Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics

---

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Intellectuals so the arguement goes, are an endangered species. Once at the centre of crucial debates about politics and culture, today they have forsaken their proud and public-spirited independence and retreated to academia where they pursue such esoteric subjects as post-modern aethetics and post-structuralist theory. The essays in this volume disputre this diagnosis and re-examine the controversy over the role of the intellectual in society. They place intellectuals in a specific historical context and evaluate their real and potential role in the circumstances that define our public life - the media, government bureaucracy, the new social movements. In so doing, these essays seek to find a new ground for the intellectual from where to carry out the responsibilities of public opposition. The volume is divided into sections to theory, interviews and historical cases.

Author Bio

Bruce Robbins is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below and the editor of Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (Minnesota, 1990).