Late modernism and the cultural politics of Cold War America, 1946--1964

This project explores the challenge to the hegemony of modernism as a social theory and as an aesthetic category in American social thought after the Second World War. It begins by detailing the rise of modernism as the key conceptual tool for postwar intellectuals. Modernism appeared throughout expressionism, New Criticism, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, and the vogue of neo-Freudianism, and included diverse figures such as Philip Rahv, Theodor Adorno, John Crowe Ransom, Clement Greenberg, Herbert Marcuse, and Dwight Macdonald. Modernism served a variety of purposes for these thinkers: as a source of salvation for an Enlightenment project gone astray; as a critique of mass culture; and as a substitute for the failures of socialism and liberalism. Modernism's insistence upon locating a transcendent foundation for subjectivity was the thread weaving together these discourses, and it became the cultural trope for postwar intellectuals who needed an escape from the pressures of social change at the onset of the Cold War.; In response, a diverse set of writers and critics offered a deliberate challenge to this intellectual discourse. A new tradition of late modernism expressed a willingness to deal with the fragmentation of subjectivity produced by postwar social and economic changes. These late modernists rejected the abdication of social contestation implicit within the modernist project and its unwillingness to connect with anything outside the text or outside the consciousness of the individual. My list of late modernists includes the sociologists C. Wright Mills, Erving Goffman, and David Riesman; the writers James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Charles Olson; the psychoanalyst Norman Brown; and the social critic Paul Goodman. Modernism's attempt to construct an ontological haven for subjectivity beyond the vicissitudes of modern life seemed to these late modernists an intellectual folly in the face of creeping political and social forces. In reaction, these late modernists fashioned a new form of cultural politics, one that deeply affected the character of postwar radicalism.