De Man and Bloom’s anti-materialist criticism emerged during liberal-imperial transition from Korea to Vietnam

Evidence

The figures who came to dominate the US literary scene from the 1960s onwards - figures like Paul de Man and Harold Bloom - had emerged towards the end of this transition from Dulles-style, pathological anticommunism to the Kennedy-style, hard-edged ‘liberal’ imperialismthe transition, one might say, from Korea to Vietnam. … Bloom’s early work had the effect, first, of privileging the Romantic Movement as the modern movement, thus _extending the tendencies which were already there in Frye and Cleanth Brooks but taking them further in Nietzschean directions; and, second, oflocating the difference of later texts in the anxieties produced by earlier ones, so that the field of textual production becomes contentious and conflictual, while the history of such productions and contentions itself remains strictly textual. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 228

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the reader’s question of whether textual-conflict-only readings evade material forces — Ahmad reads Bloom’s anxiety-of-influence as keeping textual history strictly textual. — connects to: Poststructural literary theory’s nationalism critique tracked the national-bourgeois state’s rise and fall — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 184; Anidjar recounts Bloom reading Othello-Desdemona love as a figure of failed statesmanship — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 528

Broader Connections

• Anidjar recounts Bloom reading Othello-Desdemona love as a figure of failed statesmanship #exemplifies (0.85) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 528
• Poststructural literary theory’s nationalism critique tracked the national-bourgeois state’s rise and fall #expands (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 184