College Literature

Robert Genter's Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America synthesizes postwar American intellectual history by analyzing the cultural artifacts of several postwar sociologists, postwar novelists, literary critics, abstract expressionist painters, and public intellectuals. While an impressive swath of artists and intellectuals are discussed in detail, the titular heroes of Genter's genealogy are rhetorician Kenneth Burke; sociologists C. Wright Mills, Erving Goffman, and David Riesman; psychoanalyst Norman Brown; abstract artist Jasper Johns; and novelists James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison.

Late Modernism describes postwar American modernism as an ongoing cultural debate among intellectuals and artists about common anxieties and themes, including totalitarianism, authoritarianism, the atomic threat, the rise of big science, changing gender roles, and identity formation. This premise effects the book's organization and its argumentative logic. After his introduction, Genter gives almost equal attention to high, romantic, and late modernism throughout his eight chapters because he defines his late modernists, as individuals and as a group, against the ideas and arguments of high and romantic modernists, respectively. Genter argues that an otherwise "varied" group of high modernists including literary and cultural critics like Theodor Adorno, Lionel Trilling, and Allen Tate prized the autonomous work of art, formalism, and orthodox Freudian psychology, inter alia (13). In contrast, key members of the Beat generation—Genter's "romantic modernists"—privileged primitive myth, Jungian archetypes, and improvisational aesthetic techniques to understand and combat those same anxieties. In their turn, late modernists perceived cultural artifacts as acts of persuasive communication designed to achieve particular effects, and they theorized that human identities are formed through complex interactions in historical and interpersonal contexts.

From this perspective, Genter parallels the premises of late modernists by organizing his own book with a quasi-Burkian approach, what he calls "a combative debate" (12) in which all of his historical characters are constantly in clear conflict with opposing modernist discourses. On one hand, this approach allows Genter to make clear and often persuasive claims for late [End Page 150] modernists as individuals and as a group, and to create a genealogy in the sense of uncovering interesting similarities among otherwise heterogeneous figures like Lionel Trilling and Theodor Adorno, or Ralph Ellison and David Riesman. On the other hand, it leads to a privileging of inter-group similarity in which key differences are repressed. Likewise, connections between members of different groups are often suppressed. For example, Saul Bellow is identified as a romantic modernist, largely due to his interest in Wilhelm Reich's psychoanalytic theories (138) and despite his considerable aesthetic and political differences with someone like Jack Kerouac; Theodor Adorno is made into a "high modernist" due to his attacks on mass culture and his elitism, but his dialectical interest in history is suppressed as a result. To his credit, Genter acknowledges the general rule that many differences exist between his grouped figures, but for the most part readers will have to look elsewhere for details.

Both the introduction and the first chapter of Late Modernism feature the most important character in Genter's late modernism: Kenneth Burke, who defined art as a rhetorical act, a persuasive act of communication between artist and audience. In his introduction, Genter defines late modernists as those who were either influenced by Burke or "paralleled the theoretical moves he made" (48). In chapter one, Genter details the attitudes of high modernists of the 1940s and 1950s toward the privileging of "big science" in postwar America, and then he describes the alternate responses of first the romantic modernists and finally the late modernists, led by Burke. Part one's final two chapters show how two late modernists, the sociologist David Riesman and the psychoanalyst Norman Brown, differed from high modernists and paralleled Burke through their responses to authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Sociologist David Riesman avoided the high modernist overreaction to the culture industry by theorizing that individuals could successfully resist ideological indoctrination, while psychologist Norman Brown radically reinterpreted Freud to argue that the healthy ego...