Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
At a time when American political and cultural leaders considered the United States to stand at "the center of world awareness," thinkers and artists of all sorts seemed preoccupied with uncovering and securing principles that lay at the center of things. Throughout the midcentury period, they probed questions such as these: What defined the essential character of "American culture" as a whole? How could certain fundamental, crucial, and permanent standards of human morality be rescued from the flux and the horrors of history? In what ways did a stable self at the core of personality emerge through the human life cycle? What basic principles distinguish the scientific method, securing truth or validity from error, illusion, or myth? Are there key elements to democracy, to the integrity of a society, to order in the world? As At the Center demonstrates, their endeavors produced many competing answers, some of which revealed the possibility that the centers would not hold and wholes might dissolve. Others concluded the quest may not be worth the candle and eccentric and eclectic approaches were preferable to those that set out to find what held things together.
Synopsis
At a time when American political and cultural leaders asserted that the nation stood at "the center of world awareness," thinkers and artists sought to understand and secure principles that lay at the center of things. From the onset of the Cold War in 1948 through 1963, they asked: What defined the essential character of "American culture"? Could permanent moral standards guide human conduct amid the flux and horrors of history? In what ways did a stable self emerge through the life cycle? Could scientific method rescue truth from error, illusion, and myth? Are there key elements to democracy, to the integrity of a society, to order in the world? Answers to such questions promised intellectual and moral stability in an age haunted by the memory of world war and the possibility of future devastation on an even greater scale. Yet other key figures rejected the search for a center, asserting that freedom lay in the dispersion of cultural energies and the plurality of American experiences. In probing the centering impulse of the era, At the Center offers a unique perspective on the United States at the pinnacle of its power.
Synopsis
At the Center explores the mode of perception and reflection which grasped at consensus and sought to determine "centers" or orienting norms, and prevailed across many registers of thought, imagination, and practice in the 1950s, as well as the varieties of argument and expression that escaped inclusion within coherent wholes.