Culture as Counterculture: Essays on Literature and Ideas

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, "high culture"-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 "popular culture" compared itself: the standard against which artistic achievement was measured. Today, no one disses classical music-"Roll Over Beethoven"-in the same way. It has become the embodiment of art for its own sake, moving from "high culture," argues Adam Kirsch, to "counterculture"-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.