> The most revealing response was supplied by the American writer Joyce
> Carol Oates. 'The term "intellectual" is a very self-conscious one in
> the United States,' she said. 'To speak of oneself as an
> "intellectual" is equivalent to arrogance and egotism, for it suggests
> that there is a category of persons who are "not-intellectual".'
>
> And in our egalitarian age that would not do. Americans have an
> abhorrence of people who, as William Styron put it, 'live in irony
> towers'
>
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
>