Culture as Counterculture

In Culture as Counterculture, leading literary critic and intellectual Adam Kirsch explores the question of how 21st-century religion, art, and science engage with the past, and are both re-enlivened and redefined by it. Since the early 20th-century, "e;high culture"e;-particularly classical music-has steadily been losing its authority, and not just because it was supplanted, as some argue, by mass-produced kitsch. For years after World War Two, it still represented that to which "e;popular culture"e; compared itself: the standard against which artistic achievement was measured. Today, no one disses classical music-"e;Roll Over Beethoven"e;-in the same way. It has become the embodiment of art for its own sake, moving from "e;high culture,"e; argues Adam Kirsch, to "e;counterculture"e;-subversive, challenging, and defiant. Kirsch, a poet and critic who currently serves as the editor of the Wall Street Journal's Weekend Review Section, has written on a wide range of subjects. This new collection of essays reflects the full extent of that range. Kirsch explores the question of how 21st-century religion, art, and science engage with the past, and are both re-enlivened and redefined by it. He takes on such topics as the literary abilities of ChatGPT, the return to tradition by contemporary Jewish novelists, and the 19th-century perception of poets William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley as radical rather than canonical figures. The book concludes with "e;Nothing That Is Not There,"e; an essay new to this volume that engages Jewish terms to reflect and respond to the challenges to faith and meaning in a secular age.