Cold War Modernists

[ish mailian]

Literary Modernism and Beyond
The Extended Vision and the Realms of the Text
by Richard Lehan
Early modernists turned to theories of consciousness and aestheticism
to combat what they saw as the hostility of naturalism and to find new
ways of thinking about reality. This consciousness took various forms,
including a Jamesian sense of moral ambiguity, Proustian time spots,
and B ergsonian intuition, but the Nietzschean theory that reality
depends on perception connected them all. This modernist movement
reached a distinguished level of achievement with novelists Thomas
Mann, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, but a succession of
counterinfluences transformed it after World War II, when elitism and
a desire for a homogeneous culture gave way to diversity and elements
of mass culture. In Literary Modernism and Beyond, Richard Lehan
tracks the evolution of the movement from its emergence in the late
nineteenth century to its recent incarnations.

http://lsupress.org/books/detail/literary-modernism-and-beyond/

On Sun, Feb 7, 2016 at 9:32 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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