[lbo-talk] TS Eliot & antisemitism

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Oct 5 12:22:21 PDT 2011


On 10/5/2011 12:24 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Oct 5, 2011, at 1:12 PM, c b wrote:
>
>> Eliot, Pound, Stein (protected by Vichy French), Nietzsche. There
>> seems to be a correlation between rightwing politics and major lit
>> crit/ aesthetic philosophers credentials.
>
> Shelley? Whitman? Ginsberg, even?

We haven't had many on our side, it's true. But serious reaction seems to have been endemic in "modernist" literature. One can add Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, Roy Campbell, Wallace Stevens. I believe Heine was, then wasn't with us. I think I know how to 'defend' the literature they produced, but I don't know how to _explain_ that streak in modernism. I _think_ it began with a negative reaction to capitalism without an understanding of (a) how capitalism _differed_ from earlier class societies and (b) what it _was_ that made capitalism so sinister. And that was coupled with a drive to 'conserve' (and sometimes first discover) a cultural/ethical tradition that they thought had once existed. Just noodling.

Carrol



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