The highbrow migration to the us of ecu writers, intellectuals, and artists within the Thirties and Nineteen Forties has frequently been narrowly noticeable as a conflict among a rarefied eu modernist sensibility and a debased American mass tradition. In Transatlantic Aliens, Will Norman reorients our figuring out of midcentury American tradition through considering dialectically in regards to the interfusion of aesthetic and highbrow practices throughout either the cultural hierarchy and the Atlantic. The transatlantic exchanges of midcentury emerge within the ebook as a trouble element for modernism at which claims for the autonomy of excessive tradition turned more and more untenable, the geographical middle of cultural authority was once displaced, and the governing rules of the yank cultural box went via a section of dramatic instability.

Norman relays this severe narrative via a chain of interlinked case reports of key figures, together with C. L. R. James, Theodor Adorno, George Grosz, Raymond Chandler, Simone de Beauvoir, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Steinberg. He discovers the unusual afterlives of ecu modernism in disorientating and uncanny juxtapositions: the aesthetics of French symbolism flicker one of the neon symptoms of a small city at the hours of darkness, and echoes of Mondrian’s grids are saw within the kind of a boardroom revenues chart. on the middle of Transatlantic Aliens is a perception of alienation that encompasses either its political and aesthetic valences. What unites the exilic figures it addresses is the will to remodel the sensible adventure of alienation right into a confident source for criticizing and dealing with a reconfigured postwar panorama.

Addressed to students and readers of yankee and comparative literatures in addition to of cultural background and visible tradition, the ebook combines tests of person works of art, novels, and different texts with extra far away readings spanning time and area. A gallery of colour plates fantastically illuminates the book's research. reading hardboiled fiction via Flaubert, New Yorker cartoons via modernist portray, and Bette Davis via Hegel and Marx, Transatlantic extraterrestrial beings challenges and alterations the way in which we comprehend modernism’s position in midcentury American culture.