The Unpossessed

The Unpossessed PDF Author: Tess Slesinger
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 159017545X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Tess Slesinger’s 1934 novel, The Unpossessed details the ins and outs and ups and downs of left-wing New York intellectual life and features a cast of litterateurs, layabouts, lotharios, academic activists, and fur-clad patrons of protest and the arts. This cutting comedy about hard times, bad jobs, lousy marriages, little magazines, high principles, and the morning after bears comparison with the best work of Dawn Powell and Mary McCarthy.

The Unpossessed

The Unpossessed PDF Author: Tess Slesinger
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 159017545X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Tess Slesinger’s 1934 novel, The Unpossessed details the ins and outs and ups and downs of left-wing New York intellectual life and features a cast of litterateurs, layabouts, lotharios, academic activists, and fur-clad patrons of protest and the arts. This cutting comedy about hard times, bad jobs, lousy marriages, little magazines, high principles, and the morning after bears comparison with the best work of Dawn Powell and Mary McCarthy.

The Unpossessed City

The Unpossessed City PDF Author: Jon Fasman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 144063856X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
A gripping novel about the dangers and draws of contemporary Russia--from the author of The Geographer's Library With The Geographer's Library, Jon Fasman made an "inventive and spirited" debut (The New Yorker) that landed him on The New York Times bestseller list. Every bit as dazzling, The Unpossessed City takes readers into the Wild East that is Russia today. There we meet Jim Vilatzer--an American expat whose Russian language skills land him a job interviewing former inmates of the Gulag and ensnare him in a web of deceit involving the CIA, Russia's Interior Ministry, and Central Asian arms dealers selling the most dangerous technologies to the highest bidder. From its brooding portrayal of Moscow to its riveting pace, The Unpossessed City is an atmospheric triumph in the tradition of Donna Leon's novels of Venice.

The Unpossessed

The Unpossessed PDF Author: Edward Hyams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description


Making Liberalism New

Making Liberalism New PDF Author: Ian Afflerbach
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142144092X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A revisionist history of American liberalism, from the Great Depression to the Cold War. Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by The Modernist Studies Association In Making Liberalism New, Ian Afflerbach traces the rise, revision, and fall of a modern liberalism in the United States, establishing this intellectual culture as distinct from classical predecessors as well as the neoliberalism that came to power by century's end. Drawing on a diverse archive that includes political philosophy, legal texts, studies of moral psychology, government propaganda, and presidential campaign materials, Afflerbach also delves into works by Tess Slesinger, Richard Wright, James Agee, John Dewey, Lionel Trilling, and Vladimir Nabokov. Throughout the book, he shows how a reciprocal pattern of influence between modernist literature and liberal intellectuals helped drive the remarkable writing and rewriting of this keyword in American political life. From the 1930s into the 1960s, Afflerbach writes, modern American fiction exposed and interrogated central concerns in liberal culture, such as corporate ownership, reproductive rights, color-blind law, the tragic limits of social documentary, and the dangerous allure of a heroic style in political leaders. In response, liberal intellectuals borrowed key values from modernist culture—irony, tragedy, style—to reimagine the meaning and ambitions of American liberalism. Drawing together political theory and literary history, Making Liberalism New argues that the rise of American liberal culture helped direct the priorities of modern literature. At the same time, it explains how the ironies of narrative form offer an ideal medium for readers to examine conceptual problems in liberal thought. These problems—from the abortion debate to the scope of executive power—remain an indelible feature of American politics.

The New York Intellectuals, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition

The New York Intellectuals, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition PDF Author: Alan M. Wald
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146963595X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 503

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Book Description
For a generation, Alan M. Wald's The New York Intellectuals has stood as the authoritative account of an often misunderstood chapter in the history of a celebrated tradition among literary radicals in the United States. His passionate investigation of over half a century of dissident Marxist thought, Jewish internationalism, fervent political activism, and the complex art of the literary imagination is enriched by more than one hundred personal interviews, unparalleled primary research, and critical interpretations of novels and short stories depicting the inner lives of committed writers and thinkers. Wald's commanding biographical portraits of rebel outsiders who mostly became insiders retains its resonance today and includes commentary on Max Eastman, Elliot Cohen, Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, Tess Slesinger, Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Hannah Arendt, and more. With a new preface by the author that tracks the rebounding influence of these intellectuals in the era of Occupy and Bernie Sanders, this anniversary edition shows that the trajectory and ideological ordeals of the New York intellectual Left still matters today.

Knowing Our Limits

Knowing Our Limits PDF Author: Nathan Ballantyne
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019084731X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Changing our minds isn't easy. Even when we recognize our views are disputed by intelligent and informed people, we rarely doubt our rightness. Why is this so? How can we become more open-minded, putting ourselves in a better position to tolerate conflict, advance collective inquiry, and learn from differing perspectives in a complex world? Nathan Ballantyne defends the indispensable role of epistemology in tackling these issues. For early modern philosophers, the point of reflecting on inquiry was to understand how our beliefs are often distorted by prejudice and self-interest, and to improve the foundations of human knowledge. Ballantyne seeks to recover and modernize this classical tradition by vigorously defending an interdisciplinary approach to epistemology, blending philosophical theorizing with insights from the social and cognitive sciences. Many of us need tools to help us think more circumspectly about our controversial views. Ballantyne develops a method for distinguishing between our reasonable and unreasonable opinions, in light of evidence about bias, information overload, and rival experts. This method guides us to greater intellectual openness--in the spirit of skeptics from Socrates to Montaigne to Bertrand Russell--making us more inclined to admit that sometimes we don't have the right answers. With vibrant prose and fascinating examples from science and history, Ballantyne shows how epistemology can help us know our limits.

The Church Monthly

The Church Monthly PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description


Write Like a Man

Write Like a Man PDF Author: Ronnie Grinberg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691193096
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
How virility and Jewishness became hallmarks of postwar New York’s combative intellectual scene In the years following World War II, the New York intellectuals became some of the most renowned critics and writers in the country. Although mostly male and Jewish, this prominent group also included women and non-Jews. Yet all of its members embraced a secular Jewish machismo that became a defining characteristic of the contemporary experience. Write like a Man examines how the New York intellectuals shared a uniquely American conception of Jewish masculinity that prized verbal confrontation, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation. Ronnie Grinberg paints illuminating portraits of figures such as Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, and Irving Howe. She describes how their construction of Jewish masculinity helped to propel the American Jew from outsider to insider even as they clashed over its meaning in a deeply anxious project of self-definition. Along the way, Grinberg sheds light on their fraught encounters with the most contentious issues and ideas of the day, from student radicalism and the civil rights movement to feminism, Freudianism, and neoconservatism. A spellbinding chronicle of mid-century America, Write like a Man shows how a combative and intellectually grounded vision of Jewish manhood contributed to the masculinization of intellectual life and shaped some of the most important political and cultural debates of the postwar era.

New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century

New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century PDF Author: Sabrina Fuchs Abrams
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271097027
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Seen as too smart, too sassy, too sexy, and too strident, female humorists have been resisted and overlooked. New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century corrects this tendency, focusing on the foremothers of women’s humor in modern America, who used satire, irony, and wit as indirect forms of social protest. This book focuses on the women who stood on the periphery of predominantly male New York intellectual circles in the twentieth century. Sabrina Fuchs Abrams argues that the advent of modernism, the women’s suffrage movement, the emergence of the New Woman and the New Negro Woman, and the growth of urban centers in the 1920s and ’30s gave rise to a new voice of women’s humor, one that was at once defiant and conflicted in defining female identity and the underlying assumptions about gender roles in American society. Her study gives special attention to the contributions of the satirists Edna St. Vincent Millay (pseudonym Nancy Boyd), Tess Slesinger, Dorothy Parker, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Dawn Powell, and Mary McCarthy. Grounded in theories of humor, feminist and critical race theory, and urban studies, this book will find an audience among scholars and students interested in women writers, feminist humor, modern American literature, and African American studies.

Labor and Desire

Labor and Desire PDF Author: Paula Rabinowitz
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807863955
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
This critical, historical, and theoretical study looks at a little-known group of novels written during the 1930s by women who were literary radicals. Arguing that class consciousness was figured through metaphors of gender, Paula Rabinowitz challenges the conventional wisdom that feminism as a discourse disappeared during the decade. She focuses on the ways in which sexuality and maternity reconstruct the "classic" proletarian novel to speak about both the working-class woman and the radical female intellectual. Two well-known novels bracket this study: Agnes Smedley's Daughters of Earth (1929) and Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps (1942). In all, Rabinowitz surveys more than forty novels of the period, many largely forgotten. Discussing these novels in the contexts of literary radicalism and of women's literary tradition, she reads them as both cultural history and cultural theory. Through a consideration of the novels as a genre, Rabinowitz is able to theorize about the interrelationship of class and gender in American culture. Rabinowitz shows that these novels, generally dismissed as marginal by scholars of the literary and political cultures of the 1930s, are in fact integral to the study of American fiction produced during the decade. Relying on recent feminist scholarship, she reformulates the history of literary radicalism to demonstrate the significance of these women writers and to provide a deeper understanding of their work for twentieth-century American cultural studies in general.