ABSTRACT
This chapter first combs through the Bohemian intellectual tradition in western society, following key research done by Cesar Grana, Jerrold Siegel, Albert Parry, and Elizabeth Wilson. It then considers the Dissent circle within this intellectual tradition. It examines the historical influence of Bohemia’s traditional opposition to Bourgeois, and then of Bohemia’s evolution toward Academia, on Dissent cultural criticism. During the 1950s, the famous Bohemian narrative of “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” launched by Norman Podhoretz, aroused hot debates within the New York intellectual circle. The author of this book looks on this ongoing discussion as a process through which the neoliberal branch of the New York family—many of them originally Bohemians—tried to “debohemianize” (get rid the Bohemian label) themselves. Nevertheless, other Dissent writers such as Howe, Paul Goodman, Mitchell Cohen, and Douglas F. Dowd created “lament narratives” bemoaning the decline of the Bohemian critical culture. Thus, they present an antithesis to the “The Know-Nothing Bohemians” narrative. Such contesting Bohemian narratives provided important rhetorical opportunities for the New York intellectuals as they constructed post-Sixties narratives of American intellectual life.
