TY - BOOK ID - 85770831 TI - The naked communist : Cold War modernism and the politics of popular culture PY - 2013 SN - 0823245594 0823252531 0823250350 082324556X 0823245578 PB - New York : Fordham University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Anti-communist movements KW - Cold War KW - Popular culture KW - Aesthetics KW - Anti-communist movements in literature. KW - Cold War in literature. KW - American literature KW - Beautiful, The KW - Beauty KW - Esthetics KW - Taste (Aesthetics) KW - Philosophy KW - Art KW - Criticism KW - Literature KW - Proportion KW - Symmetry KW - Anti-communist resistance KW - Underground, Anti-communist KW - Communism KW - World politics KW - Culture, Popular KW - Mass culture KW - Pop culture KW - Popular arts KW - Communication KW - Intellectual life KW - Mass society KW - Recreation KW - Culture KW - History KW - Philosophy. KW - Political aspects KW - History and criticism. KW - Psychology KW - United States KW - Politics and government KW - Aesthetic Ideology. KW - Anti-Communism. KW - Catastrophe. KW - Cold War. KW - Enemy. KW - Modernism. KW - Popular fiction. KW - Secrecy. KW - Radio broadcasting Aesthetics UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:85770831 AB - The Naked Communist argues that the political ideologies of modernity were fundamentally determined by four basic figures: the world, the enemy, the secret, and the catastrophe. While the “world” names the totality that functioned as the ultimate horizon of modern political imagination, the three other figures define the necessary limits of this totality by reflecting on the limits of representation. The book highlights the enduring presence of these figures in the modern imagination through detailed analysis of a concrete historical example: American anti-Communist politics of the 1950's. Its primary objective is to describe the internal mechanisms of what we could call an anti- Communist “aesthetic ideology.” The book thus traces the way anti-Communist popular culture emerged in the discourse of Cold War liberalism as a political symptom of modernism. Based on a discursive analysis of American anti-Communist politics, the book presents parallel readings of modernism and popular fiction from the 1950's (nuclear holocaust novels, spy novels, and popular political novels) in order to show that, despite the radical separation of the two cultural fields, they both participated in a common ideological program. ER -