About

I am Paul Schloss. 

I use film and literature to explore historical and philosophical themes. I think of films and novels as controlled experiments where the individual confronts a society and its ruling ideas. 

My work has a kinship to the sociology of the arts, but with this difference: I am not interested in applying pre-packaged concepts to a book or movie. Instead, I look at how characters act in the particular circumstances of their creation. Literacy criticism, old-fashioned belles-lettres, the best means, I have found, for comprehending both ourselves and the humanities.

Herman Hoeneveld: Paris 1968

The 1960s is a crucial decade. Its ideas now dominate our life. The 1960s the time when radicals - I am thinking of the New Left - thought to return us to the traditional community. They had both failure and success. The Open Society has become pervasive; but its inhabitants increasingly think like villagers. To understand this decade we must grasp the generation that preceded it. A large slice of my literary and film criticism to understand the zeitgeist that created them.

Particular themes:

War Words: an investigation into the Second World War’s effect on the artist’s imagination; that radar picking up the changes to come. 

The Zone: Partly influenced by Elizabeth Bowen's depiction of London under the Blitz these pieces explore The Zone, a place of freedom, if we accept the risks, which are enormous.
Aesthetic Maladies: Artists: what an odd lot!

The Interviews

Academics are fascinating. In a collaboration with Alan Macfarlane I explore the strange and rich world of thinker and scholar.

I relaunched the site in 2018, changing the focus slightly: Serenity Science had become too elusive, thinking itself the member of a small exclusive club, when, alas, it is but a tiny tot in a vast playground.  

Contact

Outside the Castle on Substack