>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.
Watched my undergrad hero, Harold Bloom, on C-SPAN's Booknotes last night. Bloom defended the canon, denounced PCness, and self-identified several times as a "socialist." A weird, cranky, but compelling performance - filled with denunciations of the New York Times.
The transcript isn't up yet on their website, but at one point, Bloom cited Trotsky - whom he called a fine critic and writer, even if he was a murderous and horrid man - as urging the revolutionary proletariat to read Dante.
Doug