Small and Large Cultures: Individuality, the Collective, Conformity and the Period of the Cold War
Abstract
The Cold War is something I analyze in two parts. First, I examine its politics, including political literatures and cultures large and small that concentrate on central concerns of the Cold War. Second, I discuss small and minor literatures in the period of the Cold War in theory and practice, including examples from the Netherlands and Canada that are in the period of the Cold War but do not focus on it as its primary concern or theme. In these sections, I argue for the centrality of the tension between tyranny and liberty, individual and the group, conformity and nonconformity and related matters. The article ranges in the politics of the Cold War from the background of Marx and Mill though Churchill, Stalin, Truman, McCarthy to Russell, Grant and Ignatieff. In literature, that is the Cold War in ink, the essay analyzes Orwell’s essay on the nuclear bomb and his novels, Nineteen Eighty-four and Animal Farm as well as Miller’s play, The Crucible and a poem by Einstein on Russell. I concentrate on examples of Dutch fiction and their translation into English and a Canadian novel, The Weekend Man, by Richard B. Wright, because they are an element of “minority literatures.” Besides exploring the Cold War, I briefly examine theories of minor or small literatures, including some aspects of the views of Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari.