Brian K. Goodman will discuss The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain. He will be joined in conversation by Pozen Center Faculty Director Mark Philip Bradley. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.
About the book: The Nonconformists explores how risky encounters between American and Czech writers behind the Iron Curtain shaped the art and politics of the Cold War and helped define an era of dissent.
American writers had long been attracted to Prague, a city they associated with the spectral figure of Franz Kafka. Goodman reconstructs the Czech journeys of Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, and John Updike, as well as their friendships with nonconformists like Havel, Josef Škvorecký, Ivan Klíma, and Milan Kundera. Czechoslovakia, meanwhile, was home to a literary counterculture shaped by years of engagement with American sources, from Moby-Dick and the Beats to Dixieland jazz and rock ’n’ roll. Czechs eagerly followed cultural trends in the United States, creatively appropriating works by authors like Langston Hughes and Ernest Hemingway, sometimes at considerable risk to themselves.
The Nonconformists tells the story of a group of writers who crossed boundaries of language and politics, rearranging them in the process. The transnational circulation of literature played an important role in the formation of new subcultures and reading publics, reshaping political imaginations and transforming the city of Kafka into a global capital of dissent. From the postwar dream of a “Czechoslovak road to socialism” to the neoconservative embrace of Eastern bloc dissidence on the eve of the Velvet Revolution, history was changed by a collision of literary cultures.
About the author: Brian K. Goodman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University, where he is also a faculty affiliate at the Center for Jewish Studies and the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, & East European Studies. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Instructor at the Pozenn Family Center for Human Rights. His writing on literature, dissent, and free expression has appeared in American Literary History, the Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures, the Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, and Public Books.
About the interlocutor: Pozen Center Faculty Director Mark Philip Bradley is the author of The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (2016), Vietnam at War (2009), and Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam (2000), which won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. He is the coeditor of Making the Forever War (2021), Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn (2015), Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars (2008), and Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights (2001). Bradley's work has appeared in the American Historical Review, Journal of American History, the Journal of World History, Diplomatic History, and Dissent. Bradley is Bernadotte E. Schmitt Professor of History and the College.
Co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program, Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies, Seminary Co-op Bookstore, and the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights.