For Monday, 9/24

One thing I noticed is that Marx, Gramsci, and Williams reading all deal with some sort of classification, whether it is of social class, intellectuals, or idealogy. For me, all of the readings were extremely difficult, since the readings were not, say, self-explanatory. I had to keep my dictionary close throughout the readings, and even with it I couldn't even quite come close to completely understanding the ideas. A good literature enriches readers' knowledge and experience. For this to be done, the communication between the author and the reader is critical. This communication can be facilitated greatly if the author uses the similar or same "language" as the readers. I believe the reason why the readings, expecially Marx, was so difficult for me (hopefully for all of us) was that it was a mere expression of Marx's ideas, with no help provided to help readers to understand his ideas and connect them with our everyday life problems (which makes it easier, by a lot). A good literature, then I presume, is one written in communicable language that enriches reader's knowledge and experience.
In Gramsci reading, there are two types of intellectuals: one with fancy resume and one without.
One without would be entrepreneurs, who become successful with their people skills and knowledge of their business field. One with would be professionals, the ones with desiriable professions, with disregard to their financial success. How these intellectuals are distinguished from the rest is the exclusiveness of their knowledge, as depicted in ecclesiastics example, or that they know better on the same subject. I also liked the argument that whether intellectuals are an independent class or whether they're present in every classes. I still don't completely understand what he meant by "All men are intellectuals, but not all function as such." The way I understand this was that only those who can put their intellect to work are intellectuals: one who knows a lot but does little can't be an intellectual.