Late Modernism : : Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America / / Robert Genter.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Penn Press eBook Package American History
• VerfasserIn: Genter, Robert,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2011]; ©2011
• Year of Publication: 2011
• Language: English
• Series: The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (384 p.)

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 1960s. 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 1950s 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 1960s.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- 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