1960
When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern
Columbia University Press
1960
When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern
Columbia University Press
In 1960, when World War II might seem to have been receding into history, a number of artists and writers instead turned back to it. They chose to confront the unprecedented horror and mass killing of the war, searching for new creative and political possibilities after the conservatism of the 1950s in the long shadow of genocide.
Al Filreis recasts 1960 as a turning point to offer a groundbreaking account of postwar culture. He examines an eclectic group of artistic, literary, and intellectual figures who strove to create a new language to reckon with the trauma of World War II and to imagine a new world. Filreis reflects on the belatedness of this response to the war and the Holocaust and shows how key works linked the legacies of fascism and antisemitism with American racism. In grappling with the memory of the war, he demonstrates, artists reclaimed the radical elements of modernism and brought forth original ideas about testimony to traumatic history.
1960 interweaves the lives and works of figures across high and popular culture—including Chinua Achebe, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Paul Celan, John Coltrane, Frantz Fanon, Roberto Rossellini, Muriel Rukeyser, Rod Serling, and Louis Zukofsky—and considers art forms spanning poetry, fiction, memoir, film, painting, sculpture, teleplays, musical theater, and jazz. A deeply interdisciplinary cultural, literary, and intellectual history, this book also offers fresh perspective on the beginning of the 1960s.
Al Filreis recasts 1960 as a turning point to offer a groundbreaking account of postwar culture. He examines an eclectic group of artistic, literary, and intellectual figures who strove to create a new language to reckon with the trauma of World War II and to imagine a new world. Filreis reflects on the belatedness of this response to the war and the Holocaust and shows how key works linked the legacies of fascism and antisemitism with American racism. In grappling with the memory of the war, he demonstrates, artists reclaimed the radical elements of modernism and brought forth original ideas about testimony to traumatic history.
1960 interweaves the lives and works of figures across high and popular culture—including Chinua Achebe, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Paul Celan, John Coltrane, Frantz Fanon, Roberto Rossellini, Muriel Rukeyser, Rod Serling, and Louis Zukofsky—and considers art forms spanning poetry, fiction, memoir, film, painting, sculpture, teleplays, musical theater, and jazz. A deeply interdisciplinary cultural, literary, and intellectual history, this book also offers fresh perspective on the beginning of the 1960s.
Tightly focused on work done within the year of its title, 1960 offers a compelling account of how artists processing the memory of mass trauma in World War II turned to innovation and reinvention as a means of recovery. Al Filreis has managed a rare accomplishment—writing a profound work of historical analysis that has deep implications for ideas shaping our lives today. Johanna Drucker, author of Iliazd: Meta-Biography of a Modernist
1960 offers a provocative and vivid intellectual history from a literary perspective. Reading works as diverse as John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things and Jackson Mac Low’s aleatory poetry as part of the belated processing of World War II traumas, it asks us to reconsider the origins, references, and trajectories of the postwar avant-gardes. Craig Dworkin, author of Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography
This brilliantly syncretic book confronts the repression of World War II in American culture, circa 1960. Filreis thinks through a constellation of songs, literature, poetry, and films, each pierced by the war. His linked essays show how great art is not only ethically necessary but also a source of endless pleasure. 1960 is a tour de force of critical intelligence. Charles Bernstein, author of Pitch of Poetry
Al Filreis's 1960 is a brilliant and absorbing cultural history of the moment when the repressed traumas and unspeakable atrocities of World War II erupted into the work of thinkers and artists across the globe. Reckoning with language's inadequacy to bear witness to—much less to reveal—crimes that language itself abets, these writers (from Fanon to Baldwin, Celan to Baraka, Achebe to Arendt to Auden, Duncan, Rothenberg, and others) developed and applied theories of language and power we still rely upon today. International in scope, rich in character and incident, 1960 is an investigatory and archival tour de force that excavates connections between figures and ideas undetected until now. Elisa New, director and host of PBS, Poetry in America
Al Filreis adds 1960 to the years that matter. The story he tells about the art, literature, and film of that year is complicated, one less utopian than many presume, one defined by the despair of World War II, one where it matters that Celan and Baldwin gave talks on the same day in October of 1960. This is a beautiful book, full of detailed readings of minor and major figures that reconfigure and contextualize the avant-garde and experimental traditions of that era. Juliana Spahr, author of Du Bois's Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment
[An] impressive study which offers countless new perspectives on the shift from the conservative 1950s to the progressive, often radical 1960s. Leonardo Reviews
Highly recommended. Choice Reviews
Preface
Part I. Emerging from the Night of the Word
1. An Introduction to the Survivor: New Contexts for Genocide
2. Pain-Laden Rhymes: Challenges to Narrative and the Radical “Writing I”
3. Openings of the Field: Deep Memory and Its Counterwords
Part II. The End of the End of Ideology
4. Absurd Judgment: Auden, Arendt, Eichmann, and the Kafka Revival
5. Oppose the Anti-Everything: Zero Art and the Hopeful Leap
6. Adjustment and Its Discontents: Aleatory Art vs. Cold War Deradicalization
7. Disaster Defies Utterance: Arts of the Unsayable
8. Thaw Poetics: Folk Revival, Radical Unoriginality, and the Old Word Witness
9. Abomunism: Wars Within Wars in American Poetry
10. Favorite Things
Notes
Index
Part I. Emerging from the Night of the Word
1. An Introduction to the Survivor: New Contexts for Genocide
2. Pain-Laden Rhymes: Challenges to Narrative and the Radical “Writing I”
3. Openings of the Field: Deep Memory and Its Counterwords
Part II. The End of the End of Ideology
4. Absurd Judgment: Auden, Arendt, Eichmann, and the Kafka Revival
5. Oppose the Anti-Everything: Zero Art and the Hopeful Leap
6. Adjustment and Its Discontents: Aleatory Art vs. Cold War Deradicalization
7. Disaster Defies Utterance: Arts of the Unsayable
8. Thaw Poetics: Folk Revival, Radical Unoriginality, and the Old Word Witness
9. Abomunism: Wars Within Wars in American Poetry
10. Favorite Things
Notes
Index