Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Sara Marcus, "Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis" (Harvard UP, 2023)
Description: Moving from the aftermath of Reconstruction through the AIDS crisis, a new cultural history of the United States shows how artists, intellectuals, and activists turned political disappointment--the unfulfilled desire for change--into a basis for solidarity.Sara Marcus argues that the defining texts in twentieth-century American cultural history are records of political disappointment. Through insightful and often surprising readings of literature and sound, Marcus offers a new cultural history of the last century, in which creative minds observed the passing of moments of possibility, took stock of the losses sustained, and fostered intellectual revolutions and unexpected solidarities.<...