Anti-Communism: Culture, Literature, Propaganda
28 August 2013
Institute of English Studies, Senate House, University of London
http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/ies-events/conferences/AntiCommunism
Organisers: Dr Benjamin Kohlmann (Columbia University/Freiburg
University) and Dr Matthew Taunton (University of East Anglia)
'[A]t no time since 1917 has anti-communism failed to occupy a major,
even a central, place in the politics and policies of the capitalist
world.' ? Ralph Miliband & Marcel Liebman
'Perhaps the truth is that real leftism today can only be
anti-Communist.' ? Arthur Koestler
'Anti-anticommunism ? the wish to avoid giving aid and comfort to cold
warriors before 1989, and End-of-History triumphalists since ? has
crippled political thinking in the Labor and Social Democratic
movements for decades; in some circles it still does.' ? Tony Judt
Some two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, this symposium
will explore the complex literary and cultural legacies of one of the
twentieth century's most influential and under-theorised political
philosophies. Anti-communism had a shaping influence on the
development of twentieth-century Western liberalism and social
democracy as well as providing intellectual justifications for
McCarthyism and the jingoism of the Cold War Right. It was a key
element of Nazism, but also of twentieth-century anarchism. Its
relation to literary and artistic culture was equally complicated.
Rather than suggesting that there was a unified anti-communist
aesthetic, the speakers at this symposium will examine the historical
and formal specificity of anti-communist modes of writing, ranging
from avant-garde to realist-documentary forms, and from the defiantly
heterodox experiments by avant-gardists in the 1920s and 1930s to the
condemnation of modernist writing as ?proto-communist? by American
conservatives after 1945.
The symposium brings together an exciting group of scholars in order
to explore a widespread public debate that took place among writers
and intellectuals across the political spectrum and in a variety of
media. The diversity of literary anti-communism is reflected in the
range of writers considered at this symposium, from critical fellow
travellers and chastened 1930s radicals to exiles, émigrés, and Cold
War Conservatives. Writers to be discussed will include Emma Goldman,
Wyndham Lewis, Rebecca West, George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Edward
Upward, Ayn Rand, Vladimir Nabokov, Arthur Koestler, Doris Lessing,
and Hannah Arendt. The speakers will illustrate the pervasiveness of
anti-communist attitudes from a variety of disciplinary perspectives,
taking into account critical arguments about anti-communism that were
conducted in literary and political journals (including Partisan
Review, Encounter, and others) and in the media, as well as the more
extreme and more visible instances of anti-communist polemic and
propaganda.
Confirmed speakers include: Prof. Tyrus Miller (University of
California, Santa Cruz), Prof. David Ayers (Kent), Prof. Adam Piette
(Sheffield), Dr. Marina MacKay (Durham), Dr. Nick Hubble (Brunel), Dr.
Petra Rau (UEA), Dr. Ben Harker (Salford), Dr. Thomas Karshan (UEA),
Dr. Benjamin Kohlmann (Freiburg / Columbia), Dr. Matthew Taunton
(UEA), and Dr Debra Rae Cohen (University of South Carolina)
This symposium is supported by the Leverhulme Trust and the University
of East Anglia.
Registration is open, and a full programme is now available here:
http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/ies-events/conferences/AntiCommunism
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The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
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