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GORNICK

                                                      July 24, 2014

                                             "What are Intellectuals
                                              Good For", p.217, trade

                                                   SCIALABBA
  Scialabba on Vivian Gornick:

  "Vivian Gornick's three slender essay collections
  and short, lambent memoir _Fierce Attachments_
  (1987) contain some of the best feminist writing                  NEW_LOVE
  in recent decades.  ...  she has returned,
  passionately, relentlessly, to a single cluster
  of insights: Romantic Love can be-- as often as
  not has been-- a salvation myth."


  "... power over one's own life comes
  not from complementary union, from
  two-in-oneness, but from --

       " 'the steady command of one's own thought'     As should be clear at
                                                       this point, one thing
       "  'only one's own working mind marks the       intellectuals are good
          solitude of the self'                        at is elevating
                                                       intellectual activity
       " 'to live consciously is the real              to a central position.
          business of our lives' ... "


                                      Aren't there similar
                                      problems with the romantic
                                      appeal of trying to be a
                                      lone individual genius?

                                      HEROIC_ART

   Scialabba comments:

   "'To live consciously is the
   real business of our lives,'
   Gornick writes, out of a
   feminist, rationalist tradition"
                                             That tradition was actually
                                             one of my grudges against
                                             70s-style feminism.  Preaching
                                             "consciousness raising" to
                                             already self-conscious teens
                                             seems like a cruel trick.

                                                      FLIRT



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