Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation

by Charles Newman, Gerald Graff

Overview

The Post-Modern Aura is Charles Newman's classic and incendiary polemic about the "Post-Modern" attitude in fiction, culture, and sensibility. In it, he challenges the "revolutionary" claims of avant-garde novelists and literary theorists as well as the arguments of neoconservatives, neorealists, and advocates of "moral fiction." Newman argues that neither of these groups confront the unprecedented break with tradition entailed by an economics and culture of inflation. A combination of cultural critique, literary criticism, economic forecast, and historical jeremiad, The Post-Modern Aura is finally a positive statement, celebrating "The Act of Fiction" and suggesting how the forces which have been devaluing it might be overcome.

In the twenty-first century as an interest in Marxist thought again coincides with the specter of financial inflation, The Post-Modern Aura is timely again. 


 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810106680
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	04/01/1985
Edition description:	1
Pages:	203
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

CHARLES NEWMAN (1938-2006) was an alumnus of Yale and Oxford. From 1964-75 he taught at Northwestern University where he founded and edited the literary journal TriQuarterly. Subsequently he taught at Johns Hopkins University and Washington University in St. Louis. He was a recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim, Rockefeller and National Endowment grants, as well as the Zabel award for A Child's History of America. His novels include New Axis, The Promisekeeper, There Must be More to Love than Death, and White Jazz. He was also well known for the Marxist anthology Literature in Revolution (1972), which he edited with George Abbott White.

Editorial Reviews

"Charles Newman's The Post-Modern Aura is a real eye-opener; the best thing I've read on the state of American culture in a long time, and grounded, moreover, in a tough-minded analysis of the economics of publishing—something unheard of in the annals of literary criticism."  —Christopher Lasch, author of The Culture of Narcissism


"Newman's book is a hybrid, a combination of literary criticism, cultural analysis, political polemic, economic forecast, and historical lament. . . . Newman makes us feel that the future of the arts is very much involved in the health of the culture at every level, and he manages this without falling into the reductive equations that describe novels or paintings as reflections of this thing or that." —Robert Boyers, Salmagundi

From the Publisher