Street Smarts and Critical Theory: Listening to the Vernacular (Wisconsin Project on American Writers)

Rating:
Summary: Vernacular Intellectuals
Review: This is an under-recognized classic in the field of popular culture studies, one of the few outside of folklore studies that takes non-academically-trained intellectuals seriously : the "common" human as thinker. Accessible to a general audience and useful for the advanced researcher, McLaughlin builds on and updates Gramsci's "organic intellectual." His examples are interesting and entertaining: zines, evangelical xians, new agers, advertisers, school teachers. This is by no means a perfect study, but it is an innovative beginning for considering the intellectual lives and labors of those who are usually ignored within intellectual history. Worth the price just for the project that is laid out in the introduction, I teach this book as often as I can.