In a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten today,
intellectuals of all schools shared a belief that human nature was
under threat. The immediate result was a glut of dense, abstract
books on the "nature of man." But the dawning "age of the crisis of
man," as Mark Greif calls it, was far more than a historical
curiosity. In this ambitious intellectual and literary history,
Greif recovers this lost line of thought to show how it influenced
society, politics, and culture before, during, and long after World
War II. During the 1930s and 1940s, fears of the barbarization of
humanity energized New York intellectuals, Chicago
protoconservatives, European Jewish emigres, and native-born
bohemians to seek "re-enlightenment," a new philosophical account
of human nature and history. After the war this effort diffused,
leading to a rebirth of modern human rights and a new power for the
literary arts. Critics' predictions of a "death of the novel"
challenged writers to invest bloodless questions of human nature
with flesh and detail. Hemingway, Faulkner, and Richard Wright
wrote flawed novels of abstract man. Succeeding them, Ralph
Ellison, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, and Thomas Pynchon
constituted a new guard who tested philosophical questions against
social realities--race, religious faith, and the rise of
technology--that kept difference and diversity alive. By the 1960s,
the idea of "universal man" gave way to moral antihumanism, as new
sensibilities and social movements transformed what had come
before. Greif's reframing of a foundational debate takes us beyond
old antagonisms into a new future, and gives a prehistory to the
fractures of our own era.
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