Retracing The Lost Steps

IN CREATING FAULKNER'S REPUTATION: THE POLITICS OF MODERN LITERARY Criticism, Lawrence Schwartz details the process that legitimized an avant-garde aesthetic in the U.S. academic and popular media as part of a post-World War II, Cold War cultural project. As part of this process, formalist aesthetics and modernism displaced the realism and naturalism of the prewar years, which had been "taint[ed] . . . by an overt political orientation and ties to international Communism and support of the Soviet Union," 1 and critics condemned the representation of politics in literature—unless, of course, these politics were clearly anti-Communist (201-2). "The demands of the Cold War," Schwartz writes, "required a cultural politics which promoted new literary and artistic voices as evidence of a 'true' allegiance to the arts, and which also appeared to be an aesthetics without political content or motivation. In the morality play of the Cold War, American 'liberalism' represented democracy; and its literature and art, cultural freedom" (201)—a direct contrast to those of the Soviet Union, where Stalinist politics and the propagandistic, state-imposed social realism squelched artistic freedom and individualism (ibid.). In the late 1940s, this campaign [End Page 81] culminated in a reinterpretation of the work of William Faulkner that elevated the author's status in the United States from that of a regionalist to a writer who spoke to universal human values, and whose explorations of the Southern myth were reinterpreted as allegories of the human condition in the modern world; during the same period, as Schwartz details, social novelists such as Theodore Dreiser, John Steinbeck, and Richard Wright, who had enjoyed significant success in the 1930s, fell out of favor (3)

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