The Public Intellectual

In this excitingand timely book, prestigious thinkers such as Edward Said, Jacqueline Rose, Bruce Robbins, and Stefan Collini discuss the role of writers and intellectuals today and in the past, examining the ways in which thought can be publicly expressed, and how it may relate or fail to relate to activism. Their combined responses represent a major and long overdue riposte to claims of a decline in public intellectual life.

The volume significantly extends the historical range of most writing about intellectuals, exploring the relationship between thought, professionalism, and public action from Hellenistic late antiquity onward. Other essays in this collection are immediately contemporary in focus, addressingthe ways in which the idea of the public intellectual is being reformed today in different political and national contexts and in different media, including film and the visual arts.

List of Contributors.

Acknowledgments.

Introduction (Helen Small).

1. The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals (Edward W. Said).

2. Pre–modern Intellectual Biography (Rita Copeland).

3. Humanism, Slavery, and the Republic of Letters (David Wallace).

4. Hamlet the Intellectual (Margreta de Grazia).

5. Deaths of the Intellectual: A Comparative Autopsy (Jeremy Jennings).

6. New Art, Old Masters, and Masked Passions (Linda S. Kauffman).

7. Apathy and Accountability: The Challenge of South Africa s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the Intellectual in the Modern World (Jacqueline Rose).

8. The Sweatshop Sublime (Bruce Robbins).

9. "Every Fruit–Juice Drinker, Nudist, Sandal–Wearer ": Intellectuals as Other People (Stefan Collini).

Index.

Helen Small is Fellow in English Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford. She is currently the holder of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2001–2004), and is writing a book on the philosophy and literature of aging.

"[...]this is a fascinating, engaging example of the fecundity of the human intellect." Library Journal