Recent Writings
Dollimore’s essay "On Leaving" (2011) is biographical, dealing with its author’s teenage years, his arrival at university, then his departure from that place later in his life, but it also includes a more abstract discussion of the modern university and its function in society. Dollimore discusses the modern professionalised academy, and argues that it promotes mediocrity: 'the professionally defended arts academic is only half alive'; 'professional success – the successful career – is one of the most compromised, complicit and corrupt kinds of success available today.' Dollimore claims that, even if it has always been true that 'you have to find your way through or around formal education in search for what really matters,' it is also true that 'ever before... has the project of creating value inside of, and against, educational institutions been so necessary.'
In "A Civilization and its Darkness" (2012) Dollimore examines Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, and explores the relationship between civilization and the forces that subvert and destroy it. Civilization, Dollimore writes, 'is, at some level, profoundly and necessarily limited, focused and exclusionary, built on repressions which remain constitutive.' The repressed forces, however, re-emerge intensified, which means that 'only the most highly civilized can become truly daemonic.' Dollimore also reiterates, from Sex, Literature and Censorship, his belief that 'to take art seriously is to recognize that it has the power to compromise both our morality and our humanity.'
Dollimore, in his extended "Foreword" to Ewan Fernie's book The Demonic (2012), discusses centrally the modern state of literary criticism. He dislikes the 'obscurantist' tendencies of a lot of so-called "theory," but he also deplores the fact that 'historicism in one newish form or another, has become a new orthodoxy.' The most committed historicism, Dollimore claims, 'tends towards a policing of the play against interpretation. It doesn't just avoid questions of value, but represses them; in other words it's a contextualizing which is also, and more fundamentally, a containment.'
A call for a new sort of spiritually intense living runs through Dollimore's recent writings. For example, in his "Foreword", he councils that 'authenticity is more often than not outside the doxa,' and states: 'almost everything that is done, including what we ourselves do, be it at the macro or the micro level, could and should be done more authentically, more honestly, more meaningfully, more truthfully.'
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