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Intellectuals

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Re “Not Down to Our Last Intellectual,” July 1: Josh Getlin writes of the last generation of New York intellectuals, “Despite disagreements, they were all people of the book, ruled by the written word. But in our time, intellectual debates are just as likely to focus on MTV and Madonna as on Marxism.”

The New York intellectuals did not write only about literature. James Agee, Edmund Wilson, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Irving Howe and many others wrote classic essays about pop cultural forms like silent comedy and Western movies, comic strips, murder mysteries and the early days of TV. Today’s much-ridiculed cultural studies scholars are in the direct line of the New York intellectuals in writing about MTV and Madonna as well as about literature. And Marxism is often a common element between the two periods--not in its misappropriated association with Communist totalitarianism, but as an often insightful critical method.

DONALD LAZERE

Professor of English

Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo

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