Description
Book SynopsisDetails the end of the modern and the emergence of the postmodern in 1960s philosophy, literature and popular culture
Trade Review“In a series of wrenching, heretical re-readings of its classics, Marianne DeKoven rescues the decade of the sixties from a false familiarity and restores a sense of its adventurous if fragile alliance between literature and theory, modernist utopian critique and the messy creativity of the postmodern present. Instead of the usual nostalgia and polemic,
Utopia Limited delivers intellectual precision and tough love. The story of the sixties has never been told with more rigor or more freshness.”—Bruce Robbins, author of
Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress“Marianne DeKoven has written a blueprint for how to delve deep into the sixties without romantic or cynical nostalgia. She recaptures fully that cultural moment by showing how sixties writers kept sliding back and forth between totalizing dreams of utopia and more private and diverse expressions of their wishes and identities.”—Ann Snitow, coeditor of
The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation“Utopia Limited will set in place a new way of understanding the interface between social, cultural, and political impulses in the sixties. Its aim—and its success—is not simply to mark out what we can now see as the emergent postmodern in texts as diverse as
The Port Huron Statement and
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but to interpret, through attentive close readings, precisely how and where the modern and nascent postmodern are joined in such texts.”—Cora Kaplan, author of
Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and FeminismTable of ContentsPreface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
I. Modern to Postmodern
Introduction: Modern, Sixties, Postmodern 3
1. Modern to Postmodern in Herbert Marcuse 26
II. Culture Industry to Popular Culture
2. Culture Industry to Popular Culture in
Mythologies 57
3. Las Vegas Signs Taken for Wonders 72
4. Loathing and Learning in Las Vegas 86
5. Endnotes I: Sixties, Avant-Garde, Popular Culture 114
III. Participatory Democracy to Postmodern Populism
6. Participatory Democracy in Port Huron 123
7. Paradise Then 143
8. William Burroughs: Any Number Can Play 161
9. Endnotes II: Sixties, Avant-Garde, Popular Culture 183
IV. Subject Politics
10. Politics of the Self 189
11. Laing’s Politics of the Self 200
12. Tell Me Lies about Vietnam 210
13.
Fire Next Time or Rainbow Sign 228
14. Personal and Political 249
15. Utopia Limited 270
Conclusion: Post-Utopian Promise 288
Notes 291
Selected Annotated Bibliography
Part 1. The Postmodern 323
Part II. The Sixties 334
Index 345
