Late modernism : art, culture, and politics in Cold War America / Robert Genter.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Genter, Robert.

Series:

Arts and intellectual life in modern America.

The arts and intellectual life in modern America

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Modernism (Art)--United States.

Modernism (Art).

Arts, American--20th century.

Arts, American.

Arts and society--United States--History--20th century.

Arts and society.

Arts--Political aspects--United States--History--20th century.

Arts.

United States--Intellectual life--20th century.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (384 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In the thirty years after World War II, American intellectual and artistic life changed as dramatically as did the rest of society. Gone were the rebellious lions of modernism-Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky-and nearing exhaustion were those who took up their mantle as abstract expressionism gave way to pop art, and the barren formalism associated with the so-called high modernists wilted before the hothouse cultural brew of the 1960's. According to conventional thinking, it was around this time that postmodernism with its characteristic skepticism and relativism was born. In Late Modernism, historian Robert Genter remaps the landscape of American modernism in the early decades of the Cold War, tracing the combative debate among artists, writers, and intellectuals over the nature of the aesthetic form in an age of mass politics and mass culture. Dispensing with traditional narratives that present this moment as marking the exhaustion of modernism, Genter argues instead that the 1950's were the apogee of the movement, as American practitioners-abstract expressionists, Beat poets, formalist critics, color-field painters, and critical theorists, among others-debated the relationship between form and content, tradition and innovation, aesthetics and politics. In this compelling work of intellectual and cultural history Genter presents an invigorated tradition of late modernism, centered on the work of Kenneth Burke, Ralph Ellison, C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, Jasper Johns, Norman Brown, and James Baldwin, a tradition that overcame the conservative and reactionary politics of competing modernist practitioners and paved the way for the postmodern turn of the 1960's.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Introduction. A Genealogy of Postwar American Modernism

Part I. High Modernism in America Self and Society in the Early Cold War

Chapter One Science, Postmodernity, and the Rise of High Modernism

Chapter Two Reconsidering the Authoritarian Personality in America: The Sociological Challenge of David Riesman

Chapter Three Psychoanalysis and the Debate over the Democratic Personality: Norman Brown's Freudian Revisions

Part II. The Revolt of Romantic Modernism Beatniks, Action Painters, and Reichians

Chapter Four A Question of Character: The Dramaturgy of Erving Goffman and C. Wright Mills

Chapter Five Beyond Primitivism and the Fellahin: Receiving James Baldwin's Gift of Love

Chapter Six Masculinity, Spontaneity, and the Act: The Bodily Ego of Jasper Johns

Chapter Seven Rethinking the Feminine Within: The Cultural Politics of James Baldwin

Part III. The Challenge of Late Modernism

Chapter Eight Rhetoric and the Politics of Identification Writ Large: The Late Modernism of Kenneth Burke, C. Wright Mills, and Ralph Ellison

Conclusion The Legacy of Late Modernism

NOTES

INDEX

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781283890205

1283890208

9780812200072

0812200071

OCLC:

794700601