To Brecht and Back. Notes on Clement Greenberg’s Avant-Garde and Kitsch

Clement Greenberg’s international reputation is partly due to the success of one of his first and most perceptive essays, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, published in the Fall 1939 issue of “Partisan Review”. Despite its unsurpassed importance, the article still requires a broader comprehension of its origins: according to Greenberg’s personal papers, the essay’s main concepts began to take form during the Winter 1939, when the author was involved in the drafting of a new essay on Bertolt Brecht, still unpublished today, at that time submitted to the “Partisan Review”’s editorial board but rejected. A second document enables to trace back Avant-Garde and Kitsch’s roots even further: according to a letter by Greenberg, one of the editors, Dwight Macdonald, plagiarized the rejected script as his last essay, Soviet Society and Its Cinema, clearly seemed to prove. The varied topics articulated in the letter, as well as in the draft on Brecht, would be at the basis of Avant-Garde and Kitsch, becoming crucial and early components of the editorial process of the well-known essay.

Modernidad y tradición en la crítica de cine norteamericana.

En la década de 1960, los debates alrededor de la noción de autor señalan la transición hacia una teoría contemporánea del cine. En los Estados Unidos, Andrew Sarris recupera los postulados de la politique des auteurs (que se había enunciado poco antes desde las páginas de Cahiers du cinéma) y los aplica al cine norteamericano. Confrontando con Dwight Macdonald o con Manny Farber, los textos de Sarris prepararon el ingreso de los estudios de cine a la universidad aunque, significativamente, la perspectiva académica se constituyó como un ataque contra el auterism. Este ensayo estudia ese momento previo a la consolidación de los Film Studies, cuando el cine todavía tenía que probar su legitimidad en el territorio de las artes.

Gatekeeping from Within

This chapter elucidates the previously opaque and little-understood roles of foundation and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) staff and officers, or “philanthropoids” as famous American writer Dwight Macdonald referred to them in his famous New Yorker article. These officers included program directors Walter Anderson (NEA) and Norman Lloyd (Rockefeller); vice president W. McNeil Lowry (Ford); and chairmen Roger Stevens (NEA) and Nancy Hanks (NEA). Foundation and NEA officers, as well as board of trustee members, were “interactional experts”—experts knowledgeable about a field, even if not actively contributing to new knowledge or self-identifying as experts—with tremendous influence in the operation of the system. They decided the kinds of outside voices that were heard in the decision-making process. They were gatekeepers, interlocutors, and translators between the outside consultants they recruited and grant applicants. They wielded the almighty red and black pens and their Rolodexes were a who’s who of asked experts.

La ciudad y la ciudad. Fantasías póstumas en la narrativa breve de Samuel Beckett y China Miéville

Desde el cambio de milenio, los abordajes críticos de la obra de Samuel Beckett – figura incuestionable del modernismo literario– a la luz de materiales considerados marginales respecto de la literatura “seria” han tenido un crecimiento considerable. Entre otras intervenciones críticas, se han sugerido posibles conexiones entre sus escritos y ciertas ramas de la ficción especulativa. Esto ha implicado poner a prueba un régimen de jerarquías y diferencias que cierta mitología (pos)modernista enunció como una “Gran División” (Huyssen) entre arte elevado y cultura de masas. Desde el otro lado de esta divisoria, el nombre de China Miéville –comúnmente asociado a la New Weird fiction– transita hoy un proceso de canonización que realza ciertas características de su escritura, tratando otras estratégicamente, en pos de su consagración como escritor “literario”. Sintomática de estos cruces ha sido la inclusión de ambos autores en un canon de escrituras slipstream, nombre que el escritor estadounidense Bruce Sterling dio a un supuesto género emergente capaz de expresar lo enrarecido de la experiencia contemporánea. El prisma del subgénero “fantasía póstuma” nos dará una base para articular el close reading de los materiales con algunas de esas grandes ficciones totalizantes que han dado forma al debate “teórico” en Gran Bretaña y los EE.UU. desde los años ochenta. A través de este ensayo de “mediación middlebrow” (término cuya alcurnia modernista se remonta a figuras como Virginia Woolf, Dwight Macdonald o Clement Greenberg), investigaremos las premisas y los efectos metodológicos, hermenéuticos y conceptuales que arroje el análisis comparado de los textos. Focalizándonos en las estéticas urbanas desplegadas por ambos autores, evaluaremos las potencialidades de ciertas perspectivas recientes en torno a Beckett, pero también los límites de un abordaje supuestamente “no canonizante” de la obra del gran autor irlandés.

tempo della malafede": L'attualità del pensiero di Nicola Chiaromonte

Nicola Chiaromonte era giornalista e saggista, erede delle idee di An- drea Caffi, amico di personalità come Albert Camus e Hanna Arendt e integrante del gruppo newyorkese della Politics di Dwight Macdonald. Ha scritto innumerevoli saggi sulla società del ventesimo secolo che ci possono aiutare a capire la crisi attuale dei valori e dell’arte. Questo testo si propone a discutere alcune delle idee del saggista presenti, specialmente, nel testo ‘Il tempo della malafede’, nel quale l’autore parla delle “menzogne utili” che si sovrappongono alle verità “inutili” nel nostro mondo “artefatto – interamente voluto e costruito dall’uomo”. Con questo saggio, Chiaromonte anticipa l’attuale concetto della “post-verità” (o post-truth, secondo l’Oxford Dictionary).

La mayor comprensión para el mayor número: la posición de Noël Carroll acerca del “arte de masas”

En el presente trabajo expondremos las líneas maestras de la teoría del arte de masas de Noël Carroll. La novedad de su propuesta radica en que, al contrario de la mayoría de pensadores que han abordado el fenómeno, nuestro filósofo busca una teoría puramente descriptiva que renuncie a la valoración de su objeto de estudio, limitándose a ofrecer un marco conceptual capaz de clasificar las expresiones artísticas de la sociedad de masas. Como complemento, intentaremos contextualizar su propuesta presentando las bases del debate mediante las ideas de Clement Greenberg y Dwight MacDonald, principales fundadores del tópico. Por último, concluiremos con algunos materiales para la crítica de la posición de Carroll.

The Second Imperialist War

This chapter explains the difficulties caused for the Trotskyist movement and like-thinking Marxists by World War II, due to its combination of vexing features. Writings by James P. Cannon on “the proletarian military policy” and by Albert Goldman in the pages of the Militant newspaper are used to explain the strategy by which resistance to fascism was theorized. The alternative thinking of Dwight Macdonald and the perspectives of Meyer Schapiro and Edmund Wilson are also discussed, as well as new developments in literary criticism.

Midcult y arte de masas en la sociedad contemporánea

Como expresión de la clásica dicotomía entre alta cultura y cultura popular, la estética y la teoría del arte han tendido siempre a jerarquizar las artes, distinguiendo entre un arte superior y otro inferior. Este trabajo pretende demostrar que esa tendencia ha sido reemplazada hoy por otra a la igualación, de acuerdo con el concepto <em>midcult </em>de Dwight MacDonald. Retomamos aquí dicho concepto para explicar la situación del arte actual, pero sin la connotación peyorativa que le dio su autor y asociándolo, en cambio, a un esfuerzo por elevar el nivel artístico y cultural del gran público.

The Showman in the Art House

Having achieved fame as America’s foremost purveyor of low culture, Levine began dealing in arthouse cinema at a national level—a field of endeavor that many felt he was unsuited for. This chapter focuses on Levine’s packaging of arthouse cinema for American audiences in the early 1960s and on the criticisms occasioned by critics and commentators, who accused Levine of being an interloper and dilettante. The chapter shows how, with the questioning of the concept of “high culture” at this time, cultural gatekeepers and elites sought to fortify their positions and to exert an even greater authority over movie culture. Levine was an ideal target for critics such as Dwight Macdonald and Bosley Crowther, but this chapter argues that their criticisms actually worked in Levine’s favor by portraying him as the maverick outsider that he portrayed himself to be. The chapter also investigates accusations that Levine was seeking critical redemption and an improved public image through his dealings in art cinema—accusations that were never true but were directed at him for the remainder of his career.

On Blustering: Dwight Macdonald, Modernism and The New Yorker

This chapter considers US critic Dwight Macdonald's celebrated two-part hatchet job on so called middlebrow culture: ‘Masscult and Midcult’. However, it loses its edge when it comes to assessing The New Yorker, the middlebrow magazine for which Macdonald, at the time he wrote the articles in 1960, had been a staff writer for eight years. Like all middlebrow products, Macdonald says, The New Yorker is produced to a formula that makes it monotonous, except that its formula is better than the one used in editing its ‘Midcult brethren’. The chapter shows how Macdonald's prose emblematises a midcentury middlebrow literary mode called blustering. Blusterers, who appear all over middlebrow US prose of the early Cold War, aim to talk with the appearance of forthrightness, but they get so bogged down that they end up muddled and mired in self contradiction.