pilate , would not stay for an answer .sx There are few answers here , plenty of hypotheses .sx To be told that Kierkegaard " with eccentric and iconoclastic brio hypostases into absolutes the variables of the modern condition " is to be told nothing about Kierkegaard or the modern condition , even if one reads on .sx The sense of history , too , is slap-happy , though buoyed up with the hope that where carelessness is owed it may look like something else .sx There are " date-clusters" , for example , or happy coincidences of books and events , probably rather useful on a blackboard , and in general a light-handed way with detail .sx George Orwell did not call his most famous novel 1984 , for example , and Thomas Mann , who was not in Germany when the Nazis seized power , was not forced into exile :sx he chose not to return .sx But then research is neither the method nor the object of the book .sx To read the first date-cluster , which figures the Communist Manifesto of 1848 , Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races of five years later , and the death of Kierkegaard , one would never guess that Marx and Engels publicly advocated genocide - or that Gobineau , that monster of the Right , did not .sx This is a world of simple oppositions ; and though the book itself is not tidy , its assumptions are .sx Kafka broods over the book and decorates the dust-jacket .sx He never knew totalitarianism , but he had a bossy father and arguably prefigured the whole thing .sx There is a point to be made here :sx perhaps that he urged submission to bullying before the bullies marched in step or built their concentration-camps , since his opposition stopped short at writing an indictment of his father which he did not publish .sx But no coherent case is built here , though Kafka is rightly seen as heroic , in his grief if nothing else .sx It would be a rash historian , in any case , who claimed that his writings had any effect on the course of history .sx The book is altogether a pleasant pastime , and may mask more conviction than it shows .sx Its tone is at once knowing and bland , as if the author had seen , and seen through , a lot of profundities of which he is prepared to report only a little .sx Hence the whimsy .sx Strange that gulag and gas-chamber should inspire a tone of mild amusement and cosmic scepticism .sx But then it is the product of a department of literature , and literature can do that to people , if they let it .sx Hoyles has read a lot of books , and he will be a good critic if he can brace himself to ask whether the lip-service he still pays is still worth paying .sx From Hysteric to analyst .sx By CHRISTINA BRITZOLAKIS .sx SINCE Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963 , the history of her reception as a writer has been beset by the language of scandal and controversy .sx Robert Lowell's description of the posthumously published Ariel poems as " the autobiography of a fever " set the keynote for many febrile accounts of Plath's life and work as the symptoms of a self-destructive pathology .sx Madness and suicide became the telos and ultimate meaning of her career :sx on the one hand , she was positioned as the prototypical female subject of psychoanalysis , the hysteric who confesses her illness ; on the other , she became a literary martyr to the feminist cause , doomed victim of a culture in which genius was defined as a male cultural preserve .sx Jacqueline Rose's incisive and carefully researched critique of Plath's cultural afterlife starts from the bold assumption that " Plath is a fantasy " .sx In the " haunted " responses of biographers and critics , the poet becomes accountable for the spectre of female sexuality which her writing summons up .sx Pathologising critical discourse , whether celebratory or damning , projects fears about the decline of high culture on the image of a deathly femininity .sx Part of Rose's polemic is , however , reserved for feminist criticism , which has , she argues , too often tended to recapitulate the dualistic terms of this debate , reading women's writing either as a narrative of unified selfhood or as a hysterical outpouring of the body .sx The book's project is to avoid the pitfalls of these alternative extremes , using the psychoanalytic concept of " fantasy " to attend to the interface between the psychic and the historical .sx The terms of the debate are thus neatly reversed :sx Plath becomes the analyst , whose writing diagnoses the symptomatic discontents of criticism .sx In her most persuasive chapter , 'The Archive' , Rose provides a detailed and scrupulous mapping of the multiple ways in which the corpus of Plath's writings has been controlled and indeed censored by the Plath Estate .sx This is a timely assertion of " the diversity of interpretation " against the restrictions placed on it by Ted and Olwyn Hughes .sx Rose's target is not , however , the estate itself , but the self - defeating " logic of blame " at work in the editing of the papers , which attempts to legislate between the different and contradictory selves produced by the letters , diaries , novels , and poems .sx If the archive attempts to constitute a Sylvia Plath cleansed of anger , sexuality , left-wing politics and popular culture , Rose goes some way towards restoring these crucial texts of her life and work .sx In particular , she argues that Plath's long-standing ambition to be a writer of fiction for women's magazines , which has been censoriously relegated to the margins of her identity as a writer , should be recognised as central .sx This is a valuable insight , even if it seems something of an overstatement ; Rose tends to stress the " pleasure " derived from " low " forms of writing at the expense of the many guilty , ambivalent or contemptuous moments in Plath's writing .sx Rose's close readings of individual poems form the least successful part of the book's exposition .sx " Fantasy " is too capacious a paradigm to account for the specificity of a poem's address to its readers .sx The concluding analysis of 'Daddy' , for example , draws on a plethora of diverse contextual material , which , however fascinating in itself , tends to swallow up the poem .sx What is elided , in the fraught and circuitous route to the conclusion that Plath's poems " lay out a psychic economy of writing " , or illustrate " the uncertainty inherent to language and subjectivity " , is the intermediary level of literary history .sx None the less , the book more than fulfils its aims , opening up the direly impoverished debate on Sylvia Plath to the salutary air of critical theory .sx Young Artists in the marketplace .sx John Cornall .sx IN THE art world , August is the quiet season .sx In London , private galleries tend to stay open , but only to put on mixed exhibitions , of established and new 'on-trial' artists , showing small , modestly priced works aimed at the small domestic market and the passing buyer .sx In recent years , private galleries have also put on summer exhibitions of graduate and student art .sx Though often packaged as if they were award shows , these exhibitions serve the same commercial function as the mixed exhibitions .sx The dealers hope for a higher than average turnover of low priced works and they also have an eye out for promising new individual sellers .sx The fourth annual Northern Graduates at the New Academy Gallery until august 31 includes works by 26 graduates chosen from Midland and Northern art schools and polytechnics by Nairi Sahakian of the gallery and Paul Mason , head of sculpture at Staffs Poly .sx There are some memorable works including two intriguing diptychs by Cypriot painter , Paul Kouroussis decorative paper-works by Fernanda Santos .sx But mostly the works , jam-packed into a long room , are polite , sellable pieces ( cartoon cats , desktop post-modernism , landscapes with a frisson of modernist style) .sx The prices of the works in the New Academy range from pounds110 to pounds 2,000 .sx But though cheap , student art can also be big business .sx This year the New Academy and others had to pick from what Fresh Art had left behind .sx Fresh Art , earlier in the summer , was a huge exhibition of student work put forward from art colleges held at the Business Design Centre in Islington .sx Fresh Art was like a trade fair for student art .sx Leaflets and posters with the Fresh Art acid-house type flower logo were widely distributed .sx A steep entrance of pounds6 was charged and the organisers apparently took 50 per cent of all sales .sx Showing near the New Academy , there are also two more student exhibitions - less commercially biased than Fresh Art .sx These are the British Telecom New Contemporaries at the ICA , " a national showcase for the best of Britain's art students and recent graduates " , selected from over 1,200 entries , by two European museum curators , and an artist .sx Alistair Maclean ; and Into the Nineties , at the Mall Galleries , showing work from London's postgraduate colleges , the Slade , Chelsea , The RCA , Goldsmiths' and the Royal Academy schools .sx Like last year , the New Contemporaries contained much slick museum-sized internationalist art from the academy of conceptualism .sx Neat parodies and gags neatly packaged .sx Some of the work in the Mall Galleries , as might be expected from MA students , was very good , notably Julia Stovell's green and orange painting , 'Eyes I dare not meet in dreams' .sx Overall , the Northern and Midland graduates' work looks different next to the brashness and polish of the best publicised work from London colleges .sx At Goldsmith's , for example , students are encouraged to be street-wise - to avoid the bohemian manner of the 1970s and to present themselves and their work in a business-like way .sx Bernard Cohen , Slade professor , reflects anxiety about the market pull on young artists when , in the catalogue to the Nineties , he writes :sx " The educational policy of the Slade does not concern itself with the marketplace .sx Our students make Fine Art .sx " Clyde Hopkins , head of painting at Chelsea , makes a similar point , when he states that their course aims to develop " practical and technical abilities as well as professional awareness .sx " .sx But Cohen and Hopkins should also know that , post-art college , there is little or no supporting system ( meaning critics , galleries , curators , funding ) for serious progressive art based in traditional fine art values .sx