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Since the late nineteenth century, American intellectuals have consistently criticized the mass arts, charging that entertainments ranging from popular theater, motion pictures, and dance halls to hit records, romance novels, and television are harmful to
One of America's foremost philosophers challenges the lost generation of the American Left to understand the role it might play in the great tradition of democratic intellectual labor that started with writers such as Walt Whitman and John Dewey.
What use is thinking? This study addresses the ways in which modern American thinkers have intervened in the public sphere and attempted to mediate relations between social and political institutions and cultural and intellectual production. Chapters on both well-known (Henry Adams, Langston Hughes, C. Wright Mills, Angela Davis) and neglected (Randolph Bourne, Mary McCarthy, Paul Goodman) public intellectuals considers how these figures have address a range of problems, including the dangers and difficulty of critical dissent thought during wartime, the contemporary crisis of the humanities under neoliberalism, the legacy of American anti-intellectualism, academic professionalism, and the perils of consumer culture and popular tastes. This book reviews in as critically sympathetic a manner as possible a select few of the minor and major currents of twentieth-century American radical thinking in order to see where they might take us, and how they inflect our current social and intellectual predicaments. Arguing that any "use-value" theory of intellectual production is limiting, Radical Legacies endeavors to maintain and expand a space and reassert an argument for the importance of sustained critical reflection on our collective dilemmas today. It assesses a practice of thought that is engaged, committed, involved, and timely, without being necessarily “practical” or even useful.
A Companion to 20th-Century America is an authoritative survey of the most important topics and themes of twentieth-century American history and historiography. Contains 29 original essays by leading scholars, each assessing the past and current state of American scholarship Includes thematic essays covering topics such as religion, ethnicity, conservatism, foreign policy, and the media, as well as essays covering major time periods Identifies and discusses the most influential literature in the field, and suggests new avenues of research, as the century has drawn to a close
Americans have a long history of public arguments about taste, the uses of leisure, and what is culturally appropriate in a democracy that has a strong work ethic. Michael Kammen surveys these debates as well as our changing taste preferences, especially in the past century, and the shifting perceptions that have accompanied them. Professor Kammen shows how the post-traditional popular culture that flourished after the 1880s became full-blown mass culture after World War II, in an era of unprecedented affluence and travel. He charts the influence of advertising and opinion polling; the development of standardized products, shopping centers, and mass-marketing; the separation of youth and adult culture; the gradual repudiation of the genteel tradition; and the commercialization of organized entertainment. He stresses the significance of television in the shaping of mass culture, and of consumerism in its reconfiguration over the past two decades. Focusing on our own time, Kammen discusses the use of the fluid nature of cultural taste to enlarge audiences and increase revenues, and reveals how the public role of intellectuals and cultural critics has declined as the power of corporate sponsors and promoters has risen. As a result of this diminution of cultural authority, he says, definitive pronouncements have been replaced by divergent points of view, and there is, as well, a tendency to blur fact and fiction, reality and illusion. An important commentary on the often conflicting ways Americans have understood, defined, and talked about their changing culture in the twentieth century.
A Companion to American Cultural History offers a historiographic overview of the scholarship, with special attention to the major studies and debates that have shaped the field, and an assessment of where it is currently headed. 30 essays explore the history of American culture at all analytic levels Written by scholarly experts well-versed in the questions and controversies that have activated interest in this burgeoning field Part of the authoritative Blackwell Companions to American History series Provides both a chronological and thematic approach: topics range from British America in the Eighteenth Century to the modern day globalization of American Culture; thematic approaches include gender and sexuality and popular culture
This book is the first comprehensive account of the Argentine magazine Punto de Vista (1978–2008), a cultural review that gathered together prominent Argentine intellectuals throughout the last quarter of the twentieth century. Directed by cultural historian and public intellectual Beatriz Sarlo, the story of the magazine serves as a lens to study the evolution of Argentine intellectuals from the leftist mobilization of the 1960s through periods of military dictatorship and then the shifting politics of democratization in the 1980s and 1990s. The book argues that the way in which the Argentine intellectual left negotiated the political and cultural transformations of the late twentieth century can be understood as the history of two political defeats: that of the revolutionary utopias of the 1960s and 1970s and that of the social democrat project in the 1980s. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this book encompasses a wide range of debates taking place in Argentina, from the years prior to the dictatorship to the postdictatorship period.
The role played by the humanities in reconciling American diversity—a diversity of both ideas and peoples—is not always appreciated. This volume of essays, commissioned by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, examines that role in the half century after World War II, when exceptional prosperity and population growth, coupled with America's expanded political interaction with the world abroad, presented American higher education with unprecedented challenges and opportunities. The humanities proved to be the site for important efforts to incorporate groups and doctrines that had once been excluded from the American cultural conversation. Edited and introduced by David Hollinger, this volume explores the interaction between the humanities and demographic changes in the university, including the link between external changes and the rise of new academic specializations in area and other interdisciplinary studies. This volume analyzes the evolution of humanities disciplines and institutions, examines the conditions and intellectual climate in which they operate, and assesses the role and value of the humanities in society. Contents: John Guillory, "Who's Afraid of Marcel Proust? The Failure of General Education in the American University" Roger L. Geiger, "Demography and Curriculum: The Humanities in American Higher Education from the 1950s through the 1980s" Joan Shelley Rubin, "The Scholar and the World: Academic Humanists and General Readers" Martin Jay, "The Ambivalent Virtues of Mendacity: How Europeans Taught (Some of Us) to Learn to Love the Lies of Politics" James T. Kloppenberg, "The Place of Value in a Culture of Facts: Truth and Historicism" Bruce Kuklick, "Philosophy and Inclusion in the United States, 1929–2001" John T. McGreevy, "Catholics, Catholicism, and the Humanities, 1945–1985" Jonathan Scott Holloway, "The Black Scholar, the Humanities, and the Politics of Racial Knowledge Since 1945" Rosalind Rosenberg, "Women in the Humanities: Taking Their Place" Leila Zenderland, "American Studies and the Expansion of the Humanities" David C. Engerman, "The Ironies of the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and the Rise of Russian Studies" Andrew E. Barshay, "What is Japan to Us"? Rolena Adorno, "Havana and Macondo: The Humanities Side of U.S. Latin American Studies, 1940–2000"
Here, a variety of distinguished scholars revisit and rethink the legacy of the New York intellectuals, showing how this small, predominantly Jewish group moved from communist and socialist roots to become a primary voice of liberal humanism and, in the case of a few, to launch a new conservative movement.