Cold War Modernists

[ish mailian]

European intellectuals of the 1950s dismissed American culture as
nothing more than cowboy movies and the A-bomb. In response, American
cultural diplomats tried to show that the United States had something
to offer beyond military might and commercial exploitation. Through
literary magazines, traveling art exhibits, touring musical shows,
radio programs, book translations, and conferences, they deployed the
revolutionary aesthetics of modernism to prove—particularly to the
leftists whose Cold War loyalties they hoped to secure—that American
art and literature were aesthetically rich and culturally significant.

Yet by repurposing modernism, American diplomats and cultural
authorities turned the avant-garde into the establishment. They remade
the once revolutionary movement into a content-free collection of
artistic techniques and styles suitable for middlebrow consumption.
Cold War Modernistsdocuments how the CIA, the State Department, and
private cultural diplomats transformed modernist art and literature
into pro-Western propaganda during the first decade of the Cold War.

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/cold-war-modernists/9780231162302
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l