April 1, 1947
Toward a Definition of Cultural Crisis
In recent years, the word “crisis” has been on everybody’s lips, but there has been little attempt to analyze its meaning. Since so important a concept requires clarification, the present […]
April 1, 1947
Kafka’s Prayer¹
To explore the truth in the thought of Kafka, I deal first at perhaps surprising length with what he said in his own person in a few aphorisms and reported […]
April 1, 1947
Sartre vs. Proust
January 1, 1947. Sirs: I have found Sartre’s Existentialist organ, Les Temps Modernes, so hard to come by in this country that I think you yourselves, like most of your […]
April 1, 1947
Editors in Person: Little Magazines
Since we have been invited to effect a rapprochement between historical scholarship and the literary magazine, let me quote this: It remained for the 19th Century, with the critical writing […]
April 1, 1947
Action as Passion: “Tristan” and “Murder in the Cathedral”
When toward the end of the Eighteenth Century the “dramatic” gradually ceased to be identified with the vicissitudes of the Rationalists’ moral will, in its timeless struggle against inclination, the […]
April 1, 1947
Movie Letter
The mechanization of Hollywood aesthetics continues at an undiminished rate of speed. All the movies of the past months firmly reassert the factory principle that the standard article is inexhaustibly […]
April 1, 1947
Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley, nearly four years after his death, is a controversial figure in the development of American painting. Estimates vary between the contention that he did not know how to […]
April 1, 1947
L’Homme Est Une Passion Inutile: Sartre and Heidegger
The “stages on life’s way” as Kierkegaard describes them are, first and last, steps in a pilgrimage from the world to God: it is the ultimate confrontation of the individual with […]
April 1, 1947
“Evening Storm, Schoodick, Maine”
In 1928 Marsden Hartley wrote: “I have come to the conclusion that it is better to have two colors in right relation to each other than to have a vast […]
January 1, 1947
China Letter No. I
I am told that China has had a conscious culture, a mature (if not an adult) civilization, for three thousand years; I know well merely the past year of it, […]
January 1, 1947
Art Letter
Current comment stresses the diversity of the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.1 In this selection of fourteen American painters and sculptors one is struck by a variety of […]
January 1, 1947
Hemingway
The situations and characters of Hemingway’s world are usually violent. There is the hard-drinking and sexually promiscuous world of The Sun Also Rises; the chaotic and brutal world of war […]