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Transatlantic Aliens

Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America

Will Norman

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How did the experience of transatlantic displacement shape literature, art, and thought in midcentury America?

The intellectual migration to the United States of European writers, intellectuals, and artists in the 1930s and 1940s has often been narrowly seen as a clash between a rarefied European modernist sensibility and a debased American mass culture. 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. The...

How did the experience of transatlantic displacement shape literature, art, and thought in midcentury America?

The intellectual migration to the United States of European writers, intellectuals, and artists in the 1930s and 1940s has often been narrowly seen as a clash between a rarefied European modernist sensibility and a debased American mass culture. 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. The transatlantic exchanges of midcentury emerge in the book as a crisis point for modernism at which claims for the autonomy of high culture became increasingly untenable, the geographical center of cultural authority was displaced, and the governing principles of the American cultural field went through a phase of dramatic instability.

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.

Reviews

Reviews

Writing with the style and vocabulary of modern intellectualism, [Norman] demonstrates the culture to which new scholars can aspire. Highly recommended.

Norman shows that certain other emigres seemed to gather their powers from the very antagonistic differences they encountered. Even more relevant for us now, the European cosmopolitans encountered a wave of right-wing authoritarianism and xenophobia that echoes the challenges faced by current immigrants.

The book's scope, and something fresh in its writing, shows this to be something more than an academic book marketed only for university libraries. It undeniably has a subject which should reach a wider readership, engaging with issues which are of the moment and with writers and artists who exceed mere 'academic' interest. It was not possible to read any chapter of this study without learning something... its insights and information are stimulating and thoughtful.

An exciting and accomplished scholarly project. Norman's compelling study shows the way our understanding of modernism remains—and should stay—inherently conflict-ridden. This subtle and illuminating book will contribute significantly to modernist studies and to the cultural history of the midcentury United States.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
288
ISBN
9781421420943
Illustration Description
18 halftones, 8 color plates
Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1Homeless Aliens and Dialectical Culture Critique: C. L. R. James and Theodor Adorno
Chapter 2 The Yankee from Berlin: George Grosz
Chapter 3The

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1Homeless Aliens and Dialectical Culture Critique: C. L. R. James and Theodor Adorno
Chapter 2 The Yankee from Berlin: George Grosz
Chapter 3The Big Empty: Raymond Chandler's Transatlantic Modernism
Chapter 4 The Taste of Freedom: Simone de Beauvoir, Vladimir Nabokov and the Intellectual Road Trip
Chapter 5 Saul Steinberg's Vanishing Trick: Modernism, the State, and the Cosmopolitan Intellectual
Conclusion: Not to Grin is a Sin
Notes
Index

Author Bio
Will Norman
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Will Norman

Will Norman is a senior lecturer in American literature at the University of Kent. He is the author of Nabokov, History, and the Texture of Time.