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The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973
Mark Greif
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Description for The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973
Hardback. Num Pages: 448 pages. BIC Classification: 1KBB; 2AB; DSBH; DSK; JFCX. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (U) Tertiary Education (US: College). Dimension: 163 x 235 x 31. Weight in Grams: 766.
In a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten today, intellectuals of all schools shared a belief that human nature was under threat. The immediate result was a glut of dense, abstract books on the "nature of man." But the dawning "age of the crisis of man," as Mark Greif calls it, was far more than a historical curiosity. In this ambitious intellectual and literary history, Greif recovers this lost line of thought to show how it influenced society, politics, and culture before, during, and long after World War II. During the 1930s and 1940s, fears of the barbarization of humanity energized ... Read moreNew York intellectuals, Chicago protoconservatives, European Jewish emigres, and native-born bohemians to seek "re-enlightenment," a new philosophical account of human nature and history. After the war this effort diffused, leading to a rebirth of modern human rights and a new power for the literary arts. Critics' predictions of a "death of the novel" challenged writers to invest bloodless questions of human nature with flesh and detail. Hemingway, Faulkner, and Richard Wright wrote flawed novels of abstract man. Succeeding them, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, and Thomas Pynchon constituted a new guard who tested philosophical questions against social realities--race, religious faith, and the rise of technology--that kept difference and diversity alive. By the 1960s, the idea of "universal man" gave way to moral antihumanism, as new sensibilities and social movements transformed what had come before. Greif's reframing of a foundational debate takes us beyond old antagonisms into a new future, and gives a prehistory to the fractures of our own era. Show Less
Product Details
Publisher
Princeton University Press
Place of Publication
New Jersey, United States
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
About Mark Greif
Mark Greif is associate professor of literary studies at the New School. He is a founder and editor of the journal n+1.
Reviews for The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973
A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year for 2015 (selected by Adam Thirlwell) Winner of the 2015 Morris D. Forkosch Book Prize, Journal of the History of Ideas Winner of the 18th Annual (2016) Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University A New Statesman Book of ... Read morethe Year for 2015 (selected by Robert Macfarlane) One of Flavorwire's 10 Must-Read Academic Books for 2015 One of the Slate Book Review's Overlooked Books of 2015 One of The Paris Review's Staff Picks for 2015 (selected by Lorin Stein) "An important book, a brilliant book, an exasperating book... In The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973, the gifted essayist Mark Greif, who reveals himself to be also a skillful historian of ideas, charts the history of the 20th-century reckonings with the definition of 'man.'"
Leon Wieseltier, New York Times Book Review "In careful, thoughtful, and elegant prose reminiscent of Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson, Greif gives a brilliant exploration of the philosophical field that developed in the middle decades of the 20th century and echoes even up to our own time... Greif's dazzling, must read analysis offers luminous insights into midcentury American understandings of humanity and its relevance to the present."
Publishers Weekly, starred review "[A]n important new study of mid-century intellectual life."
Louis Menand, New Yorker "Bracingly ambitious... [He is] a stimulating literary critic."
Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books "I will not insult [Mark] Greif by calling him a public intellectual. He is an intellectual, full-stop... An intellectual is not an academic who can write plain or a journalist who can write smart, but something else altogether... Greif's history turns out to be a prehistory
our prehistory."
William Deresiewicz, Harper's "[The Age of the Crisis of Man is] a brilliant contribution to the history of ideas, one of the rare books that reshapes the present by reinterpreting the past."
Adam Kirsch, Tablet "[E]xhilarating...By 'the discourse of man' Greif means the vast midcentury literature on human dignity, from Being and Nothingness, to the 'Family of Man' photo exhibition, to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
a discourse that Greif interrogates with verve, erudition, sympathy, and suspicion, and that he follows into the fiction of our time."
Lorin Stein, Paris Review "It is encouraging to come across the work of a young scholar that offers clear-eyed insight into the origins of the current malaise, while also exemplifying what a fresh contribution to humanistic study might look like today... [A]mbitious and deeply researched."
Christopher Benfey, New York Review of Books "[W]ith this brilliant book Greif is restarting the project of 're-enlightenment,' pointing us toward ... the spiritual daylight of the present
where literary purposes and political agendas are moments on an intellectual continuum, not the terms of an either/or choice."
James Livingston, Bookforum "A striking construction, bringing together an array of thinkers and intellectual traditions whose synchronicity has gone largely unremarked."
David Simspon, New Left Review "Sometimes a work of cultural history surprises and enlightens simply by naming what we had not thought required a name. [Such is] Mark Greif's revelatory study of mid-20th -century humanism."
Brian Dillon, Guardian (UK) "A stunning intellectual history of the 20th century... [W]hat this book really offers is a new way of thinking about thinking, and the particular thinking that fiction can do."
Adam Thirlwell, Wall Street Journal "[O]ne of the most accessibly intelligent and provocative looks at a fascinating period in American intellectual life. Read it, if only for Greif's exploration of white Americans' appropriation of the phrase 'The Man.' But also read it for so much more; it will stay with you for a long time."
Kristin Iversen, Brooklyn Magazine "[G]reat detail, buttressed with deep research, presented with great analytic and synthetic skill... Unlike many scholars, he has a heart and isn't afraid to show it."
Alan Jacobs, Books & Culture (Christianity Today) "[E]xhilarating reading... Greif has written a work of real intellectual and moral force."
Anthony Domestico, Commonweal "The Age of the Crisis of Man is an unusual book. It stands out in part fo the grandiosity o f its ambitions: Greif tries to provide an expansive new framework for the midcentury trajectory of American ideas... A founding editor of n+1, he aims to mine the texts of an earlier generation for social philosophies that can serve the political needs of the present day."
Angus Burgin, Dissent "[I]lluminating of the intellectual situation Greif and all of us inhabit... Greif's conclusion: ... know your past, for sure; know that people have tried things that didn't pan out; know your way about contemporary theory, but wear that knowledge lightly; and, most of all, remain playful."
Kevin Mattson, Boston Review "The mastery on display here
the sheer diversity of thinkers explored
is staggering. Some of them will no doubt be familiar to you: Adorno, Jaspers, Foucault, Arendt. Others might prove a little fuzzier: Mortimer Adler, Shulamith Firestone, Sidney Hook. All are deftly woven into the fabric of crisis discourse
both the juicy rivalries and strange bedfellows
often with dazzling results... A tour de force."
Dustin Illingworth, Brooklyn Rail "Mark Greif's probing new book, The Age of the Crisis of Man, ... allows us to see intellectual culture repeating what are easy to identify, looking back, as hopelessly circular or reductive debates. Greif does a fine job, and a gentle one, describing this."
Christopher Nealon, Public Books "[A] learned exploration of an important debate, which still reverberates in many forms."
Francesca Wade, Prospect (UK) "[The Age of the Crisis of Man] works to uncover a major discourse in American letters, a largely postwar dialogue about the human (or posthuman) condition. It's a formidable project on Greif's part, one that could change the story we tell about intellectual politics in the 20th century."
Jonathan Sturgeon, Flavorwire "[A]n ambitious look at political thought in the 20th century, and how that thought was reflected in the work of several notable American writers... [W]hat emerges is a complex portrait of a literary culture, and the theories that informed it."
Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn "[F]ascinating and rich... The strength of the book is that although I disagree with much of what he says about the general position his readings of the novelists are engaging, lucid, attractively fresh and critically astute. So if you disagree with my views you should still read the book, and if you agree with me you should too."
Richard Marshall, 3AM Magazine "After reading Greif, one begins to wonder how we could have overlooked what was hiding in plain sight... Greif's book shows just how engaging it can be to glimpse philosophy in its human setting and view fiction as an agent of thought."
Patrick Redding, Society for U.S. Intellectual History Blog "A welcome work that belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who is serious about understanding twentieth-century thought and culture."
Daniel Wickberg, Society for U.S. Intellectual History Blog "Essayistic in style, brimming with wit and erudition, the book is sui generis in its take on Anglo-American analytical philosophy and human science, demonstrating that ours is by no means a 'unique' nor a 'uniquely bad time.'"
Adriana Neagu, ABC Journal "Greif is undoubtedly right to suggest that 'crisis' was a key theme, and his deft analysis of that theme offers an important correction to the persistent notion that the mid-century was the golden age of technocracy... [O]ne finds in Greif's book spirited, smart, and often surprising explorations of the thought of the period."
Daniel Immerwahr, Modern Intellectual History "Mark Greif's hugely impressive The Age of the Crisis of Man ... is dense, original and authoritative."
Robert Macfarlane, New Statesman "Greif approaches what could be a dry historical subject with a fiction writer's flair for character and narrative pacing, and his inventiveness and sense of wonder never subside. It's a great work of criticism about the idea of greatness, and where we get such ideas."
Evan Kindley, Slate "A tour de force of riveting interdisciplinary history."
James Dawes, Journal of American History "Mark Greif's ambitious study offers a compellingly nuanced and nonetheless comprehensive historical narrative of the inception and ensuing evolution of a crisis discourse which has proven to be instrumental in shaping the intellectual landscape of the United States through several decades."
Peter Csato, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies Show Less
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