[PDF] The Naked Communistcold War Modernism And The Politics Of Popular Culture eBook

Author : Roland Vegso
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 18,14 MB
Release : 2013
Category : History
ISBN : 082324556X

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The Naked Communist argues that the political ideologies of modernity were fundamentally determined by four basic figures: the world, the enemy, the secret, and the catastrophe. While the "world" names the totality that functioned as the ultimate horizon of modern political imagination, the three other figures define the necessary limits of this totality by reflecting on the limits of representation. The book highlights the enduring presence of these figures in the modern imagination through detailed analysis of a concrete historical example: American anti-Communist politics of the 1950s. Its primary objective is to describe the internal mechanisms of what we could call an anti-Communist "aesthetic ideology." The book thus traces the way anti-Communist popular culture emerged in the discourse of Cold War liberalism as a political symptom of modernism. Based on a discursive analysis of American anti-Communist politics, the book presents parallel readings of modernism and popular fiction from the 1950s (nuclear holocaust novels, spy novels, and popular political novels) in order to show that, despite the radical separation of the two cultural fields, they both participated in a common ideological program.

Author : Roland Végső
Publisher :
Page : 245 pages
File Size : 34,46 MB
Release : 2013
Category : Aesthetics
ISBN : 9780823252534

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'The Naked Communist' argues that the political ideologies of modernity were fundamentally determined by four basic figures the world, the enemy, the secret, and the catastrophe.

Author : George A. Gonzalez
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 121 pages
File Size : 26,18 MB
Release : 2019-02-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1498591868

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Reality is made up of the Absolute and Causality. The absolute (most saliently philosophized about by Georg Hegel) is where normative values inhere. Causality can be described as the measurable effects of the normative values of the absolute and the laws of physics (also ostensibly a product of the absolute). Humans are special insofar as they access the higher aspects of the Absolute – altruism, compassion, love, humor, science, engineering, etc. The Absolute also contains what can be considered the less attractive values or impulses: greed, lust for power, hate, self-centeredness, conceit, etc. Predicating society on what I deem the lower (spirits) aspects of the absolute (most prominently, greed) results in personal, social dysfunction and ultimately the end of civilization. Conversely, a society based on justice is stable and vibrant. Justice is a classless society, free of gender and ethnic biases. My argument is based on popular culture – especially the Star Trek franchise. One implication of my thesis is that capitalist values generate psychological neurosis and societal instability – even catastrophe. Additionally, the political values that dominate the current neoliberalist world system (and especially the American government) are the other, the will to power – resulting in war, and global political instability. Popular culture is germane to philosophy and contemporary politics because television/movie creators frequently try to attract viewers by conveying authentic philosophical and political motifs. Conversely, viewers seek out authentic movies and television shows. This is in contrast to opinion surveys (for instance), as the formation of the data begins with the surveyor seeking to directly solicit an opinion – however impromptu or shallow

Author : Konrad H. Jarausch
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 19,94 MB
Release : 2017-02-06
Category : History
ISBN : 3110496178

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The traces of the Cold War are still visible in many places all around the world. It is the topic of exhibits and new museums, of memorial days and historic sites, of documentaries and movies, of arts and culture. There are historical and political controversies, both nationally and internationally, about how the history of the Cold War should be told and taught, how it should be represented and remembered. While much has been written about the political history of the Cold War, the analysis of its memory and representation is just beginning. Bringing together a wide range of scholars, this volume describes and analyzes the cultural history and representation of the Cold War from an international perspective. That innovative approach focuses on master narratives of the Cold War, places of memory, public and private memorialization, popular culture, and schoolbooks. Due to its unique status as a center of Cold War confrontation and competition, Cold War memory in Berlin receives a special emphasis. With the friendly support of the Wilson Center.

Author : Roland Vegso
Publisher :
Page : 490 pages
File Size : 19,35 MB
Release : 2007
Category :
ISBN : 9781109993431

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The dissertation addresses three interrelated fields of academic inquiry: Cold War studies, American literary history, and political theories of literature. In the first half of the dissertation, I provide a historical analysis of American anti-Communist politics in the early Cold War context and show that anti-Communism was dependent on a particular definition of modernism. In the second half of the dissertation, I examine three related genres of American anti-Communist popular fiction: nuclear holocaust novels, spy novels, and popular political novels. On the theoretical level, I argue that the primary goal of ideology is always to define a particular field of social visibility by identifying the legitimate limits of representation. I show that anti-Communist propaganda defined the limits of representation by reference to three recurrent figures: the enemy, the secret, and the catastrophe. Furthermore, I analyze the way "modernism" came to signify within this political discourse the necessary separation of political and aesthetic representation through the simultaneous exclusion of totalitarianism and mass culture. I read the three genres of popular fiction as three attempts to establish a field of representation within which the three figures (the catastrophe in nuclear holocaust novels, the secret in spy novels, and the enemy in political novels) could emerge as figures of the constitutive limits of representation.

Author : Li-Chun Hsiao
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 191 pages
File Size : 35,18 MB
Release : 2022-08-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1498569102

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The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches argues that what appeared to be a "genesis" of new literature engendered by the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan was made possible only through the "splendid isolation" within the Cold War world order sustaining the bubble in which "Free China" lived on borrowed time. The book explores the trenches of freedom in whose confines the soldier-poets' were surrealistically acquiesced to roam free under the aegis of "pure literature" and the buffer zone created by the US presence in Taiwan—and the modernists' expatriate writing from America—that aided their moderated deviance from the official line. It critically examines the anti-establishment character and gesture in the movement phase in terms of its entanglements with the state apparatus and the US-aided literary establishment. Taiwan's modernists counterbalance their retrospectively perceived excess and nuanced forms of exit with a series of spiritual as well as actual returns, upon which earlier traditionalist undercurrents would surface. This modernism's mixed legacies, with its aesthetic avant-gardism marrying politically moderate or conservative penchants, date back to its bifurcated mode of existence and operation of separating the realm of the aesthetic from everything else in life during the Cold War.

Author : Marina MacKay
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 185 pages
File Size : 29,49 MB
Release : 2017-05-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1472590090

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The modernist period was an era of world war and violent revolution. Covering a wide range of authors from Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy at the beginning of the period to Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett at the end, this book situates modernism's extraordinary literary achievements in their contexts of historical violence, while surveying the ways in which the relationships between modernism and conflict have been understood by readers and critics over the past fifty years. Ranging from the colonial conflicts of the late 19th century to the world wars and the civil wars in between, and concluding with the institutionalization of modernism in the Cold War, Modernism, War, and Violence provides a starting point for readers who are new to these topics and offers a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the field for a more advanced audience.

Author : Francesca Orsini
Publisher : Open Book Publishers
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 19,73 MB
Release : 2022-02-23
Category : Art
ISBN : 1800641915

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This timely volume focuses on the period of decolonization and the Cold War as the backdrop to the emergence of new and diverse literary aesthetics that accompanied anti-imperialist commitments and Afro-Asian solidarity. Competing internationalist frameworks produced a flurry of writings that made Asian, African and other world literatures visible to each other for the first time. The book’s essays examine a host of print culture formats (magazines, newspapers, manifestos, conference proceedings, ephemera, etc.) and modes of cultural mediation and transnational exchange that enabled the construction of a variously inflected Third-World culture which played a determining role throughout the Cold War. The essays in this collection focus on locations as diverse as Morocco, Tunisia, South Asia, China, Spain, and Italy, and on texts in Arabic, English, French, Hindi, Italian, and Spanish. In doing so, they highlight the combination of local debates and struggles, and internationalist networks and aspirations that found expression in essays, novels, travelogues, translations, reviews, reportages and other literary forms. With its comparative study of print cultures with a focus on decolonization and the Cold War, the volume makes a major contribution both to studies of postcolonial literary and print cultures, and to cultural Cold War studies in multilingual and non-Western contexts, and will be of interest to historians and literary scholars alike.

Author : Toby Manning
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 41,63 MB
Release : 2018-01-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1350036404

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John le Carré and the Cold War explores the historical contexts and political implications of le Carré's major Cold-War novels. The first in-depth study of le Carré this century, this book analyses his work in light of key topics in 20th-century history, including containment of Communism, decolonization, the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, the Cambridge spy-ring, the Vietnam War, the 70s oil crisis and Thatcherism. Examining The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), Smiley's People (1979) and other novels, this book offers an illuminating picture of Cold-War Britain, while situating le Carré's work alongside that of George Orwell, Graham Greene and Ian Fleming. Providing a valuable contribution to contemporary understandings of both British spy fiction and post-war fiction, Toby Manning challenges the critical consensus to reveal a considerably less radical writer than is conventionally presented.