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Cultural Correspondence
Series
Identifier:
IA.SER.081-->
Description
Description copied from Brown University digital collections website:A journal born from the collapse of the New Left and hopes for a new beginning of a social movement, but also of left-wing thinking about culture, Cultural Correspondence was in many ways a unique publication.
Its founding editors, Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, had both served on the editorial board of the journal Radical America, founded in 1967. Buhle had been the founder of that bi-monthly journal, creating it out of a network of activist-intellectuals in the Students for a Democratic Society; Wagner was officially "Poetry Editor," but after its shift from Madison, Wisconsin, to the Boston area in 1971, he became a member of an expanded board of editors. Together they taught at the Cambridge-Goddard Graduate School, then Wagner left for Europe and Buhle left the editorial board, moving to Yonkers. An exchange of letters from these locations spawned the notion of a new publication. It was to be the first radical magazine put out by members of a generation that had since childhood watched television and appreciated as well as enjoyed a considerable portion of it, also films and "pulp" literature.
The two had shared a strong interest in popular culture since childhood days, but had gained new cultural insights through a close reading of the Frankfort School, especially Herbert Marcuse and Theodore Adorno. While the Frankfort intellectuals were wholly pessimistic about commercial culture, their idealistic, dialectical method of analysis had much to offer New Left radicals. As editors of Cultural Correspondence, the two frankly aspired to turn the Frankfort School theory upon its head, as Marx had upturned Hegel's idealism. They believed that masses of ordinary people learned through the socialization of mass culture, however alienated the form of their engagement with it; and they believed that clever radicals had exerted key influences here and there within mass or commercial culture, comic books to film and television.
They were joined by a wide range of intellectuals in this venture, notably Daniel Czitrom and George Lipsitz (sometime members of the editorial board), but also David Marc, James P. O'Brien and Ann D. Gordon, among other friends and colleagues, all but Marc having some roots in Madison, Wisconsin. Surrealist Franklin Rosemont edited one issue, and with Penelope Rosemont laid out another. Like so many "little magazines," it regularly lost money. After an announced final issue in 1981, was taken over by poet-activist Jim Murray for several further issues before its demise, serving mainly at the end as an unofficial organ of the New York artists' group PADD. The fading of public resistance against Reaganism after the 1982 mass demonstrations against nuclear weapons no doubt signaled the experiment's demise.
Readers of this website will want to explore the issues further through the "Introduction" to the volume Popular Culture in America (University of Minnesota, 1987), its contents drawn from the pages of the magazine.
Paul Buhle
Providence, RI
September, 2005
http://library.brown.edu/cds/cultural_correspondence/about.html
Related people
Paul Buhle (editor)Dorrwar Bookstore (distributor)
Dave Wagner (editor)