"Our Country and Our Culture" in The Era of Americanist and Modernist Studies: Reading The New York Intellectuals After Historicism

In 2002—in the portentous moment between the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq—Michael Lind published a cri de coeur in The Hudson Review. In it, he lamented the sad state of U.S. state culture, with "political and civic leader[s]" unwilling to quote poetry and "Poets Against America" (Lind's tendentious fabrication) spewing their "bitter multicultural and feminist" spleen "with a zeal that the propagandists of our Fascist, Communist and (now) illiberal Muslim enemies can hardly match" (2002, 535). Lind's ideal of literature as sincere civic engagement celebrates poets as our "fellow citizens," representative figures who "identify with their societies" (2002, 540-1), even if current U.S. poetic culture authorizes only attitudes of "condemnation" or "indifference" toward the "res publica" (2002, 537-8; wondrously, he links Poundian malice and countercultural rabble-rousing via a single Romantic-Modernist figural juggernaut of irrationalist hatred of democratic civilization). Written more than five years after their author redeemed himself "Up from Conservatism," these claims interest me for the ideological pattern of recognitions though which Lind maps his Americanist anxiety: the most important part of the essay is easily the title, "Our Country and Our Culture," which readers recognize as the name of a Partisan Review symposium published in three parts over the second half of 1952—one of the most visible texts associated with the New York intellectuals. At no point in the essay does Lind actually mention the symposium, likely assuming that everybody knows it already as an epitome of Cold War accommodationist engagement with the state. Super-visible for embodying this dominant narrative, the symposium presents the New York intellectuals as former resistant leftists maturing into engaged liberals, just as the U.S. matures into the role of superpower.² The Cold War's persistence as the representative contextual key to "Our Country and Our Culture" and the New York intellectuals is attested as much by wonkosphere apparatchiks like Lind as by revisionary literary historiography that repeatedly establishes a historicist reiteration of itself as a response to Cold War accommodationist professionalism. In fact, critics who lament the declining influence of the New York intellectuals and critics who celebrate it often share a reductive historicist interpretation of the symposium—overseen by a largely unquestioned figure of the "public intellectual" and anchored by twinned axiomatic beliefs in representational knowledge and a nationalized concept of a cultural body politic—that simplifies "the New York intellectuals" into embodiments of modernism's containment within Americanism. I argue here not, simply, that we need a fresh reading of the 1952 symposium to refine our knowledge of the New York intellectuals. Rather, scholarship today needs to critically reconsider the kind of normative frames through which we approach this key moment of Americanism and U.S. modernism in order to imagine alternatives to Americanist and modernist historicism.

The New York intellectuals, whom Irving Howe called the only U.S. group justifiably termed an "intelligentsia" (1968, 29), remain key figures in scholarly accounts of the displacement of the Cold War and modernist primal scenes into postwar Americanisms. But their renown is dominated by the single theme of accommodation, an account now so visible that we have trouble seeing beyond it.³ To contest this super-legibility, I analyze a chapter in the history of the narrative's differentiation of the accommodationist orthodoxy it describes and the post-Cold War present of its reiteration. Confident assertions of the New York intellectuals' importance—a narrative primarily of liberal accommodation with the state, and secondarily of modernist domestication in the academy, often taking specific form in subnarratives about the institutionalization of academic literary criticism, about the diminution of the American Left, and about intellectual complicity in U.S. cultural imperialism, by critics both praising and condemning the New York intellectuals—have not fully addressed their perverse legibility. I return to "Our Country and Our Culture," a prooftext of this orthodox accommodation narrative, to make two polemical claims. First, the super-visibility of the dominant accommodation account suppresses...