>Thanks, Doug [snip] I have to agree with your to the point
>review of their [Rage Against the Machine etc.] aesthetic
>akin the the worst of the 30's proletarian novels.
Which novels are we talking about here? One problem - addressed by Foley in the book mentioned and also Alan Wald - is that a myth of the dreadful proletarian novel, written according to the CP's party line, has considerable influence. Yet those picking up this story tend to run with a diluted version of what Rahv and Phillips were saying in the 40s & 50s.
What did happen is that New Masses literary critics sometimes judged novels according to their 1930s 'political correctness'. This was coincided with CPUSA cliqueishness & nepotism in literary circles, and vicious campaigns against 'Trotskyism'. Against this sordid background, it's no surprise that the 30s proletarian novel was parodied. But we need evidence based on evaluating the actual books for Doug's point to make sense (even before comparing them to thrash bands).
.
On a related issue: back on Fri, 10 Dec 1999 17:08:26 -0500 (EST) "Michael Hoover" <hoov at freenet.tlh.fl.us> in
>Subject: Re: dead topix
went a bit far the other when he wrote:
>re. sectarians, Granville Hicks, in responding to James T. Farrell's
>attack (_A Note on Literary Criticism_) on CP and *New Masses*,
>acknowledged constraining elements but suggested that sectarianism
>of Marxist (that is, party) critics was necessary response to
>aestheticism of bourgeois critics who deemed working class experience
>unsuitable for literature.
It's precisely the approach of Hicks and co. that is used to support the claim, usually from right wing literary critics, that there was a party line in literature and that proletarian novels were written to the orders of the central committee. I took issue with this in a book chapter published last year:
'The Novel as Propaganda: Revisiting the Debate' in Bertrand Taithe and Tim Thornton (eds.), _Propaganda: Political Rhetoric and Identity, 1300-2000_ (Sutton Publishing, 1999)
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