York Intellectuals Research Articles

Utopia in New York: Nicola Chiaromonte and the New York Intellectuals’ “Superstition of Science”

This article reintroduces Italian antifascist intellectual Nicola Chiaromonte to anglophone twentieth-century intellectual history by foregrounding Chiaromonte's transatlantic exchange with the New York intellectuals. Drawing from Chiaromonte's unpublished notes and correspondence, as well as his published writing in English and Italian, it elaborates how what I call Chiaromonte's “negative utopianism” migrated concepts and concerns from the political-philosophical context of 1930s Paris to 1940s New York. Though descriptions of Chiaromonte in New York accentuate his rejection of Marxism within sectarian radical circles, I resituate this tension vis-à-vis the philosophical clash between Chiaromonte's speculative, phenomenological conceptual framework and his US milieu's scientific rationalism and naturalistic pragmatism. Thanks to his influence on Dwight Macdonald's politics magazine, Chiaromonte became a contact point with the ideals animating the antifascist resistance and the theoretical transformations inaugurated by the decentered subject—one whose promotion of relationality and limit as grounds for recentering the transatlantic left had longer echoes.

‘One of the last secret maestros’: Nicola Chiaromonte between Europe and America

ABSTRACT The article describes the transatlantic cultural mediation performed by Italian editor, critic and political activist Nicola Chiaromonte, focusing specifically on his relationships with figures from the mid-twentieth-century U.S. cultural formation known as the New York Intellectuals. Drawing heavily on unpublished correspondence and archival materials, it highlights how Chiaromonte – who in the 1930s belonged to influential Italian and French intellectual networks, as well as to the antifascist movement ‘Giustizia e Libertà’ – publicly and privately transmitted political ideas forged in the debates of the Italian antifascist diaspora and the intellectual matrix of interwar Paris to leftwing 1940s New York circles associated with literary and socio-political magazines such as Partisan Review (P.R.) and politics. After exploring Chiaromonte’s years as a refugee in Manhattan as a scene of formal and informal cultural mediation, it turns to his post-war role as co-editor of the Italian Congress for Cultural Freedom (C.C.F.) magazine Tempo Presente (T.P.), foregrounding this institutional role as a site of idea circulation and exchange that leveraged Chiaromonte’s transnational cultural knowledge and connections. The article emphasizes the significance of interpersonal relationships not only to Chiaromonte’s political vision but also as sites of transformational intellectual labour.

Mary McCarthy and the Genealogy of Progressive Liberalism

Three decades after graduating from Vassar, in 1963, McCarthy published her bestselling novel The Group – a phenomenal commercial success that brought her fame, wealth, and plenty of scorn from her fellow New York intellectuals. In The Group, she revisits the site of her political and aesthetic awakening, Vassar College, by focusing on the lives of eight – or, at closer counting, nine – Vassar girls, a group of friends from the class of ‘33, who have just graduated, and now are off to put their Vassar-bred ambitions into practice, or not. At first sight, the novel is not concerned with politics. Yet indirectly, it reinterprets and reevaluates the liberalism of the 1930s. And it does so, curiously, by hanging on, in some crucial ways, to the model function of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, though what it appropriates from Dos Passos no longer corresponds to the young McCarthy’s enthusiasm of the year 1933.

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History by Nancy Sinkoff (review)

Reviewed by: From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History by Nancy Sinkoff Kirsten Fermaglich Nancy Sinkoff. From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020. 538 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000337 In From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History, Nancy Sinkoff has done the important work of reclaiming Lucy Dawidowicz's significance as an American public intellectual in the years after World War II. Although few scholars have previously identified Dawidowicz as a member of the famed New York Jewish intellectuals, Sinkoff makes a compelling case for this categorization. Despite Dawidowicz's significance in helping to establish the intentionalist school of Holocaust thought, which argued for the primacy of Hitler's antisemitism in explaining the origins of the Holocaust, she has mostly been forgotten in books on New York Jewish intellectuals, and has similarly fallen off the map of American intellectual history, and of American Jewish history. By describing Dawidowicz's friendships with figures like Irving Howe and Norman Podhoretz, and by highlighting her [End Page 482] public prominence as an interpreter of the Holocaust and of eastern European Jewish culture, as well as expertise in Yiddish language and literature, Sinkoff reclaims Dawidowicz's significance in American Jewish and intellectual life. As the title of the book suggests, Dawidowicz moved politically from liberal to conservative over the course of her life, a trajectory that mirrored that of many other New York Jewish intellectuals. Born in 1915 in New York City to Jewish immigrants from Warsaw, Dawidowicz lived in Jewish neighborhoods in the Bronx, and attended high school and college in New York City. She was also deeply involved in the secular Yiddishist community of the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute. Like other New York Jewish intellectuals, the left-wing politics of this environment shaped her early life as a member of the Young Communist League and National Student League. By 1938, however, like many on the Left, she had broken with the Soviet Union, and intensified her studies of Yiddish, accepting a fellowship as a graduate student at the YIVO in Vilna, and departing for research in Poland that same year. Those experiences became defining ones in shaping her identification with Polish Jews facing destruction. Dawidowicz barely escaped the Nazi occupation and felt deeply all her life the deaths of her friends and patrons in Poland. Immediately after the war, she worked with the YIVO and the Joint Distribution Committee, tracking down and collecting the Yiddish literary treasures scattered throughout Europe, as well as working with survivors in DP camps. In 1949, she began almost twenty years on the staff of the American Jewish Committee (AJC). During that time, Sinkoff shows, her politics moved steadily rightwards. Her reports on communism and the Soviet Union reflected her fervent anticommunism and anxieties about Jewish radicalism, while her work on religious minorities and Black-Jewish relationships in the United States reflected at first the standard liberal position of the AJC, but increasingly signaled dissent from strict separation of church and state, and discomfort with Black social and cultural differences from Jews. By the late 1960s, when she left the AJC, her politics had already turned inward to the history and well-being of the Jewish community and rightward away from the universal ideologies that marked Jewish liberalism. That preoccupation with eastern European Jewish history was the final and perhaps most significant chapter of her life, as described by Sinkoff. Dawidowicz published two major books that established her as an expert in eastern European Jewish history and the Holocaust—The Golden Tradition and Hitler's War against the Jews—and cemented her relationship with New York Jewish intellectuals, who at that moment were experiencing a similar political and intellectual turn towards Judaism, the Jewish community, and the Holocaust. Although she had planned on publishing a major book on the history of the American Jewish community towards the end of her life, she never completed it; it was her work on eastern European Jewry and the Holocaust that marked her professional and...

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History by Nancy Sinkoff

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History by Nancy Sinkoff

Sinkoff, Nancy. From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History, Wayne State University Press, 2020, pp. 538. Price: $34.99

Sinkoff, Nancy. From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History, Wayne State University Press, 2020, pp. 538. Price: $34.99

Nancy Sinkoff: From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History

Nancy Sinkoff: From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History

"The Saddest Man I Ever Knew": Ralph de Toledano and the Jewish Roots of American Conservatism

"The Saddest Man I Ever Knew":Ralph de Toledano and the Jewish Roots of American Conservatism Yoav Fromer1 (bio) Writer Ralph de Toledano's death in 2007 was met mostly with indifference. The handful of newspapers that did mark the solemn occasion referred to the Moroccan-born, New York-raised Jewish intellectual as "a friend of Nixon" and a "nonconformist conservative" while relegating him to a marginal place in the story of American conservatism.2 But having written several novels, poetry collections, and over twenty non-fiction books that ranged in topic from communist infiltration to the life of Robert F. Kennedy to the history of jazz, he was so much more. In addition to publishing countless articles in Newsweek, National Review, and King Features and other venues over a prolific seventy-year career, Toledano played a greater role in American politics than historians have acknowledged. It was his friend and colleague, National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., who observed the irony in which a man who had done so much for American conservatism was remembered so little. In a witty obituary that couched praise with censure, Buckley suggested that Toledano had been forgotten, partly because of his own standoffishness, and lamented: "It can't be predicted that this poet of melancholy will live on, other than in the archives."3 That is certainly where Toledano has been relegated, at least until now. Except for his correspondence with the influential anticommunist crusader, Whittaker Chambers, which was published in 1997 as Notes from the Underground, no study of Toledano's life or legacy has ever been completed. Appearing as a footnote in the biographies of central conservative figures that he befriended, like Chambers and Richard M. Nixon, or cast in a supporting role in broad historical studies of the conservative movement, Toledano remains, at least in public memory and [End Page 253] scholarship, a man who wasn't really present at creation.4 Even though he was: at every critical juncture in the initial stages of development of American conservatism, Toledano played some part. He was an intimate confidant of Chambers, a close friend of Buckley, and a dedicated supporter and advisor of Nixon from the onset of his career. According to historian Rick Perlstein, it was Toledano's adulation of Nixon in Seeds of Treason, the bestselling book he co-authored about the Alger Hiss trial, that brought the ambitious young congressman to the attention of Dwight Eisenhower and helped secure him the vice-presidential nomination in 1952: "Ike read the book and liked the cut of the young man's jib."5 It is not only from the historiography of conservatism that Toledano is conspicuously missing. Despite growing up in New York and studying at Columbia University in the 1930s under the notable literary critic Lionel Trilling, Toledano, who was born in Tangier to Jewish-American parents and descended from a famed Sephardic rabbinical dynasty that dated back to medieval Spain, has been completely left out of the numerous histories of the New York Intellectuals.6 The Washington Post obituary noted: "His political views migrated steadily rightward through the decades, a political path trodden by a number of leftist intellectuals from the 1930s and 1940s."7 But there was nothing common about Toledano's turn to the right. If anything, he had been one of the first Jewish intellectuals to clear that unmarked path: having grown up in a middle-class liberal home and dabbled with socialist ideas in college, [End Page 254] he had abandoned his leftist sympathies by the late 1930s, and never truly felt comfortable with either the radicalism nor liberalism of fellow New York Intellectuals, the famed group of writers, scholars, and critics who wrote for a handful of polemical magazines from the 1930s to the 1960s and redefined the American left. "I was never at home in the liberal community," Toledano wrote in his autobiography, explaining his early decision to "turn my back ideologically on Partisan Review which did not even know of my existence." As an editor at the anti-Stalinist magazine The New Leader in 1940, Toledano had already espoused staunch anticommunist ideas, to such a degree that during military...

Whatever Happened to the New York Intellectuals?

Over the course of a very few decades, the New York Intellectuals went form being the intellectual community in U.S. cultural life to a historical coterie with little contemporary relevance. This article suggests some of the reasons for this evolution, both intellectual and personal.

Kazin\u2019s Trilling: A Cold War Portrait

This essay describes the eminent Americanist, critic, and New York intellectual, Alfred Kazin’s creation of a Lionel Trilling “character” in his 1978 autobiography, New York Jew, and his use of that character to critique significant features of the country’s Cold War literary culture. Among these are: the narrowing and hardening of intellectual discourse in a cultural-political climate dominated by the “liberal consensus,” the discrediting of the progressive impulse in American writing, the subordination of “class” to “culture” in evaluations of American writers, and the changing status of Jews and Jewish writers in post-war America. Tapping into strong personal feelings, Kazin creates in Trilling a harsh, thoughtful and compelling portrait of an era.

GAUGING THE GERMAN JEWISH

Few fields are as riddled with terminological indecision as “German Jewish thought.” One cannot invoke this sphere without immediately bumping up against essential questions of definition. Should membership within its bounds be reserved for those who wrote, primarily, as Jews for Jews, even if in a non-Jewish language? Or should its borders be expanded substantially to include Jewish contributions to secular German thought—or, perhaps more aptly put, secular thought in German, in order not to exclude the vast number of Central European Jewish innovators who wrote in the language? If one takes the latter route, the problems only proliferate, for the question then ensues, what makes any of these supposed Jewish contributionsJewish? How is the Jewishness of a particular work, school of thought, or sensibility to be gauged and assessed? How does one avoid the risk of reading too much in—or too little? How does one steer clear of reducing Jewishness to some stable core or essence, without relying on a notion so broad and diffuse as to be effectively meaningless? And always lurking is the question whether, in imputing Jewishness to a cultural product or outlook, one has betrayed its creator, who would have recoiled at being labeled a “Jewish” author or artist. These problems are not peculiar to German Jewish intellectual history. They arise wherever and whenever Jews have been disproportionately prominent in the shaping of secular culture—for instance, in the writing of the “New York intellectuals” in the postwar United States. But the role of authors and artists of German Jewish background proved especially pronounced even after many, like Hannah Arendt or Leo Strauss, emigrated to escape the Nazis. In their new environments, they remained active participants in intellectual life, and the question remains whether they were carrying on the tradition of German Jewish thought.

Insights from the infamous: Recovering the social-theoretical first phase of populism studies

While early studies of populism, usually dated from the 1960s, were highly interdisciplinary, contemporary research in this field is dominated by political science and political theory. This current phase of research is narrowly focused on certain forms of political action and remarkably reluctant to pathologize the US case. Social theory plays at most a marginal role. Recent historicizations of this field have failed to recognize the significance of the prior ‘missing first phase’ of populism studies (1940–65) led by key sociological figures among the New York Intellectuals and the Frankfurt School. Social theorization was prominent then and US populism’s contingent vulnerability to demagogic exploitation was a major research focus. This article provides an immanent critical reconstruction of these thinkers’ key social-theoretical insights, building to a schematization of ‘modern demagogy’.

Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition

Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition Jacques Berlinerblau (bio) Andy Connolly. Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017. 292 pp. $105.00. Donald J. Trump's ascension to the presidency of the United States might be seen as the exclamation point on an American liberal tradition sentenced to decades of decline. Philip Roth never sought to predict or explain that decline. Still, a few of his major novels offer insights into the challenges, tensions, and instabilities that have roiled this political philosophy—a political philosophy that most, but certainly not all, American Jews have embraced with passion since the New Deal. Andy Connolly's Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition seeks to make sense of the author's interrogation of liberalism by focusing on the American Tetralogy (i.e., American Pastoral, 1997; I Married a Communist, 1998; The Human Stain, 2000; The Plot Against America, 2004), and Exit Ghost (2007). Connolly opens by discussing one of Roth's thematic obsessions: the contradiction between trying to produce art unsullied by the vicissitudes of life and the manner in which those vicissitudes sully all artistic production. These lengthy discussions of Nathan Zuckerman's formalist/New Critical pretensions are learned, yet not immediately germane to the subject of political liberalism. Too, it is hard for scholars to break much new ground on this issue. When it comes to how the artist processes experience, Roth usually beats his critics to the punch; he has relentlessly—and recursively—canvassed every inch of this dilemma in works like My Life as a Man (1974) and The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988). Roth's musings on liberalism, however, are far less picked over by either the author or his critics. It is here where Connolly's work stands to make an original contribution. Following the lead of earlier scholars, Connolly sets his analysis of I Married a Communist within the context of the "New York Intellectuals." The latter broke with the stridency of Communist views, in favor of a "more tame politics of centrist liberalism" (62). Their thinking about art and its relation to politics bears affinities with the views of New Critics. It is in [End Page 97] this crisscross between New Critics and New York Intellectuals that Connolly situates Nathan Zuckerman and Murray Ringold's dialogue. Their epic conversation is about "the fate of progressive politics in post-war American life" and "the struggle for relevance of literary culture during this period" (62). Like Murray, the New York Intellectuals rejected Communism's adulation of the collective, its facile moralizing, and its tidy historical schemata. For these thinkers, art revealed a different truth, a sovereign truth, and a truth truer than the one coughed out by materialist meta-narratives. Murray thus appears as an avatar of the "unimpassioned, self-scrutinizing, and yet still morally engaged liberal" (80). Leo Glucksman (Nathan's cape-clad instructor and would-be seducer) similarly espouses such ideas, passionately rejecting any art placed in the service of political expedience. Connolly is more cautious about pinning down Zuckerman's relation to the New Critics/New York Intellectuals. After all, the novelist's own encounter with crypto-Communist Ira Ringold was, initially, one of admiration and discipleship. It was from Ira that Nathan learned that art must "enshrine the struggles of the embattled" (Communist 38). Connolly's most inspired readings occur in his discussion of American Pastoral. This novel's engagement with Vietnam-era politics helps us understand how American Jewish political sympathies were soon to be fractured across not two, but three lines. The decade fomented New Left radicals, such as Merry Levov, who reacted with violence to the New Deal status quo favored by their liberal elders. Yet the tumultuous 1960s is also the decade in which the seeds of Jewish neoconservatism were planted. Connolly cleverly parses Swede Levov as an example of a "de-vitalized center" and a harbinger of a Jewish shift to the Right (Connolly 120). Levov's unthinking nostalgia for America augurs the cheap nationalism of later Red State patriots. His decision to move the Newark Maid factory out of the country for cheaper labor foreshadows neoliberal economic policies. His abandonment...

Morals, Manners, and the Middlebrow

Critics have long portrayed Lionel Trilling as a cultural mandarin. However, this well-regarded critical orthodoxy neglects Trilling’s work in the mass media. Trilling’s affiliations with Columbia University and the New York Intellectuals are well attested, but his coeditorship of two book clubs and his work as a guest on radio and television programs have been almost forgotten. Seeking to redress this oversight, this essay focuses on Trilling’s work as a script supervisor for Channing (1963–64), a television series adaptation of his campus fiction “Of This Time, of That Place.” The essay argues that as a public intellectual, Trilling presented himself as a “cultural supervisor” whose criticism and fiction sought to guide the culture as a whole. While Trilling’s supervision rested on having access to a variety of institutions, both elite and popular, he was unable to effect the supervision that he desired in television. Thus while “Of This Time, of That Place” was an antimiddlebrow polemic, Channing drew on the conventions of golden age drama anthologies and was the very embodiment of middlebrow culture. As a script consultant, Trilling resisted these changes, but his advice was disregarded. By delving into this neglected episode in Trilling’s career, the essay shows that Trilling’s position as a supervisor of culture could be assumed rhetorically but could not be achieved in practice. Ironically, in taking on the role of a script supervisor Trilling was unable to act as a supervisor of culture

Numb Modernism: Sentiment and the Intellectual Left in Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed

This essay traces a critique of anti-sentimentalist leftist impersonality in the critically underestimated and best-selling novel The Unpossessed (1934). Tess Slesinger’s satire parodies the deadened affect that results from programmatic refusals of subjectivity and personal life among New York intellectuals who ineffectually conspire to found a radical magazine. Although the novel has typically been read as a roman à clef, its broader target becomes evident when positioned in relation to masculinist orthodoxies of objectivity and scientific materialism that dominated American Marxist magazines in the early 1930s. Pitted against abstraction in particular, Slesinger challenges impersonality’s disembodied imperative, which renders what this article terms “impersons”: waifs “unpossessed” of agency and emotional intensity, and thus unfit not only for collective action but any form of deliberate futurity whatsoever. Slesinger’s intervention suggests a deep affinity between leftist collectivism and modernist individualism, despite their superficial antinomy: according to her, both dangerously extend a suspicion of sentiment into the negation of personhood.

The Other Victorians at Fifty Introduction

The Other Victorians at Fifty Introduction Daniel Bivona (bio) The Other Victorians has lived an unusually long scholarly life since its initial publication in 1967. Like all long-lasting and oft-cited works, Marcus’s text has attracted its share of criticism as well as praise. Writing in the 1990s, Andrew H. Miller described The Other Victorians as “the single most influential account of sexuality in Victorian Britain before the work of Foucault” (2). The Other Victorians has served as a touchstone text—one to which scholars in both the humanities and the social sciences turn again and again when thinking about the history of human sexuality and its literary representations. It is a book of intellectual history whose central argument many of us feel obliged to engage to this day, even if, in some cases, mainly to contest its claims. Drawn from a plenary panel presented at the 2016 meeting of the North American Victorian Studies Association, these essays offer a “critical celebration” of Marcus’s contributions. They each consider this signal text by Marcus, who was at the time of its publication not only an author, but also a dissertation director, a university professor, a New York Intellectual, and a crusader for the end of the Vietnam War. In these pages, Simon Joyce, Seth Koven, and Collette Colligan assess the contexts for the writing of The Other Victorians, and the legacies of this landmark work. Taken together, these contributions suggest that what many of us value above all in this work is the way it has challenged (and continues to challenge) us all to engage in a debate opened up by Marcus in his consideration of nineteenth-century pornography, a topic long neglected—or [End Page 463] underplayed—by scholars until his work helped to make it a respectable scholarly pursuit. It is fitting that, despite arguing that the realms of literature and pornography ought to be kept distinct, as Colligan reminds us in her essay, Marcus himself was the first to invite scholars to fully investigate the neglected riches of the pornographic archive. Although Marcus clearly stipulated a position that can now seem somewhat quaint to interdisciplinary scholars—that “literature” is a culturally and ethically superior genre to pornography, with its endlessly repetitive narrative elements and its libertine indifference to conventional morality—one ought to consider the historical context: The Other Victorians was published only nine years after the 1957 Supreme Court decision, in Roth v. United States, that allowed literary works containing sexual representations to be sold in the U. S. only if they were works of “redeeming social importance.” The essays by Joyce, Koven, and Colligan offer three critical readings of Marcus’s work and its legacies. In so doing, they provide three distinctly different acknowledgements of its importance. In his essay “Past, Present, and Pornography,” Joyce makes a broad but ultimately compelling claim in response to Marcus’s contention that there is no homosexual canon of Victorian pornography. Joyce re-poses Foucault’s question about whether, when it comes to sex and sexuality, we are “modern” or still stubbornly “Victorian.” If “modern,” then we “align,” so it seems, with the position of Victorian pornography. If still “Victorian,” then do we “compliment the past for being a lot more modern than we typically admit?” (466). In a rereading of Teleny; Or, the Reverse of the Medal (1893) and The Pearl (1879–80), Joyce contests Marcus’s claim. He notes that there is neither a homosexual nor a heterosexual pornography in the nineteenth century, because the characters in many of these narratives move from male-female sex to male-male sex and back again without the texts taking overt notice that a significant boundary has been crossed and re-crossed. As Joyce concludes, rereading Marcus through the lens of Foucault reminds us of the “continued residual force of a unitary model of sexuality through the nineteenth century and beyond” (474). Koven’s essay “The Marriage of Social Science and Literary Criticism in The Other Victorians” returns us to an emphasis on the more intellectually revolutionary aspects of Marcus’s 1966 book. Koven’s essay is a generously appreciative reading of The Other Victorians as an inspirational...

The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary HistoryUnclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture

The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary HistoryUnclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture

“Our Country and Our Culture” in the Era of Americanist and Modernist Studies: Reading the New York Intellectuals After Historicism

"Our Country and Our Culture" in The Era of Americanist and Modernist Studies:Reading The New York Intellectuals After Historicism1 Benjamin Schreier (bio) In 2002—in the portentous moment between the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq—Michael Lind published a cri de coeur in The Hudson Review. In it, he lamented the sad state of U.S. state culture, with "political and civic leader[s]" unwilling to quote poetry and "Poets Against America" (Lind's tendentious fabrication) spewing their "bitter multicultural and feminist" spleen "with a zeal that the propagandists of our Fascist, Communist and (now) illiberal Muslim enemies can hardly match" (2002, 535). Lind's ideal of literature as sincere civic engagement celebrates poets as our "fellow citizens," representative figures who "identify with their societies" (2002, 540-1), even if current U.S. poetic culture authorizes only attitudes of "condemnation" or "indifference" toward the "res publica" (2002, 537-8; wondrously, he links Poundian malice and countercultural rabble-rousing via a single Romantic-Modernist figural juggernaut of irrationalist hatred of democratic civilization). Written more than five years after their author redeemed himself "Up from Conservatism," these claims interest me for the ideological pattern of recognitions though which Lind maps his Americanist anxiety: the most important part of the essay is easily the title, "Our Country and Our Culture," which readers recognize as the name of a Partisan Review symposium published in three parts over the second half of 1952—one of the most visible texts associated with the New York intellectuals. At no point in the essay does Lind actually mention the symposium, likely assuming that everybody knows it already as an epitome of Cold War accommodationist [End Page 277] engagement with the state. Super-visible for embodying this dominant narrative, the symposium presents the New York intellectuals as former resistant leftists maturing into engaged liberals, just as the U.S. matures into the role of superpower.2 The Cold War's persistence as the representative contextual key to "Our Country and Our Culture" and the New York intellectuals is attested as much by wonkosphere apparatchiks like Lind as by revisionary literary historiography that repeatedly establishes a historicist reiteration of itself as a response to Cold War accommodationist professionalism. In fact, critics who lament the declining influence of the New York intellectuals and critics who celebrate it often share a reductive historicist interpretation of the symposium—overseen by a largely unquestioned figure of the "public intellectual" and anchored by twinned axiomatic beliefs in representational knowledge and a nationalized concept of a cultural body politic—that simplifies "the New York intellectuals" into embodiments of modernism's containment within Americanism. I argue here not, simply, that we need a fresh reading of the 1952 symposium to refine our knowledge of the New York intellectuals. Rather, scholarship today needs to critically reconsider the kind of normative frames through which we approach this key moment of Americanism and U.S. modernism in order to imagine alternatives to Americanist and modernist historicism. The New York intellectuals, whom Irving Howe called the only U.S. group justifiably termed an "intelligentsia" (1968, 29), remain key figures in scholarly accounts of the displacement of the Cold War and modernist primal scenes into postwar Americanisms. But their renown is dominated by the single theme of accommodation, an account now so visible that we have trouble seeing beyond it.3 To contest this super-legibility, I analyze a chapter in the history of the narrative's differentiation of the accommodationist orthodoxy it describes and the post-Cold War present of its reiteration. Confident [End Page 278] assertions of the New York intellectuals' importance—a narrative primarily of liberal accommodation with the state, and secondarily of modernist domestication in the academy, often taking specific form in subnarratives about the institutionalization of academic literary criticism, about the diminution of the American Left, and about intellectual complicity in U.S. cultural imperialism, by critics both praising and condemning the New York intellectuals—have not fully addressed their perverse legibility. I return to "Our Country and Our Culture," a prooftext of this orthodox accommodation narrative, to make two polemical claims. First, the super-visibility of the dominant accommodation account suppresses...

Fighting over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution, written by Rafael Rojas

Fighting over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution, written by Rafael Rojas

Fighting over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution by Rafael Rojas

Fighting over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution by Rafael Rojas