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V. F. Calverton The Liberation of American Literature (1932):
That the attempt to be above the battle is evidence of a defense mechanism can scarcely be doubted. Only those who belong to the ruling class, in other words, only those who had already won the battle and acquired the spoils, could afford to be above the battle. Fiction which was propagandistic, that is, fiction which continued to participate in the battle, it naturally cultivated a distaste for, and eschewed. Fiction which was above the battle, that is fiction which concerned only the so-called absolutes and eternals, with the ultimate emotions and the perennial tragedies, but which offered no solutions, no panaceas -- it was such fiction that won its adoration.
"It is possible that we are growing a bit tired of the novel with a purpose," The Nation declared in its issue of April 18, 1912, reflecting that change in the process of consummation, and then adding in a carping vein that the "American novelist, like the American playwright, has listened to the counsel which urged him to look for his materials in problems of the nation and the day."
The new aim was to escape social reality and to exalt individual emotionality. In short, this new ideology, like that of all leisure classes, sought to cultivate literature as a form of escape -- escape either from boredom or from its own limitations of self and soul....
Most of the literature of the world has been propagandistic in one way or another.... In a word, the revolutionary critic does not believe that we can have art without craftmanship; what he does believe is that, granted the craftmanship, our aim should be to make art serve man as a thing of action and not man serve art as a thing of escape.
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Why are we so slow, so indifferent about mobilizing narrative and the image? Can't we see that it is, after all, works of fiction, no matter how mediocre they may be artistically, that best arouse political passion? -Roland Barthes
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