Abstract
This chapter outlines recent approaches to the study of ‘cold war culture’, and—by way of contrast—to the plural and multifaceted nature of cultures of the Cold War in Europe. It illustrates the value of these approaches for readings of the place of Shakespeare in those cultures, tracing them through the themes and arguments of the chapters that follow.
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Notes
- 1.
For an account of, and attempt to recuperate, Shakespeare’s ‘timeless universality’, see Ryan (2015). For the ‘absolute contemporaneity’ of the Cold War, see Jacques Derrida (1984, p. 27): ‘The nuclear epoch is not an epoch, it is the absolute épochè […] [I]f “literature” is the name we give to the body of texts whose existence, possibility and significance are the most radically threatened, for the first and last time, by the nuclear catastrophe, that definition allows our thought to grasp the essence of literature, its radical precariousness and the radical form of its historicity […]. [T]he historicity of literature is contemporaneous through and through, or rather structurally indissociable from something like a nuclear epoch’.
- 2.
- 3.
Taking his cue from George Kennan’s famous Long Telegram and US President Harry Truman’s subsequent announcement in March 1947 of a ‘doctrine of containment’ in American support for the Greek struggle against communist insurgency, Secretary of State George Marshall announced in June 1947 a programme of international aid, the European Recovery or Marshall Plan, the purpose of which ‘should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist’ (Hahnimäki and Westad 2003, p. 122).
- 4.
See, for instance, Marsha Siefert (2012, p. 25): ‘American Cold War Culture is often typically identified with books or movies that specifically address Cold War concerns, from the arms race to the space race, and include representations of “the Other”, from spy films to science fiction, the Communist enemy within as well as in the East. Everything from Hollywood to the evening television news, from serial music to abstract art, has been analysed as Cold War Culture’.
- 5.
For an account of ‘realist’ approaches to Cold War political theory, see Ferguson and Koslowski (2000).
- 6.
‘Post-revisionist’ because ‘revisionist’ approaches, arising from the disillusion associated with Vietnam in the early 1970s, countered interpretations of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s as the result of Soviet expansionism with a reading of American nuclear aggression against a defensive Russia. Post-revisionism, stimulated by John Lewis Gaddes’ The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (1972) maintained the bipolar model of power, but reinterpreted it in terms of combined and complementary agencies. The ‘cultural turn’ initiated by Nadel and Whitfield, which applied a similar perspective to cultural rather than political dynamics, immediately preceded Gaddes’ summative study We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997).
- 7.
p. 53, below.
- 8.
p.24.
- 9.
p. 82.
- 10.
p. 33.
- 11.
This is not to ignore the fact that most critical readings of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk and his Fortunes in the World War (1921–1923) see him as politically subversive, if inadvertently so. Shakespearian critics in the Cold War, including M.C. Bradbrook, assimilated the figure to the equally equivocal Shakespearian ‘poor player’ figure (1978, p. 216).
- 12.
p. 41.
- 13.
p. 88.
- 14.
For an account of Annan’s handling of the student crisis at UCL in 1968 see his obituary in The Guardian, 23 February 2000 (http://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/feb/23/guardianobituaries, accessed 25 August 2015).
- 15.
I use ‘singularity’ here in the mathematical sense of ‘a point at which a function takes an infinite value’, especially in space-time where/when matter is infinitely dense, such as at the centre of a black hole (OED, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/180178, accessed 23 August 2015).
References
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Bradbrook, M. C. (1978). Shakespeare: The poet in his world. New York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida J. (1984). No apocalypse, not now (Full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives) (C. Porter and P. Lewis, Trans.). Diacritics, XIV(2), 20–31.
Douglas, A. (1998). Periodizing the American century: Modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism in the Cold War context. Modernism/Modernity, V(3), 71–98.
Ferguson, Y., & Koslowski, R. (2000). Culture, international relations theory and Cold War history. In O. A. Westad (Ed.), Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, interpretations, theory. London: Frank Cass, pp. 149–179.
Hanhimäki, J. M., & Westad, O. A. (2003). The Cold War: A history in documents and eyewitness accounts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ryan, K. (2015). Shakespeare’s universality: Here’s fine revolution. London: Bloomsbury, Arden Shakespeare.
Siefert, M. (2012). East European Cold War culture(s): Alterities, commonalities, and film industries. In A. Vowinckel, M. M. Payk, & T. Lindenberger (Eds.), Cold War cultures: Perspectives on Eastern and Western European societies. New York/Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 23–54.
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Sheen, E. (2016). Introduction: Conflict, Commemoration, Celebration. In: Sheen, E., Karremann, I. (eds) Shakespeare in Cold War Europe. Global Shakespeares. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51974-0_1
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