On Sun, 3 Sep 2000, John K. Taber wrote:
> isn't needed. Sartre says that there is nevertheless a bourgeois blessed
> use for writers (and poets). What would that be today? Journalist, like
The culture-industry calls the individuals it blesses or otherwise accords symbolic capital to "stars", really a cosmological category transformed into a cultural one. Bourdieu talks endlessly about this process, that capital takes on symbolic and cultural forms, it's not just a pile of money somewhere, earning interest. Capital is a social relation, not a thing, and takes on all these bizarre forms.
> And finally, what could a proletariat writer be?
Works of art can't be narrowly defined as bourgeois or proletarian, and neither can specific writers. Whatever the author thinks or says, the text they produce is another matter entirely. The most you could say is that great works of art really do have a profound solidarity with progressive social movements, which I'll define loosely as those which fight for the interests of the proletariat. Speaking as a litcritter, I've found that the teaching of literature can be one of the most subversive things you can do at a university; it's a way of crossing gender lines, national identities, traveling back in time and forwards, and raising tough questions about why the heck we spend so much time as a species screwing each other over, instead of solving our collective problems. Which is why the Right hates and fears litcritters.
-- Dennis