Author: Gregory D. Sumner Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 9780801430206 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 298
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".
Author: Dwight Macdonald Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi ISBN: 9781578065332 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 214
Book Description
A representative selection of interviews with one of the most acute observers of American politics, society, and culture in the twentieth century
Author: Clive Bush Publisher: Peter Lang ISBN: 9781906165253 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 612
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.
Author: J. Newsinger Publisher: Springer ISBN: 0333983602 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 189
Book Description
Orwell's Politics is a study of the development of George Orwell's political ideas and beliefs from his time as a policeman in Burma through to the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four . It places Orwell's thinking in historical context, examining his response to mass unemployment in 1930s Britain, to revolution in Spain, to the impact of the Second World War and its aftermath. Orwell remained both an anti-Stalinist and a socialist up until his death.
Author: Hugh Wilford Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135294704 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 345
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
Author: Ian Williams Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1349952540 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 181
Book Description
This book analyzes George Orwell’s politics and their reception across both sides of the Atlantic. It considers Orwell’s place in the politics of his native Britain and his reception in the USA, where he has had some of his most fervent emulators, exegetists, and detractors. Written by an ex “teenage Maoist” from Liverpool, UK, who now lives and writes in New York, the book points out how often the different strands of opinion derive from “ancestral” ideological struggles within the Communist/Trotskyist movement in the 30’s, and how these often overlook or indeed consciously ignore the indigenous British politics and sociology that did so much to influence Orwell’s political and literary development. It examines in the modern era what Orwell did in his–the seductions of simplistic and absolutist ideologies for some intellectuals, especially in their reactions to Orwell himself.
Author: Douglas Charles Rossinow Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 9780812240498 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 348
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.
Author: Kevin Mattson Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 9780271046709 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 324
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.
Author: John Rodden Publisher: University of Texas Press ISBN: 0292748973 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 416
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.”
Author: Evelyn Barish Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0871406934 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 561
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.
Author: Gregory D. Sumner
Author: Dwight Macdonald
Author: Clive Bush
Author: J. Newsinger
Author: Hugh Wilford
Author: Ian Williams
Author: Douglas Charles Rossinow
Author: Kevin Mattson
Author: John Rodden
Author: Evelyn Barish