Between-War Writing

"Although American writers attacked business rule — from the modernists of the 1920s to the leftists of the 1930s — they profited both materially and aesthetically from the order which they condemned. The feeling of alienation which inspired them led not to political revolt but to literary or radical aestheticism — a development which served the interests of the market economy."

Summary

Written in 2008, Between-War Writing bridges the chronological arc of Finkenstaedt's literary studies, covering the interwar period from roughly 1918 to 1941. Where Capitalist Totalism traced the cultural formations of the Gilded Age and Progressive era, and Intellectual Elitism and Capitalist Writing would examine the postwar decades, this volume occupies the turbulent middle ground: the era of modernism, the Depression, and the Popular Front — a period in which American writers came closest to genuine political engagement and furthest, paradoxically, from genuine political effect.

The book opens with a striking three-way comparison: Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and corporate-democratic America are shown to share more than they disavow. All three built mass ideological consensus through the politics of exclusion; all three relied on bureaucratic management and technological organization; all three suppressed the racial, ethnic, and economic "other" upon whose marginalization their internal unity depended. Against this global backdrop, American literary modernism must be read — not as a rebellion against capitalism but as one of its cultural products.

Part I examines the rise of modernist and radical alienation. The First World War gave writers a defining rhetoric of disillusionment — but Finkenstaedt shows how this alienation functioned as a form of social distinction, a mark of membership in a cultural aristocracy that set itself above the consumer middle class while depending on it for readers, publishers, and prestige. The Depression-era Left fared no better: absorbed by Roosevelt's New Deal, the Communist movement ignored Black Americans entirely and ultimately reinforced the consensus it sought to overthrow.

Part II turns to modernist aesthetics in all its variety — the expatriate aestheticism of Pound, Hemingway, and Stein; the mainstream modernism of Stevens, Eliot, and Fitzgerald; the agrarian nostalgia of the Southern Fugitives; and the distinct strategies of women writers navigating a literary world that marginalized them at every turn.

Part III is the most searching section: a close examination of the ethnic and class elitism pervading the literary intelligentsia, including a sustained analysis of anti-Semitism among major modernist writers. And in the book's most powerful chapter — The Image of the Black in the Between-War Period — Finkenstaedt returns to her central argument: that the Black American served as the constitutive outside against which white literary identity defined and consoled itself, while Black writers and artists developed, in the face of this hostility, an alternative aesthetic rooted in a relationship with experience that Western rationalism had systematically suppressed.

The conclusion is sobering: "Now, as American — and Western — economic and military power has invaded the globe, dividing it into the minority rich and mighty against an increasing majority of the poor and impotent, there would seem to be no issue but another catastrophe."

Key Quotes

"The aesthetic innovations of the modernists and the social protest of the Leftists subsided as both movements were absorbed in the commodity economy."

"As Carl Schmitt pointed out, the solidarity of the so-called democratic community depended on its exclusion — and moral deprecation — of alterity. Nazi Germany was obsessed by the myth of the homogenous folk; Americans eliminated and enslaved non-European peoples."

"Toni Morrison: 'Black people in general don't annihilate evil…We believe that evil has a natural place in the universe…and are not surprised at its existence or horrified or outraged.' Superstition and magic were 'another way of knowing things.'"

"Intellectuals who enclose themselves in their dominant cultural context try to avoid underlying dimensions of existence. They suppressed what frightened them: they associated the horror of the unknown — of death itself — with the woman and especially with the black in their midst whom they would control and repress."

Key Themes

Alienation as distinction — The modernist posture of alienation is shown to be not a genuine challenge to the social order but a form of cultural capital — a marker of aesthetic superiority that preserved the writer's elite status within the very system he claimed to oppose.

The absorption of dissent — Every wave of political engagement in the interwar years — the Leftists of the 1930s, the fellow travellers, the Popular Front — was ultimately absorbed into liberal consensus, leaving the racial and economic structures of capitalism intact.

Anti-Semitism and ethnic exclusion — A forensic examination of the ethnic hierarchies within the literary world itself, showing how anti-Semitism and nativist anxiety structured the relations between Anglo-Saxon writers and their Jewish and immigrant contemporaries.

The Black aesthetic as alternative — Against the dominant culture's suppression of the irrational, the corporeal, and the unknown, Black writers and artists — from the Harlem Renaissance through Toni Morrison — are shown to preserve a relationship with hidden dimensions of experience that offers a genuine alternative to Western rationalist totalism.

The void and its projections — Drawing on Freud, Kristeva, and Zizek, Finkenstaedt argues that white culture's compulsive projection of chaos, sexuality, and death onto Black and female bodies is the symptom of a civilization that cannot confront its own mortality.

In the Context of the Oeuvre

Between-War Writing occupies the central position in Finkenstaedt's literary trilogy, connecting the Gilded Age formations of Capitalist Totalism to the postwar culture examined in Intellectual Elitism and Capitalist Writing. It is also the volume that most directly engages with the psychoanalytic and poststructuralist traditions — Freud, Kristeva, Lacan, Zizek — integrating them into her historical argument in ways that reveal new dimensions of the cultural logic she has been tracing since Slaves of Freedom.