Abstract

Now that the 1960s are over by all accounts, one does not have to defend or deny the past: political stagnation mitigates the need for and makes absurd an heroic history of the sixties. Still, an apologist history remains unwarranted. Disguised apology is the difficulty with Gates of Eden. Dickstein tries to write a history of the culture of the sixties that will win back the trust of his intellectual fathers. These men, the so-called New York Intellectuals, had disparaged the times. Dickstein uses their revered concept, modernism, to elevate the literature and, by the way of loose association, the "frustrated, Edenic impulse” and the “magic politics” of the sixties up to the level of academic texts.