Social and cultural history Books

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Book SynopsisDenise Hardesty Sutton is an associate professor at the New York City College of Technology (City Tech) CUNY, USA.

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Book SynopsisJim Stockton is Lecturer Emeritus in Philosophy at Boise State University.

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Book SynopsisWillem de Kooning’s six numbered Woman paintings have incited a maelstrom of critical controversy. At their debut in 1953, the critics were incensed by the ugliness of the images themselves and by the inclusion of vestiges of the figure in abstraction. Consequently, they questioned de Kooning’s attitude toward women and commitment to the Abstract Expressionist project. Countering such objections to de Kooning’s psychological state and artistic goals, Marlene Clark’s The Woman in Me: Willem de Kooning, Woman I-VI argues that these canvases could be read as self-portraits, negating claims of misogyny and explaining the presence of figuration amidst abstraction. On a number of occasions, de Kooning admitted that the images on these canvases were “me—but with big shoulders.”The Woman in Me focuses on de Kooning’s propensity to “play” with the sexed body in his paintings. Clark argues that earlier criticism may have missed a more philosophical dimension of de Kooning’s paintings, one that explores the malleability of representations of biological sex and the male/female binary.

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Book SynopsisThe only book of its kind, South Carolina Onstage offers a collection of plays spanning two hundred years, all by South Carolina authors. It begins with a concise history of the theater in the Palmetto State, from the first dramatic production in Charleston in 1735 and the golden age of the Dock Street and Charleston Theaters, through the rise of opera houses and community theatres across the state, to the dynamic dramatic culture South Carolina today enjoys. Each of the seven plays in Jon W. Tuttle's curated volume illuminates a different moment in South Carolina's history and is prefaced by an introductory essay. The plays included are William Ioor's The Battle of The Eutaw Springs (1807), John Blake White's Modern Honor (1812), Sarah Pogson's Young Carolinians (1818), William Gilmore Simms's Michael Bonham (1855), Rebecca Dial's Sand (1920), Alice Childress's Wedding Band (1966), and Sarah Hammond's Kudzu (2003). Collectively, the plays trace the compelling history of South Carolina drama and capture the rich diversity of the state's playwrights.

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Book SynopsisThe Emergence of the French Public Intellectual provides a working definition of "public intellectuals" in order to clarify who they are and what they do. It then follows their varied itineraries from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the nineteenth century. Public intellectuals became a fixture in French society during the Dreyfus Affair but have a long history in France, as the contributions of Christine de Pizan, Voltaire, and Victor Hugo, among many others, illustrate. The French novelist Émile Zola launched the Dreyfus Affair when he published "J'Accuse," an open letter to French President Félix Faure denouncing a conspiracy by the government and army against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was Jewish and had been wrongly convicted of treason three years earlier. The consequent emergence of a publicly-engaged intellectual created a new, modern space in intellectual life as France and the world confronted the challenges of the twentieth century.

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Book SynopsisFrench Intellectuals at a Crossroads examines a broad array of interrelated subjects: the effect of World War I on France's intellectual community, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the rise of international communism, calls for pacifism, the creation of an "Intellectuals' International of the Mind," the debate over the myth of the disengaged intellectual, the apolitical group of "intellectuels non-conformistes," and, finally, the challenges of surrealism. Together, these developments reflected the diversity of intellectual commitment in France in the uncertain and troubled 1920s and 1930s. The interwar period also witnessed France's relative decline, as expressed in a move from a mood of immense relief coupled with a feeling of debilitating fatigue to an inward-looking, pessimistic, and defeatist outlook that presaged World War II and national collapse.

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Book SynopsisThe Communist Temptation: Rolland, Gide, Malraux, and Their Times traces the evolution of the committed left-wing public intellectual in the interwar period, specifically in the 1930s, and focuses on leading left-wing intellectuals, such as Romain Rolland, André Gide, and André Malraux, and their relationships with communism and the broader anti-fascist movement. In that turbulent decade, Paris also welcomed a growing number of Russian, Austrian, Italian, Dutch, Belgian, German, and German-speaking Central European refugees—activists, writers, and agents, among them Willi Münzenberg, Mikhail Koltsov, Eugen Fried, Ilya Ehrenburg, Manès Sperber, and Arthur Koestler—and Paris once again became a hotbed of international political activism. Events, however, signaled a decline in the high ethical standards set by Émile Zola and the Dreyfusards earlier in the twentieth century, as many pro-communist intellectuals acted in bad faith to support an ideology that they in all likelihood knew to be morally bankrupt. Among them, only Gide rebelled against Moscow, which caused ideological lines to harden to the point where there was little room for critical reason to assert itself.

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Book SynopsisThe Soviet Communist Party faced a large-scale problem of regulating membership after the Russian Revolution of 1917. While recruitments were conducted mainly according to the internal Party rules, exclusion campaigns were periodically adopted to ensure ideological purity. In the decades before World War II, these reviews took various forms – from mere administrative re-registration to violent purges that involved millions of arrests. The so-called "Great Purge" of 1937-1939 implicitly recognized the failure of the party's original policy of recruitment and promotion, and of the inability of the Party's political leadership to influence membership.Although the "Great Purge" proved tragic, its implementation revealed great preparation and almost daily membership management. As surprising as it may seem, the statistics on membership movements (accessions, expulsions, etc.) were never as well kept as they were from 1937 to 1939. After the Great Purge, a new and more intellectual membership rose to power. This generation presided over the destiny of the Soviet Union until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. The innovative character of Gaël-Georges Moullec's study lies in the use of unpublished archival sources.

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