MORRIS DICKSTEIN
523
mindlessly parroted by the new academicians of the Left , it would
also remain a touchstone for those who could constructively refute
or adapt it . Without rejecting Marxism, Marcuse helped radicals
break with the old Marxist orthodoxies and think freshly about the
novelties of their own modern situation .
With these last comments on Brown and Marcuse I've gone far
afield from that transition period when the ftfties began
to
break up
in the realm of cultural theory . The late ftfties were a fertile period , a
seedbed of ideas that would burgeon and live in the more activist,
less reflective climate that followed . A comparable breakup and tran–
sition could be traced in almost every sphere of American society dur–
ing the same period: in politics , in education, in advertising , in
popular culture , and in each of the creative arts . Sometimes the roots
of change were not American at
all.
In ftlm, for example, the influx
of the new European directors-Godard , Truffaut, Chabrol, Fellini,
Antonioni, Bergman-inaugurated a golden age that included a re–
discovery of these sophisticated artists ' own American models . In lit–
erature the changes in national sensibility were reflected even more
turbulently, as experiment and innovation jostled the conservative
conventions of the postwar period. For those of us in college at that
time the changes of adolescence-and the exhilarations of intel–
lectual adolescence-superseded yet became interwoven with the
problems of cultural change .
It
was an exciting time to be growing
up-less stable than the ftfties , less hectic than the sixties, but alive
with possibility , rich with eerie dissonances between a still living past
and a dimly apprehended future .
We are saddened by the death of our friends
Polly Cowan
and
Louis G. Cowan
a member of our advisory board
and for many years its chairman
