In this article, I offer a close reading of Merleau-Ponty's Les Aventures de la dialectique (1955). This work of political philosophy, which culminates in a long chapter on Sartre that sealed the rupture between the two thinkers, also reflects on the politics of literature. While their quarrel has been widely discussed, the role of literature in this regard has received little attention. I will show how the notion of literary engagement, coined in 1945, was renegotiated during the Cold War through competing views of history. Adopting an intellectual-historical approach, I analyse how engagement is entwined with political conjunctures and philosophical positions.
Although the most characteristic fictional mode of the period, the mid-twentieth-century novel sequence attracts little critical attention. Of particular interest for exploring its temporal distinctiveness are those autobiographical sequences that were acclaimed in their 1950s and 1960s time as Second World War books, but which were, this essay argues, essentially Cold War endeavours. Focusing on Anthony Powell's representation of his wartime work with the forces-in-exile of occupied Poland in A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75), this essay considers the unrivalled affordances of the novel series for the reanimation of historical events not as past but as ongoing process.
