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.
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.
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
Al Filreis is Kelly Family Professor of English, director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, codirector of PennSound, and founder and faculty director of the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism (1994) and Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–60 (2008), and he is the host of the podcast PoemTalk.
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*
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