Fr. 52.50

1960 - When Art Literature Confronted Memory of World War II Remade Modern

English · Paperback / Softback

Shipping usually within 1 to 3 weeks (not available at short notice)

Description

Read more










Al Filreis recasts 1960 as a turning point to offer a groundbreaking account of postwar culture. He examines an eclectic group of artistic, literary, and intellectual figures who strove to create a new language to reckon with the trauma of World War II and to imagine a new world.

List of contents

Preface
Part I. Emerging from the Night of the Word
1. An Introduction to the Survivor: New Contexts for Genocide
2. Pain-Laden Rhymes: Challenges to Narrative and the Radical “Writing I”
3. Openings of the Field: Deep Memory and Its Counterwords
Part II. The End of the End of Ideology
4. Absurd Judgment: Auden, Arendt, Eichmann, and the Kafka Revival
5. Oppose the Anti-Everything: Zero Art and the Hopeful Leap
6. Adjustment and Its Discontents: Aleatory Art vs. Cold War Deradicalization
7. Disaster Defies Utterance: Arts of the Unsayable
8. Thaw Poetics: Folk Revival, Radical Unoriginality, and the Old Word Witness
9. Abomunism: Wars Within Wars in American Poetry
10. Favorite Things
Notes
Index

About the author

Al Filreis is Kelly Family Professor of English, director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, codirector of PennSound, and founder and faculty director of the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism (1994) and Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–60 (2008), and he is the host of the podcast PoemTalk.

Summary

In 1960, when World War II might seem to have been receding into history, a number of artists and writers instead turned back to it. They chose to confront the unprecedented horror and mass killing of the war, searching for new creative and political possibilities after the conservatism of the 1950s in the long shadow of genocide.

Al Filreis recasts 1960 as a turning point to offer a groundbreaking account of postwar culture. He examines an eclectic group of artistic, literary, and intellectual figures who strove to create a new language to reckon with the trauma of World War II and to imagine a new world. Filreis reflects on the belatedness of this response to the war and the Holocaust and shows how key works linked the legacies of fascism and antisemitism with American racism. In grappling with the memory of the war, he demonstrates, artists reclaimed the radical elements of modernism and brought forth original ideas about testimony to traumatic history.

1960 interweaves the lives and works of figures across high and popular culture—including Chinua Achebe, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Paul Celan, John Coltrane, Frantz Fanon, Roberto Rossellini, Muriel Rukeyser, Rod Serling, and Louis Zukofsky—and considers art forms spanning poetry, fiction, memoir, film, painting, sculpture, teleplays, musical theater, and jazz. A deeply interdisciplinary cultural, literary, and intellectual history, this book also offers fresh perspective on the beginning of the 1960s.

Additional text

Al Filreis adds 1960 to the years that matter. The story he tells about the art, literature, and film of that year is complicated, one less utopian than many presume, one defined by the despair of World War II, one where it matters that Celan and Baldwin gave talks on the same day in October of 1960. This is a beautiful book, full of detailed readings of minor and major figures that reconfigure and contextualize the avant-garde and experimental traditions of that era.

Customer reviews

No reviews have been written for this item yet. Write the first review and be helpful to other users when they decide on a purchase.

Write a review

Thumbs up or thumbs down? Write your own review.

For messages to CeDe.ch please use the contact form.

The input fields marked * are obligatory

By submitting this form you agree to our data privacy statement.