1960

Al Filreis recasts 1960 as a turning point to offer a groundbreaking account of postwar culture. He examines an eclectic group of artistic, literary, and intellectual figures who strove to create a new language to reckon with the trauma of World War II and to imagine a new world.

Al Filreis is Kelly Family Professor of English, director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, codirector of PennSound, and founder and faculty director of the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism (1994) and Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–60 (2008), and he is the host of the podcast PoemTalk.

Juliana Spahr, author of Du Bois's Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment:
Al Filreis adds 1960 to the years that matter. The story he tells about the art, literature, and film of that year is complicated, one less utopian than many presume, one defined by the despair of World War II, one where it matters that Celan and Baldwin gave talks on the same day in October of 1960. This is a beautiful book, full of detailed readings of minor and major figures that reconfigure and contextualize the avant-garde and experimental traditions of that era.

Elisa New, director and host of PBS, Poetry in America:
Al Filreis's 1960 is a brilliant and absorbing cultural history of the moment when the repressed traumas and unspeakable atrocities of World War II erupted into the work of thinkers and artists across the globe. Reckoning with language's inadequacy to bear witness to—much less to reveal—crimes that language itself abets, these writers (from Fanon to Baldwin, Celan to Baraka, Achebe to Arendt to Auden, Duncan, Rothenberg, and others) developed and applied theories of language and power we still rely upon today. International in scope, rich in character and incident, 1960 is an investigatory and archival tour de force that excavates connections between figures and ideas undetected until now.

Charles Bernstein, author of Pitch of Poetry:
This brilliantly syncretic book confronts the repression of World War II in American culture, circa 1960. Filreis thinks through a constellation of songs, literature, poetry, and films, each pierced by the war. His linked essays show how great art is not only ethically necessary but also a source of endless pleasure. 1960 is a tour de force of critical intelligence.

Craig Dworkin, author of Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography:
1960 offers a provocative and vivid intellectual history from a literary perspective. Reading works as diverse as John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things and Jackson Mac Low’s aleatory poetry as part of the belated processing of World War II traumas, it asks us to reconsider the origins, references, and trajectories of the postwar avant-gardes.

Johanna Drucker, author of Iliazd: Meta-Biography of a Modernist:
Tightly focused on work done within the year of its title, 1960 offers a compelling account of how artists processing the memory of mass trauma in World War II turned to innovation and reinvention as a means of recovery. Al Filreis has managed a rare accomplishment—writing a profound work of historical analysis that has deep implications for ideas shaping our lives today.