Download or read book Marxism and Modernism written by Eugene Lunn and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1984-11-09 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much attention has been directed to the pivotal debates of the 1930s amongst four luminaries of German Marxist culture -- between George Lukacs and Bertolt Brecht, which focused on realism in literature, and between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, which dealt with avant-garde and mass culture in capitalist society. "Marxism and Modernism" gives these wide-ranging controversies their most intensive treatment to date, analyzing them in terms of the major challenge to a Marxist aesthetics in this century: the interpretation of the formal and historical meaning, and social value, of cultural modernism. The intellectual developments of each of these four influential writers are examined, along with their responses to fascism and Stalinism, and their varying relations to the many strands of Marxist thought and modernist aesthetics. -- From publisher's description.