Partisans re-viewed.

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Thompson, Anne.; (1990) Partisans re-viewed. Doctoral thesis , Institute of Education, University of London. Green open access

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Abstract

The following thesis is a case study, a history, of -a magazine, Partisan Review, over a period of twenty years (1934-1954) treating it as a series of texts together constituting a transforming discourse. A discourse constructed in and against a discourse of Americanism, itself constructed through an interplay with representations of Europe. Partisan Review was initiated in 1934 within the institutional and intellectual framework of the American Communist Party as an organ of the John Reed Club. In 1937 formal links with the Communist Party were severed and the magazine reappeared as nominally independent but with clear Trotskyist sympathies. After a period of non-alignment without any explicit political programme, an editorial in 1952 declared a neo- Liberal and anti-communist support for "Our Country and Our Culture". It is asserted that these shifts did not constitute radical breaks, but were constructed gradually. The thesis attempts to make the discourse and its process of transformation intelligible to the reader by mapping the emergence and inter-relations of key concepts (including Aestheticism, Alienation, National, Intellectual, Science.) It is argued that each concept or element was defined both by its opposition to an antithetical concept and its place in the discourse - by the specific combination or articulation of the elements. Three editorial texts from 1937, 1941 and 1952, are taken as exemplars, momentary crystallisations of this transformatory practice, and each is subjected to an analysis which attempts to unpick and to gloss its changing component elements and the transforming articulations between elements.

Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Title:	Partisans re-viewed.
Open access status:	An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Language:	English
Additional information:	A very large insert 'Left Wing Parties and Organisations USA 1900-60' (in a folder at the back of the thesis) was not scanned.
Keywords:	Discourse analysis,Serials,Political theory
UCL classification:	UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education
URI:	https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10018711