1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910819430903321

Autore

Redding Arthur F. <1964->

Titolo

Radical legacies : twentieth century public intellectuals in the United States / / Arthur Redding

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Lanham : , : Lexington Books, , [2016]

©2016

ISBN

1-4985-1267-4

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (171 p.)

Disciplina

320.530973

Soggetti

Intellectuals - United States - History - 20th century

Literature and society - United States - History - 20th century

War and literature - United States - History - 20th century

Dissenters - United States - History - 20th century

Criticism - History - 20th century

Radicals - United States

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: The uselessness of American intellectuals -- Be free!: globalism and democratic pedagogy in Henry James and Henry Adams -- World War I and the origins of the national security state: Mary Antin, Randolph Bourne, and Emma Goldman -- Mary McCarthy's swizzle sticks: food, drink, and consumerism in the American depression -- Herman Melville's Cold War: re-reading C. L. R. James's mariners, renegades, and castaways -- Turning poetry into bread: Langston Hughes, travel-writing, and the professionalization of African-American literary production -- Legacies of the new left: Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills, and Angela Davis -- Conclusion: Thought during wartime: American public intellectuals in the twenty-first century.

Sommario/riassunto

What use is thinking? This study addresses the ways in which modern American thinkers have intervened in the public sphere and attempted to mediate relations between social and political institutions and cultural and intellectual production. Chapters on both well-known and neglected public intellectuals address problems of critical dissent



during wartime, the contemporary crisis of the humanities under neoliberalism, and the perils of consumer culture and popular taste, arguing that any ""use-value"" theory of intellectual production is limiting.