Books by Chris Vials
In the aftermath of World War II, the United States emerged as the dominant imperial power, and i... more In the aftermath of World War II, the United States emerged as the dominant imperial power, and in US popular memory, the Second World War is remembered more vividly than the American Revolution. American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950 provides crucial contexts for interpreting the literature of this period. Essays from scholars in literature, history, art history, ethnic studies, and American studies show how writers intervened in the global struggles of the decade: the Second World War, the Cold War, and emerging movements over racial justice, gender and sexuality, labor, and de-colonization. One recurrent motif is the centrality of the political impulse in art and culture. Artists and writers participated widely in left and liberal social movements that fundamentally transformed the terms of social life in the twentieth century, not by advocating specific legislation, but by changing underlying cultural values. This book addresses all the political impulses fueling art and literature at the time, as well as the development of new forms and media, from modernism and noir to radio and the paperback.
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The book contends that the functional equivalent of fascist movements and fascist currents have e... more The book contends that the functional equivalent of fascist movements and fascist currents have existed in the United States since the 1920s. While they have never taken full control of the state, they have palpably impacted American culture and politics at a number of critical junctures, and they continue to haunt American life. Yet these dark currents have been met, if not fully checked, time and again by a vigorous antifascist tradition.
Long before scholars discovered Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception,” Foucault’s biopolitics, or Carl Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty, antifascism was a pervasive discourse used by intellectuals, writers, activists, and others to describe the structural tendency of Western liberal societies to slide into ever more un-democratic forms, and to deliver the antithesis of their universalist promises.
In the United States, throughout the twentieth century, liberals and the left were more deeply haunted by the problem of fascism than those in the center or to the right, and by relentlessly placing their anxieties into the public sphere, they played a crucial role in defining the terms through which it was remembered and discussed.
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Realism for the Masses is an exploration of how the concept of realism entered mass culture, and ... more Realism for the Masses is an exploration of how the concept of realism entered mass culture, and from there, how it tried to remake "America." The literary and artistic creations of American realism are generally associated with the late nineteenth century. But this book argues that the aesthetic actually saturated American culture in the 1930s and 1940s and that the left social movements of the period were in no small part responsible. The book examines the prose of Carlos Bulosan and H. T. Tsiang; the photo essays of Margaret Bourke-White in Life magazine; the bestsellers of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Mitchell; the boxing narratives of Clifford Odets, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren; and the Hollywood boxing film, radio soap operas, and the domestic dramas of Lillian Hellman and Shirley Graham, and more.
These writers and artists infused realist aesthetics into American mass culture to an unprecedented degree and also built on a tradition of realism in order to inject influential definitions of "the people" into American popular entertainment. Central to this book is the relationship between these mass cultural realisms and emergent notions of pluralism. Significantly, Vials identifies three nascent pluralisms of the 1930s and 1940s: the New Deal pluralism of "We're the People" in The Grapes of Wrath; the racially inclusive pluralism of Vice President Henry Wallace's "The People's Century"; and the proto-Cold War pluralism of Henry Luce's "The American Century."
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Articles / Chapters by Chris Vials
American Literature in Transition: 1940-1950, Cambridge UP, 2017, 2017
Frank Capra’s documentary film series Why We Fight (1942-1945) has functioned in American memory ... more Frank Capra’s documentary film series Why We Fight (1942-1945) has functioned in American memory as a kind of shorthand for the mission of the Second World War. In mandatory screenings, all U.S. servicemen were required to see Capra’s binary vision of a world divided into an Allied “free world” and an Axis “slave world.” But while Capra’s template resonated across a range of cultural productions, no single narrative of “Why We Fight” became hegemonic during the war years. This chapter examines the multiplicity of ways in which American cultural producers articulated the mission and purpose of the Second World War, identifying the points of convergence and friction between the various narrative strands. A few of the major and sometimes overlapping narrative strands it identifies are the Popular Front-informed vision of “The People’s War” and Capra’s dualistic republican vision pitting a “free world” against “a slave world.”
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Margaret Atwood’s MadAddam trilogy marks an emergent literary critique of neoliberalism which has... more Margaret Atwood’s MadAddam trilogy marks an emergent literary critique of neoliberalism which has emerged over the last 25 years, primarily in dystopian and science fiction. Rather than calling out neoliberalism for a hypocritical statism, or for creating a kind of unfreedom all to easily envisioned as dictatorship, she shows us the tyranny inherent in its utopian idea of freedom, which ultimately restricts human action through diffuse channels based in quotidian realms. As such, the trilogy parts company with the earlier antifascist analytic that marked her earlier work The Handmaid’s Tale. While affirming the didactic value of speculative fiction as a means
of contesting neoliberal utopianism, this article also contends that if one takes Atwood’s critiques too literally, they – like the wider popular tendency they inscribe – cause us to underestimate the continued importance of the centralised nation-state in maintaining capitalist social relations.
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Created Unequal: Class and the Making of American Literature, Ed. Andrew Larson (London: Routledge, 2014), 2014
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American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography, 2006
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Book Reviews by Chris Vials
Science and Society, 2014
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Journal of Asian American Studies, 2005
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Papers by Chris Vials
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Mechanistic approaches describing the complex processes that underpin forest system dynamics are ... more Mechanistic approaches describing the complex processes that underpin forest system dynamics are increasingly required in order to manage forests from a multi-purpose perspective. When describing future forest dynamics the environmental implications of climate change on long-lived organisms such as trees also focus attention on the need to adopt a holistic perspective. In turn, any future perspective has to account for the interacting dynamics of the wider processes resulting from environmental, ecological and land-use change. Therefore considerable understanding of the biological, biophysical and physical processes influencing the life cycle of trees and the forest ecosystem is required to achieve full representation of the system and its dynamics. Sam Evans, Tim Randle, Paul Henshall, Catia Arcangeli, Jennifer Pellenq, Sebastien Lafont and Chris Vials
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Books by Chris Vials
Long before scholars discovered Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception,” Foucault’s biopolitics, or Carl Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty, antifascism was a pervasive discourse used by intellectuals, writers, activists, and others to describe the structural tendency of Western liberal societies to slide into ever more un-democratic forms, and to deliver the antithesis of their universalist promises.
In the United States, throughout the twentieth century, liberals and the left were more deeply haunted by the problem of fascism than those in the center or to the right, and by relentlessly placing their anxieties into the public sphere, they played a crucial role in defining the terms through which it was remembered and discussed.
These writers and artists infused realist aesthetics into American mass culture to an unprecedented degree and also built on a tradition of realism in order to inject influential definitions of "the people" into American popular entertainment. Central to this book is the relationship between these mass cultural realisms and emergent notions of pluralism. Significantly, Vials identifies three nascent pluralisms of the 1930s and 1940s: the New Deal pluralism of "We're the People" in The Grapes of Wrath; the racially inclusive pluralism of Vice President Henry Wallace's "The People's Century"; and the proto-Cold War pluralism of Henry Luce's "The American Century."
Articles / Chapters by Chris Vials
of contesting neoliberal utopianism, this article also contends that if one takes Atwood’s critiques too literally, they – like the wider popular tendency they inscribe – cause us to underestimate the continued importance of the centralised nation-state in maintaining capitalist social relations.
Book Reviews by Chris Vials
Papers by Chris Vials
Long before scholars discovered Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception,” Foucault’s biopolitics, or Carl Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty, antifascism was a pervasive discourse used by intellectuals, writers, activists, and others to describe the structural tendency of Western liberal societies to slide into ever more un-democratic forms, and to deliver the antithesis of their universalist promises.
In the United States, throughout the twentieth century, liberals and the left were more deeply haunted by the problem of fascism than those in the center or to the right, and by relentlessly placing their anxieties into the public sphere, they played a crucial role in defining the terms through which it was remembered and discussed.
These writers and artists infused realist aesthetics into American mass culture to an unprecedented degree and also built on a tradition of realism in order to inject influential definitions of "the people" into American popular entertainment. Central to this book is the relationship between these mass cultural realisms and emergent notions of pluralism. Significantly, Vials identifies three nascent pluralisms of the 1930s and 1940s: the New Deal pluralism of "We're the People" in The Grapes of Wrath; the racially inclusive pluralism of Vice President Henry Wallace's "The People's Century"; and the proto-Cold War pluralism of Henry Luce's "The American Century."
of contesting neoliberal utopianism, this article also contends that if one takes Atwood’s critiques too literally, they – like the wider popular tendency they inscribe – cause us to underestimate the continued importance of the centralised nation-state in maintaining capitalist social relations.