Beschreibung
This work is the first full-length study of Joseph Freeman.
It traces his literary and political biography as „New York
Intellectual“ between 1920 and 1960, centering upon the
question of his marginalization as one of the leading
intellectuals of the literary left in the 1930s. Therefore,
the study deals specifically with the mechanisms and
functions of intellectual discourses during this period,
which is characterized both by its cultural transition from
modernism to postmodernism and by the literary phenomenon
of what Saul Bellow chooses as the title of his first novel
Dangling Man (1944). This figure, bereft of religious
and
ideological certainty became a literary motif in American
and European intellectual novels of the 40s and 50s, i. e.
Manès Sperber’s Wie eine Träne im Ozean (1949-1955),
Norman
Mailer’s Barbary Shore (1951), Richard Wright’s
The Outsider
(1953). In all these novels, the protagonists are initially
attracted by communism, but in the course of events learn to
reject this ideology. Sidney Hook calls these novels
„literature of disillusionment.“ Consequently, the author
compares Freeman’s two novels Never Call Retreat
(1943) and
The Long Pursuit (1947) with novels by European und
American
intellectuals in order to show that the „dangling man“ –
or the „homeless left,“ as it has been called in Europe –
has been central to the modernist experience and how it has
been marginalized after 1945.