The point is the idealization of the actually existing working class on the left,
idealization? Wojtek's saying that there's an identifiable cultural left TODAY that sits around and tells everyone how great it is to be working class, poor, redneck, whatever. he's saying that people TODAY do this.
This isn't an example of people doing it today. So, if this is your only example of a tendency on the left, then I'm not buying it. I have no doubt that there are some people who do what you say, I've just never heard of any left writer who says what Wojtek says they say.
Well, actually I can think of one: Spivak, when she criticized some folks in Post Colonial studies when she wrote about the sub-altern.
So, which left writers, today, can I go read about. I'm heading to the library and I'd like to place them on interlibrary loan. I can sit here and OCR or transcribe one book after another that directly undermines Wojtek's claims. Why is it that, as you asked Wojtek, you can't name one writer on the left who valorizes the lives of the poor, rednecks, american indians, whoever Woj gets on about? If it's such a widewpread trend, then surely it's there.
which Prof Cox thought unquantifiable or something, is actually something with a rich and controversial history. The essay specifically mentions American & Russian examples, and its pervasiveness in both Communist and populist ideologies, and its great potential appeal today. The author takes strong exception to this, and I mostly agree with the piece.
If that's talking past, it's not me who's missing the target.
Doug
So when the reviewer wrote this, he was really saying that art like Conroy's was widewpread and advanced by Stanlinists:
"Conroy wrote a second and considerably inferior novel, A World to Win, published in 1935. With the Communist Party's turn in 1934-35 towards the popular front, in which friendly relations with well-known liberal authors and critics sympathetic to the USSR such as Ernest Hemingway and Malcolm Cowley became paramount, the Stalinists junked their proletarian literature orientation. To a certain extent, figures like Conroy and others were shunted aside. "
How is "junking" a "proletarian literature orientation" an example of widespread it is? To me, it read as if the guy was talking about minority views that never got off the ground.
Kelley