[lbo-talk] TS Eliot & antisemitism

[wrobert at uci.edu]

Early Dos Passos, Alfred Doblin (Berlin Alexanderplatz), Franz Kafka,
Robert Musil, the surrealists, etc.  These claims get a lot messier when
you move out of the Anglo-American terrain.  On the other hand, Celine
makes the rest of the folks on this list look like a bunch of
humanitarians.... robert wood


> 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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