In everyday usage in the languages and cultures with which I am familiar, a "writer" is a person who produces literature--that is, a novelist, poet, dramatist. I think it is generally true that in all cultures writers have a separate, perhaps even more honorific, place than do "intellectuals"; the aura of creativity and an almost sanctified capacity for originality (often vatic in scope and quality) accrues to writers as it doesn't at all to intellectuals, who with regard to literature belong to the slightly debased and parasitic class of "critics."
Yet at the dawn of the twenty-first century the writer has taken on more and more of the intellectual's adversarial attributes in such activities as speaking…
Topics:
Region: