[DOWNLOAD] "Virginia Woolf & Vera Brittain: Pacifism and the Gendered Politics of Public Intellectualism." by Studies in the Humanities * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Virginia Woolf & Vera Brittain: Pacifism and the Gendered Politics of Public Intellectualism.
- Author : Studies in the Humanities
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Reference,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 367 KB
Description
A recent debate spurred by the publication of Richard A. Posner's Public Intellectuals (2001, 2003)--though not a matter with which he concerns himself--centers on questions of authority and valuation: that is, how one determines which cultural figures qualify as "public intellectuals," and who is qualified to make those determinations. The act of naming public intellectuals appears to be as much inflected by an individual's cultural, gender, and ideological biases as by his or her politics, background, and operating definitions. Such acts, moreover, are powerfully inflected by the omissions, and politics, of literary and intellectual history. Several recently compiled lists of public intellectuals reflect a broader tendency among academics and intellectuals to discredit or elide the role that women have played historically, and continue to play, as producers of cultural and social knowledge circulating in the public domain. The list of "Britain's Top 100 Intellectuals" selected by the editors of Britain's Prospect magazine for its centennial issue in July 2004, for example, included only twelve women, leading a commentator in the Guardian to reflect how "a female 'public' intellectual is rarely regarded with the same deference as her male counterpart" (Barton). The lists of "100 Top Global Intellectuals" compiled in 2005 and 2008 by Prospect, and Foreign Policy likewise included only ten women among their ranks. (1) And of the 546 prominent intellectuals (both past and present) included on Richard Posner's list, only 13.2% are women and 4.8% are black (194-207). (2) That Posner includes writers of the early twentieth century rather than focusing exclusively on contemporary intellectuals invites us to consider how literary history has helped to shape this list, and the ways in which the politics of literary canonization continue to dominate contemporary discourse on the subject of public intellectualism.