[D66] The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973

[J.N.]

	bookjacket <http://press.princeton.edu/images/k10326.gif> 	
	


  The Age of the Crisis of Man:
  Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973
  Mark Greif

*One of /Flavorwire/’s 10 Must-Read Academic Books for 2015*

Hardcover | 2014 | *$29.95* / £19.95 | ISBN: 9780691146393
448 pp. | 6 x 9 | SHOPPING CART
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eBook | ISBN: 9781400852109 | 
Our eBook editions are available from these online vendors
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Reviews <http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10326.html#reviews> | Table
of Contents <http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10326.html#TOC>
Chapter 1[PDF] pdf-icon <http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s10326.pdf>


	

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 New York intellectuals, Chicago protoconservatives, European
Jewish émigrés, 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.

*Mark Greif* is assistant professor of literary studies at the New
School. He is a founder and editor of the journal/n+1/.

*Review:*

"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/*

"[/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/*

"'One of the striking features of the discourse of man to modern eyes,
in a sense the most striking, is how unreadable it is, how tedious, how
unhelpful. The puzzle is why it is unreadable.' Thus, Mark Greif in his
exhilarating study /The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in
America 1933-1973/. 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/*

"[/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/*

*Endorsement:*

More Endorsements <http://press.princeton.edu/quotes/q10326.html>

*Table of Contents:*

/Preface/ ix
PART I Genesis 1
CHAPTER 1 Introduction /The “Crisis of Man” as Obscurity and
Re-enlightenment/ 3
CHAPTER 2 Currents through the War 27
CHAPTER 3 The End of the War and After 61
PART II Transmission 101
CHAPTER 4 Criticism and the Literary Crisis of Man 103
PART III Studies in Fiction 143
CHAPTER 5 Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison /Man and History, the Questions/ 145
CHAPTER 6 Ralph Ellison and Saul Bellow /History and Man, the Answers/ 181
CHAPTER 7 Flannery O’Connor and Faith 204
CHAPTER 8 Thomas Pynchon and Technology 227
PART IV Transmutation 253
CHAPTER 9 The Sixties as Big Bang 255
CHAPTER 10 Universal Philosophy and Antihumanist Theory 281
CONCLUSION Moral History and the Twentieth Century 316
/Notes/ 331
/Acknowledgments/ 401
/Index/ 405


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