Robert Warshow s The Immediate Experience - 1619 Words

Robert Warshow, author of The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theater and Other Aspects of Popular Culture, was at once a student and teacher of experience. He was a lover of popular culture in all forms, a â€Å"New York Intellectual†, and a disenchanted writer searching for the cultural value in everything he saw, read or experienced. (denby 2001, xiii) Through reading his collection of critical essays one can see Warshow as a Jewish man, with strong opinions about communism and its affect on society, a movie buff, and a critic enamored with experience. Experience both from the perspective of the artist, as well as the observer of the art. From the beginning of his life, it seems, Robert Warshow was a man destine to be a political-intellectual, immersed in both history and the tensions of the moment. (denby 2001, XV) Growing up in New York early in the twentieth century, and being the son of Adolph Warshow who at one point ran for congress on the socialist ticket, Robe rt gained early insight into the political strain of the time. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Warshow found himself an editor and writer for the social-democratic, anti-stalinist magazine The New Leader. After the war, he began working for Commentary as an editor, but also publishing his own work. This was a pivotal job for him, as Commentary was widely known and read by other intellectuals of the time. (denby 2001, xii) While Warshow grew during this era, as a critic of popular culture, hisShow MoreRelatedThe Popularity of Gangster Films in the Early Nineteen-Thirties2065 Words   |  9 Pagesgroup within society who could make upward mobility believable, tells much about how legitimate institutions had failed - but that mobility was still at the core of what Americans held to be the American dream[5]. In the early 1930s productions began within Hollywood of what were commonly described as social problem pictures[6], these films dealt specifically with the social difficulties of the period such as unemployment/labour struggles (Black Fury1935), racial Read MoreThe Crucible Narrative2336 Words   |  10 Pageshistorian Chadwick Hansen, much of Coreys property had already been seized, and he had made a will in prison: His death was a protest ... against the methods of the court. [8]This echoes the perspective of a contemporary critic of the trials, Robert Calef, who claimed, Giles Corey pleaded not guilty to his Indictment, but would not put himself upon Trial by the Jury (they having cleared none upon Trial) and knowing there would be the same Witnesses against him, rather chose to undergo what Death