Encounter Magazine and the Twilight of Modernism

Abstract

Encounter , the English-language journal published by the nongovernmental Congress for Cultural Freedom in the Cold War, was a key element of the effort to persuade Western intellectuals on the non-Communist left to side with the "Free World" and against Communism. Encounter 's first editors, the English poet Stephen Spender and the American writer Irving Kristol, used modernist art and literature as evidence of the superiority and freedom of the West. In this, they helped modernism move from being a fringe movement to being the very establishment of the British and American cultural and literary scene, and erased modernism's radical or anti-bourgeois associations. In so doing, Encounter wrote modernism's obituary as a vital movement, turning it into a style or a set of formal techniques.