Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility
2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 103; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jaw602
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Art, Politics, and Modernism
ResumoGeorge Cotkin's Feast of Excess is the latest in a series of attempts to capture the essence of post–World War II thought and culture. Perhaps first was Ronald Berman's America in the Sixties (1968), followed by Morris Dickstein's Gates of Eden (1977). Later, Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin's America Divided (1999) was joined by Howard Brick's Age of Contradiction (2000) and, recently, Mark Greif's The Age of the Crisis of Man (2015). Cotkin's emphasis falls less on the 1960s per se than on what Susan Sontag called a “new sensibility” that began to show itself in the early 1950s (“One Culture and the New Sensibility,” in Against Interpretation, by Susan Sontag, 1966). The essence of new sensibility was an obsession with excess, transgression, extravagance, extremity, and experimentation. Immersion in sex and violence; the exploration of sound and silence; fascination with confession but also with blank affectlessness; a maximalist sense of overload and minimalist spirit of subtraction: the cultural center did not hold. One of our most versatile intellectual and cultural historians, Cotkin proceeds by analyzing a series of seminal artistic and cultural figures who were part of and furthered this radical cultural shift. Cotkin also underscores the effacement of the boundaries between high and low, avant-garde and mass culture. Some names are familiar—Diana Arbus, Lenny Bruce, Jerry Lee Lewis—while some are not—Judith Malina and Chris Burden.
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