Cold War Modernism Research Articles

Trilling Redux

Abstract This short essay considers the cultural and historical context of Lionel Trilling’s unfinished, unpublished novel in response to Michael Kalisch’s essay for this issue. Written in the 1940s, The Journey Abandoned (editor’s title) reprises Trilling’s preoccupations in The Liberal Imagination with anti-Stalinist liberalism and Cold War modernism and emphasizes the importance of American literature to Trilling at the beginning of his career as both a critic and a novelist. Trilling championed those writers—and created fictional characters—whose thinking affirmed and resisted the status quo. The dynamism of dialectical thinking that enlivened his essays also echoed the pluralist model of consensus liberalism, in which multitude conflicts were in continual negotiation. In concluding, the essay suggests that the unfinished novel, perpetually open to interpretation, is an apt tribute to Trilling’s signature mode of thought.Ambitious and having to make his way professionally (he had just become an assistant professor in 1939), Trilling saw American literature as a vehicle of upward mobility for himself, just as it was for Vincent.

When Literary Politics Mattered to Geopolitics

This essay-review examines new books about the roles that American writers played in twentieth-century foreign policy debates, cultural diplomacy, and political advocacy, both in the lead-up to World War II and in the early years of the Cold War. The books under consideration are Ichiro Takayoshi’s American Writers and the Approach of World War II, 1935–1941 , and Greg Barnhisel’s Cold War Modernism . The essay-review assesses the claims of each book regarding their shared interest in how and why various American writers and intellectuals engaged in debates and campaigns related to the nation’s foreign policy decisions before and after World War II. In turn, the essay-review argues that in comparative terms, contemporary American writers have all but abdicated their once-active and pluralist presence in national debates about the US’s possible roles and responsibilities in the world at large.

Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 322 pp. $40.00

A term like “modernism” exudes the sort of elasticity that is bound to attract scholars eager to parse its various meanings, no matter how elusive. An entire journal now exists that is devoted to the classification of modernism and to studies in relevant works of literature in particular. Because the standard experimentalist works emerged at roughly the same time as the rise of fascism and Nazism, modernism ought to be a good candidate to set off against the despotisms of the right. The key episode in this regard was the notorious exhibition of Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) that the Nazis mounted in Munich in 1937. And yet Ezra Pound, a supremely modernist poet (“Make it new!”) who championed T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, broadcast so many dreadful speeches from Fascist Italy that only a clinical diagnosis of his madness spared him from a postwar conviction for treason. That a tyranny of the left, in the Stalinist USSR, also impugned and outlawed modernism, and exalted the style of socialist realism instead, suggests how tempting it is to define modernism—at least in part—by its incompatibility with totalitarianism. Yet, in 1947, when Harry Truman came across Circus Girl Resting, a painting by the Japanese-American Yasuo Kuniyoshi, the president exclaimed: “If this is art, I’m a Hottentot” (p. 55). Perhaps no artistic movement ever provoked so varied a spectrum of political resistance. But in the United States, hostile Fair Dealers like Truman tended to be outnumbered by conservatives, who were typically members of Congress of conventional aesthetic taste, insofar as they thought about the sublimity of painting or music at all. In the name of commonplace opinion and the thrift that taxpayers expected, such foes snapped at a visionary effort in public diplomacy that helped win the Cold War in the art galleries and in the little magazines. Calculations of the throw-weight of missiles were not enough; Abstract Expressionism could be enlisted to defeat Communism as well. What Greg Barnhisel crisply labels “Cold War modernism” constituted a claim that American culture could trump its Soviet counterpart, because the United States promoted individuality of expression and the freedom to be as creative as one’s talent might permit. America meant the right to paint a model who has three eyes and a body that could be blocked out into cubes, or to compose a piece of music that may reveal a beginning and middle and end—but not necessarily in that order. Such works demonstrated the autonomy of art in a democratic society at a time when the exemplars of the avant-garde elsewhere were imprisoned and even executed. Ideas are weapons,

The Ghosts of Development: The United States and Jordan's East Ghor Canal

The East Ghor Canal was a Cold War–era irrigation project financed by the U.S. government in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. By placing East Ghor in the context of previous land reform campaigns in the Jordan River valley during the Ottoman imperial and British mandatory periods, this article criticizes scholarly interpretations of Cold War modernization. Portraying U.S. overseas development policies as outgrowths of American liberalism ignores the ways in which the liberal tradition could be reconfigured when it encountered other reform legacies in Third World regions. The transnational study of postwar expertise neglects the distinct historical antecedents that prepared the ground for development programs in particular places. The article challenges the notion of American exceptionalism by reinterpreting East Ghor in a long-term regional context. Global and regional perspectives together are needed to understand the history of development, a point that underscores the need for greater collaboration between Cold War and area studies.

The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives the Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War

The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives the Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War

Profits of Development: The Development and Resources Corporation and Cold War Modernization

Profits of Development: The Development and Resources Corporation and Cold War Modernization

Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture Erika Doss Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture. By Sara Doris. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. It might seem surprising that Pop art, a style currently commanding some of the highest prices in the art market (in May 2007, Andy Warhol's 1963 painting Green Car [End Page 93] Crash sold for $71.7 million at Christie's New York), was once considered a serious threat in the art world. A hard-edged and generally brightly colored kind of painting inspired by the stuff of post–World War II American popular culture (hence, the name), Pop emerged in the mid-1950s in the United States and Europe. If thoroughly embraced today, such that the canvases of Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist, among others, are hailed as "masterworks," in the early 1960s Pop art was attacked by multiple critics for being frivolous, derivative, and entirely too complicit with consumer cultures. To put it simply, Pop art didn't fit with then current definitions of "art," and in particular, various strains of postwar, Cold War modernism like Abstract Expressionism. This, of course, was precisely what most Pop artists were up to: challenging elitist assumptions about the nature and purpose of modern art; proposing a new kind of American art that freely borrowed on the subjects and style of mass culture in order to raise questions about postwar social realities. Sara Doris's Pop Art and the Contest Over American Culture provides a compelling reevaluation of Pop, especially in terms of how it—and the critical discourse surrounding it—embodied postwar anxieties about mass culture's creeping authority. Recent scholars have been divided on this: some arguing that Pop uncritically championed mass culture, others that it worked to destabilize boundaries between high and low. If Doris veers to the latter, the major contribution of her book is to position Pop within its larger historical, social, and political context, most notably "the point of transition between the conservatism and conformity of the Cold War 1950s and the radicalized countercultural movements of the later 1960s" (62-63). Focusing on postwar assumptions about taste, culture, and social mobility, Doris reconsiders Pop from the vantage of 1960s youth and Camp cultures and argues for its pivotal role in reshaping modern—and contemporary—understandings of American art and artists, and the culture industry in general. This includes the rapidity with which modern art styles—aping mass consumerism, and notions of planned obsolescence—emerged in postwar America. Already, by 1962, Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler observed that Pop had become "art historical," largely because of its mass mediation in magazines like Life and Time and its eager appropriation by a new generation of art dealers and collectors. Although critics argued that Pop wasn't even art, their guardianship of American taste was steadily undermined by a booming 1960s art market which saw Pop art prices escalate like IBM stock. The upshot of this, as Doris recounts, was that Pop's more critically subversive overtures—evident in Warhol's death and disaster pictures of car crashes and race riots, and Rosenquist's F-111 (1964–1965), a gigantic mural-sized painting of a Vietnam era fighter-bomber interspersed with images of mass-marketed commodities—were ignored. In the end, Pop was itself viewed on consumer terms: as a cultural commodity, as the style to buy. Erika Doss University of Notre Dame Copyright © 2008 Mid-America American Studies Association

Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (review)

Reviewed by: Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary Hsuan L. Hsu Giles, Paul . 2002. Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press. $64.95 hc. $21.95 sc. xiii + 337pp. In Virtual Americas, Paul Giles picks up where his last book—Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730-1860—left off. The two books together demonstrate remarkable scope: Virtual Americas covers representations and refractions of British culture by authors ranging from Frederick Douglass to Thomas Pynchon. Virtual Americas explores, with immense insight and breathtaking speed, both familiar and relatively obscure texts (such as Herman Melville's Clarel and Thomas Pynchon's nonfiction essays, which, Giles notes, "because they have not yet been collected in one volume, are rarely read together as a group" (229)), as well as theoretical texts ranging from Jürgen Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action to Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics. Giles studies Douglass's awakening to national consciousness during his international travels to Britain and Ireland; Melville's simultaneous mockery of British authoritarianism and American reinscriptions of British hierarchies; the way in which Henry James's "surrealist" visualizations reconfigure European values by interpreting their metaphors materially; Robert Frost's transnational displacement of nationalistic "political fetishism"(147); the perverse fetishisms that Lolita has in common with area studies; the demystification of British forms and American transcendentalism in Thom Gunn and Sylvia Plath's expatriate poems; Pynchon's reconfiguration of local and American spaces in fictions refracted by British settings and characters; and, finally, the ways in which British cultural studies and American studies can interrupt one another's ideological assumptions by working as "ludic images of their opposite."(268) The speed with which Giles negotiates so many texts "dislocates" us not only from the nationalist frameworks of "area studies" but also [End Page 216] from the common tendency to identify an author with a handful of canonical works: many of the chapters span the entire careers of the authors they examine. However, the very range of Giles's work may raise eyebrows in readers skeptical of a critical framework that can generate two books published in consecutive years, which cover nearly three centuries of literature in (or, rather, "between") two national traditions. Giles's argument about the refractive mirroring that aestheticizes, refracts, dislocates, empties out, and virtualizes (the frequency with which he varies and doubles up such terms—as when he speaks of Vladimir Nabokov's "tone of inversion or detachment" (168)—seems to belie their vagueness) both British and American cultural contexts seem almost too versatile. Although his brilliant readings make his choice of authors appear quite natural, he never discusses his principles of selection. Why Melville and James, rather than Edith Wharton, or the Mark Twain of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court? Why Robert Frost, and not T.S. Eliot? The flexibility of Giles's scope is even more evident in the easy way in which the book's subtitle slides between "Transnational Fictions" and "The Transatlantic Imaginary": Melville's narratives of the South Seas and the Holy Land, the "transpacific" scenarios that arise in Vineland and Frost's "Once by the Pacific," and Vladimir Nabokov's Russian origins seem to fit too easily into Giles's account of a primarily transatlantic transnationalism. This conflation of the transnational with the transatlantic is most evident in the implicit equation that Giles draws between British decadence and Cold War xenophobia: "[Frost's] style of cold war modernism in the Steeple Bush poems, predicated on the attraction and repulsion of antagonistic opposites, involves a metaphorical externalization and partial suppression of those self-consciously decadent elements that inspired his early work" (150, emphasis added). And even transatlantic influences are interpreted in constrained terms: for the most part, Giles treats only British and American writers, leaving out accounts of Southern European intertexts on the one hand and the transnational literature of the "black Atlantic" on the other. But with respect to the Anglo-American writings he takes on, Giles's individual chapters have much to offer even to those readers who find his occasional lack of geographical specificity suspect. For, in addition to his broad claim...