The period immediately following the Second World War was a time,
observed Randall Jarrell, when many American writers looked to the
art of criticism as the representative act of the intellectual.
Rethinking this interval in our culture, Neil Jumonville focuses on
the group of writers and thinkers who founded, edited, and wrote
for some of the most influential magazines in the country,
including Partisan Review, Politics, Commentary, and Dissent. In
their rejection of ideological, visionary, and romantic outlooks,
reviewers and essayists such as Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Lionel
Trilling, Harold Rosenberg, and Daniel Bell adopted a pragmatic
criticism that had a profound influence on the American
intellectual community. By placing pragmatism at the center of
intellectual activity, the New York Critics crossed from large
belief systems to more tentative answers in the hope of redefining
the proper function of the intellectual in the new postwar world.
Because members of the New York group always valued being
intellectuals more than being political leftists, they adopted a
cultural elitism that opposed mass culture. Ready to combat any
form of absolutist thought, they found themselves pitted against a
series of antagonists, from the 1930s to the present, whom they
considered insufficiently rational and analytical to be good
intellectuals: the Communists and their sympathizers, the Beat
writers, and the New Left. Jumonville tells the story of some of
the paradoxes and dilemmas that confront all intellectuals. In this
sense the book is as much about what it means to be an intellectual
as it is about a specific group of thinkers. This title is part of
UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of
California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest
minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist
dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed
scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology.
This title was originally published in 1991.
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