The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre & Other Aspects of Popular CultureThis collection of essays, which originally appeared as a book in 1962, is virtually the complete works of an editor of Commentary magazine who died, at age 37, in 1955. Long before the rise of Cultural Studies as an academic pursuit, in the pages of the best literary magazines of the day, Robert Warshow wrote analyses of the folklore of modern life that were as sensitive and penetrating as the writings of James Agee, George Orwell, and Walter Benjamin. Some of these essays--notably "The Westerner," "The Gangster as Tragic Hero," and the pieces on the New Yorker, Mad Magazine, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, and the Rosenberg letters--are classics, once frequently anthologized but now hard to find. |
Contents
The Legacy of the 30s | 3 |
Woofed with Dreams | 19 |
Poet of the Jewish Middle Class | 25 |
The Idealism of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg | 39 |
Paul the Horror Comics and Dr Wertham | 53 |
E B White and the New Yorker | 75 |
An Old Man Gone | 79 |
The Gangster as Tragic Hero | 97 |
The Flight from Europe | 213 |
Paisan | 221 |
The Enclosed Image | 231 |
ReViewing the Russian Movies | 239 |
Kafkas Failure | 255 |
The Dying Gladiator | 261 |
Hope and Wisdom | 265 |
Essence of Judaism | 269 |
The Westerner | 105 |
The Anatomy of Falsehood | 125 |
Father and Sonand the FBI | 133 |
The Movie Camera and the American | 143 |
The Liberal Conscience in The Crucible | 159 |
Monsieur Verdoux | 177 |
A Feeling of Sad Dignity | 193 |
The Working Day at the Splendide | 273 |
Sadism for the Masses | 277 |
Gerty and the G Is | 281 |
The Art of the Film | 285 |
AFTER HALF A CENTURY | 289 |
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | 301 |