Fordham University Press The Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture

Product Description 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. Review "Mr. Végső has established a perspective on cold war literary and cultural politics informed by the most sophisticated post cold war political theory - Ranciere, Badiou, Laclau-Mouffe, Zizek. In providing this perspective, he has constructed a framework for the analysis of cold war cultural politics that is certain to exert a major influence on the accounts of that period for many years to come." -----Donald Pease, Dartmouth College "This book provides a wonderful new way to understand a crucial moment in the history of literary and political studies: the intersection in the 1950s between the canonization of Modernist Literature and Anti-Communist politics. The book provides a very important intervention in the way literature is studied and taught: we often try to read texts in their own eras, without paying attention to the ways that those texts and those eras have been in effect "constructed" by later history. Modernism seems to be a product of the early twentieth century; Végsö shows that what we see in Modernism is far more a product of the 1950s." -----Michael Tratner, Bryn Mawr College About the Author Roland Végső is Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.