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. He takes on such topics as the literary abilities of ChatGPT, the return to tradition by contemporary Jewish novelists, and the 19th-century perception of poets William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley as radical rather than canonical figures.

The book concludes with "Nothing That Is Not There," an essay new to this volume that engages Jewish terms to reflect and respond to the challenges to faith and meaning in a secular age.