Dwight MacDonald and the Politics Circle

Dwight MacDonald and the Politics Circle PDF Author: Gregory D. Sumner
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801430206
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sumner finds the clearest expression of Macdonald's creative power and of the political thinking that would eventually bridge the "Old Left" and the "New".

Dwight MacDonald and the Politics Circle

Dwight MacDonald and the Politics Circle PDF Author: Gregory D. Sumner
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801430206
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sumner finds the clearest expression of Macdonald's creative power and of the political thinking that would eventually bridge the "Old Left" and the "New".

The Century's Midnight

The Century's Midnight PDF Author: Clive Bush
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9781906165253
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 612

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Century's Midnight is an exploration of the literary and political relationships between a number of ideologically sophisticated American and European writers during a mid-twentieth century dominated by the Second World War. Clive Bush offers an account of an intelligent and diverse community of people of good will, transcending national, ideological and cultural barriers. Although structured around five central figures - the novelist Victor Serge, the editors Dwight Macdonald and Dorothy Norman, the cultural critic Lewis Mumford and the poet Muriel Rukeyser - the book examines a wealth of European and American writers including Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Walter Benjamin, John Dos Passos, André Gide, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, George Orwell, Boris Pilniak, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ignacio Silone and Richard Wright. The book's central theme relates politics and literature to time and narrative. The author argues that knowledge of the writers of this period is of inestimable value in attempting to understand our contemporary world.

Masscult and Midcult

Masscult and Midcult PDF Author: Dwight Macdonald
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 159017447X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
A New York Review Books Original An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free. This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.

The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War

The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War PDF Author: Hugh Wilford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135294704
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shortly after it was founded in 1947, the CIA launched a secret effort to win the Cold War allegiance of the British left. Hugh Wilford traces the story of this campaign from its origins in Washington DC to its impact on Labour Party politicians, trade unionists, and Bloomsbury intellectuals

Discriminations

Discriminations PDF Author: Dwight Macdonald
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780670274376
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Get Book Here

Book Description


Intellectuals in Action

Intellectuals in Action PDF Author: Kevin Mattson
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271046709
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
Born in 1966‚ a generation removed from the counterculture‚ Kevin Mattson came of political age in the conservative Reagan era. In an effort to understand contemporary political ambivalence and the plight of radicalism today‚ Mattson looks back to the ideas that informed the protest‚ social movements‚ and activism of the 1960s. To accomplish its historical reconstruction‚ the book combines traditional intellectual biography—including thorough archival research—with social history to examine a group of intellectuals whose thinking was crucial in the formulation of New Left political theory. These include C. Wright Mills‚ the popular radical sociologist; Paul Goodman‚ a practicing Gestalt therapist and anarcho-pacifist; William Appleman Williams‚ the historian and famed critic of "American empire"; Arnold Kaufman‚ a "radical liberal" who deeply influenced the thinking of the SDS. The book discusses not only their ideas‚ but also their practices‚ from writing pamphlets and arranging television debates to forming left-leaning think tanks and organizing teach-ins protesting the Vietnam War. Mattson argues that it is this political engagement balanced with a commitment to truth-telling that is lacking in our own age of postmodern acquiescence. Challenging the standard interpretation of the New Left as inherently in conflict with liberalis‚ Mattson depicts their relationship as more complicated‚ pointing to possibilities for a radical liberalism today. Intellectual and social historians‚ as well as general readers either fascinated by the 1960s protest movements or actively seeking an alternative to our contemporary political malais‚ will embrace Mattson’s book and its promise to shed new light on a time period known for both its intriguing conflicts and its enduring consequences.

Visions of Progress

Visions of Progress PDF Author: Douglas Charles Rossinow
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812240498
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description
Rossinow revisits the period between the 1880s and the 1940s, when reformers and radicals worked together along a middle path between the revolutionary left and establishment liberalism. He takes the story up to the present, showing how the progressive connection was lost and explaining the consequences that followed.

The Unexamined Orwell

The Unexamined Orwell PDF Author: John Rodden
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292748973
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Get Book Here

Book Description
A reflection on Orwell-as-idea that “outlines some of the misconceptions and misuses of the Orwell name” (Modern Fiction Studies). The year 1984 is just a memory, but the catchwords of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four still routinely pepper public discussions of topics ranging from government surveillance and privacy invasion to language corruption and bureaucratese. Orwell’s work pervades the cultural imagination, while others of his literary generation are long forgotten. Exploring this astonishing afterlife has become the scholarly vocation of John Rodden, who is now the leading authority on the reception, impact, and reinvention of George Orwell—the man and writer—as well as of “Orwell” the cultural icon and historical talisman. In The Unexamined Orwell, Rodden delves into dimensions of Orwell’s life and legacy that have escaped the critical glare. He discusses how several leading American intellectuals have earned the title of Orwell’s “successor,” including Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Christopher Hitchens, and John Lukacs. He then turns to Germany and focuses on the role and relevance of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the now-defunct communist nation of East Germany. Rodden also addresses myths that have grown up around Orwell’s life, including his “more than half-legendary” encounter with Ernest Hemingway in liberated Paris in March 1945, and analyzes literary issues such as his utopian sensibility and his prose style. Finally, Rodden poses the endlessly debated question, “What would George Orwell do?” and speculates about how the prophet of Nineteen Eighty-Four would have reacted to world events. In so doing, Rodden shows how our responses to this question reveal much about our culture’s ongoing need to reappropriate “Orwell.”

The Politics of Authenticity

The Politics of Authenticity PDF Author: Douglas Charles Rossinow
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231110570
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the 1960s a left-wing movement emerged in the United States that not only crusaded against social and economic exploitation, but also confronted the problem of personal alienation in everyday life. These new radicals - young, white, raised in relative affluence - struggled for peace, equality and social justice. Their struggle was cultural as well as political, a search for meaning and authenticity that marked a new phase in the long history of American radicalism.

The Double Life of Paul De Man

The Double Life of Paul De Man PDF Author: Evelyn Barish
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0871406934
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 561

Get Book Here

Book Description
A landmark biography that reveals the secret past of one of the most influential academics of the twentieth century. Over thirty years after his death in 1983, Paul de Man, a hugely charismatic intellectual who created with deconstruction an ideology so pervasive that it threatened to topple the very foundations of literature, remains a haunting and still largely unexamined figure. Deeply influential, de Man and his theory-driven philosophy were so dominant that his passing received front-page coverage, suggesting that a cult hero, if not intellectual rock star, had met an untimely end. Yet in 1988, de Man's reputation was ruined when it was discovered that he had written an anti-Semitic article and worked for a collaborating Belgium newspaper during World War II. Who was he, really, and who had he been? No one knew. Still in shock, few of his followers wanted to find out. Once an admirer, although never a theorist, the biographer Evelyn Barish began her own investigation. Relying on years of original archival work and interviews with over two hundred of de Man's circle of friends and family, most of them now dead, Barish vividly re-creates this collaborationist world of occupied Belgian and France. Born in 1919 to a rich but tragically unstable family, Paul de Man, a golden boy, was influenced by his uncle Henri de Man, a socialist turned Nazi collaborator who became the de facto Belgian prime minister. By the early 1940s, Paul, while seemingly only a reviewer for Nazi newspapers, was secretly rising in far more important jobs in Belgium's and France’s collaborationist regimes. Postwar, barred from the university, de Man created a publishing house, but stole all its assets; then, facing jail, he fled to New York, abandoning his family (his opportunistic, anti-Semitic writing seemed the least of his crimes). Arriving penniless, he quickly rose again, befriending an entire generation of American writers in New York, including Dwight Macdonald, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Mary McCarthy. Barish sketches de Man's renowned careers at Bard and Yale, as well as the circumstances surrounding his loving—but bigamous—second marriage to former Bard student Patricia Kelley, who created the tranquillity he so lacked. Juxtaposing this personal story to his meteoric rise through American academia, Barish traces the origins of the philosophical deconstructionism that he later created with Jacques Derrida, showing how de Man attracted followers with his attack on the hypocrisy of society that attempts to cover up the "essential alienation" of art from "the system." While focusing on the biographical facts, this commanding and psychologically probing biography reveals as much about human behavior and the cross-currents of twentieth-century intellectual thought as it does about the man who held an entire generation in his thrall.