Dennis Claxton wrote:
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> Perry Anderson's book on postmodernism does a great job of tracing
> the use of term. One of the earliest uses in the U.S. is in an essay
> from 1972 by Leo Steinberg on Robert Rauschenberg. Steinberg praises
> Rauschenberg and calls Clement Greenberg on the carpet.
In 1972, looking around for something to do to shore up my precarious position (after the events of 69-70) which I had come to call (only half facetiously) that of a tenured temp, I plunged into reading critics of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and for about the next 10 years read very little except Milton on the one hand and Marx/Engels/Lenin/Gramsci/Mao, & the Monthly Review on the other. And it was bringing Milton & his critics face to face with Marx that illuminated for me the myth of "The Individual." The poem continually forces the isolated reader to make free abstract choices of this alternative or that, i.e. individualizes the reader.
Carrol