Champs des “literary intellectuals” : Collini sur Snow

Collini ranges so wide, fluid (elegantly both essayistic and ultimately scholarly). On the Snow-Leavis controversy, moving on to the perception (and the beautiful touch of exposition, how does he find this tone, since tone is such a matter of discussion in Leavis on Snow : a matter of authority and contests in authority) of shifts not only in science and the philosophy, history and sociology of science but also in the nature and social location of the literary science and Snow’s detested “literary intellectuals” (“Chelsea and Greenwich Village, rather than Oxford and Harvard”) :

Since then, many of the periodicals of general culture have folded or sharply contracted their coverage of literature, and the modern counterparts to Snow’s ‘literary intellectuals’ are more likely to meet each other at an academic conference or a campus-based ‘writers’ workshop‘. (li, The Two Cultures, CUP 1998).

aussi : There has not only been a huge expansion of higher education across the world since the late 1950s, as a result of which universities and their concerns bulk larger in the national cultures of the advanced societies that they did; but there has also been a decline in the opportunities offered by those societies to making a living as a writer and literary journalist.

Comme “littérature”, “art”, se déplace donc, mais oui, “université” aussi, et pas seulement dans les refoulements que j’étudie : une croissance évidente aussi.