Hollywood Intellect

The death of the 'public intellectual' has been announced more often than the death of the novel a 2006 article in <I>New York</I> magazine claimed. <I>Hollywood Intellect</I> argues that the assumptions on which such laments rest result from misleading inattention to the intellectual work that mass culture performs. From D.W. Griffith's <I>Intolerance</I> to <I>The Simpson's Movie</I> much of America's influential intellectual work has come out of Hollywood which has long shaped America's intellectual agenda.