David Schanoes (2 results)

Soft cover. Condition: Very Good. 96 pages. C L R James "Black Studies" / David Schanoes "Work In America - Their Time and Ours" (SL#125/11).

An ironically titled surrealist assessment of the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács, published shortly after his death in June 1971. Contributors include Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, Paul Garon, David Schanoes, Peter Manti, and other members of the Chicago Surrealist Group. Among the contents are Schanoes's "Goulash," Manti's "Anti-Realism: St. Georg's Revelation in Aesthetics and the Outcome of Classical Bourgeois Realism," and a collective "Letter to the Editors of Telos." The pamphlet is a polemic rather than a conventional memorial. Although recognizing the importance of Lukács's early writings-particularly his analysis of reification and class consciousness-the contributors attack his subsequent accommodation to Stalinism, his defense of socialist realism, and his hostility toward modernism and the artistic avant-garde. Lukács's dismissal of surrealism and other experimental forms is treated as part of a broader authoritarian effort to subordinate poetry and imagination to the cultural requirements of the Communist Party. The collective letter challenges the reverential treatment accorded Lukács by Telos, an influential journal then engaged in recovering traditions of Western Marxism for the American New Left. For the Chicago surrealists, critical Marxism could not be revitalized by overlooking its authoritarian inheritances. Revolutionary theory had to remain inseparable from freedom of imagination, the transformation of everyday life, and resistance to bureaucratic power-whether exercised by capitalist society or by a party claiming to act in the proletariat's name. Published during an especially active period for Surrealist Editions and Black Swan Press, In Memory of Georg Lukacs illuminates the Chicago group's distinctive position at the intersection of Marxism, anarchism, and surrealism. It demonstrates both their serious engagement with Marxist philosophy and their refusal of doctrinal allegiance: a compact contribution to the intellectual debates through which the group sought to distinguish revolutionary surrealism from Stalinism, academic Marxism, and the institutional avant-garde. Stapled wrappers, 19, [1] pp., illus. A fine copy.…