Paul L. Rosenfeld ( 1890-1946) almost single-handedly established the music of living
American composers on a solid critical foundation in the period between the two world wars.
Although he built a reputation chiefly as a critic of music, he was a man ofletters who ranged
across all the arts with unrivaled competence and ease. Rosenfeld's contemporaries
acknowledged him as a champion of that strain of modernism which celebrated the
interrelatedness of the arts. His importance for the wider culture of early twentieth-century
American modernism also lay in his seriousness about the arts. Rosenfeld earned forward the
American democratic and romantic belief, epitomized by Walt Whitman and Alfred Stieglitz, in
the capacity of art to articulate basic values that enrich and even ennoble the human person.
Such an idealistic conception of the value of art was increasingly losing favor among the
American literati during the 1920s, the period when Rosenfeld enjoyed his greatest influence and
prestige. During this decade of"terrible honesty," American intellectuals tended to dismiss the
"ideals of men" in favor of a single-minded interest in a more bitter realism. Inasmuch as they
denigrated the notion that art held any kind of privileged status as a conveyor of values, they
were in effect nascent postmodemists.
This study ofPaul Rosenfeld's life and work examines the achievements ofPaul
Rosenfeld as a critic of the arts in their relation to the wider American culture of the interwar
years, and as a purveyor of modernism against the background of the first strains of
postmodemism. It will also treat at length Rosenfeld's efforts as a writer, editor, and minor philanthropist on behalf of establishing a distinctively American music, literature, and painting.
This cultural nationalism, I argue, is best understood as part ofRosenfeld's modernist project.
To a lesser degree this thesis also deals with the changing position of the man of letters in
American life. / History / D. Litt et Phil. (History)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:unisa/oai:uir.unisa.ac.za:10500/17914 |
| Date | 06 1900 |
| Creators | Aquila, Dominic, Anthony |
| Contributors | Cuthbertson, Gregor, Berry, Chris |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 1 online resource (460 leaves) |
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