Aesthetic Vision Research Articles

Becoming-Samurai

Becoming-Samurai

The Making of a Japanese Avant‐Garde in Colonial Dairen, 1924–1937

AbstractIn this article, I discuss how the Manchurian port city of Dairen became a cultural center for Japanese avant‐garde literary and artistic production in the twenties and thirties. I examine the transnational flow of aesthetic and literary ideas between Tokyo and Dairen, and the economic and political factors enabling Japanese and Western avant‐garde movements to flourish in this peripheral outpost of the Japanese empire. Notably, Dairen was the cradle of the Japanese surrealist movement in poetry, and later, provided a venue for an active group of surrealist artists. Though distanced from Tokyo, the central cultural and political locus of a rapidly expanding Japanese empire, Dairen served as an important crossroads in northeast Asia for trade, culture, and political ideology. Born out of Russian and Japanese imperialism, the free port of Dairen and its cosmopolitan cultural environment supported the complex historical conditions prompting a multi‐faceted literary and aesthetic vision for the Japanese avant‐garde.

Aesthetic Imagination, Civic Imagination, and the Role of the Arts in Community Change and Development

Aesthetic Imagination, Civic Imagination, and the Role of the Arts in Community Change and Development

Twelfth Night (review)

Reviewed by: Twelfth Night John R. Ford Twelfth Night Presented by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival at the Octagon Stage, Montgomery, Alabama. March 12–July 23, 2006. Directed by Gavin Cameron Webb. Scenic Designer Bob Cothran. Dramaturg Susan Willis. Costume Designer Susan Branch. Scenic Painter Erin Brown. Lighting Designer Liz Lee. Composer Gregg Coffin. Sound Designer Jake Carter. Fight Choreographer Scot Mann. Voice and Dialect Coach Sarah Felder. Movement Coach Denise Gabriel. Stage Manager Sara Lee Howell. Production Assistant Michael Andrew Rodgers. Assistant Stage Manager Kimberly J. First. With Patrick Porter (Orsino), Anthony Reimer (Curio), John Michael Marrs (Valentine), Lauren Bloom (Viola), Chris Boyd (Sea Captain), Roger Forbes (Sir Toby Belch), Rebecca Koon (Maria), Duane Black (Sir Andrew Aguecheek), Joe Vincent (Feste), Merideth Kaye Clark (Olivia), Paul Hebron (Malvolio), Chris Boyd (Sir Topas, the Priest), Tim Gittings (Sebastian), Chris Mixon (Antonio), Mark Allan Jeter (Fabian), and others. The unifying concept of director Gavin Cameron-Webb's production of Twelfth Night at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival was one of excess. The term applied to every element—if that overworn word still serves—of the play, from the overwritten geography of Illryia itself to the high fantastical language of its inhabitants, to the self-conscious and willfully determined revelry, to the busy stage scenery that often impeded the unruly traffic of all that movement. As dramaturg Susan Willis commented in a pre-performance talk, even the number of lovers is excessive, far more than a happy ending requires or even tolerates. The setting, as well as the set, contributed to the climate of excess as well as to its limits. The extravagant Cavalier costumes of this production suggested the imminence of Puritan reform. The set also was richly detailed, its design somewhat insistently imposed on the intimate space of the Octagon Theater by scenic director Bob Cothran, working in the spirit of the aesthetic vision of sculptor Sergio Bustamante. Appropriate for a play so oddly conscious of time throughout its revelry, a large, ornamental clock-tower loomed above the playing space. One of two figures would emerge from that clock, its presence defining whether we were in Orsino's household or Olivia's. A woman holding a mirror signaled Olivia's house, while a man with crossed legs signaled Orsino's. Each symbol suggested a conventionally defined image—feminine vanity and Petrarchan unrequited desire—that the play itself would deconstruct with its variety of gender subversions. The stage itself consisted of two elevated mini-stages, accessed by a series of steps. The surface of each [End Page 77] was ornamented by a series of blue swirling shapes that, looked at one way, resembled the scalloped waves of the sea, but eyed in another, a fanned out peacock's tail. At the upstage boundary a stairway led up to multiple doorways. If the set emphasized the revelry of this play, it also suggested something of the wonder. No matter how riotous the action grew, we never lost an awareness of the presence of the sea or the unrelenting passage of time. When Orsino boldly announced that the capacity of his love "receiveth as the sea," those words were quite literally circumscribed by the iconography of a less rhetorical sea, whose tempests might or might not be kind. The rhythms of the sea also suggested the limiting and omnipresent awareness of time in the play. But time also announced itself musically. Amid all the raucous music of the reveling, one could hear the repeated chimes of the clock tower. We know, of course, that Illyria, surprisingly, has a clock, for Olivia tells Cesario/Viola that "the clock upbraids me with the waste of time." This production took that one reference to a clock and disseminated its chimes throughout the play. We heard them as Malvolio began to speculate on the benevolent powers of fortune. We heard the bells again as Sir Toby and Fabian turned the caterwauling up a notch, convincing Sir Andrew that he needed to awake his dormouse valor and challenge Cesario to a duel. The chimes occurred unexpectedly, of course. Especially given this production's Cavalier setting and costuming, the chimes had a way of reminding us of what was to come...

The Real Filth in American Psycho

The Real Filth in American Psycho

Shelley's Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision. Benjamin Colbert.Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime. Cian Duffy.Shelley and Vitality. Sharon Ruston.

<i>Shelley's Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision</i>. Benjamin Colbert.<i>Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime</i>. Cian Duffy.<i>Shelley and Vitality</i>. Sharon Ruston.

An Aesthetics of Movement: Baudelaire, Poetic Renewal, and the Invitation of Dance

In a letter written to Arsene Houssaye, which appears in its finished form as the liminal Lettre-Dedicace to his Petits Poemes en (1862), Charles Baudelaire speaks in the name of a poetics and of an aesthetics born of an increasingly mobile modernity. Specifically, he declares his dream of a prose which he describes in terms that draw attention to the mind's movement. He asks: Quel est celui de nous qui n'a pas, dans ses jours d'ambition, reve miracle d'une poetique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtee pour s'adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l'ame, aux ondulations de la reverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience? (146). (1) The attentive reader cannot help but notice the importance Baudelaire places on movement relative to poetic thought and prose. Moreover, he articulates movement through the vocabulary of dance. We notice, for example, that he describes consciousness as interlacing figures forming innombrables rapports, which suggest the ephemeral patterns a spectator would see emerging and dissolving on a ballroom floor. According to this vision, the reverie of the poet-spectator is punctuated by experiences of undulating movement and small, abrupt leaps or soubresauts. It is as if the poet were defining the contours of a modern poetics in which danced movement would play a central role. Indeed, his discussion of movement in the liminal Lettre-Dedicace amplifies this impression. To be sure, the Baudelairean motif of dance, expressed both figuratively and as rhythmic movement, recurs in a number of the poet's writings. We encounter it overtly in, for example, the verse poems Le Serpent qui danse and Harmonie du soir of Spleen et Ideal (1857), and in Danse macabre of the Tableaux parisiens (1859). Similarly, allusions to dance play a significant role in the essay Les Paradis Artificiels (1853), in the poem Le Thyrse (1863), and in several of Baudelaire's posthumously published Fusees. In each instance, the poet refers to dance both in relation to the experience of poetic thought and as a kind of embodied poetry. To apply Francisco Varela's definition of embodiment to the present analysis, it appears that Baudelaire seeks to enact a union between mind and body in the poem and through poetic use of danced rhythms and movement, as I shall show (Varela 27). Despite the recurrence of dance in his writings, Baudelaire's interest in this art form and his use of it as a source of poetic invention have received relatively little scholarly attention in recent years. In the following analysis, I shall examine Baudelaire's poetic engagement with dance in a selection of poetic and critical writings, in view of identifying its relationship to the poet's poetics and aesthetic vision. To frame my discussion, I propose to respond to the following questions: What role does dance play in Baudelaire's poetic and aesthetic writings and how do allusions to dance serve to articulate the poet's ideal of le miracle d'une poetique? Does the dance motif evolve in his poetry and is the rhythmic effect of dance-related imagery distinguishable from the often-remarked effect of bercement that Baudelaire cultivates in his poems? How do dance motifs correspond to Baudelairean notions of poetic thought and to experiential or embodied poetic reflection? And finally, what are the historical and cultural phenomena that may offer insight into Baudelaire's elaboration of the dance motif, both with respect to the emergence of the modern city and with respect to dance history? I shall turn first to the encroaching context of modernity and mobility in which Baudelaire was writing. Modern Mobility and Lyric Movement Without a doubt, Baudelaire lived during a time that bore witness to accelerated change. Moreover, this inveterate Parisian belonged to the urban landscape of Paris, whose residents experienced change, both physical and perceptual, in a concentrated way. …

The Sublime Spectatorship of War: The Erasure of the Event in America's Politics of Terror and Aesthetics of Violence

In order that the war which the United States is fighting in Iraq be presented as acceptable, successful and perhaps pleasurable to the American public, an aesthetic imagination that relies on the sublime has been mobilised. This sublime aesthetic of war, relayed by contemporary media and popular cultural forms (photo-journalism and television shows in particular), consists of producing spectacular, violent and shocking images of `others' in distress or harm's way in places where America's wars are being fought. The recent FX network programme Over There and some photo-journalistic displays of dead or tortured Iraqis in news magazines or commemorative volumes are examples of the logic of sublime spectatorship. An ideology of America at war is enabled through a visual experience that consists of forcing the spectator's imagination not only to go through unbearable and shocking images but also to transcend this initial painful experience by discovering beyond it readily available reasons and larger-than-life truths that can make sense of it all and justify those horrific scenes. The production of sublime spectatorship is indeed an ideological exercise. The sublime images examined in this article suggest that an ideology of American humanism as/in war is at stake. It is an ideology that postulates that only Americans (even if they are soldiers) are equipped to provide hope, morality and humanity to the Middle East (starting with Iraq). This article argues that the sublime image of war transforms the idea of what counts as an event today into a spectacle that requires understanding, acceptance and even enjoyment to be achieved by the audience, but only at the cost of going through the ordeal of the unpleasurable image and of finally adhering to a set of ideological beliefs. Yet, in a counter-ideological fashion, this article also concludes that a more resistant event or image today, one that might open up the political to new and unplanned critical and democratic possibilities, becomes visible too.

Benjamin Colbert's Shelley's Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision

Benjamin Colbert's <i>Shelley's Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision</i>

Aesthetics Awry: The Painter of Light™ and the Commodification of Artistic Values

Thomas Kinkade is America’s most commercially successful and wealthy artist, with an annual turnover in excess of $100 million. Many artists and art dealers are business focused; Kinkade may have just taken this commercial concern to its logical extreme by extending his lifestyle brand into galleries, real estate, and equities. Like brands, art circulates within commodity culture, largely outside the artist’s control once it leaves the studio. Yet management theory often clings to an appreciative, aesthetically elevated conception of aesthetics and art, combined with an essentialized, glamorized notion of The Artist, ignoring art’s historical role in selling pictures, celebrating power, and serving patrons. In this paper, I present a case study of aesthetics gone awry, as a warning about applying excessive aesthetics—or at least a romantic, historically uncontextualized vision of aesthetics—to management and marketing research, and to provide an important reminder of the intellectual risks of aestheticizing management: critical perspective often slips away, and aesthetics is once again elevated to a higher spiritual plane than commerce.

Policing and Performing Liberal Individuality in Anthony Trollope's The Warden

In this essay I argue that Anthony Trollope's The Warden (1855) anticipates and problematizes Trollope's oft-cited representativeness of the Victorian period generally, and Victorian liberalism in particular. As J&amp;#x9f;rgen Habermas has shown, Victorian liberalism should be construed less in terms of its promotion of pluralism than in terms of an"ambivalence" as to its practical implications. Correspondingly, The Warden offers a performative exemplification of Victorian liberalism that is instructive precisely because it paradoxically refuses definitively to represent it. The instruction I would draw from this paradox relates to the moral "pinch" that Septimus Harding, the novel's protagonist,feels as a result of his aspiration to "be right" as opposed to being "proved" right. This paradox disrupts the reader's reflexive inclination to read Harding's emancipation in traditionally Romantic terms. Just as Harding was "awoken" from the self-induced oblivion of a hegemonic morality, so too the reader is awoken from the self-induced oblivion of the disciplinary conventions of Victorian literary experience that D. A. Miller and David Lloyd critique. Thus the novel can be said to embody Victorian liberalism precisely to the extent that it illuminates the question of such embodiment as open, as a practical problem confronting and animating Victorian society. Hence Trollope makes Harding's imaginary cello-playing the medium or 'embodiment' of his"awakening": the pursuit of "right being" is a matter of "testing" the boundaries of political action and aesthetic imagination alike.

Horror and the Everyday in Post-Holocaust France

The recent proliferation of studies of French representations of the Holocaust, dominated by trauma studies and postmodern theory, has tended to privilege the survivor testimony of Robert Antelme (author of L'Espèce humaine), the critical work of Maurice Blanchot on the unnameable and a Levinassian ethics of the other. In this article I would like to focus on a different strand in post-Holocaust art and theory in France in which the significant imaginative thinker aiming to shape a new aesthetic vision is not Blanchot but Alain Resnais's collaborator on Nuit et brouillard, Jean Cayrol. Through an analysis of Resnais's film (1955), I will consider ways in which the interplay between everyday life and horror, and especially the role of objects in this process, are central to the emergence of a reshaped artistic vision in post-Holocaust France: in the words of Cayrol, an ‘art concentrationnaire … où l'invraisemblable et le naturel se confondraient’. I will then discuss the importance of an antifascist politics of representation at the heart of this artistic vision which subsequent treatments of the Holocaust have often effaced.

L'écriture et la vie : N. Scott Momaday et le texte stéréoscopique

This study examines N. Scott Momaday&#8217;s work from a formal angle. Without negating the typically native American ethnic background, it highlights the surface phenomena that shape the novels of Momaday: light, body, movement, sound, gaze..., and shows how the aesthetic vision is simultaneously an experience of life and its never-ending invention of the real, the complex transformation of chaos into harmony. Here the fiction of Momaday is considered as a compendium that celebrates the essential qualities of life. The reader is presented with an intricate pattern where aesthetics is in tune with an exacting sense of the spiritual, as Momaday&#8217;s poetics is informed by the spiritual belief in the efficiency of art.

Shelley's Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision (review)

Shelley's Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision (review)

Shelley's Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision

Contents: Introduction 'The sun rises over France': post-Napoleonic travellers' Europe 'Citizens of the world': dislocated vision in Alastor 'The raptures of travellers': writing Mont Blanc 'Relics of antiquity': Shelley's classical tour through Italy 'The emblem of Italy': two-fold vision in Prometheus Unbound 'Empire o'er the unborn world': Shelley's Hellas Bibliography Index.

HARD TIMES: PHILOSOPHY AND THE FUNDAMENTALIST IMAGINATION

Hard Times:Philosophy and the Fundamentalist Imagination Randall Everett Allsup "Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to the Facts!" So admonishes headmaster Gradgrind in the very beginning of Hard Times, Charles Dickens' prescient tale of education in the industrial world.1 Facts—"addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, settle everything somehow and never wonder"—Facts form the essence of Gradgrind's philosophy.2 A close reading of Gradgrind's opening monologue will provide the starting off point for an examination of the role and place of philosophy in the music curriculum. I am particularly intrigued by the question Reimer posed in his opening. He asked us to consider, Who is philosophy of music education for? We will return to this question at the close of this brief reflection. For the moment, however, I would like to continue on to the second paragraph of Hard Times, where Dickens does something very interesting. Following Gradgrind's inglorious monologue, he casts the scene of a small schoolroom, a "plain, bare, monotonous vault."3 Headmaster Gradgrind stands in front; he is described with a "square wall of a forehead," his mouth is "wide, thin, and hard set," his voice "inflexible and dry."4 His hair "bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside."5 A square wall of a forehead, a lumpy head like the crust of a plum pie: these words give us more than "hard Facts"—they are more than mere descriptors. It seems that Dickens, through metaphor, mood, dynamic contrast—through the aesthetic imagination—has imbedded a quiet rebuke to the bold commonsense of Facts. The Gradgrind philosophy finds easy parallel to current thinking in American education. In the fundamentalist imagination, sources of ambiguity must be rooted out—basic skills make adults out of reasoning animals. "Children should be tested on basic reading and math skills every year, between grades three and eight. Measuring is the only way to know whether all our children are learning—and I want to know, because I refuse to leave any child behind."6 The speaker, of course, is George W. Bush whose call to basic skills and episodic testing appeals [End Page 139] to our sense of reason. Like Gradgrind suggests, it is the principle on which we brought up our own children, and this is the principle on which we will bring up today's children. Such a philosophy of education proudly combines folk beliefs about teaching and learning with the hard science of thorough assessment. The President further recommends that our children "must also be educated in the values of our civil society. Some people think it's inappropriate to make moral judgments anymore. Not me. We must be willing to draw a clear line between right and wrong. Those clear lines must be supported by political leaders, public schools, and our public institutions. Educating our children about their moral and civil responsibilities will serve them—and the nation—every bit as well as the academic learning they require."7 In addition to discipline-based standards of knowledge, Facts (in this view) govern the rules of citizenship, provide moral clarity, and as we will see shortly, inform the aesthetic. It is worth noting that such a linear equation—those clear straight lines—currently places skeptics in the category of unpatriotic, miseducative, and morally corrupt.8 The fundamentalist philosophy of education is a governing philosophy—it is a philosophy for, not with, its initiates. Judgments are passed, not reached; answers are given, not argued. Teachers in this setting—whether willing accomplices or not—define what needs to be known and...

Shelley's Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision. Benjamin Colbert.

Previous articleNext article No AccessShelley's Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision. Benjamin Colbert.William A. UlmerWilliam A. Ulmer Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 36, Number 4Autumn 2005Review Issue Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24044261 Views: 2Total views on this site © 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The intersection of science and literature in Musil's The man without qualities

As the utopian projection of a world in which the conditional mood is preferred to the indicative, Robert Musil's ambitious novel The Man Without Qualities is widely recognized as a great example of aesthetic modernism and a profound reflection on the postmodern condition. Based on the new and more inclusive English translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike, this study provides the English-speaking reader with a well-researched commentary that situates Musil's novel in the cultural, literary, and scientific context of the early 20th century. Revealing the novel's many philosophical underpinnings, the study analyzes the intersection of theoretical reflection and aesthetic imagination essential to Musil's programmatic move beyond realism. Thomas Sebastian explores Musil's background in experimental psychology, which he studied under the pioneering psychologist Carl Stumpf, and how it and other strains of scientific thought, including that of Ernst Mach, on whose philosophical ideas Musil wrote his doctoral thesis, are reflected in his great novel.Thomas Sebastian is associate professor of German at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Masochistic Modernisms:A Reading of Eliot and Woolf

Masochistic Modernisms:A Reading of Eliot and Woolf Eve Sorum (bio) In Virginia Woolf's penultimate diary entry, made as German planes flew over London and as she began her final descent into illness, she proclaims, "No: I intend no introspection. [. . .] Observe perpetually. [. . .] Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope" (Diary V 357–58). In these words we see kernels of a modernist aesthetic—a sense of both resiliency and despair in the face of terrifying mental, social, and political events, and the determination to make some use of this situation through a creative act. By taking Gilles Deleuze's explanation of the formal nature of masochism one step further, I argue that this modernist aesthetic depends on a dynamics of suffering and compensation that can be described as masochism.1 I would like to forge a stronger connection between these two systems of ordering the world—literary aesthetics and masochism—by suggesting that attention to this surface link will reveal the ways in which a masochistic ordering through pain actually defines key modernist aesthetic philosophies. Looking through the lens of masochism, therefore, I propose a rereading of the work and aesthetic philosophies of two major modernists, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. I have chosen these two writers because they are viewed as canonical representatives of high modernism, and they both wrote a number of pieces that proclaim their aesthetic visions. Focusing on Eliot and Woolf also means that that I can probe the manifestation of a masochistic aesthetics in poetry and in fiction, as well as in their stylistically and tonally contrasting essays. Even when these writers examine a similar dynamic—for example, the relationship between reader and text, as we will see in Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and Woolf's "On Being Ill"—they formulate the interaction in tellingly different ways. Thus, pairing them allows for an exploration of the variations within a masochistic aesthetics. [End Page 25] My project involves a shift in critical focus: instead of thinking primarily about how modernist literature orders a chaotic world, I examine how Eliot and Woolf's aesthetic philosophies depend on this chaos. In other words, the suffering, pain, self-sacrifice, and disorientation are precisely what enable acts of literary creation, and the artist comes into being through exposure to such shattering experiences. Reading Eliot and Woolf through masochism, therefore, gives us a new way to conceive of a modernism that feeds off of suffering for its sense of meaning. The aesthetics of Eliot and Woolf are what I will call a masochistic aesthetics—a manifestation of a particularly modernist conception of the artist and her project, in which creativity and self-destruction are linked in inextricable and productive ways. Identifying the latent masochism in their works does not diminish our view of Eliot's and Woolf's novels and poems as brilliant aesthetic achievements; it does, however, redirect our attention to the simultaneous dependence on and rejection of the fissures, sacrifices, and gaps that produce these pieces of literature. The darker side of this inquiry, of course, revolves around the perhaps unanswerable question of whether suffering, however successfully it produces meaning and order, can ever be worthwhile. In the past decades, numerous critics of Eliot and Woolf have touched on the relationship between suffering, alienation, or loss and the writers' literary production. Maud Ellmann provides a thorough reading of Eliot's theory of impersonality as she explores how his poems "compose and decompose the self" (15). Roger Poole rereads Woolf's mental breakdowns through her novels in an attempt to understand the biographical through the literary, while Shirley Panken takes the opposite approach by examining the ways in which Woolf works through her emotional and psychological problems in her writing. Work done on trauma, mourning, and the Great War has opened up new ways of reading the writing of these modernists. Tammy Clewell argues that, in "her sustained effort to confront the legacy of the war, Woolf repeatedly sought not to heal wartime wounds, but to keep them open" (198), thereby initiating a discussion of the way that absence and loss figure as essential elements in Woolf's...

The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979

Anxiety and affluence have never been more prominent subjects of public conversation than at the present moment, but Daniel Horowitz's new book makes us realize that contemporary discourse has significantly inverted the terms of the mid-twentieth-century debate over consumer culture. Whereas Cold War critics would have argued about the threats posed by abundance, today's commentators are far more likely to itemize the threats posed to abundance. Anxieties of Affluence stops well short of the contemporary moment, to be sure, but it does retrace, lucidly and dispassionately, the book-by-book journey by which the nation's public intellectuals helped change the terms of debate about consumer culture from a moralist to a “post-moralist” (p. 3) frame of reference. Beginning with the rationed world of World War II, Horowitz finds a distinct moral and aesthetic vision of “curtailed consumption” (p. 20) emerging under the pen of Lewis Mumford, Reinhold Niebuhr, Philip Wylie, and numerous consumer activists. These critics regarded the wartime acceptance of deferred consumption as the pause that would refresh and regenerate a “secular religion” of “common sacrifice” (p. 37) in the bleak, exiguous postwar period. When those years turned out to be ones of Cold War—sponsored prosperity, and, further, when that prosperity came to be celebrated by émigré market intellectuals such as Ernest Dichter, George Katona, and Paul Lazarsfeld, the moralist vision of a “chastened consumption” (p. 20), became less Marxist and more Freudian, less utopian and more tragic, less like a blueprint and more like the blues.