January 11, 2008
Russell Jacoby on The Last Intellectuals at twenty
Apropopos this September 19 post noting three recent essays casting retrospective glances at literary and intellectual life twenty to twenty-five years ago, Russell Jacoby, the author of The Last Intellectuals, now revisits the topic he first addressed in that important 1987 book:
With some exceptions, the campus natives cried foul when my book appeared. Gray academics turned purple. The historian Thomas Bender judged the book "careless, ill-conceived, and perhaps even irresponsible." According to my critics, I missed the plethora of younger intellectuals outside the limelight; I overlooked the Foucauldian radicals who occupied academic crevices; I ignored the new forms of intellectual contestation; I prized an anti-intellectual simplicity; I pined for 1950s intellectuals and old white guys like Irving Howe and Lionel Trilling. In an era of theoretical advances, I championed the rear guard.
Have 20 years clarified this argument?
[ ... ]
Too many voices may cancel each other out. Bérubé himself has given up regular blogging to write books instead. Ortega y Gasset's fear almost a century ago of the "revolt of the masses" needs an update. We face a revolt of the writers. Today everyone is a blogger, but where are the readers? A New Yorker cartoon reverses the usual picture of a literary festival with book lovers lined up to get the author's autograph. The cartoon shows a table and a queue, but authors line up to see "The Reader," who sits behind the table. On the Internet, articles, blog posts, and comments on blog posts pour forth, but who can keep up with them? And while everything is preserved (or "archived"), has anyone ever looked at last year's blogs? Rapidly produced, they are just as rapidly forgotten.
To read the rest, visit The Chronicle of Higher Education.