As I mentioned on The Daily Treatise blog, this site now hosts a Pierre Bourdieu page. Lately I’ve been revisiting Distinciton for my dissertation chapter on middlebrow culture in postwar US, and I can’t help but remarking how brilliant it is (Distinction, not my chapter).
Coincidentally enough, for that same chapter I was getting around to Dwight Macdonald’s essay on midcult when I heard that the Partisan Review has folded. I suspect that PR will be one of those institutions that people look at in appreciation more and more. Particularly as there seems to be a dearth of periodicals dealing intellectually with culture and politics. The Baffler could at times be brilliant, but it’s fallen off my radar screen. Lingua Franca was too much into academic glitterati, and in any case is defunct now. What journal today would solicit and publish something as brilliant as Sontag’s “Notes on Camp”? (I’d always thought that that essay was retrograde until I tried to define what camp was while teaching Anger’s Scorpio Rising and realized how much Sontag gets right). If there has been a demise in a certain type of public intellectual, so too has there been a retreat of public forums that engage intellectual insight.
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