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The Country of the Mind Must Also Attack

Kathy Peiss

in Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe

With war imminent, Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish and William “Wild Bill” Donovan, soon to be head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forged a new relationship between libraries and ... More

With war imminent, Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish and William “Wild Bill” Donovan, soon to be head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forged a new relationship between libraries and America’s nascent intelligence service. Their urgent call for foreign information was a response to the international crisis, but it was also a culmination of larger changes in American libraries, academia, and cultural institutions. A new sense of purpose had arisen in the interwar years, characterized by national ambition and internationalist commitment. New ideas about organizing and accessing information challenged the traditional book. The Nazi attack on knowledge and culture intensified concerns about preserving, reproducing, and accessing materials. These developments would be yoked to an emergent intelligence apparatus and commitment to open-source collecting as a way to know the enemy. With the outbreak of war, MacLeish and Donovan devised a plan to send American librarians abroad to acquire foreign publications.Less

Radio's Writers: A Public Voice in the Modern World

in Radio's America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture

This chapter investigates a group of writer-directors who came to believe that in the modern world, authentic communication had to reach a mass audience. Radio makes art a social force and the ... More

This chapter investigates a group of writer-directors who came to believe that in the modern world, authentic communication had to reach a mass audience. Radio makes art a social force and the artist's voice relevant. In the late 1930s, many writers found in radio the opportunity to undertake a new and ambitious project. Archibald MacLeish was hardly the only writer concerned about the place of art and the artist's voice in the American society of the Depression era. Art for the public and art that took on public issues did not have to go hand in hand. In radio, writers found an ideal vehicle for their efforts to weigh varied perspectives. Politically minded, artistically ambitious writers like Norman Corwin and Arch Oboler could not express themselves fully on air. In the 1930s, the limits a mass-produced culture imposed upon artistic and political speech were real and, at times, very stark.Less

Thirty-Two. Reflections and Ruminations

Steve Swayne

in Orpheus in Manhattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of America's Musical Life

In the aftermath of the bicentennial commission, Schuman's compositions took on a darker hue. During this period of his life, he began to lose a number of his close colleagues: Roy Harris, Seymour ... More

In the aftermath of the bicentennial commission, Schuman's compositions took on a darker hue. During this period of his life, he began to lose a number of his close colleagues: Roy Harris, Seymour Shifrin, and Samuel Barber in particular. He also waged battle against the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which he founded, because he felt it had strayed from the vision he had for American music. This chapter examines the works from this period, including Schuman's only song cycle, set to words of Archibald MacLeish, as well as a number of works Schuman composed to commemorate various friends and colleagues. Even though much around Schuman appeared to be crepuscular, there was also evidence that a new day for his music was on the horizon.Less

Prestige Radio: The Columbia Workshop and the Poetics of Sound

Jeff Porter

in Lost Sound: The Forgotten Art of Radio Storytelling

Although wireless storytelling was still in its early stages, it didn’t take long for radio to mature. Vital to the literary turn in radio, as chapter two shows, was the prestige movement launched by ... More

Although wireless storytelling was still in its early stages, it didn’t take long for radio to mature. Vital to the literary turn in radio, as chapter two shows, was the prestige movement launched by the underdog CBS network, which became a haven for inventive radio auteurs whose creative output rescued broadcast culture (at least for a spell) from the pull of daytime soaps and for-profit programming. American network radio was barely ten years old when CBS debuted the Columbia Workshop in the summer of 1936. The aim of the Workshop was to produce serious radio literature by pushing the envelope of playwriting as well as broadcast technology. Not only Orson Welles but other writers who moved into radio—including Norman Corwin, Arch Oboler, and Archibald MacLeish—were invited to press the boundaries of radiophonic storytelling. During the course of its eight-year run, the Workshop aired nearly 400 works for radio, many of them bold and experimental exceptions to what listeners ordinarily heard. Prestige radio contributed to what many saw as a novel body of enduring literature, a virtual public library that allowed CBS to characterize itself not just as a broadcaster but as a publisher.Less

The Poetic Universe: Mapping Interrelations between Modern American Poetry and the Sciences

Peter Middleton

in Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After

Postwar New American poets and their successors, the Language Writers, insisted that their poetry was capable of intellectual inquiry. After giving examples of their claims for poetry, the chapter ... More

Postwar New American poets and their successors, the Language Writers, insisted that their poetry was capable of intellectual inquiry. After giving examples of their claims for poetry, the chapter sets out the book’s methodological assumptions. Literary theory has struggled to represent adequately the interrelations between science and poetry because it has not engaged with the epistemological claims of the sciences. Yet science is part of the DNA of modern literary theory. One major theme of the book is how poets attempted to develop new poetic epistemologies. Science envy has been attributed to the early-twentieth-century modernist poets, but the book argues that the picture is more complex in the postwar era. Many disciplines employed methods and concepts from physics, seeing this not as physics envy but as intellectual opportunity. The book then maps out schematically the different kinds of responses made by postwar American poets of all kinds to the sciences. It goes on to show how some of these responses had antecedents among modernist predecessors. Archibald MacLeish’s poem “Einstein” is discussed in detail because of its representative character. The importance of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound for later poets is discussed.Less

New Exile

Vincent Giroud

in Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music

Nabokov left France in 1933 to lecture at the Barnes Foundation. Shortly afterward, his ballet Union Pacific, on a scenario by poet Archibald MacLeish, the first ballet on an American theme, ... More

Nabokov left France in 1933 to lecture at the Barnes Foundation. Shortly afterward, his ballet Union Pacific, on a scenario by poet Archibald MacLeish, the first ballet on an American theme, triumphed in a choreography by Massine. Nabokov’s friendships in New York included photographers Cartier-Bresson and Beaton and composer Elliott Carter, to whom he always remained close. In 1936, after visiting his mother in Nazi Germany, he took up a position as music professor at Wells College, in upstate New York.Less

Introduction: Acting Corporate

Lisa Siraganian

in Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons

The Introduction contextualizes the book’s broader legal and philosophical debates about corporate personhood, collective agency, and modernism. The book’s methodology and structure are explained ... More

The Introduction contextualizes the book’s broader legal and philosophical debates about corporate personhood, collective agency, and modernism. The book’s methodology and structure are explained using accessible modernist poems, political cartoons, and legal case studies to present to non-experts the key ideas and historical background of corporate personhood in the U.S., with its first life not after the U.S. Supreme Court case Citizens United (2010), but after Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Beginning with an extended example from Muriel Rukeyser’s long poem, The Book of the Dead, the Introduction canvasses American literature from the nineteenth through the twentieth century to show how the book renders the field of modernist studies radically different, as modernism’s formal speculations emerge as deeply entangled with a range of social and political developments. Asking the question “Has a corporation a soul?” becomes a means to explore the aims of collective social agents, and to think through how collective forms produce meaning by their acts. Not until the postwar era did philosophy synthesize these ideas (on the possibility of corporate intention) being teased out in mostly prewar novels, poetry, and short stories. The third section situates this analysis within modernist literary studies as a field, culminating with a reading of an Archibald MacLeish poem in light of this focus on collective action and literary form and descriptions of each subsequent chapter.Less