Document Type
Reconsideration
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Michael Denning's The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century was published in late 1996. There are numerous ways of reading its contribution to American cultural studies. Simply put, the book pursued a reading of US cultural history using the "Birmingham School" cultural studies approach developed in Britain in the 1970s to which Denning himself was a contributor. Simultaneously, it sought to recover a home-grown analytical and radical tradition, by looking at the early contributions of loosely analogous intellectual tendencies situated in the US labor movement in the quarter century or so after the trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Each task derives its moral and persuasive force from its close relationship with the social movement that Denning studies in magisterial and comprehensive detail. Lastly, as Denning indicates here (as in other works), the study could also assist those seeking to reconstitute some form of social democratic, class-based movement for equality and justice in the present day.
Repository Citation
Barnfield, Graham. "Shadowy Aesthetics: The Cultural Front, Literary Judgments and Perceptions of Mass Entertainment." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–14. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss1/27