Education
He holds a Doctor of Philosophy in American studies from Yale.
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book
The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973
( In a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten tod...)
In a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten today, intellectuals of all schools shared a belief that human nature was under threat. The immediate result was a glut of dense, abstract books on the "nature of man." But the dawning "age of the crisis of man," as Mark Greif calls it, was far more than a historical curiosity. In this ambitious intellectual and literary history, Greif recovers this lost line of thought to show how it influenced society, politics, and culture before, during, and long after World War II. During the 1930s and 1940s, fears of the barbarization of humanity energized New York intellectuals, Chicago protoconservatives, European Jewish émigrés, and native-born bohemians to seek "re-enlightenment," a new philosophical account of human nature and history. After the war this effort diffused, leading to a rebirth of modern human rights and a new power for the literary arts. Critics' predictions of a "death of the novel" challenged writers to invest bloodless questions of human nature with flesh and detail. Hemingway, Faulkner, and Richard Wright wrote flawed novels of abstract man. Succeeding them, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, and Thomas Pynchon constituted a new guard who tested philosophical questions against social realities--race, religious faith, and the rise of technology--that kept difference and diversity alive. By the 1960s, the idea of "universal man" gave way to moral antihumanism, as new sensibilities and social movements transformed what had come before. Greif's reframing of a foundational debate takes us beyond old antagonisms into a new future, and gives a prehistory to the fractures of our own era.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/069117329X/?tag=2022091-20
Mark Greif
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His recent book is The Age of the Crisis of Manitoba: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton University Press, 2015). One of the co-founders of, he is a frequent contributor to the magazine and writes for numerous other publications. Greif teaches literature at the New School University in New York City.
Greif received a Bachelor in History and Literature from Harvard in 1997, after which he received a Marshall Scholarship, which he used to study British Literature and 19th and 20th century American Literature at Oxford through 1999.
Greif is associate professor of literary studies at the New School University in New York City. In the fall of 2004, along with fellow writers and editors Keith Gessen, Chad Harbach, Benjamin Kunkel, and Marco Roth, Greif launched the literary journal n + 1.
Greif has served as both an editor and writer for the journal, contributing essays on a wide variety of topics: politics, sociology, Radiohead. In 2010, he described the journal"s mission: “We are creating a long print archive in an era of the short sound bite.”
Greif"s criticism is marked by a willingness to address popular culture, conservative books, leftist academic critical theory, and link these to literature and larger questions of culture.
He contributed a chapter to the book Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter Happier More Deductive (Chicago: Open Court, 2009).
Works
book
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The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973
( In a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten tod...)
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The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973
