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Transatlantic Aliens
Will Norman
其他書名
Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America
出版
JHU Press
, 2016-11-27
主題
Social Science / Popular Culture
Literary Criticism / Modern / 20th Century
History / Social History
Social Science / Emigration & Immigration
Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory
History / Modern / 20th Century / General
ISBN
1421420953
9781421420950
URL
http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=yddtDQAAQBAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
EBook
SAMPLE
註釋
“A cogent and innovative account of the politics of literary and artistic modernism in the early years of the Cold War . . . an exceptional book.” —
Transatlantica
In
Transatlantic Aliens
, Will Norman reorients our understanding of midcentury American culture by thinking dialectically about the interfusion of aesthetic and intellectual practices across both the cultural hierarchy and the Atlantic.
Norman relays this critical narrative through a series of interlinked case studies of key figures, including C. L. R. James, Theodor Adorno, George Grosz, Raymond Chandler, Simone de Beauvoir, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Steinberg. He discovers the strange afterlives of European modernism in disorientating and uncanny juxtapositions: the aesthetics of French symbolism flicker among the neon signs of a small town in the dead of night, and echoes of Mondrian’s grids are observed in the form of a boardroom sales chart. At the heart of
Transatlantic Aliens
is a conception of alienation that encompasses both its political and aesthetic valences. What unites the exilic figures it addresses is the desire to transform the practical experience of alienation into a positive resource for criticizing and coping with a reconfigured postwar landscape.
Addressed to scholars and readers of American and comparative literatures as well as of cultural history and visual culture, the book combines assessments of individual artworks, novels, and other texts with more distant readings spanning time and space. A gallery of color plates beautifully illuminates the book’s analysis. Examining hardboiled fiction through Flaubert,
New Yorker
cartoons through modernist painting, and Bette Davis through Hegel and Marx,
Transatlantic Aliens
challenges and changes the way we understand modernism’s place in midcentury American culture.