Marshall Berman – författare

I denna sällsynt rika och fängslande bok utforskar Marshall Berman en upplevelse som präglat alla samhällen och människor som dragits in i den kapitalistiska omvälvningen av världen: upplevelsen av en modernitet där inget är bestående och stabilt, där traditionella livsformer och tänkesätt raseras. I konsten, litteraturen, musiken och arkitekturen fångas denna samhälleliga omvälvning av modernismen. Med hjälp av fascinerande omtolkningar av Goethes "Faust", Marx' "Kommunistiska manifestet", Baudelaires Parisskildringar, de stora ryska författarna -- Pusjkin, Gogol, Dostojevskij -- visar Berman hur alla dessa konfronterades med moderniseringen i hela dess sammansatthet: fasan inför förintelsen av det trygga och invanda parad med förhoppningarna om det nya och dess frigörande möjligheter. I centrum för Bermans undersökning står också Staden som den arena där moderniseringens hela motsägelsefullhet framträder tydligast: 1800-talets Paris med Haussmans boulevarder, det tsaristiska Petersburg och slutligen författarens egen uppväxtmiljö i New Yorks Bronx, som skildras som en symbol och ett offer för moderniseringen. "All that is solid melts into air" publicerades ursprungligen 1982 och har blivit en inflytelserik och älskad klassiker över hela världen. Arkiv förlags femte svenska upplaga (den första gav vi ut redan 1987) har lyfts in i vår serie Moderna klassiker och är ombruten, översedd och utökad med ett nytt efterord av författaren. "En djärv nytolkning av den estetiska modernismen och ett stycke briljant upplysningsarbete." (Stefan Jonsson, Dagens Nyheter)

Marshall Berman was one of the great urbanists and Marxist cultural critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and his brilliant, nearly sui generis book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is a masterpiece of the literature on modernism. But like many New York intellectuals, the essay was his characteristic form, accommodating his multifarious interests and expressing his protean, searching exuberant mind. This collection includes early essays from and on the radical '60s, on New York City, on literary figures from Kafka to Pamuk, and late essays on rock, hip hop, and gentrification. Concluding with his last essay, completed just before his death in 2013, this book is Berman's intellectual autobiography, tracing his career as a thinker through the way he read the 'signs in the street'.

Described as 'a continuous carnival' and 'the crossroads of the world,' Times Square is a singular phenomenon: the spot where imagination and veracity intersect. To Marshall Berman, it is also the flashing, teeming, and strangely beautiful nexus of his life. In this remarkable book, Berman takes us on a thrilling illustrated tour of Times Square, revealing a landscape both mythic and real. Interleafing his own recollections with social commentary, he reveals how movies, graphic arts, literature, popular music, television, and, of course, the Broadway theater have reflected Times Square's voluminous light to illuminate a vast spectrum of themes and vignettes. Part love letter, part revelatory semiotic exposition of a place known to all, On the Town is a nonstop excursion to the heart of American civilization, written by one of our keenest, most entertaining cultural observers.

In this acclaimed exploration of the search for "authentic" individual identity, Marshall Berman explores the historical experiences and needs out of which this new radicalism arose. Focussing on eighteenth-century Paris, a time and place in which a distinctively modern form of society was just coming into its own, Berman shows how the ideal of authenticity-of a self that could organize the individual's energy and direct it toward his own happiness-articulated eighteenth-century man's deepest responses to this brave new world, and his most ardent hope for a new life in it. Exploring in particular the ideas of Montesquieu and Rousseau, Berman shows how the ideal of authenticity was radically opposed to the bourgeois, capitalistic idea of "self-interest."

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest books on modernity. A kaleidoscopic journey into the experience of modernization, it captures the dizzying social changes that swept up and transformed the lives of millions of people. Berman delves into the aesthetic and intellectual controversies of art, literature, and architecture: from the writing of Goethe, Marx and Dostoevsky to the Paris of Baudelaire and Haussmann, the Petersburg of the Tsarist builders and Pushkin, and the New York of devastated wastelands and creative artists.

A new beginning for Marxism might just be on the horizon of a landscape despoiled by Soviet communism and a now wobbling world capitalism. The attention attracted by the 150th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto included laudatory references to Marx in venues as unexpected as The New York Times and The New Yorker. More predictably, the tributes in such publications focused on the strength of Marx as a critic of capital or a powerful wordsmith, rather than as an advocate of communism. But, if Marxism is to enjoy a rebirth in the coming century, appreciation needs to move beyond its value as a critical tool or a literary pleasure. The emancipatory potential of Marxism, its capacity to configure a world beyond the daily grind of selling one's labor to stay alive, will have to be established anew. No one has made a better start to this task than the esteemed critic and writer Marshall Berman. Berman first read The Communist Manifesto in the same week as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman while at high school. A few years later, now a student at Columbia University, he was handing out copies of Marx's 1844 Manuscripts, purchased for 50 cents each at the (Soviet) Four Continents Bookstore in New York, as holiday presents for friends and relatives. Here was the beginning of a lifelong engagement with Marxism that, as this volume demonstrates, has been both consistent and refreshing. In these pages are discussions of work on Marx and Marxism by Edmund Wilson, Jerrold Siegel, James Billington, Georg Lukcs, Irving Howe and Isaac Babel. They are brought together in a single embrace by Berman's spirited appreciation of Marxism as expressive, playful, sometimes even a little vulgar, but always an adventure.