Subject: Re: Public Intellectuals
From: Cecilia Baader (ceciliabaader@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Nov 21 2001 - 11:28:12 GMT
Good Morning,
There's a recent article in THE NEW YORK TIMES that discusses this very
subject. (That is, if you subscribe to the view that writers are
intellectuals, which they so often are not.) You can find it at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/magazine/18IDEALAB.html
An excerpt:
For a start, let's recognize that writers are enablers. They haven't done
an adequate job of explaining why they matter. What novelist -- or, for
that matter, what critic -- could write an essay today that would stir up
trouble the way Norman Mailer did with his lip-curling evaluations of his
contemporaries in ''Advertisements for Myself''? (Franzen's biting
15,000-word manifesto, which he published in Harper's in 1996, went
largely unnoticed until he started tangling with television celebrities.)
The essayist Louis Menand declared the death of his kind in The New Yorker
not long ago, acknowledging that ''Hollywood movies and rock 'n' roll
proved to be far more powerful weapons in the global struggle for hearts
and minds than the great books had ever been.''
--Cecilia.
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