The Twilight of the Intellectuals : Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War

The Twilight of the Intellectuals : Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War

  • ただいまウェブストアではご注文を受け付けておりません。 ⇒古書を探す
  • 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版/ページ数 376 p.
  • 言語 ENG
  • 商品コード 9781566633116
  • DDC分類 973.92

Full Description


For nearly half a century, Hilton Kramer has been closely involved with the political and cultural world of American intellectuals-in an age when their character was, as Lionel Trilling once wrote, "predominantly of the Left." In this provocative and engaging collection of his essays and reviews, Mr. Kramer explores, in effect, the intellectual history of the cold war and its divisive impact on our politics and culture. We live now, he notes, in the aftermath of an immense intellectual upheaval. Marxism and modernism, which for the most of the century had defined intellectual life in America, have now lost much of the moral authority they long enjoyed. Communism in the Soviet Union and its satellite states has collapsed; modernism is under assault in Western democratic cultures. In this sense, Mr. Kramer observes, we live in the twilight of an intellectual era. Tracing the critical debate that has governed this upheaval in our thinking, Mr. Kramer surveys the writers who were in the forefront of that debate-Whittaker Chambers, Lillian Hellman, Sidney Hook, Dwight MacDonald, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Clement Greenberg, Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, and others-and the issues that animated their criticism and controversies. The Twilight of the Intellectuals is certain to excite comment and argument as passionate as the debate it describes.

Contents

Part 1 Acknowledgements vii Part 2 Introduction: On the Style and Politics of an Intellectual Class xi Part 3 IN THE SERVICE OF STALINISM Chapter 4 Whittaker Chambers: Thinking about Witness 3 Chapter 5 Whittaker Chambers: The Judgment of History 23 Chapter 6 Who Was Josephine Herbst? 32 Chapter 7 The Life and Death of Lillian Hellman 59 Chapter 8 The Blacklist Revisited 70 Chapter 9 Nora Sayre's Sentimental "Journey" 81 Part 10 THE TWILIGHT OF THE NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS Chapter 11 The Edmund Wilson Centenary 95 Chapter 12 The Follies of Dwight MacDonald 107 Chapter 13 Mary McCarthy & Company 118 Chapter 14 The Role of Sidney Hook 129 Chapter 15 Irving Howe: "Socialism is the Name of Our Desire" 149 Chapter 16 Diana Trilling and the Politics of Psychoanalysis 157 Chapter 17 Saul Bellow, Our Contemporary 167 Part 18 FROM MODERNISM TO THE "NEW SENSIBILITY" Chapter 19 Clement Greenberg in the Forties 183 Chapter 20 Clement Greenberg and the Cold War 195 Chapter 21 Lincoln Kristen and the "Aesthetic" Generation 207 Chapter 22 The "Apples" of Meyer Schapiro 214 Chapter 23 Susan Sontag: The Pasionaria of Style 222 Part 24 "CLOSING TIME IN THE GARDENS OF THE WEST" Chapter 25 Cyril Connolly's Horizon 235 Chapter 26 An Orwell for the Nineties 248 Chapter 27 Bloomsbury Idols 258 Chapter 28 The Tynan Phenomenon 275 Chapter 29 The Flowers of Sartre's Grave 285 Part 30 THE STRANGE FATE OF LIBERAL ANTI-COMMUNISM Chapter 31 What Was the Congress for Cultural Freedom? 305 Chapter 32 Life After Liberalism: The New Republic at Eighty 319 Chapter 33 Reflections on Partisan Review 334 Part 34 Afterword 349 Part 35 Index 361