Literary Intellectuals Research Articles

The Humanities in the Era of Cooperation: Beyond C. P. Snow's “Two Cultures”

During the forty years since C. P. Snow decried the existence of “two cultures” and castigated “literary intellectuals” for their lack of concern for humanity as a whole, an intellectual revolution in the humanities, driven in part by the intellectual obliteration of boundaries between disciplines and in part by globalization, has reoriented scholars toward engagement in the world and communication with scientists. A recognition that interdependence makes cooperation essential, whether among scholars or among nations, is bringing about an “era of cooperation” among disciplines and between academic and non-academic institutions.

Somebody Else's Foremother: David Haynes and Zora Neale Hurston

If there is a single distinguishing feature of the literature of black women - and this accounts for their lack of recognition - it is this: their literature is about black women; it the trouble to record the thoughts, words, feelings, and deeds of black experiences that make the realities of being black in America look very different from what men have written. (Mary Helen Washington, 'Darkened Eye' 35) It is not late-breaking news that literary criticism is another form of storytelling, of mythmaking. (Deborah E. McDowell, Reading 118) Introduction: Possessing the Secret of Their Eyes Were Watching God David Haynes's 1995 novel Somebody Else's Mama takes the trouble to record the thoughts, words, feelings, and deeds of black women, while its narrative logic ultimately leads to what Mary Helen Washington terms a recurring in the fiction of black women writers, a in which women intimacies that can be trusted only to a spirit (' Darkened Eye' 35). Washington, in her lucid and impassioned 1987 essay 'The Darkened Eye Restored': Notes Toward a Literary History of Black Women, cites the friendship between Janie Crawford and Pheoby Watson in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God as providing one of the clearest enactments of that scene in black women's literature. According to Washington, the conversation between Janie and Pheoby at the novel's end represents an exemplary moment of female bonding, itself a prerequisite for women's (36). Similarly drawn together and defined by shared story, Paula Johnson and Miss Xenobia Kezee - the central characters in David Haynes's Somebody Else's Mama - are also talking just to each other at the end of the book. The novel thus ends with a convention Washington associates with African American women's literature in general, and Their Eyes Were Watching God in particular. By thus implicitly declaring himself and Somebody Else's Mama to be sympathetic, kindred spirits of Hurston and her novel, Haynes intervenes in conventionally gendered constructions of an African American literary tradition. Their Eyes Were Watching God has constituted one of the most common sites for a contemporary, critical, and textual form of bonding among many African American women literary intellectuals. A number of contemporary black feminist writers and critics (Alice Walker, most famously) have dated their introduction and conversion to the study of African American women's writing from their first encounter with Hurston's novel. Their reading of the book, along with an account of the reading experience as personally and intellectually transformative, has provided them a means of self-definition as black feminist literary critics. These accounts often engage a rhetoric of possessives: The women possess, or are possessed by, Hurston and Their Eyes. Sherley Anne Williams, in her foreword to the 1978 University of Illinois Press re-issue of the book, recounts her initial, graduate school encounter with Hurston in a time when literature was still an exotic subject (vi). Having to share with other students the few available copies of a then-out-of-print Their Eyes, Williams reports that, when it had finally become [her] turn to read the book, she became Zora Neale's for life (vii). Mary Helen Washington, in her foreword to the 1990 Harper & Row edition of Their Eyes, traces a similarly possessive, but more collective, history for black women readers and teachers of Hurston's text: Like most of my friends and colleagues who were teaching in the newly formed Black Studies departments in the late sixties, I can still recall quite vividly my own discovery of Their Eyes.... Andrea Rushing, then an instructor in the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard, remembers reading Their Eyes in a women's study group with Nellie McKay, Barbara Smith, and Gail Pemberton. …

Closing the Knowledge Gap Between Scientist and Nonscientist

Closing the Knowledge Gap Between Scientist and Nonscientist

The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR

Bathrick's study is potentially most important book on GDR culture appear in English language...It is kind of book which changes way we look at things and will clearly be a 'must read' for anyone in field. (Patricia A. Herminghouse, editor of Frauen im Mittelpunkt: An Anthology of Contemporary German Women Writers). In this definitive study, David Bathrick examines East German culture both before and after fall of Berlin Wall in November 1989. Bathrick argues that dissident East German writers were unique among East European literary intellectuals in that they attempted to open up alternative spaces for public speech from within [the] framework of Marxism and state socialism. According Bathrick, the fact that some of them had been censored, hunted, questioned, and ridiculed does not belie fact that they were also - and sometimes even simultaneously - privileged, nurtured, courted, and coddled...It was precisely their function on 'both sides' of power divide, as official and nonofficial voices within whole, which defined a kind of in GDR. Bathrick applies his insights into this particular kind of intellectual a wide range of topics. He compares oppositional culture in East Germany radical cultures elsewhere, examines complex political and cultural relations of East and West Germany, traces anguished history of East German avant-garde, and describes troubled effort develop a revolutionary theatrical tradition in East Germany. The book also includes nuanced insights into collapse of East German political order in late 1980s and more recent revelations about collaboration of allegedly oppositional writers with Stasi (state police). In his treatment of these and other issues, Bathrick enters hotly contested territory. Yet he brings clarity and scrupulous fairness these issues that are still very much alive in Germany - and elsewhere - today. David Bathrick is professor and chair of Department of German Studies at Cornell University. He is editor of New German Critique and author of The Dialect and Early Brecht: Trommeln in der Nacht.

A Hazard of New Fortunes and the Reproduction of Liberalism

In his seventy-eighth year, William Dean Howells wrote Henry James, I am comparatively dead cult with my statues cut down and grass growing over me in pale moonlight.(1) When he made that typically accurate, typically ironic self-appraisal, literary modernism was on rise. Howells' image was in process of being simplified and solidified as administrator of genteel tradition he had felt ambivalent toward his whole life. Today insights of modem era are more open to question and reputation of notoriously equable realist has never been better. One reason Howells' fortunes have improved is because contemporary literary intellectuals, in comparison to those of modernist era, have become less wary of everyday life. Mimicking Michel Foucault's eschewal of masters and geniuses in favor of solidly established non-geniuses (Ricardo rather than Smith, Bentham rather than Marx), some of today's most influential critics enjoy analyzing figures whose achievements typify rather than transcend conflicts of their particular historical moment. In last several years, Howells has thus attracted readers who have for most part purged themselves of crypto-romantic resentments that blinded modernists, and who have analyzed his status as normative literary figure of his time with relative disinterestedness. Alfred Kazin remarked that Howells it his function to mediate between moral man and immoral society.(2) It is precisely that -- Howells' significance as his culture's mediator -- that so fascinates critics today. Yet to great extent, Howells is still being brought to docket for crime he considered his primary virtue: liberalism. Many of Howells' current readers view him from perspectives that wistfully yearn toward stances of whole-souled radicalism. Such critics feel obliged to describe Howells' characteristic self-divisions and inconsistencies as if they were fatal flaws -- as if they were qualities that finally justify his twentieth-century rank as figure who can be pidgeonholed and dismissed by few misquotations (such as his notorious smiling aspects of life remark). Indeed, review of current arguments shows that most of Howells' best readers have often been content to dwell upon fact that liberal self-division is hallmark of Howells' writing. This self-division has been usually described in terms borrowed from historian Warren Susman, who has posited that after Civil War there was large shift in modal types(23) for individual development in United States. Economic prosperity and rise of mass culture, Susman argues, caused decline of productivist, largely protestant, and hard-working of and growth of consumerist, manifestly secular, and pleasure-oriented of personality.(4) If old culture of character valued consistency, moral centeredness, and expressing oneself through work, new culture of personality valued (and still values) unpredictability, charismatic waywardness, and expressing oneself through play. Susman's distinction has been directly echoed by such critics as Eric Sundquist and Richard Brodhead, among others. Sundquist has remarked that realists like Howells endlessly sought to capture in their fiction the transformation of `father' and `family' into `boss' and `corporation,'(5) and Brodhead, writing about A Modern Instance, remarks upon Howells' interest in a new kind of personality, character in which internalized cultural authority is strong enough still to impinge on self-esteem, but no longer strong enough to regulate behavior.(6) Repeatedly case has been made that Howells' engagement with centrifugal forces of new culture of consumption overwhelmed repeated and often dogmatic assertions of more centripetal ethical norms with which he often ended his books. Speaking of A Hazard of New Fortunes, Alfred Habbeger notes that closure of text -- in which Basil March insists that Margaret Vance's religious ecstasy must(7) contain answer to text's political riddles -- does not, in fact, lay to rest questions regarding social justice that are raised during course of novel. …

The Two Cultures Revisited

This article addresses the question of two cultures, that is, the relationship between the culture of natural scientists and the culture of literary intellectuals, a distinction made by C. P. Snow in his 1959 lecture, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. This reading of Snow draws from the theoretical and methodological strategies discussed by scholars interested in the supposed dichotomy between literature and science. Similar trends also can be found in social studies of science, where the constructive and rhetorical practices of scientists have been emphasized.

Dividing up reality

Late in 1995, the author spent some time in South Africa, where in 1974–78 he had done most of his formal futures work. He took the opportunity to reflect on that period. A central feature of the work in the 1970s had been the dividing up of reality. Some characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of reductionism are noted, as are some critical assumptions which may underlie futures studies. A reductionist approach may lead to disappointment: what is an appropriate response to such disappointment? The essay goes on to look at the relevance of futures studies for business. Some familiar ways of studying the contexts within which business operates may seem to provide a ready home for futurist approaches. But there are significant dangers for futurists who have inadequate practical experience of business and who may be ignorant of recently gained insights into how business strategies are in practice formed. The essay ends with a broader question. The late Lord Snow was alarmed by the dangerous results of a gulf between scientists and ‘literary intellectuals’. Can futures studies help to reduce that gulf? (A brief appendix to the essay questions the relevance of postmodernism to futures studies).

Literary intellectuals and the dissolution of the state: professionalism and conformity in the GDR

For two generations, writers in the German Democratic Republic enjoyed a massive audience in their own country, a readership dependent on their works for a measure of utopian solace amid the grimness of life under communism. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, these writers were abandoned by their readers and stripped of the professional structures that had supported them. What drove leading thinkers, including those of the avant-garde who publicly embraced intellectual freedom, to serve as government informants? Why were they content to work within a repressive system rather than challenging it outright? This collection of interviews with more than two dozen writers and literary scholars, including several Stasi informants, provides a survey of the motivations, compromises and illusions of East German intellectual life. In conversations with Robert von Hallberg, writers such as novelist Hermann Kant, playwright Christoph Hein, and avant-garde poet-publisher Sascha Anderson talk about their lives and work before the fall of the Wall in 1989 - about the constraints and privileges of Communist Party membership, experiences of government censorship and self-censorship, and relations with their readers. They reflect on why the possibilities of opposition to the State seemed so limited, and on how they might have found ways to resist more aggressively. Turning to the controversies that have emerged since reunification, including the Stasi scandals involving Anderson and Christa Wolf, they discuss their feelings of complicity and the need for further self-examination. Two interviews with Anderson - one conducted before he was exposed as a Stasi collaborator and one afterwards - offer insight into the double life led by many writers and scholars in the German Democratic Republic.

The "Two Cultures" Revisited

POSTMODERNISM MIGHT BE DEFINED AS AN INABILITY TO NEGOTIATE the myriad levels of abstraction at play in the aestheticized reality of contemporary life. This epistemological crisis is perhaps nowhere seen more clearly than in the antagonism between literary intellectuals and pioneers of new electronic media-between the culture of the text and the culture of the image, whose modes of knowledge are often taken to be mutually exclusive. If we are ever to make sense of the problems posed by the new media and the opportunities these offer, we must begin to rethink our longstanding equation of meaning with the logic and syntactical structures of language and reevaluate our other ways of knowing the world.

Between Two Cultures: Geography, Computing, and the Humanities

Literary intellectuals at one pole - at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension - sometimes ... hos tility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion they can't find much common ground.1

Have the Intellectuals Failed? On the Sociopolitical Claims and the Influence of Literary Intellectuals in West Germany

Have they really failed? Opinions vary, and answers seem incompatible with each other. Dozens of articles filled literary pages of German newspapers in autumn of 1992, and each one of them could have carried precisely this same question as their tide. Book fairs displayed new titles like Twilight of Intellectuals and The Rise and Fall of Intellectuals, which reminded one (me, at least) all too painfully of Grandeur and Misery of Courtesans .. .1 My own answer to question, incidentally, is yes and no. Strictly limiting myself to internal German debate, my attempt to answer question with help of wealth of printed matter has resulted in three piles of paper, each roughly same size. Each pile represents one of accusations aimed at the intellectuals. (This word refers here and in following pages only to intellectuals in old Federal Republic, not in former East Germany.) First: Intellectuals reacted with skepticism if not with outright rejection to historical chance of German reunification. Even now they are not yet ready to draw consequences or perspectives from new situation in Germany, Europe, and world. Second: This failure is due largely to typical illusions of a generationally specific group of intellectuals who are usually referred to, in

The Politics of Reading Billy Budd

In 1919, few years before Tutankhamen's tomb was discovered, Raymond Weaver unearthed more modest cultural treasure closer to home. Going through Herman Melville's papers for the first time since the author's death, Weaver discovered a batch of some 340 sheets of yellow paper, about six by eight inches, covered with an incredibly crabbed manuscript in pencil in Melville's hand. This sheaf turned out to be an unknown novel Melville completed at the end of his life: Billy Budd. Weaver called it Melville's last testament, but what the deceased's intentions were has been under dispute. Early commentators of the twenties and thirties tended to regard this tragedy of innocence undone as of acceptance, serene acquiescence to this world's imperfection made possible by Christian faith in spiritual redemption. The next generation of critics, however, made case for just the opposite; Billy Budd was Melville's ironic of resistance, final indictment of the man-of-war's society in keeping with the earlier republican spirit of White Jacket and Moby-Dick. By the 1960s, confidence in Billy Budd as testament was shaken, and critical commentary focused on its ambiguities.1 Because of its syllogistic clarity, no doubt, the history of Billy Budd criticism is well known. But there is one intriguing aspect of it that deserves more attention. The shift over time from univocal to an ambiguous reading coincides with the engagement of literary intellectuals in left-wing politics during the '30s and the subsequent repudiation of the left after the collapse of the Popular Front and the onset of the Cold War. During this time, the two groups of critics who emerged as the most authoritative voices on American literature-a discipline of strategic cultural importance in the postwar period-were the American Studies critics and the New York Intellectuals.

The Struggle for the Cultural Heritage: Christina Stead Refunctions Charles Dickens and Mark Twain

T he received values with which we academic literary intellectuals most closely involve ourselves are the values of the cultural treasures,' the canonized masterpieces, for which we serve our students as intermediaries. In the years between the first and the second world wars, the established canon and its transmission faced strenuous challenge and probing discussion, not just, as our training leads us to expect, because of modernism, but also through the revolutionary and reactionary political struggles of those years. The debates over Proletarian Culture and Socialist Realism in the Soviet

The Gramsci-Trotsky Question (1922-1932)

evidence of a Trotskyist influence on Gramsci is,' I think, rather persuasive, and in any case should be carefully evaluated in order to determine what insights the interaction between these two major figures of world communism can provide into the encounter between the Classical (Trotsky) and Western (Gramsci) traditions of revolutionary Marxism, to use Perry Anderson's terminology.2 Some of the recent scholarly work done on Gramsci, and a preponderance of the references to him that one comes across in left periodicals published during the last ten to fifteen years have tended to downplay his connections with the makers and events of the Bolshevik revolution, and to privilege those aspects of his ideas that fit into the framework of what has been loosely called cultural radicalism. Gramsci has become a kind of role model to many radical literary intellectuals, academic Marxists, and left-leaning social democrats. No doubt Gramsci has much to offer people interested in consciousness, subjectivity, and superstructural problems. But it should always be remembered that, for Gramsci, the study of how we understand phenomena and of how and why particular conceptions of the world are mediated by institutions and filter down into the consciousness of the masses was part of a larger enterprise whose aim was the socialist restructuring of capitalist society. His pessimism of the intellect, so widespread today, was counterbalanced by an optimism of the will, which seems to be sorely lacking in left circles of the 1980's. Had Gramsci lived on into the 60's and 70's, perhaps he would have sympathized with the skepticism of new left intellectuals today who ask What is socialism, anyway?, or who are rereading Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky with the insights them by Foucault and Derrida. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to see Gramsci as in some respects a precursor of deconstructionism. One can accept the view of Gramsci as a thinker who provided a new and unique reformulation of Marxian theory.3 His reflections on the role of intellectuals in rationalizing systems of political control and domination would be sufficient--even

Negative Forces and Positive Non-Entities: Images of Women in the Dramas of Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones) is generally regarded as the leading black playwright of the decade 1964-1974. His dramas, often characterized by arresting imagery, humorous but painful irony, and liberating anger, went far in exposing the fundamental racism of American life. They sought through a variety of stylistic devices to posit new myths which would return to black people a sense of themselves as their own standard of legitimacy and beauty. To the mainstream literary critics and intellectuals, Jones was an enfant terrible, gifted as a craftsman but excessively unfair in his views of whites. To nationalist oriented black intellectuals and activists, Baraka was the father of the Black Arts movement, a poet-politico who brilliantly demonstrated how culture could be a crucial weapon in a liberation struggle. Yet all such evaluations, whether made by whites or blacks, men or women, tend to disregard the fact that his dramaturgy is almost overwhelmingly male-dominated and womanhating.

C.P. Snow — The Two Cultures, or: “Renaissance man is not possible”

The concept o f the Two Cultures is based on the view that there is a lack of communication between scientists and literary men. Snow expresses the view that the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups. Snow, although a novelist himself, seems to condemn the literary intellectuals in his advocacy of science as the most revolutionary force in the world today. He is convinced that, because science is essentially "progressive”, and the political views of the scientists are more tenable and workable, the scientists would possess the means - and the desire -to end want and disease in every corner of the world.

The PEN Club, 1930-50

There is little doubt that one recurring question which continues to tax literary intellectuals hinges on the emotive issue of the social responsibility of the writer. In pursuit of this question, those interested in the role of the intellectual have, to some extent, tended to focus their attention on the 1930s. During that decade, variously described as 'pink' or 'red', it has been argued that there was a great political awakening and mobilization of intellectuals who actively campaigned for at least some form of radical social change if not revolution. According to popular opinion, there was a 'swing to the left' during the 1930s, though the extent of this alleged swing is a moot point. In this paper I wish to test this popular opinion, albeit implicitly, by examining the case of what can, perhaps, be regarded as the archetypal writer's association, the PEN Club.' The idea of the PEN Club was first conceived in 1921 by the little-known poet and novelist, Miss C. A. Dawson-Scott. Like many of her contemporaries she had been overwhelmed by the suffering, hate and misery generated during and after the first world war, and shared in the prevailing conviction that the horrors of 1914-18 must not be repeated. To further this end she established PEN, a vehicle for the promotion of 'tolerance and friendliness' two virtues which she considered were lacking in the world. The initial impulse behind the formation of the club was, thus, humanitarian, an impulse which is still evident fifty or more years later.

The Culture of the Provincetown Players

In the first decades of this century, American movements for social reform included a programme, somewhat belated perhaps, for cultural renewal. Disaffected from their society, lamenting a split between the nation's commercial-industrial genius, so visibly institutionalized, and its creative cultural talent, so individual and so isolated, analysts like Van Wyck Brooks undertook to search for what he entitled “ a usable past.” The phrase implied, however, that much or even most of that past, as commonly understood, was unusable: a witness to the split, or, in relation to the literary culture itself, a congeries of intellectual and artistic activity passive in the presence of social change, oblivious to its realities, merely acquiescent in relation to the institutions of a developing modern industrial society. Culture in America, Brooks and his allies felt, had no institutions. Without them the seeds of genius would not germinate, for there was no nurturing process, no method of transmission.When “ progressive ” literary intellectuals sifted the past for its neglected, potentially alternative, tradition, they rightly did not think to look back to any earlier American dramatist for inspiration, much less to a “ usable ” dramatic tradition. Yet when the whole Progressive attempt to reformulate the social and cultural basis of American life faltered and foundered in the years of the First World War, a modest theatrical venture undertaken just as the wider movements suffered their first setbacks preserved something of Progressive social vision — focussed it, prompted it, and passed it on as a legacy to later artists and to the intellectual community, and to the public.

Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai and the Chinese Marxist Conception of Revolutionary Popular Literature and Art

It is now generally agreed that the intensity and magnitude of social commitment witnessed in China's revolutionary literary movement of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s is unparalleled among literary movements of the modern period. Accordingly, an increasing amount of scholarly attention is being directed to the general problem of the relationship between literature and revolution in China. Unfortunately, however, our overall conception of the scope of this revolutionary activity remains exceedingly narrow. One reason for this may be that for many scholars the subject of literature and revolution immediately brings to mind the dynamic, but familiar, New Culture literary revolution and the May Fourth generation of westernized revolutionary writers. As a result, discussions on literature and revolution normally dwell on the literary activities and views of a familiar cast of literary intellectuals featuring Lu Hsün, Kuo Mo-jo, Mao Tun and a variety of new players “introduced” from time to time. Unhappily, this pre-occupation with revolutionary elites and the western culture which so profoundly inspired them tends to obscure the role of a second and equally important force on the revolutionary literary and cultural scene, the diverse popular literary and artistic movement.

The Humanistic Basis of Scientific Work

From this premise followed the stress on historical and interdisciplinary cases of scientific advance. The Project Physics Course, developed during the late 1960s and now used by over 250,000 students in schools and colleges here and abroad, represents a second-generation version of this movement, a humanistic view of the physical sciences that also includes the discussions of epistemological issues in science, of the science-technology interactions, and of social consequences of scientific and technological work. C. P. Snow's 1959 Rede Lectures, which stirred up a well-remembered furor of publications, had less of a cultural or curriculum-oriented purpose than a geopolitical one. Snow's was a strangely premature apocalyptic treatise that came at a relatively euphoric time. His perception was that a gulf of mutual incomprehension between literary intellectuals and scientists would be disastrous for a living culture because it impedes the development of a scientifically literate administrative elite that, he felt, is needed to see our way through the three great menaces before us: Hbomb war, overpopulation, and the gap between the rich and the poor. These and other recent efforts continue to have their effects upon the structure of the curriculum. But some cautionary remarks are in order. No curricular innovation in this field is likely to go much beyond what has already been achieved unless it bases itself on some fundamentally different or deeper understanding of what scientists do, what humanists do, and what the relationships are between their activities. Though we have now a dozen, largely competing, views on the nature of science, there are good reasons to believe that our fundamental understanding of the scientific enterprise remains quite inadequate. The state and support of theoretical (i.e., basic) work on the way any understanding of the scientific enterprise could be translated into effective curricular innovation is even more precarious. It follows that those desirous of improving the humanistic content of scientific studies should pay attention to the need for much more basic research on the nature of the scientific enterprise and on the consequences of such research for curriculum innovation.