1. Quoted in Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), 248–49. James Angleton graduated with a degree in English literature from Yale University, where he was the editor of the modernist journal Furioso. After university he joined what was to become the Central Intelligence Agency, where he was instrumental in coordinating efforts to ensure that the Italian Communist Party would not prevail in that country's elections in 1948. Angleton often referred to Eliot when representing the Soviet Union in public. That country was, he said, quoting Eliot's Gerontion on a television interview, “a wilderness of mirrors.” See Robin Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
2. Fritz Strich, Goethe and World Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), 349.
3. Ibid., 349–51.
4. David Damrosch, for example, asserts that world literature encompasses all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin. See David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 6.
5. John Pizer, for example, has observed that a “renewed interest in Goethean Weltliteratur is the almost inevitable result in our day of developments that somewhat mirror, and advance, those of Goethe's time: the end of the cold war and the concomitant rise of global financial institutions and multinational corporations (including many publishing houses); the emergence of numerous authors whose political, cultural, and sometimes even linguistic allegiances transcend the bounds of individual nation-states; and technologies such as the World Wide Web. Thus Goethe's pronouncement in 1827 on the arrival of a Weltliteratur rendering national literatures rather insignificant is more accurate today than it was in Goethe's age.” See John Pizer, “Toward a Productive Interdisciplinary Relationship: Between Comparative Literature and World Literature,” Comparatist 31 (May 2007): 6. For an analysis of cosmopolitanism as a situation of displacement, see Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanism,” Social Text, nos. 31/32 (1992): 7.
6. For analysis of how contemporary discussions of Weltliteratur incapacitate a thorough critique of globalization, see Andreas Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” New German Critique 100 (2007): 196–97; and Robert E. Livingston, “Global Knowledges: Agency and Place in Literary Studies,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 145–57.
7. According to Vilashini Cooppan, “Read through the uncanny, literature's vast life becomes in fact a kind of life-in-death, a form of haunting. The spectral haunting quality of world literature illuminates the dynamic relation of interaction, borrowing, improvisation, and alteration that actually produce texts across time.” See Vilashini Cooppan, “Ghosts in the Disciplinary Machine: The Uncanny Life of World Literature,” Comparative Literature Studies 41, no. 1 (2004): 22.
8. See, for example, Jonathan Arac, “Commentary: Literary History in a Global Age,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2009): 747–60; Walter F. Veit, “Globalization and Literary History; or, Rethinking Comparative Literary History—Globally,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2009): 415–35; Emily Apter, “Untranslatables: A World System,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2009): 581–98.
9. As Pheng Cheah argues “one vocational task of literature in this world of comparison is to provide an aesthetic-cognitive mapping of how the mechanisms and technologies of infrastructural comparison work in specific locations and their negative, coercive effects.” See Pheng Cheah, “The Material World of Comparison,” New Literary History 40, no. 3 (2009): 523–45. Also see Edward W. Said, “Globalizing Literary Study,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): doi:10.2307/463641; Emily Apter, “On Translation in a Global Market,” Public Culture 13, no. 1 (2001): 1–12.
10. Sibel Irzık makes the argument that Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book is structured and even addressed to Western readers insofar as the story is told to a Western journalist. Sibel Irzık, “Istanbul,” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 734–35. Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book, trans. Güneli Gün (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994). The Black Book was published first in Turkey in 1990.
11. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot,” in Critically Modern, ed. B. M. Knauft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 220.
12. Franco Moretti, The Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez (New York: Verso, 1996), 50. Also see Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBois (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (January 2000): 54–68; Franco Moretti, “More Conjectures,” New Left Review 20 (March 2003): 73–81; Franco Moretti “The Novel: History and Theory,” New Left Review 52 (July 2008): 111–24; Pascale Casanova, “Literature as a World,” New Left Review 31 (2005): 71–90; Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (New York: Verso, 2005); and Wai Chee Dimock and Laurence Buell, eds., Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
13. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 351.
14. Ibid., 354.
15. György Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1971).
16. Casanova, “Literature as a World,” 72.
17. See, in particular, Edward Said's chapter on “Discrepant Experiences,” in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1994), 31–43.
18. Critical accounts have been advanced by Aamir R. Mufti, “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 3 (March 2010): 458–93; Christopher Prendergast and Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, eds., Debating World Literature (New York: Verso, 2004); and especially Jonathan Arac, “Anglo-Globalism,” New Left Review 16 (July–Aug 2002): 35–45. For an analysis of how traveling theories limit critical analysis because such theories have become deracinated from the historical situation that generated the theories in the first place, see Edward W. Said, “Traveling Theory,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 226–47.
19. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 56.
20. Ibid., 55.
21. See Casanova, “Literature as a World,” 71. For a rebuttal of this claim, see, for example, Edward Said's discussion of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park in Culture and Imperialism, 80–97. The argument that textually based criticism and secular criticism (by which Said means a criticism that is both rooted in the world and in the idea that history is made by humans and can be remade by them as well) is not mutually exclusive is discussed by Said in Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
22. See, for example, Montgomery McFate and Andrea Jackson, “An Organizational Solution for DOD's Cultural Knowledge Needs,” Military Review 85, no. 4 (July–August 2005): 18; Montgomery McFate, “The Military Utility of Understanding an Adversary Culture,” Joint Forces Quarterly, no. 38 (2005): 42–48; Montgomery McFate, “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relationship,” Military Review 27 (2005): 24–37; Montgomery McFate, “Iraq: The Social Context of IEDs,” Military Review 85, no. 3 (2005): 37–40; Montgomery McFate and Andrea Jackson, “The Object Beyond War: Counterinsurgency and the Four Tools of Political Competition,” Military Review 86, no. 1 (2006): 56–69; and Montgomery McFate and Steve Fondacaro, “Cultural Knowledge and Common Sense,” Anthropology Today 24, no. 1 (2008): 27.
23. McFate, “The Military Utility of Understanding an Adversary Culture,” 48.
24. “The Human Terrain System,” http://humanterrainsystem.army.mil/Default.aspx.
25. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 86.
26. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 254.
27. AAA Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the U.S. Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC), “Final Report on the Army's Human Terrain System Proof of Concept Program,” October 14, 2009, 21–22.
28. In 1964, the Special Operations Research Office of American University received a grant from the U.S. Army for “Operation Camelot” in an effort to recruit social scientists as part of the government's counterinsurgency efforts in Vietnam. See Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Unintended Consequences of Area Studies,” in The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, ed. Noam Chomsky (New York: New Press, 1997), 222.
29. Said, Orientalism, xix.
30. I am by no means claiming that the government ran and administered cultural life.
31. Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” trans. Edward and Marie Said, Centennial Review 13 (1969): 3.
32. Ibid., 6.
33. Irene L. Gendzier, Managing Political Change: Social Scientists and the Third World (Boulder, CO: Westview Press Boulder, 1985).
34. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2010), 474.
1. John Crewdson and Joseph Treaster, “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.,” New York Times, December 24, 1967; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, 245; Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Jason Epstein, “The CIA and the Intellectuals,” New York Review of Books 8, no. 7 (April 20, 1967): 10; Winks, Cloak and Gown, 327; Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 4. Volker Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Edward W. Said, “Hey Mister, You Want Dirty Book?,” London Review of Books (September 1999): 8–9; and Hugh Wilford, “‘Unwitting Assets?’: British Intellectuals and the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” Twentieth Century British History 11, no. 1 (January 1, 2000): 42–60. For Said's brief criticism of Saunders, see Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 36.
2. Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?; Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer; Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: Free Press, 1989), 276; Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World; and Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 35, 276.
3. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Serge Guilbaut, ed., Be-Bomb: The Transatlantic War of Images and All that Jazz (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2007); Jane de Hart Mathews, “Art and Politics in Cold War America,” American Historical Review 81, no. 4 (October 1, 1976): 762–87, doi:10.2307/1864779; Robert Burstow, “The Limits of Modernist Art as a ‘Weapon of the Cold War’: Reassessing the Unknown Patron of the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner,” Oxford Art Journal 20, no. 1 (January 1, 1997): 68–80. On dance, see David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Naima Prevots, Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998). On music, see Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 21; Ian Wellens, Music on the Frontline: Nicolas Nabokov's Struggle against Communism and Middlebrow Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002).
4. Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left, and the Cold War: Calling the Tune (London: F. Cass, 2003); Liam Kennedy and Scott Lucas, “Enduring Freedom: Public Diplomacy and U.S. Foreign Policy,” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 309–33; and Penny Von Eschen, “Enduring Public Diplomacy,” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 335–43.
5. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World, 24.
6. See Said, Orientalism, 275; Said, Culture and Imperialism, 64–65, 243; John Carlos Rowe, “Edward Said and American Studies,” American Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2004): 33–47; Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); and Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 389.
7. John Sutherland, Stephen Spender: A Literary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
8. Kathryn Dyer, Central Intelligence Agency, Information Privacy Coordinator to the author, June 28, 2000.
9. Sol Stein, “A Short Account of International Student Politics with Particular Reference to the NSA, CIA,” Ramparts 5, no. 9 (1967): 29–38.
10. Thomas W. Braden, “I’m Glad the CIA Is Immoral,” Saturday Evening Post, May 20, 1967, 12. Encounter had two editors: one, Irving Kristol, in New York; the other, Stephen Spender, in London.
11. The National Security Act stipulates that the director of intelligence will “protect intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure.” National Security Act of 1947, 50 USC § 552 (b) (1) (2010).
12. Rubin v. Central Intelligence Agency, 2001WL1537706 (Southern District of New York [SDNY], December 3, 2001).
13. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Anchor, 2008); William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995).
14. Central Intelligence Agency v. Sims, 471 U.S. 159, 105 S.Ct. 1881, 85 L.Ed.2d 173 (1985).
15. 50 U.S.C. § 195 (2010) (formerly 50 USC § 195) (formally § 40) (2010). Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
16. The National Security exemption is 5 USC § 552 (b) (1), and the statutory exemption that gives the director of intelligence the authority to protect intelligence from unauthorized disclosure is 5 USC § 552 (b) (3).
17. Executive Order 12,958; 60 Fed. Reg. 19,825 (April 17, 1995).
18. Agamben, State of Exception, 23.
19. Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, trans. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1995).
20. Rubin v. Central Intelligence Agency, 2001WL1537706 (SDNY, December 3, 2001).
21. Ibid.
22. Central Intelligence Agency v. Sims, 471 U.S. 159, 105 S.Ct. 1881, 85 L.Ed.2d 173 (1985).
23. Ibid.
24. 50 USC § 552 (b) (1) (2010).
25. There is no knowledge so trivial that Sims does not consider worth “protecting from disclosure”: “In exercising authority under 102 (d) (3), the Director of Intelligence has the power to withhold superficially innocuous information.” We should ask what the court did not ask. Is there not a difference between protecting from disclosure and nondisclosure? From where does this language of prophylactics derive, if from no other place than the absence of national security?
26. See Jonathan Hafetz, “Secret Evidence and the Courts in the Age of National Security: Habeas Corpus, Judicial Review, and Limits of Secrecy in Detentions at Guantanamo,” Cardozo Public Law, Policy, and Ethics Journal (Fall 2006): 127–69.
27. Among the most interesting of these cases is John Berger's A Painter of Our Times, which the CCF tried, quite literally, to bury with a corpus of negative reviews. Other writers whom the CCF actively tried to marginalize included Pablo Neruda, whom it tried to discredit by rapidly duplicating his “Ode to Stalin.”
28. Michael Bérubé makes the interesting point that because the CCF put forward the idea that dissidents in the arts and letters were tolerated by Western democracies, “dissent was not a position that CIA-supported artists could dissent from. Under this heading, dissent is possible but unnecessary in open societies; it follows then that for the Cold Warrior, dissent in the United States is not the index of freedom but a form of treason.” Michael Bérubé, “American Studies without Exception,” PMLA 118, no. 1 (January 2003): 106.
29. Theodor W. Adorno, Current of Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2009), 374–78.
30. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 93.
31. Bruce Cumings, “Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies during and after the Cold War,” in Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War, ed. Christopher Simpson (New York: New Press, 1998), 159–88.
32. George Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 25, no. 4 (1947): 575; also see Nikhil Pal Singh, “Cold War Redux: On the ‘New Totalitarianism,’” Radical History Review 85 (2003): 174.
33. Denis de Rougement, “Looking for India,” Encounter, no. 1 (October 1953): 36–42; George Mikes, “Letter from Norway,” Encounter, no. 7 (April 1954): 38–44; Daniel Bell, “Letter from New York: At Vecherinka,” Encounter, no. 34 (July 1956): 65–68; Melvin Lasky, “A Sentimental Traveler in Japan,” Encounter, no. 2 (November 1953): 5–12; and Sudhin Datta, “World Cities: Calcutta,” Encounter 45 (June 1957): 35–45.
34. George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1968), 1:390.
35. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2008).
36. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 324.
37. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 11–12.
38. At the same moment the U.S. government was exporting its modern art to Europe, Congress was eager to censor its exhibition at home. As Jane de Hart Mathews writes, “With the closely reasoned rhetoric so characteristic of conspiratorial thinking, George Dondero [Republican chairman of the House Committee on Public Works] argued that modernism had been used against the Czarist government when Trotsky's friend, Wassily Kandinsky, had released on Russians ‘the black knights of the isms’: cubism, futurism, dadaism, expressionism, constructionism, surrealism, and abstractionism. Each was deadly. Cubism, according to Dondero, aimed to destroy ‘by designed disorder’; futurism, ‘by the machine myth’; dadaism, ‘by ridicule’; expressionism, ‘by aping the criminal and insane’; abstractionism, ‘by the creation of brainstorms’; surrealism, ‘by the denial of reason.’…A ‘horde of foreign art manglers’ had descended upon this country just before World War II, spreading their pernicious doctrines. Followers of these ‘international art thugs’ now included Americans such as Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, and Jackson Pollock…. In sum, a ‘sinister conspiracy conceived in the black heart of Russia’ had become a threat to America's cultural institutions and to those loyal American artists who sought to protect their cultural heritage from the new forms that were the symbols of a foreign ideology” (“Art and Politics in Cold War America,” 772).
39. Alain Badiou, “‘We Need a Popular Discipline’: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 4 (2008): 649.
Portions of this chapter previously appeared in Andrew N. Rubin, “Orwell and Empire: Anti-Communism and Globalization of Literature,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 28 (2008): 75–101. Printed with permission.
1. John Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of “St. George” Orwell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
2. Lionel Trilling, introduction to Homage to Catalonia (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), x–xi; Richard Hoggart, “George Orwell and The Road to Wigan Pier,” Critical Quarterly 7, no. 1 (Spring 1965): 81; and Mary McCarthy, “The Writing on the Wall,” New York Review of Books (January 30, 1969): 5. For a critique of Orwell's consolidating and often coercive point of view, see Edward W. Said, “Tourism among the Dogs,” in Reflections on Exile (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 97; and Simon Dentith, A Rhetoric of the Real (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), 148–73.
3. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters (London: New Left Books, 1979), 384.
4. Ibid.
5. James Miller, “Is Bad Writing Necessary? George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, and the Politics of Literature,” Lingua Franca (December/January 2000): 12–18; Judith Butler, “A ‘Bad Writer’ Writes Back,” New York Times, March 20, 1999, A15; and Cleo McNelly, “On Not Teaching Orwell,” College English 38 (1977): 553–66.
6. Ranajit Guha, “Not at Home in Empire,” Critical Inquiry 23 (Spring 1997): 493.
7. For a discussion of the significance of Orwell's representations of totalitarianism, see Étienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994), 36; Michael Halberstam, Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 118; Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 235–51; and William Pietz, “The ‘Postcolonialism’ of Cold War Discourse,” Social Text 19/20 (Fall 1988): 61.
8. George Orwell: The Critical Heritage, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 273, 286.
9. John Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of “St. George” Orwell (1989), Every Intellectual's Big Brother: George Orwell's Literary Siblings (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), and Scenes of an Afterlife: The Legacy of George Orwell (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003).
10. Neil Genzlinger, “Bending Minds with Rats,” New York Times online, March 25, 2009, http://theater.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/theater/reviews/25geor.html.
11. John Rodden, Scenes from an Afterlife, 247.
12. Ibid.
13. Darryl Campbell, “Orwell and the Tea Party,” The Millions (blog), posted July 26, 2010, http://www.themillions.com/2010/07/orwell-and-the-tea-party.html.
14. Timothy Garton Ash, “Orwell for Our Time,” Guardian, May 5, 2001.
15. Murray Sperber, “Gazing into the Glass Paperweight: The Structure and Psychology of Orwell's 1984,” Modern Fiction Studies 26, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 226.
16. Peter Davison has provided one of the best summaries in The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 20, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker and Warburg, 1998), 323–25. Also see Perry Anderson, “A Ripple of the Polonaise,” London Review of Books (November 1999): 7; Christopher Hitchens, letter to the editor, London Review of Books (January 6, 2000): 3; Perry Anderson, reply to a letter from Christopher Hitchens, London Review of Books (January 20, 2000): 3; Christopher Hitchens, reply to a letter from Perry Anderson, London Review of Books (February 3, 2000): 3; and Christopher Hitchens, “George Orwell and Raymond Williams,” Critical Quarterly 41, no. 3 (1999): 3–22.
17. Orwell, The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison, 18:383.
18. Quoted in Ros Wynne-Jones, “Orwell's Little List Leaves the Left Gasping for More,” Independent, July 14, 1996, 10.
19. Gerald Kaufman, “Big Brother of the FO,” Evening Standard, July 11, 1996, 17.
20. Quoted in Ros Wynne-Jones, “Orwell's Little List,” 10.
21. Christopher Hitchens, “Was Orwell a Snitch?” Nation (December 14, 1998): 8.
22. Orwell, The Complete Works, 20:326.
23. Bernard Crick, “Why Are Radicals so Eager to Give Up One of Their Own?” Independent, July 14, 1996, 10.
24. Letter to the author, August 2, 2000. Also see Hitchens, “Was Orwell a Snitch?,” 8; and Why Orwell Matters (New York: Penguin, 2002), 111–21.
25. See Dario Biocca, “Ignazio Silone e la polizia politica,” Nuova Storia Contemporanea 2, no. 3 (May–June 1998); Mauro Canali, “Il fiduciario ‘Silvestri,’” Nuova Storia Contemporanea 3, no. 1 (January–February 1999); and “Ignazio Silone and the Fascist Political Police,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 5, no. 1 (2000): 36–60.
26. Canali, “Ignazio Silone,” 36–60.
27. Ibid., 60.
28. Paul Krugman, “Reign of Error: The Bush Administration Rewrites History,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 29, 2006, B7. See, among others, Ryan Blethen, “Orwell Wrote Bush's Script,” Seattle Times, February 17, 2006, B6.
29. Margaret Atwood writes, “The government of Airstrip One, Winston's ‘country,’ is brutal. The constant surveillance, the impossibility of speaking frankly to anyone, the looming, ominous figure of Big Brother, the regime's need for enemies and wars—fictitious though both may be—which are used to terrify the people and unite them in hatred, the mind-numbing slogans, the distortions of language, the destruction of what has really happened by stuffing any record of it down the Memory Hole—these made a deep impression on me. Let me re-state that: they frightened the stuffing out of me. Orwell…did it so well that I could imagine such things happening anywhere” (my emphasis). Margaret Atwood, “Orwell and Me,” Guardian, posted June 16, 2003. http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,978474,00.html.
30. Andreas Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” 196. It is interesting to contrast Huyssen's much more compelling view of Weltkultur with Jameson's conceptualization of Weltliteratur as a process of communication that occurs between national literary forms. Jameson writes, “Our object of study is…the production of simulacra of national cultures; and tourism, the industry that organizes the consumption of those simulacra and those spectacles or images. This is why we by no means want to construe our discipline in terms of world culture, or of a misunderstanding of Goethe's notion of world literature as the canon or imaginary museum of all the masterpieces of history. In fact, what Goethe presciently had in mind was very much an informational or communicational concept: world literature did not mean for him Lord Byron or Rumi or the Shakuntala (all three of which he admired), but rather the Edinburgh Review and the Revue des deux mondes or Le Globe. World literature appears when the various national situations are able to speak to each other about the specificities of their worlds and their textual productions” (Fredric Jameson, “New Literary History after the End of the New,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2009): 379–80).
31. Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 6.
32. Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London: Penguin, 1980), 556.
33. Ibid., 638.
34. Michael Shelden, George Orwell: The Authorized Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 429.
35. The identities of thirty-six of the individuals listed by Orwell remained concealed by the British Foreign Office until 2003.
36. Orwell, The Complete Works, 20:255.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 249.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 18:231.
42. Ibid., 18:322.
43. Letter from George Orwell to Celia Kirwan, May 2, 1949, Public Records Office (hereafter abbreviated as PRO), Kew Gardens, London, Foreign Office (hereafter abbreviated as FO) 1110/189.
44. “Outline of Communist Strategy in South-East Asia,” August 15, 1949, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/22; Ernest Bevin, “Top Secret Cabinet Paper on Future of Foreign Publicity Policy,” FO 1110/IRD.
45. “Outline of Communist Strategy in South-East Asia,” August 15, 1949, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/221.
46. “Progress Report: Paper on Communist Strategy in South East Asia,” PRO, FO 1110/189.
47. Letter from Celia Kirwan to Ralph Murray, Adam Watson, and Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Sheridan, March 30, 1949, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/189.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Letter from George Orwell to Celia Kirwan, May 2, 1949, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/189.
51. Orwell, The Complete Works, 20:249.
52. The principle of crypto-communism itself—a neologism first used by the MP Tom Driberg and later used by Orwell against him—was characteristic of the disingenuous ambiguities that constituted the communist identity. The episteme had a logic of its own.
53. Orwell, The Complete Works, 20:255.
54. George Bernard Shaw, Prefaces by George Bernard Shaw (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 361.
55. Ibid., 359.
56. Bill Jones, The Russia Complex: The British Labour Party and the Soviet Union (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), 26.
57. J. B. Priestley, “The War—and After,” Horizon 1, no. 1 (January 1941): 15.
58. Secret Letter from Chancery to Information Research Department (hereafter abbreviated as IRD), September 27, 1954, PRO, 1079/39.
59. Letter from Chancery to IRD, September 27, 1954, PRO 1079/39.
60. Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Knopf, 1988), 342–50.
61. Paul Robeson Files, Home Office (hereafter abbreviated in the document location as HO), Alien Records, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, HO 382/6.
62. Geoffrey Crowther, Home Office, Ministry of Home Security, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, HO 335/40, 1949–50.
63. Orwell, Complete Works, 20:99.
64. Ibid., 101.
65. Raphael Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism (New York: Verso, 2006).
66. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 1.
67. Perry Anderson, “Components of the National Culture,” New Left Review 50 (1968): 3–57.
68. Ibid., 11.
69. E. P. Thompson, “Outside the Whale,” in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 213.
70. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 2005), 79.
71. See George Kennan, “The Long Telegram,” February 22, 1949, http://www.ntanet.net/KENNAN.html.
72. Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 42–43.
73. “Progress Report: Paper on Communist Strategy in South East Asia,” PRO, FO 1110/189.
74. R. V. Burks, “Statistical Profile of the Greek Communist,” Journal of Modern History 27, no. 2 (1955): 153–58.
75. “Devolution,” in The Oxford English Dictionary. See online at http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/devolution.
76. Ibid.
77. Quoted in Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2008), 38.
78. Ernest Bevin, “Top Secret Cabinet Paper on Future Foreign Publicity Policy,” January 4, 1948, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/221.
79. See Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 506–9.
80. George Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 25, no. 4 (1947): 566.
81. Ibid., 568.
82. British Foreign Office, Memorandum, “Outline of Communist Strategy in South-East Asia,” August 15, 1949, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/221.
83. Ibid.
84. Letter from Ralph Murray to Mayhew, January 28, 1949, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/221.
85. See Valerie Holman, “Carefully Concealed Connections: The Ministry of Information and British Publishing, 1939–1946,” Book History 8, no. 1 (2005): 197–226.
86. PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/738.
87. “Progress Report: Paper on Communist Strategy in South East Asia,” PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/189.
88. Orwell, The Complete Works, 18:444.
89. George Orwell, Animal Pham: Oru Palankatha, trans. Em Pi Rosi (Kottayam: Nasanal Bukk Satal, 1956).
90. George Orwell, O Tsiphliki Ton Zoon (Athens: Graphikai Technai Aspiote-Elka, 1951); George Orwell, Cuoc cách-mang trong trai súc-vât (Saigon: Imprint d’Extrême-orient, 1951); George Orwell, Negara Binatang, trans. Aus Suriatna (Bandung: Penerbitan Sangkreti, 1949).
91. Letter from Ernest Main to Ralph Murray, April 4, 1949, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/221.
92. “Proposal to Co-operate with the Americans in Producing an Arabic Version of Animal Farm, by George Orwell,” October 25, 1950, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/319.
93. Ibid.
94. Explanatory Notes, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/319.
95. C. F. MacLaren to Leslie Sheridan, March 3, 1951, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/392.
96. Letter from Ernest Main to Ralph Murray, April 4, 1949, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/221.
97. “Proposal to Co-operate with the Americans in Producing an Arabic Version of Animal Farm, by George Orwell,” PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/319.
98. “Negotiations for the Production of Animal Farm,” August 1951, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/392.
99. Memorandum from Jean Sanders to Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Sheridan, June 19, 1951, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/392.
100. Ibid.
101. Letter from T. S. Tull to IRD officers, August 10, 1951, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/392.
102. The IRD's efforts to adapt Western works of art and culture took another form altogether: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Voltaire's Candide were produced in a work entitled “Greenhorn's Travels in Stalinovia.” See “Greenhorn's Travels,” PRO, Kew Gardens, n.d., FO 1110/392; Letter from T. S. Tull to John Rayner, August 3, 1951, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/392.
103. Masao Miyoshi, Off Center: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 103.
104. Memorandum from Labor Policy Section Chief M. Machida to Chief of Kanto Civil Affairs, August 7, 1950, National Archives Records Administration, Washington, D.C., Record Group 331.2747 (17).
105. “Reports of Distribution Reaction to Animal Farm, a Cartoon Blast at Communism, August 1946–1951,” National Archives Records Administration, Washington, D.C., Record Group 331.2747 (17).
106. “Reactions over the Showing of Animal Farm throughout Ten Prefectures in the Kanto Area,” n.d., National Archives Records Administration.
107. “Reports of Distribution Reaction to Animal Farm, a Cartoon Blast at Communism, August 1946–1951,” National Archives Records Administration, Washington, D.C., Record Group 331.2747 (17).
108. Jay Rubin, “From Wholesomeness to Decadence,” Journal of Japanese Studies 11, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 100.
109. Letter from George Orwell to Leonard Moore, August 30, 1949, in Complete Works of George Orwell, 20:162.
110. Memorandum from unnamed editorial advisor to IRD staff, February 21, 1955, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/738.
111. George Orwell, O Porco Triunfante, trans. Almirante Alberto Aprá (Lisbon: Livraria Popular de Francisco Franco, 1946).
112. Letter from George Orwell to Leonard Moore, November 11, 1945, Berg Archive, New York Public Library.
113. Letter from George Orwell to Leonard Moore, January 9, 1947, Berg Archive, New York Public Library, New York, New York.
114. Letter from George Orwell to Leonard Moore, July 20, 1949, in Complete Works of George Orwell, 20:148.
115. Letter from Celia Kirwan to Jack Brimmel, July 18, 1949, Public Records Office, FO 1110/221, PR 920.
116. George Orwell, Skotsky Khutor, trans. Gleb Struve (Limburg, Germany: Possev, 1950).
117. Letter from Vladimir Pugachev to George Orwell, June 24, 1949, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/221.
118. Letter from George Orwell to Leonard Moore, July 20, 1949, in Complete Works of George Orwell, 20:148.
119. PRO, FO 1110/221, PR 920.
120. Letter from George Orwell to Leonard Moore, July 20, 1949, in Complete Works of George Orwell, 20:143.
121. Letter from George Orwell to Leonard Moore, July 28, 1949, in Complete Works of George Orwell, 20:153.
122. Letter from George Orwell to Melvin Lasky, September 21, 1949, in Complete Works of George Orwell, 20:172.
123. See Andrew Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda, 1945–1953: The Information Research Department (London: Routledge, 2004), 110–13.
124. Letter from Celia Kirwan to Charles Thayer, November 4, 1949, PRO, Kew Gardens London, FO 1110/221; FO 1110/738.
125. Memorandum from E. C. Miller Jr. to Bank of Japan, n.d., National Archives and Records Administration, Maryland, 290:15/34/07, Box 4079, C2–4.
126. Dean Acheson, “Participation of Books in Department's Fight against Communism,” April 11, 1951, National Archives Records Administration, Maryland, 511.412/6–2 851.
127. Minutes from anonymous editorial advisor to IRD staff, February 21, 1955, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/738.
128. Tony Shaw, British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 95.
129. Contract for Animal Farm between RD-DR Corporation and Halas and Batchelor Cartoon Films Ltd., November 19, 1951, Halas and Batchelor Collections, University of Surrey; “Comment on Animal Farm Script,” Psychological Strategy Board, January 23, 1953, Psychological Strategy Board Papers, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri; Telegram from Louis de Rochemont to Borden Mace, August 24, 1954, Papers of Louis de Rochemont, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming.
130. Letter from H.A.H. Cortazzi to Douglas Williams, January 25, 1955, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/740.
131. Information Section of British Embassy to the Information Policy Department, March 9, 1955, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/740; Letter from H.A.H. Cortazzi to Douglas Williams, January 25, 1955, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/740.
132. Letter from H.A.H. Cortazzi to Douglas Williams, January 25, 1955, PRO, Kew Gardens, London, FO 1110/740.
133. Letter to the Paris Theatre from Sol Stein, July 11, 1955, American Committee for Cultural Freedom Papers, New York University, Tamiment Library.
134. Memorandum from Sol Stein, July 11, 1955, American Committee for Cultural Freedom Papers, New York University, Tamiment Library.
135. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 22–23.
136. Ibid., 22.
137. Ibid., 23.
138. For a discussion of how literature functions according to discourse systems involving the sending, receiving, feedback, and storage of literary data, see Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 370. What Kittler overlooks, however, is how some literary “data” has not been “stored” or “received.”
139. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 309.
140. Ibid., 328.
141. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 256.
142. John Guillory, Cultural Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 55–56.
143. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 306.
1. See Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (New York: Common Courage Press, 1995); Richard J. Barnet, Intervention and Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1968); V. G. Kiernan, America: The New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World Hegemony (London: Zed Press, 1978).
2. Douglas Coombs, Spreading the Word: The Library Work of the British Council (London: Mansell Publishing Limited, 1988), 3.
3. Bernard Lewis, British Contributions to Arabic Studies (London: British Council and Longmans, 1941). Stephen Spender, Poetry since 1939 (London: Longmans, 1949); Edmund Blunden, John Keats (London: Published for the British Council by Longmans, Green & Co., 1950); Rex Warner, E. M. Forster (London: Published for the British Council by Longmans, Green & Co., 1950); Herbert Read, Byron (London: Published for the British Council by Longmans, Green & Co., 1951); John Lehmann, Edith Sitwell (New York: Published for the British Council by Longmans, Green & Co., 1951); Stephen Spender, On “The Cocktail Party” (London: Published for the British Council by Longmans, Green & Co., 1950); James Sutherland, Defoe (London: Published for the British Council and the National Book League by Longmans, Green & Co., 1954); and Oliver Warner, Joseph Conrad (London: Published for the British Council and the National Book League by Longmans, Green & Co., 1950).
4. Lewis, British Contributions to Arabic Studies. For a critical assessment of Lewis's work, see Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 315–20.
5. Lewis's authority as an Orientalist can certainly be located as early as 1939, when the British Council published his pamphlet, years before works such as “The Revolt of Islam” (1964) and “The Return of Islam” (1976) established him as one of the most influential figures to discredit and impugn Islam as the religion of irrationality, zealotry, and uncontrollable passion—an unrelenting menace to the West that defined, organized, and identified itself against these putative threats to its very existence (see Said, Orientalism, 315–20).
6. John Hampden, “Books and the British Council,” in The Book World Today (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1957), 230.
7. Ibid., 226.
8. Ibid., 230.
9. T. S. Eliot, “Notes towards the Definition of Culture,” in Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), 170.
10. Michael Coyle, “‘This Rather Elusory Broadcast Technique’: T. S. Eliot and the Genre of Radio Talk,” ANQ 11, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 32.
11. T. S. Eliot, “The Man of Letters and the Future of Europe,” Sewanee Review 53, no. 3 (1945): 341.
12. R. P. Blackmur, “The Logos in the Catacomb: The Role of the Intellectual,” Kenyon Review 21, no. 1 (1959): 8.
13. Ibid., 5.
14. Ibid., 7.
15. Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 23–24. Also see, Elizabeth Anne Cobbs, The Rich Neighbor Policy: Rockefeller and Kaiser in Brazil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
16. William Buxton, “John Marshall and the Humanities in Europe: Shifting Patterns of Rockefeller Foundation Support,” Minerva 41, no. 2 (2003): 133–53.
17. Lawrence H. Schwartz, Creating Faulkner's Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 81.
18. Robert Fitzgerald, Enlarging the Change: The Princeton Seminars in Literary Criticism, 1949–1951 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985), 10–11.
19. Ibid.
20. Williams's observations about the romantic artists’ relationship to the development of the literary market are quite useful and provide a general model for my discussion here. Yet his gesture toward the unevenness of this development of the “literary market” is undermined by his claim that “it is not perhaps until our own century that it is so nearly universal as to be almost dominant.” The point is precisely that the process was not universal, but thought by critics to be so. See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 33.
21. Congress for Cultural Freedom Papers, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Also see, Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy; and Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City.
22. See, for example, Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991); and Fernando Enrique Cardoso, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
23. C.L.R. James, “Britain's New Monthlies,” Saturday Review (May 22, 1954): 13.
24. B. Rajan, “Bloomsbury and the Academies: The Literary Situation in England,” Hudson Review 2, no. 3 (1949): doi:10.2307/3847799.
25. Geoffrey Wagner, “The Minority Writer in England,” Hudson Review 7, no. 3 (1954): 427–35.
26. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, “Letters concerning The Waste Land,” Nine, no. 4 (Summer 1950): 176–79.
27. Raymond Williams, “Editorial Commentary,” Essays in Criticism 4, no. 3 (1954): 341. doi:10.1093/eic/IV.3.341.
28. Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?; Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy.
29. Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy, 275–76.
30. See, for example, Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1997).
31. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 35–36.
32. Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy, 60.
33. Ibid.
34. Letter from F. J. Secker to H. Overy, June 1953, Warburg Papers, University of Reading, UK.
35. Encounter, no. 1 (October 1953).
36. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Nikhil P. Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); and also Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
37. See E. P. Thompson's “Socialist Humanism: An Epistle to the Philistines,” New Reasoner, no. 1 (Summer 1957): 107.
38. Dwight Macdonald, “America! America!” in Discriminations (New York: De Capo, 1985), 49.
39. Norman Birnbaum, “Open Letter to the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” Universities and Left Review (January 1959): 5.
40. Wagner, “The Minority Writer in England,” 431. The Hudson Review was founded in 1947 by Frederick Morgan and Joseph Bennett, both Princeton alumni and former students of the poet Allen Tate. It ceased publication in 2007.
41. Quoted in ibid., 432.
42. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
43. Congress for Cultural Freedom Papers, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Illinois. Also see Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy.
44. Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 137.
45. T. S. Eliot, “Dante,” in Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 205–30.
46. Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, 35.
47. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 136.
48. Encounter, no. 1 (October 1953).
49. Der Monat, vol. 5 (September 1954).
50. Der Monat, vol. 3 (September 1953).
51. Preuves, no. 45 (November 1954).
52. See Raymond Williams's comments about the metropole becoming a site of immediate transmission in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (New York: Verso, 1989), 37.
53. Witold Gombrowiscz, for example, was close with Constantin Jelenski, who became his translator. Jelenski was on the board of Preuves. See Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 144.
54. Raymond Williams, Culture (London: Fontana, 1981), 197.
55. Hiwar, no. 1 (1963): 61–70.
56. Peter Benson, “‘Border Operators’: Black Orpheus and the Genesis of Modern African Art and Literature,” Research in African Literatures 14, no. 4 (1983): 432.
57. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 43.
58. Janheinz Jahn, “World Congress of Black Writers,” Black Orpheus, no. 1 (September 1957): 40.
59. Wole Soyinka, You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2007), 74.
60. Coyle, “‘This Rather Elusory Broadcast Technique,’” 32.
61. Humphrey Carpenter, The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3, 1946–1996 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996), 164.
62. George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, 1:331.
63. Theodor W. Adorno, Current of Music, 376–77.
64. Stephen Spender, “We Can Win the Battle for the Minds of Europe,” New York Times, April 25, 1948, SM15.
65. Lionel Trilling, The Gathering of Fugitives (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1956), 69.
66. Lionel Trilling, “The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time,” in The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent: Selected Essays, ed. Leon Wieseltier (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 282.
67. See, for example, André Visson's As Others See Us (New York: Doubleday, 1948).
68. Sidney Hook, “Report on the International Day of Resistance to Dictatorship and War,” Partisan Review 16, no. 7 (Fall 1949): 43.
69. James Burnham, What Europe Thinks of America (New York: John Day, 1953), viii.
70. Spender, “We Can Win the Battle for the Minds of Europe,” SM15.
71. Richard Wright, “What Africa Means to Me,” Encounter, no. 12 (September 1954): 27.
72. Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, 24. For a text of the NSC-4 directive, see “Memorandum from the Executive Secretary (Souers) to the Members of the National Security Council,” December 9, 1947. Posted at http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-4.htm.
73. NSC-4, “Memorandum from the Executive Secretary (Souers) to the Members of the National Security Council,” December 9, 1947. Posted at http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-4.htm.
74. Quoted in Liam Kennedy and Scott Lucas, “Enduring Freedom,” 312.
75. Jameson, “New Literary History after the End of the New,” 379.
76. Ibid.
77. R. P. Blackmur, “The Economy of the American Writer,” in The Lion and the Honeycomb: Essays in Solicitude and Critique (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955), 50.
78. T. S. Eliot, “Notes towards the Definition of Culture,” 202.
79. R. P. Blackmur, “Toward a Modus Vivendi,” in The Lion and the Honeycomb: Essays in Solicitude and Critique (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955), 152, 157.
80. James Laughlin, “The Function of This Magazine,” Perspectives USA 1, no. 1 (Fall 1952): 5.
81. Hayden Carruth to Lionel Trilling, March 3, 1953, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.
82. As Raymond Williams has observed, “The growth of the ‘literary market’ as the type of a writer's relations with his readers has been responsible for many fundamental changes in attitude. But one must add, of course, that such a growth is always uneven, both in its operations and in its effects” (Culture and Society: 1780–1950 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983], 330). See also Antonio Candido, “Literature and Underdevelopment,” in On Literature and Society, trans. Howard S. Becker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 119–41.
83. Quoted in Edward W. Said, “The Horizon of R. P. Blackmur,” in Reflections on Exile (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 246.
84. R. P. Blackmur, “Editor's Commentary,” Perspectives USA, no. 6 (Winter 1954): 134.
85. Ibid.
86. Blackmur, “Toward a Modus Vivendi,” 4.
87. Said, “The Horizon of R. P. Blackmur,” 261.
88. Ibid., 262.
89. There is an interesting comparison, of which this observation is a revision, with Said's “Note on Modernism” in Culture and Imperialism. For Said, “spatiality” becomes the characteristic of an aesthetic rather than of political domination. What I am suggesting is that the political aspects of the domination retain some of their modernist elements in the context of American ascendancy precisely because the interstices of the Cold War and decolonization are not contiguous. In this manner, Blackmur's description of a new modus vivendi provides an account of a modernity whose terms of dominance remain unsettled and unsedimented, while they are brought together through a new kind of literary and cultural expedition that had not been available to critics of an earlier generation, with which it is interesting to compare them. It is also further evidence of Amy Kaplan's crucial observation that American exceptionalism was an inherently unstable project. In its attempts (such as Blackmur's) to imagine full horizons, there is a disordering because of the boundlessness of the ideology. See Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture.
90. Blackmur, “Editor's Commentary,” 134.
91. Ibid., 134–35.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid., 135.
94. Letter from Royce Moch, Department of State, to Lionel Trilling, March 29, 1949, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York; Letter from James L. Meader, Director of the United States Information Agency (hereafter abbreviated as USIA), to Lionel Trilling, October 24, 1956, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.
95. Letter from John Thompson to Lionel Trilling, August 29, 1956, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York. Cf. Letter from Trilling to Thompson, September 20, 1956, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.
96. Letter from Sol Stein to Lionel Trilling, October 27, 1954, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York. Also see letter from Pearl Kluger to Lionel Trilling, February 28, 1952, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York; Letter from Daniel James, Program and Publication Director of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, to Lionel Trilling, April 3, 1952, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York. For CCF, see letter from Nicolas Nabokov to Lionel Trilling, June 15, 1956, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York. For U.S. Army, see letter from Royce Moch, Department of State, to Lionel Trilling, March 29, 1949, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.
97. Letter from Lionel Trilling to James Laughlin, November 10, 1952, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York; Letter from Lionel Trilling to Irving Kristol, October 22, 1952, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York; Letter from Lionel Trilling to Melvin Lasky, December 7, 1953, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.
98. Letter from Walter W. Wriggins to Diana Trilling, December 29, 1975; and Letter from Phillips Brooks to Lionel Trilling, March 25, 1957, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.
99. Mark Krupnick, Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1986), 102.
100. Letter from John A. Krout to Lionel Trilling, May 21, 1956, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.
101. Letter from Herbert Jacobsen, Foreign Service of the United States, to Lionel Trilling, May 27, 1957, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.
102. Letter from Harold E. Howland to Lionel Trilling, June 4, 1957, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.
103. Letter from Royce Moch, Department of State, Magazine Liaison Section, to Lionel Trilling, June 7, 1949, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.
104. Letter from Royce Moch, Department. of State, to Lionel Trilling, March 29, 1949, Lionel Trilling Papers. “Outlines of Psychoanalysis” was published as Art and Neurosis (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1949).
105. In August 1956, Thompson thanked Trilling for recommending and encouraging him to apply for the position at the Farfield Foundation. “The job we talked about earlier this summer developed,” Thompson wrote, “and I have accepted it. It is the Farfield Foundation; I believe I recall that you mentioned the name, which then meant nothing to me…. I imagine that you are familiar with many of the things the work is concerned with, and I hope you will discuss it with me.” Letter from John Thompson to Lionel Trilling, August 29, 1956. Cf. Letter from Trilling to Thompson, September 20, 1956.
106. Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, 358.
107. Letter from James L. Meader, Director of USIA, to Lionel Trilling, October 24, 1956, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.
108. Letter from Lionel Trilling to James L. Meader, Director of USIA, March 6, 1957, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.
109. Lionel Trilling, “Editor's Commentary,” 5.
110. Ibid.
111. Ibid., 8.
112. Ibid., 5.
113. Ibid., 10.
114. Letter from Hayden Carruth to Lionel Trilling, March 3, 1953, Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York; and Lionel Trilling, “Editor's Commentary,” 5.
115. Mary McCarthy, “America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub,” Perspectives USA 1, no. 2 (Winter 1953): 11.
116. Ibid., 16.
117. Ibid., 17.
118. Ibid., 17–18.
119. Ibid., 18.
120. Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day (New York: Grove, 1953).
121. James Baldwin, “Everybody's Protest Novel,” Perspectives USA 1, no. 2 (Winter 1953): 11 and 16; Richard Gibson, “A No to Nothing,” Perspectives USA 1, no. 2 (Winter 1953): 11.
122. See Jonathan Arac, Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 310–14. Also see Russell J. Reising, “Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, and the Emergence of the Discourse of Anti-Stalinism,” boundary 2 20, no. 1 (1993): 94–124.
123. “Draft of Guidelines,” n.d., Lionel Trilling Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.
124. Lionel Trilling, letter to the editor, New York Times, November 24, 1953.
Portions of this chapter previously appeared in Andrew Rubin “The Adorno Files,” in Adorno: A Critical Reader, ed. Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), 172–90.
1. “Institute for Social Research/Columbia University,” Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information Act.
2. Alexander Stephan, Communazis: FBI Surveillance of German Émigré Writers, trans. Jan van Heurck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 2. For his unabridged analysis of the FBI's surveillance campaign, see the German edition of Stephan's book, Im Visier des FBI: Deutsche Exilschriftsteller in den Akten amerikanischer Geheimdienste (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995).
3. Stephan, Communazis, 2.
4. Ibid., 231.
5. Ibid., 50.
6. J. Edgar Hoover to New York Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Memorandum, October 31, 1942, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information Act.
7. FBI Case Report on Felix Weil, Arkadij Gurland, and Karl Wittfogel, September 9, 1942, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information Act.
8. Ibid.
9. Unnamed agent to J. Edgar Hoover, July 31, 1940, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information Act.
10. Los Angeles Bureau of the FBI, Unsigned and Undated Memorandum, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information Act.
11. FBI report, December 7, 1943, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information Act.
12. Edward A. Tamm to Ladd, Memorandum, June 25, 1943, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information Act.
13. In 1942, the institute retained the legal counsel of former senator King from Utah. Edward A. Tamm to Ladd, Memorandum, June 25, 1943, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information Act. Tamm wrote, “I told the Senator that if the Institute of Social Research were [sic] engaged in any violation of a Federal Statute, it would be indicted and prosecuted by Federal Courts.”
14. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 401.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. J. Edgar Hoover to New York Special Agent in Charge (SAC), Memorandum, May 20, 1955, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information Act.
22. J. Edgar Hoover to Ladd, July 18, 1941, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information Act.
23. J. Edgar Hoover to Unnamed Special Agent in El Paso, Texas, July 18, 1941, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information Act.
24. “Censorship Daily Reports,” vol. 6, July 22, 1942, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information Act.
25. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 46–47.
26. Dr. Lazarsfeld, Memorandum, n.d., Paul Lazarsfeld Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.
27. Theodor W. Adorno, Current of Music, 10.
28. Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, 239.
29. Paul Lazarsfeld to Dr. Cantril and Dr. Stanton, Memorandum, January 1, 1938, Paul Lazarsfeld Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.
30. Adorno, Current of Music, 139.
31. Adorno to Lazarsfeld, n.d., Paul Lazarsfeld Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.
32. Theodor W. Adorno, “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” Kenyon Review 8 (1945): 208–17; and “The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory,” Radio Research (New York: Harper, 1941): 110–39.
33. Lazarsfeld to Adorno, n.d., Paul Lazarsfeld Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.
34. Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, 243.
35. Theodor W. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 222.
36. “The Psychological Analysis of Propaganda,” Paul Lazarsfeld Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York.
37. Ibid., 16.
38. Ibid., 18.
39. Harold D. Lasswell, “Psychological Policy Research and Total Strategy,” Public Opinion Quarterly 16, no. 4 (1952): 498.
40. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1.
41. Ibid., 3.
42. Ibid., 7.
43. Ibid., 4–7.
44. Ibid., 8.
45. Ibid., 41.
46. Ibid.
47. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms: Culture Criticism and Society, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Spearman, 1981), 98.
48. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 87.
49. Ibid.
50. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” 222.
51. Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 47.
52. Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, 399.
53. For a study of McCloy's role in West Germany, see Kai Bird, The Chairman: John McCloy; the Making of the American Establishment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).
54. Jay, Adorno, 48.
55. Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, 479.
56. Pierre Grémion, Intelligence de l’anticommunisme: Le Congrès pour la Liberté de la culture à Paris (1950–1975) (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 421.
57. Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, 405.
58. Adorno, “Extorted Reconciliation,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 218.
59. Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, 434.
60. Ibid., 452.
61. Ibid.
62. Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950).
63. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 90.
64. Ibid., 100–103.
65. Theodor W. Adorno, “Opinion Delusion Society,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 121.
66. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” 94.
67. Theodor W. Adorno, “Sociology and Empirical Research,” in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Glyn Adley and David Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976).
68. Ibid., 70.
69. Theodor W. Adorno, Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 7.
70. Theodor W. Adorno, “Critique,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 288.
71. Ibid., 273.
72. Theodor W. Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 277.
73. Lucien Goldmann, “Goldmann and Adorno: To Describe, Understand and Explain,” in Cultural Creation in Modern Society (Saint Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1976), 131.
74. Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 93.
75. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 6.
76. Goldmann, “Goldmann and Adorno,” 135–36.
77. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 278.
78. It should be pointed out in addition that Adorno had a similar view of the situation in Palestine and Israel. When Adorno spoke out against the killing of a student at the hands of the German police (the student had been protesting a visit to Berlin by the shah of Iran), he framed his remarks by condemning the Arab states for the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The Arab states posed, Adorno declared, “a terrible threat to Israel.” See Wolfgang Kraushaar, ed., Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung: Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946 bis 1995, vol. 2 (Hamburg: Roger und Bernhard bei Zweitausendeins, 1998), 123.
79. Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” 269–70.
80. Adorno, “Extorted Reconciliation,” 240.
81. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno; or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 1990), 5.
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in The Nietzsche Reader, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large, trans. Daniel Breazeale (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 117.
2. A by no means complete list of these works would include: Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Abdirahman A. Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society (New York: Verso, 2004); Silvia Nagy-Zekmi, Paradoxical Citizenship: Essays on Edward Said (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008); William V. Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Basak Ertur et al., Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said (New York: Verso, 2008); Ferial Ghazoul, Edward Said and Critical Decolonization (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007); May Telmissany and Stephanie Tara Schwartz, Counterpoints: Edward Said's Legacy (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010); Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia, Edward Said (New York: Routledge, 2008); Patrick Williams, Edward Said, vols. 1–4 (New York: Sage Publications, 2001); Ranjan Ghosh, Edward Said and the Literary, Social, and Political World (New York: Routledge, 2009); Paul A. Bové et al., Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2000); Mustapha Marrouchi, Edward Said at the Limits (Stonybrook: State University of New York Press, 2003); Michael Sprinker, ed., Edward Said: A Critical Reader (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993); Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said and the Work of the Critic (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000); and William Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
3. Edward W. Said, Orientalism. For the numerous discussions about Orientalism and the controversy surrounding it, see, for example, Gyan Prakash, “Orientalism Now,” History and Theory 34, no. 3 (1995): doi:10.2307/2505621; James Clifford, “On Orientalism,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 255–76; Marjorie Levinson, “The Discontents of Aijaz Ahmed,” Public Culture 6 (Fall 1993): 97–131; Moustafa Marrouchi, “Counternarrative, Recoveries, and Refusals,” boundary 2 25, no. 2 (1998): 205–57; Bruce Robbins, “The East as Career: The Logics of Professionalism,” in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 48–73.
4. Edward W. Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism; and Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism.
5. See Edward W. Said, “The Horizon of R. Blackmur,” in Reflections on Exile, 246–67.
6. See Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan (New York: Pantheon, 2001).
7. See, for example, Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2006): 52.
8. James Clifford, for example, writes of Said's “restless suspicion” of totality in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, 87.
9. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 80–97.
10. Edward W. Said, “From Silence and Sound and Back Again: Music, Literature, and History,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). See Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 45–86.
11. For Said, exteriority describes the process by which the Orientalist “makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West…The Orientalist [is] never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says” (Orientalism, 20–21). It is this idea of exteriority as an enabling structure that allows the Orientalist to objectify the Orient, with no real concern for its actuality, that Said has appropriated from Foucault. To compare Said's employment of the notion of exteriority with that of Foucault's, see Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1972), 107–8, 118–25; Said, Orientalism, 20–21.
12. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” in Reflections on Exile (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 200.
13. Said, Orientalism, 12.
14. Ibid.
15. In Beginnings: Intention and Method, Said was among one of the first critics to introduce Foucault's work to an English-speaking audience in “Abecedarium Culturae,” the ABC's of culture. See Edward W. Said, “Abecedarium Culturae,” in Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 279–43. An earlier version of this work was also published as “Abecedarium Culturae: Structuralism, Absence, Writing,” TriQuarterly (Winter 1971).
16. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Reflections on Exile, 200.
17. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 26.
18. Edward W. Said, “Secular Criticism,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 23.
19. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters (London: New Left Books, 1979), 252.
20. For Said, contrapuntal criticism entails reading a text with an understanding of what is in effect the political economy of works of art insofar as contrapuntal reading (as an interpretative procedure) emphasizes that all artists and authors maintain not only a relationship to their immediate surroundings but also to other geographical regions of the world, whose work should be read in order to make visible the overlapping experiences and interdependent histories and culture of conflict and exchange. See Said, Culture and Imperialism, 66–67.
21. For Said, affiliation is very much connected to the process of legitimizing the European humanistic tradition. In “Secular Criticism,” Said writes, “the affiliative order…surreptitiously duplicates the closed and knit family structure that secures generational hierarchical relationships to one another.” That is to say, affiliation designates the process of Eurocentrism insofar as it, by virtue of its function as a structure, reproduces and consolidates cultural relationships to works of European literature in such a way that “what is ours is good, and…deserves incorporation and inclusion in our programs of humanistic study.” See Said, “Secular Criticism,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic, 21 and 24.
22. Ibid., 26.
23. Anidjar, “Secularism,” 64.
24. Said, “Identity, Authority and Freedom: The Potentate and the Traveler,” in Reflections on Exile, 404.
25. Edward W. Said, Out of Place (New York: Knopf, 1999).
26. Said, Orientalism, 25.
27. Edward W. Said, “Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals,” Grand Street, no. 47 (1993): 116.
28. See Geoffrey Green, Literary Criticism and the Structures of History: Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); Michael Holquist, “The Last European: Erich Auerbach as Precursor in the History of Cultural Criticism,” MLQ 53, no. 3 (September 1993): 371–91; and Seth Lerer, ed., Literary History and the Challenge of Philology (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
29. For an account of the tensions posed between Orientalism and humanism, see Emily Apter, “Saidian Humanism,” boundary 2 31, no. 2 (2004): 35–53.
30. Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” 1–17; Said, Orientalism, 258–60; Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 16; Said, Culture and Imperialism, 47; and Said, “History, Literature and Geography,” in Reflections on Exile, 457–58.
31. Emily Apter, “Saidian Humanism,” boundary 2 31, no. 2 (2004): 35–53; Aamir R. Mufti, “Secularism and Minority: Elements of a Critique,” Social Text, no. 45 (1995): 75–96; Aamir R. Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 1 (1998): 95–125; Aamir R. Mufti, “Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times,” boundary 2 31, no. 2 (2004): 1–9; Bruce Robbins, “Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other Transgressions: On Edward Said's ‘Voyage in,’” Social Text, no. 40 (1994): 25–37; Moustafa Bayoumi, “Our Philological Home Is the Earth,” Arab Studies Quarterly 26, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 53–66; Stathis Gourgouris, “Transformation, Not Transcendence,” boundary 2 31, no. 2 (2004): 55–79; W.J.T. Mitchell, “Secular Divination: Edward Said's Humanism,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 (2005): 462–71; Yumna Siddiqi, “Edward Said, Humanism, and Secular Criticism,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 25 (2005): 65–88.
32. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 5.
33. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 557.
34. Ibid., 574.
35. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 6.
36. Said, introduction to Mimesis, by Erich Auerbach, xxxi.
37. Ibid., xvii–xviii.
38. See Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 11–79.
39. Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 95.
40. Said, introduction to Mimesis, by Erich Auerbach, xxi–xxii.
41. Ibid., xxii.
42. Auerbach, Mimesis, 443–44.
43. Ibid., 201–2.
44. Said, “History, Literature, Geography,” in Reflections on Exile (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 457.
45. Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul,” 103.
46. Apter, “Saidian Humanism,” 43.
47. Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” 3.
48. Ibid., 2.
49. Ibid., 3.
50. Ibid., 6.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 2.
53. Ibid., 4.
54. Ibid., 3.
55. Ibid., 7.
56. Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 16.
57. Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” 21.
58. Ibid., 16–17.
59. Ibid., 17.
60. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 336.
61. Said, “History, Literature, Geography,” 457.
62. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 47.
63. Ibid. The collaboration between Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch established the Annales publication, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale in 1929. Out of their work and the work of their students, notions of longue durée, deep time, and world systems have become indispensable theoretical devices for Moretti, Casanova, and others. For a history of Annales, see Lynn Hunt, “French History in the Last Twenty Years: The Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 21, no. 2 (1986): doi:10.2307/260364. For an examination of the central assumptions, see J. H. Hexter, “Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien,” Journal of Modern History 44, no. 4 (1972): doi:10.2307/1876806. The French historian François Furet, once associated with Annales, offers an important critique in, “Beyond the Annales,” Journal of Modern History 55, no. 3 (1983): doi:10.2307/1878595.
64. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 48.
65. Ibid.
66. Adorno diagnoses the inadequacies of this kind of thought as reproducing precisely the problems in reductive thinking. “Hegel speaks in the preface about the vanity and vacuity of anyone who stands above the main issues because he is not inside of them. The abstract negativity involved in instantly sniffing out the defects of phenomenon, from the outside, as it were in order to be able to assert one's own superiority to them serves merely to gratify one's own intellectual narcissism and is therefore open to abuse from the outset. Resisting the temptation is surely among the primary requirements of the discipline of dialectics, one that cannot be over emphasized. We feel we are better than the swindle that has been foisted on to us. We cannot allow this to be the end of the story, and this is what is implied in the call for determinate negation.” See Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course, 1965/1966 (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2008), 25–26.
67. Said, “History, Literature, Geography,” 470–71.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., 470.
70. Said, “History, Literature, Geography,” 467.
71. Ibid.
72. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 26.
73. Said, “Between Worlds,” in Reflections on Exile, 565.
74. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 61.
75. Lecia Rosenthal provides a compelling reading of the relationship between Late Style and Humanism and Democratic Criticism. But she is largely dismissive of Said's efforts; mostly, it seems, because the concept of the whole of human history is viewed as an object of mastery, whereas it is not understood as a critical category within the discourse of historicism as a potential for knowledge. In many ways the attitude is symptomatic of Rosenthal's decision to posit humanism as a question of/for the future, placing an emphasis on temporality, when, as I have been arguing, it is geography that is the terrain of activity for Said. In many respects, the spatial metaphors at work in Humanism define the terms of humanism and are very much part of the text's modernism. Her search for a theory of modernism overlooks the way the text is enacting a modernist practice (hence the reference to Beckett at the end). The motif of intransigence, while certainly associated with Adorno's late style, has a great deal to do with the circumstances at the time Said gave these talks, as well as Said's understanding of Benda's view of the social function of the intellectual. Humanism is not simply “force,” as Rosenthal argues. Late art, as he argues, is a provisional home. But there were good grounds to locate the intellectual realm in the place of late art, and better grounds to characterize the possible positions one could occupy at the time Said was writing as “intransigent.” I recall very well the atmosphere after 9/11 and the few occasions that were available for dissent. I also recall the numerous attacks on his character. Jonathan Cole has written well about the various challenges to academic freedom that were common at the time Said revised these lectures, and in recent years these tendencies have fortunately dissipated. Yet, they remain an active and residual element in the culture. Overlooking the importance of Benda's notion of opposition is understandable. Many have neglected Benda because it appears as if Said was claiming that Benda places far too much emphasis on the isolated intellectual's capacity to effectively resist the organization of the collective passions. For Said, whose own experiences seemed to confirm his argument, Benda's conception of the solitary intellectual was not a defense of the quixotic, nor was it without reason. The isolated opposition to the political organization of the passions that threatened to undermine universal values is, after all, a form of local resistance. No matter the size or scope of the lobby, nation, party, or movement, the intellectual's job is to uphold a set of universal values. The location of that opposition might be “out of place,” but is “very much of that place.” It is a significant, local form of resistance. The alternative to quietism, conformism, or, even worse, an affirmation of the collective will is, Benda argued, the real trahison de clercs. “Intransigence” also captures the negativity of the late work; it adequately summarizes the conditions of the possibility of providing an imaginable alternative. The United States was on the verge of declaring yet another war on mendacious grounds, and the occupation of Palestine had continued under the leadership of Ariel Sharon. I have documented some of these activities in the introduction. “I have never seen it this bad,” Said told me. “It is unimaginable.” It was the last time that I saw him before he died in September 2003. Lecia Rosenthal, “Between Humanism and Late Style,” Cultural Critique 67 (Fall 2007): doi:10.1353/cul.2007.0033. For an account of the challenges and threat to Academic Freedom since 9/11, see Jonathan R. Cole, “Defending Academic Freedom and Free Inquiry,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 76, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 811–44; “The New McCarthyism,” Chronicle of Higher Education 52, no. 3 (2005): B7; “Academic Freedom under Fire,” Daedalus 135, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 1–13; and “The Patriot Act on Campus: Defending the University post-9/11,” Boston Review 28, nos. 3–4 (Summer 2003): 13–16. For Said's discussion of Benda, see Said, “Secular Criticism,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic, 14–15.
76. This is not to say that Said had provided the kind of full critique of historicism that he would have liked to, even if he had borrowed many of its underlying assumptions and rejected others. He still, for example, thought that there was a broader critique to be made of world historiography, which had many of same limitations as world literary historiography. In “Orientalism Reconsidered,” he wrote, “What has never taken place is an epistemological critique of the connection between the development of a historicism which has expanded and developed enough to include antithetical attitudes such as ideologies of Western imperialism and critiques of imperialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the actual practice of imperialism, by which the accumulation of territories in population, the control of economies, and the incorporation and homogenization of histories are maintained. If we keep this in mind, we will remark, for example, that in the methodological assumptions and practices of world history—which is ideologically anti-imperialist—little or no attention is given to those cultural practices, like Orientalism or ethnography, affiliated with imperialism, which in genealogical fact fathered world history itself. Hence, the emphasis in world history as a discipline has been on economic and political practices, defined by the processes of world historical writing, as in a sense separate and different from, as well as affected by, the knowledge of them which world history produces. The curious result is that the theories of accumulation on a world scale, or the capitalist world system, or lineages of absolutism depend on the same percipient and historicist observer who had been an Orientalist or colonial traveler three generations ago. They depend also on homogenizing, incorporating [a] world historical scheme that assimilates non-synchronous developments, histories, cultures, and peoples to it.” Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” in Reflections on Exile, 210.
77. If Said is interested in developing a modernist theory, we could say that he does so because the study of alternative modernities provides us with a better conceptual basis for a critical understanding of globalization. As Andreas Huyssen has observed, “Modernist geographies suggest a more abstract image of spatial organization to me, very different from the more literal understanding but crucial for my argument about subliminal links between modernism and cultural globalization today…. We need to ask whether the market can secure new traditions, new forms of transnational communications and connectivities. But we would abandon our role as critical intellectuals if we were prematurely to exclude from such considerations the question of the complex relations between aesthetic value and political effect, which is fundamentally posed by the traditions of modernism and needs to be rescued for contemporary analyses of all culture under the spell of globalization. See Andreas Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” New German Critique, no. 100 (2007): 197, 207.
78. See, for example, Sheldon Pollock, “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 4 (2009): doi:10.1086/599594.
79. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 35.
80. Ibid., 36.
81. Ibid.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid., 38.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid., 49.
86. His interest in developing a “modernist” theory and practice (as opposed to a postcolonial theory and practice) was the basis through which he worked through the distinctions between attachments of filiation and affiliation in the canon of high modernism. In “Secular Criticism,” Said had observed among a “large group” of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers a “failure of generative impulse.” Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses, Mann's Death in Venice, even Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex—“a significant and influential aspect of which posits the potentially murderous outcome of bearing children”—in one way or another had to do with matters of regeneration. “Childless couples, orphaned children, aborted childbirths, and unregenerate celibate men and women populate the world of high modernism with remarkable insistence, all of them suggesting difficulties with filiation,” he wrote (Said, “Secular Criticism,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic, 17). While the observation led him to work out an important distinction between filiation and affiliation, and related questions of attachments, modernism and the secular were related in another way as well, apart from the title. In saecula saeculorum means the “generation of generation,” a significant fact for an essay that exerts more energy describing the relationship of the absence of the regenerative power of filiation than it does defining the secular. All of this is to say that modernism had become a way for Said to think through questions of attachment and to develop a critical language that allowed him to work through the possible positions that could be occupied critically between culture and system. If the secular named a history made by humans, modernism provided the conditions when forms of belonging revealed themselves as illusions that concealed the acts of displacements they presupposed.
87. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 144.
88. Edward Said, On Late Style (New York: Knopf, 2006).
89. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course, 1965/ 1966, 30.
90. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 68.
91. Ibid., 75–76.
92. Ibid., 76.
93. Ibid., 82.
94. Ibid., 81.
95. Ibid., 83.
96. Ibid., 144.
97. Ibid., 81.