THE FIFTIES' THIRTIES

The Fifties' Thirties

a work very much in progress

Modernism, as it passed out of the era of collaboration with political fact and into an allegedly postideological era, always retained an argument against the very idea that such collaboration had ever taken place.
The making of the fifties' thirties in poetry was getting underway as early as 1946.
In the anticommunist imagination--in this culturally important sense very different from the anticommunist liberal imagination--communism bespoils intimacy so thoroughly that the very revelation of communist affiliation can concede an already existing transgressive kind of love.
Anticommunist liberals incessantly theorized against the creation of oppositions.
While deeply committed to an opposition as defining all, anticommunism was at the same time a great proponent of the idea that boundaries delineating antagonisms were no longer clearly defined.
For anticommunist liberals American poetry in the 1950s had become a hold of freedom--a deep-seated separate peace; like the self itself (per then-dominant theories of the self), it was a site that could neither be pierced nor violated by nasty political force.
For anticommunist critics, if a text was characteristically unequivocal it was clinging uselessly, even childishly, to a foregone aesthetic.
When a literary critic in 1952 worried about "mass imagination" and its effects on the development of aesthetic senses in American children he said he was referring to a threat created by the advance of technology, but it's interesting and important to note that the language of threat he used closely resembled the language of anticommunism.

I'm very interested in the concept of generations, and gave a talk on this topic at the MLA Conference in Chicago, December 1995.

here

The Great "Red Menace": United States Prosecution of American Communists, 1947-1952. By Peter L. Steinberg. West port, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1984. 311 pages. $35.00.
No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. By Ellen W. Schrecker. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 437 pages. $20.95.

For a sense of "the fifties' thirties," see an excerpt from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Politics of Hope (1962).

afilreis@writing.upenn.edu