Cultural Histories of the Intellectual: From Patriarchal Myth to Feminist Mythopoeia

Bibby, Leanne

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7_1

Leanne Bibby⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing ((PSCWW))

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Abstract

This chapter situates this book in its historical and cultural context and introduces some key ideas from theory, firstly by considering the myth of the public intellectual as it is constructed within selected theories of the intellectual, dating from the nineteenth century to recent years. I examine the severe gender-blindness of most examples of such theories, and the unwillingness of those that do mention intellectual women to treat them as anything other than anomalous, separate and inferior examples to their male peers. The rest of the chapter then reads a selection of the feminist rejoinders to these theories as efforts to modify them that often do not entirely succeed because they do not address the precise tropes and discourses underpinning patriarchal ideas. Women intellectuals certainly are intellectuals, especially where they advance feminist politics in an exercise of what Edward W. Said called the ‘critical sense’ (1994) fundamental to intellectuals, but still women, unjustly, do not achieve full cultural legitimacy alongside men. Therefore, I contend with the fact that many women intellectuals are also women authors as an indicator of fiction’s place in the re-imagining of cultural histories that recount a single and narrow story, indeed a myth, that has ceased to be useful.

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Notes

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The term ‘post-truth’ is most often used to describe political climates in which there is widespread suspicion of intellectuals and intellectualism as disloyal to a country and government, and a converse sympathy for palatable half-truths and untruths about authorities and institutions. Notoriously in 2017, Kellyanne Conway, an advisor to President Donald Trump, spoke of inaccurate figures of attendees at his inauguration as ‘alternative facts’ (Blake 2017). Michael A. Peters contextualises contemporary ‘post-truth’ attitudes using late twentieth-century political crises and movements in the United States: ‘Anti-intellectual fundamentalism held hands with McCathyism to pare back the forces of progressivism in American politics’, in response to which Gramscian ‘organic intellectuals’ worked within progressive social and political movements (2018, 1).
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School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Law, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK
Leanne Bibby

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Bibby, L. (2022). Cultural Histories of the Intellectual: From Patriarchal Myth to Feminist Mythopoeia. In: A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women. Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7_1

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7_1
Published: 31 August 2022
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-08670-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-08671-7
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