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Deconstructing Literati
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12305 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1987 |
3,632 Words |
| Author
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Gregory Wolfe
Gregory Wolfe is the founder and coeditor of Image: A Journal
of the Arts and Religion, and a frequent contributor to The
World & I. |
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Terry Eagleton
New York: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1986
114 pp., $143.95 cloth
In the context of political and ideological tumult, the role of the literary intellectual may seem obscure. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the potency of literature and the way we think about it in relation to the general movement of our culture. In totalitarian countries, it is the writer - poet, novelist, or critic - whom the authorities fear most; freedom of imagination can be more dangerous at times than mere freedom of thought. By contrast, in the West we are now witnessing a peculiar irony; as orthodox Marxism has lost its force and freshness in such disciplines as political science and history, radical and nihilistic ideologies are dominating the study of literature and turning it into the avant-garde subject in the academy.
The rise of the intellectual as an influence in the political realm has been amply explored by Julien Benda in his La Trahison des Clercs (1927), in which he excoriated his fellow intellectuals for abandoning the pursuit of knowledge for the pursuit of power. Benda might better have used the term 'ideologue,' however, to describe the type of person typically labeled as an intellectual; the scholarship of Eric Voegelin, Gerhart Niemeyer, and Russell Kirk, also has carefully outlined the structure of the gnostic, power hungry, utopian schemes that have come to be known as ideologies. Yet whether we say ideologue or intellectual, the basic definition is much the same. In The Decline of the Intellectual, Thomas Molnar writes: "[the intellectual] puts his mental ability, education, articulateness, and experience to some political or social use [and] he is not satisfied, ultimately, with interpreting the events - of economic, social, political, nature - around himself, but is trying to influence and transform them. He thus combines theory and praxis." Of course, this is hardly a recent phenomenon: it stems from the Renaissance ethos summed up by Francis Bacon in his famous phrase, "Knowledge is power." The opposite of the intellectual is the philosopher, who seeks truth for its own sake, ordering his soul according to the order of transcendent reality.
The Rise of the Literary intellectual
Compared to philosophy and political theory, literary studies are a recent development. It was only in the nineteenth century that the monopoly of classical languages and
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