Only a Voice
Essays
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Essays on politics, power, and culture from one of America’s most eminent critics
In Only a Voice, George Scialabba examines the chasm between modernity's promise of progress and the sobering reality of our present day through studies of the most influential public intellectuals of our time.
In Scialabba's hands, literary criticism becomes a powerful tool for expressing political passion and demonstrating the generative power of argument and an inquisitive mind. Drawing together a diverse group of thinkers, artists, activists, and philosophers-including Edward Said, D. H. Lawrence, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ellen Willis, and Noam Chomsky-Scialabba tours western intellectual history to find that no matter the stakes, critical thought remains a necessary precondition for politics.
Every writer, Scialabba writes, faces the choice of whether "to tilt at the state and capital or ignore them" – and the world now is too dire not to choose the former.
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This bracing compendium by essayist Scialabba (How to Be Depressed) brings together meditations on novelist Wendell Berry, Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich, Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, and other major figures of the "antimodernist left," an intellectual tradition the author suggests is defined by a skepticism of the ability of "science and progress" to bring about a "humane, democratic" society. In "A Whole World of Heroes," Scialabba argues that historian Christopher Lasch viewed modernity as the commodification and bureaucratization of "activities once left to individuals and their families," the solution for which was to be found in localizing power and decentralizing "control in workplaces, communities, and families." Meanwhile, literary critic Lionel Trilling insisted on pointing out what he saw as unavoidable trade-offs in progressive policy, believing that the egalitarianism of "radical democracy" stymies "the superbness and arbitrariness which often mark great spirits." Other essays consider how T.S. Eliot's poetry contains the "revolutionary as well as the conservative," Isaiah Berlin's focus on "the blindness of enlightenment and the cruelties of emancipation," and Ellen Willis's support for building a society in which individuals can pursue their own development unfettered by material deprivation. The erudite sketches of iconoclastic thinkers highlight the heterogeneity of leftist thought, and Scialabba has a knack for teasing out the provocative implications of his subjects' ideas. This stimulates.
