This panel will feature papers on a collection of exemplary intellectuals of the Cold War period, including Ian Watt, Clement Greenberg, Joan Didion, and Hugh Kenner, and seek a reevaluation of their work. We will historicize the function of the intellectual during the “Cultural Cold War,” with focus on these critics’ assessment of earlier eras. We argue that their work did not merely reflect Cold War ideological pressures but rather advanced sophisticated accounts of art’s relationship to politics, often in ways that troubled an West/East binary. The intellectuals’ engagement with Cold War iterations of Marxism and anticommunism will be addressed in each paper.
Gregor Baszak’s paper will defend art critic Clement Greenberg against charges that his post-War criticism was shaped surreptitiously by American political interests in the Cultural Cold War and that he espoused an “elitist, and anti-Marxist view of modernism” (Frances Stonor Saunders). These arguments are often made with the barest reference to Greenberg’s actual art theoretical writings. Revisiting Greenberg’s theoretical writings, however, reveals a consistency in his thought between the pre-War days and the Cold War era. Where Greenberg was aware of historical context and the pressures of social evolution, it was not solely with regard to the concerns of his own day. Instead, Greenberg’s historization of the rise of the modernist avant-garde is contingent on the afterlife of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, a crucial date in Marxist historiography and one that makes a frequent recurrence in his writings, especially in “Towards a Newer Laocoön.” Rather than celebrating artistic abstraction for its own sake, Greenberg stressed its function as an aesthetic expression of the crisis of bourgeois society post-1848 in which the celebration of the heroic individual as represented by the novel as a dominant art medium seemed no longer viable.
Eric Strand’s paper on Ian Watt will put the still-controversial The Rise of the Novel (1957) in the context of 1950s modernization theory, which sought to offer an alternative to Marxist narratives of development. Recently scholars have begun to historicize Watt’s work, focusing in particular on his experience as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese and how this trauma becomes allegorized through his studies of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. However, The Rise of the Novel is also specifically a Cold War document, since Watt did postwar graduate study at Harvard, sharing an intellectual milieu with modernization theorists like Talcott Parsons. The Rise of the Novel’s emphasis on the growth of print literacy and a culture-consuming public overlaps with classics such as Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society (1958), which argued that access to various forms of mass-mediated narratives allowed “traditional” people to imagine alternative social roles and thus become “modern.” On a more sophisticated level, Watt stresses that modern individualism was fostered by the productive tension between a landowning aristocracy (Henry Fielding) and urban bourgeoisie (Samuel Richardson), a developmental paradigm that was markedly different from the undemocratic landowning regimes that created fascism in Germany and Japan. Claiming the novel as the archetypal genre of this Western individualism, Watt’s study also serves as a kind of social-psychological buffer—his ultimate response to his prisoner-of-war experience. The Rise of the Novel’s Cold War origin helps to explain why revisionist critics must still engage with Watt despite his ethnocentrism, since these alternative accounts of the novel’s development continue to work within a modernization paradigm.
Stephen Schryer’s paper will examine two intellectuals closely associated with William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review in the 1960s: novelist and new journalist Joan Didion and literary critic Hugh Kenner. Buckley established National Review in 1955 as a journal that would fuse the divergent strands of U.S. conservatism: anti-Communism, traditionalism, and libertarianism. This effort culminated in the journal’s championing of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan as the standard bearers of “movement conservatism” in the 1960s. However, not all National Review contributors evaluated these two figures equally. Throughout the decade, Didion and Kenner lent their prestige to Buckley’s journal, writing numerous reviews and essays. Both were Goldwater supporters, celebrating him as an exemplar of National Review’s fusionist philosophy. However, when Reagan emerged as the voice of movement conservatism after his 1964 televised speech on behalf of Goldwater and subsequent campaign for governor of California, both denounced him as a charlatan. This distrust rested in Didion and Kenner’s perception of Reagan’s anti-intellectualism, which reflected, for both writers, a dangerous innocence characteristic of Hollywood’s impact on national politics. This paper explores both writers’ attempt to imagine Cold War conservatism as an anti-populist political stance – an effort that seemed increasingly dubious after Reagan’s rise.
Our panel moderator, Andrew Hoberek, will keep each presenter to a duration of between fifteen to eighteen minutes to assure sufficient discussion time. As political developments of our own time appear in their own right as a new Cold War between the United States and its allies on the one hand and Russia on the other, the question of an intellectual’s role amid a volatile geopolitical situation necessitates urgent revisitation. To draw conclusions for the present and the future, the lessons of the past have regained enormous importance. How does the critical study of the “Cultural Cold War” illuminate the path forward?