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Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics Alan M. Wald. Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics. London and New York: Verso, 1994. 243 pp.
Writing from the Left provides a set of powerful and persuasive exercises in "learning lessons, finding ancestors, and resurrecting models of cultural practice" from the literary history of the United States left. The material in this volume builds decisively on Alan Wald's previous work, notably in The New York Intellectuals (1987) and The Responsibility of Intellectuals (1992), but in the eighteen essays here collected from Wald during this first half of the 1990s, the issue of "radical culture and politics" is presented with an urgency that demands not only a critical anticipation of future visions, but a no less critical reexamination of a literary past that US cultural traditions have alternately suppressed and historically misrepresented. From the "Old Left" to the "New Left," with a view to a "Next Left," Wald rereads insistently the "centrality of the Communist experience in US cultural history." That experience, Wald argues, can neither be eradicated by McCarthyite witch hunt anti-Communism nor eviscerated by liberal appropriations, and this "writing from the left" elicits now both a disciplinary inquiry into cultural artefacts and a...