York Intellectuals Research Articles

Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies, and: Criticism without Boundaries: Directions and Crosscurrents in Postmodern Critical Theory (review)

Reviewed by: Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies, and: Criticism without Boundaries: Directions and Crosscurrents in Postmodern Critical Theory Vincent B. Leitch Jonathan Arac . Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies. Social Foundations of Aesthetic Forms, Vol. 1. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. 358 pp. $32.50. Joseph A. Buttigieg , ed. Criticism without Boundaries: Directions and Crosscurrents in Postmodern Critical Theory. Ward-Phillips Lectures, Vol. 12. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1987. 259 pp. $28.95. During the decades following the 1960s one widespread reaction against the New Criticism that had dominated American academic literary studies in the 1940s and 1950s was a recovery of critical allegiance to sociohistorical and political modes of inquiry, which were widely discredited in the immediate postwar years for nonliterary preoccupations. The environment from which a literary text emerged, including its anthropological, socioeconomic, political, and cultural determinants, received renewed scrutiny, as did the historical milieu of the text's reception by readers. Among those critics advocating a return to such inquiries were certain hermeneuticists, feminists, ethnic critics, reader-response theorists, Marxists, and poststructuralists. Of course, some New York intellectuals, myth critics, biographers, and literary historians had practiced sociohistorical and political criticism during the postwar period of relative eclipse. Although it is sometimes forgotten, the New Critics generally favored poetry over fiction, so that the attacks in the Sixties and thereafter against the New Critics entailed a self-conscious renewal of critical interest not simply in sociology, politics, and history but in fiction. However, such fiction was often "noncanonical," consisting both of popular genres by such disenfranchised groups of writers as women and blacks and of avant-garde texts by experimental scriptors. To generalize, forms of "cultural criticism" practiced in the wake of New Criticism revived interest in sociology, history, politics, fiction, and popular culture. Not surprisingly, some practitioners of cultural criticism in the Space Age turned suspicious eyes on the institution of the university literature department for its proclivity to foster conformity, elitism, sexism, and racism. Propounded by cultural critics of varying stripes, attacks on the regnant institution and the reigning ideology of literary studies exhibited a more or less counter-cultural orientation as well as a penchant for institutional and ideological inquiry. It should come as no surprise that the broad critique of New Criticism implied a hostility to modernism frequently in favor of an emergent liberating postmodernism. After all, New Criticism was created by partisans of high modernism. Some enemies of New Criticism made their hostility to modernism explicit whereas others did not. Whatever the case, tensions simmered in literature departments into the immediate post-Vietnam era. Among the critics associated with the emergence of new modes of postmodern cultural criticism in the 1970s and 1980s were the members of the boundary 2 group, particularly Jonathan Arac, Paul Bové, Daniel O'Hara, and William Spanos, all of whom served in editorial capacities for the journal during these decades. Whereas the work of the group in the 1970s depended fundamentally on lessons adapted from Martin Heidegger's phenomenological hermeneutics, its undertaking in the 1980s rested upon insights gleaned from Michel Foucault's genealogy of culture. The shift from Heidegger to Foucault as tutelary figure signaled a turn to interest in institutional and ideological analyses as part of a widened project, a project [End Page 319] of cultural criticism. In essence, a sociopolitical analytics was joined to a historicist hermeneutics, forming a mode of literary criticism having much in common with related contemporaneous leftist kinds of criticism, including neo-Marxism. As the leading members of the boundary 2 group moved progressively into practicing cultural critique, the enmity toward modernism, especially its critical offspring—New Criticism—displayed both an unrelenting hostile tone and a modulated historical understanding. These interests and directions of the group can be discerned in Jonathan Arac's Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies and Joseph Buttigieg's collection of essays from the group titled Criticism without Boundaries: Directions and Crosscurrents in Postmodern Critical Theory. In his Acknowledgments, Arac notes: "My greatest professional debt and pleasure is spread among the editorial group of boundary 2. . . ." In his Preface, Joseph Buttigieg explains that the essays in his...

ROLE MODELS? THE CONTINUING RELEVANCE OF THE "NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS"

Susan Stout Baker. Radical Beginnings: Richard Hofstadter and the 1930s. Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1985. xxi 4- 268 pp. Howard Brick. Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism: Social Theory and Political Reconciliation in the 1940s. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. xiii 4- 280 pp. Terry A. Cooney. The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934-1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. xi + 350 pp. David Seideman. The New Republic: A Voice of Modern Liberalism. New York: Praeger, 1986. xiii + 205 pp. Alan M. Wald. The New York Intellectuals: the Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. xvi + 440 pp. Stephen J. Whitfield. A Critical American: The Politics of Dwight Macdonald. Hamden, Ct.: Archon Books, 1984. x + 179 pp. It has been argued that the appearance of a formidable stack of books about a small group of writers may be a sign of approaching obscurity, of the turning-point in the history of thought at which their capacity to appear contemporary, to serve as role models, disappears. So R. W. Johnson predicts the decline of the Parisian intellectuals of the 1960s.1 And so it may be with the subjects of this daunting pile, an incomplete selection of works focused on writers active around New York City from the 1930s until now, many of whom achieved first fame in the pages of the legendary journal Partisan Review, with its electrifying mix of Trotskyism, anarchism and belief in the social and ethical value of artistic modernism.

The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s.Alan M. Wald

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Alan M. Wald Alan WolfeAlan Wolfe Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 93, Number 4Jan., 1988 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/228836 Views: 2Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1988 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Johanna Bockman The origins of neoliberalism between Soviet socialism and Western capitalism: “A galaxy without borders”, Theory and Society 36, no.44 (Jul 2007): 343–371.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-007-9037-x

The New York intellectuals: the rise and decline of the anti-Stalinist left from the 1930s to the 1980s

The New York intellectuals: the rise and decline of the anti-Stalinist left from the 1930s to the 1980s

Book Reviews

William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetz‐mann. The West of the Imagination Clarke Garrett. Spirit Possession and Popular Religion: From the Camisards to the Shakers J. Ronald Oakley. God's Country: America in the Fifties Angus K. Gillespie and Jay Mechling. American Wildlife in Symbol and Story Alan M. Wald. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti‐Stalinist Left From the 1930s t o the 1980s Frederick F. Siegel. The Roots of Southern Distinctiveness: Tobacco and Society in Danville, Virginia, 1780–1865 Allan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students Rob Ruck. Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh Dan C. Hazen. Latin American Masses and Minorities: Their Images and Realities Kenneth Lincoln with Al Logan Slagle. The Good Red Road: Passages Into Natiue America Spiro Kostof. America By Design: Companion Volume to the PBS Television Series William J. Baker. Jesse Owens: A n American Life Robert Pattison. The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism

The New York Intellectuals: Two Views

Review of The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s by Alan Wald. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and its Circle, 1934-1945.

The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and its Circle, 1934-1945.

The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle

Journal Article The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle. By Terry A. Cooney. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. xi + 350 pp. $25.00.) Get access Robert Booth Fowler Robert Booth Fowler University of Wisconsin, Madison Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 74, Issue 1, June 1987, Pages 216–217, https://doi.org/10.2307/1908604 Published: 01 June 1987

Charters and Poets: Winters, Swallow, Drummond

Essay Review Charters and Poets: Winters, Swallow, Drummond The Republic of Letters: A History of Postwar American Literary Opinion. By Grant Webster. (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. 381 pages, $22.50.) New and Selected Poems 1938-1978. By Donald Drummond. (Kansas City, Mo.: The Book Makers, 1979. 84 pages, $4.95.) Grant Webster holds that the history of literary criticism is the history of revolution. Authoritative “exemplars,” “followers,” and “codifiers” are replaced in time by radically different “exemplars,” “followers,” and “codi­ fiers.” So runs the thesis of Webster’s impressively documented Republic of Letters. The author’s tough-minded positivism and livelyexposures are indeed persuasive. But criticism as well as politics makes strange bedfellows. Appar­ ently the history of criticism reveals more continuity to me than to Webster. Literary critics (even “revolutionary” exemplars) do not, after all, rise out of the sea on half shells. And surely, even out here in the mythic-minded West, Webster’s report of the New Criticism’sdissolution is an exaggeration, as ishis pronunciamento that “there is no truth by which critical views can be judged to be mistaken.” With delusive impunity, Webster then judges the careers of “New Critics” (Eliot, Tate, Blackmur, Winters, Burke, Wellek, Warren, Krieger) and “New York Intellectuals” (Trilling, Rahv, Kazin, Howe, Wilson). The author appraises them under neat but constricted “charters” inspired by the “para­ digms” in Thomas S. Kuhn’s fashionable Structure of Scientific Revolu­ tions (1962). Pertinent to readers of this journal is the section entitled “Yvor Winters: The Critic as Puritan Narcissist.” Webster correctly notes that Winters lived most of his life in the West and that as editor of Seven Poets of the Pacific and contributor to west coast magazines he was a leader of the regional movement. Providing evidence for the Stanford professor’s bad temper, self-pity, and poor judgment, Webster likens Winters’s maverick behavior to F. R. Leavis’s and his moralistic dogmatism to Irving Babbitt’s. Though Winters lacked the support of Eliot’s Church or Tate’s Old South, Webster (who equates “New Criticism” with “Tory Protestantism”) sneers at what he 310 Western American Literature sees as Winters’s “Tory Mentality.” But if Webster’s scheme is right, why, one wonders, does Winters so often blast his “exemplar,” T. S. Eliot? Webster qualifies many of his assertions, cites exceptions, and acknowledges ambigui­ ties— which strengthens his book but weakens his thesis — but why, again one wonders, does Webster not mention Winters’s regard for Edmund Wilson, someone in the “other” charter? At any rate, Winters has explained that his absolutism — a good poem is short, a good poem is in metrical or measured language, a good poem makes a defensive rational statement about a given human experience — developed from his criticism, not the other way around. I myself suggest that Winters’s absolutism developed (as it seems to develop for most poetcritics ) from his own poetic practice. Of course, Webster easily demonstrates Winters’s profound contempt for Romanticism — that is, for obscurantism, decadence, automatism, mindless experimentation. Though I see more to admire than to condemn in loyal teacher-student ties, Webster feels com­ pelled to charge two of Winters’s former students, Gerald Graff and Don Stanford, with puffing up their mentor’s declining reputation. In his Forms of Discovery (1967), Winters was moved to complain: “It has been a com­ mon practice for years for casual critics to ridicule my students in a paren­ thesis; this has been an easy way to ridicule me.” But not content, Winters fares forth: . . Six or seven of my former students are among the best poets of this century.” Doubtless Winters had in mind J. V. Cunningham, Thom Gunn, N. Scott Momaday, Howard Baker, and possibly Edgar Bowers ^nd Donald Drummond. Drummond dedicated to Yvor Winters his fourth book of poetry, The Drawbridge (1962), a National Book Award nominee the year another western poet, William Stafford, won with Traveling Through the Dark. Drummond noted in his preface that he began reading contemporary litera­ ture in high school. “The year was 1931 and we had given up on Silas Marner and A Tale of Two Cities.” Drummond attended the (then...

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Ideals & Politics: New York Intellectuals and Liberal Democracy, 1820–1880

Ideals & Politics: New York Intellectuals and Liberal Democracy, 1820–1880