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Anatomy of a Cliché
- Journal of the History of Ideas
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Volume 68, Number 3, July 2007
- pp. 389-393
- 10.1353/jhi.2007.0026
- Article
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Stefan Collini's Absent Minds is a rich, critical history of a cliché: that English culture is peculiarly hostile to intellectuals. Despite striking differences in the organization of intellectual life in the U.S. and Britain, precisely the same cliché pervades American writing. The explanation may lie less in structure than in the transnational mobility of the language of the intellectual.