Mixing autobiography and academic discourse was regarded as aesthetically limiting by modernist critics

Evidence

Moreover, Boynton strongly implied that the stature of the new public intellectuals shrinks considerably seen next to the likes of Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin and those who hung around the Partisan Review and the New York City bohemia after the World War. For instance, Boynton’s highbrow modernism caused him some discomfort when he addressed the writing styles of the new black intellectuals. The admixture of autobiography with social criticism, along with the amalgamation of black speech, history, and experience with academic discourse found in the work (for example) of Derrick Bell and Patricia Williams signaled for Boynton the centrality of racial identity in the work of such writers, a feature that Boynton concluded “would have made the young Jewish New Yorkers squirm” (1995a:70). Such writing represents, for Boynton, an aesthetic limited by a fixation on racial identities and experiences and is “more admirable in a belleslettrist than in a wideranging public intellectual” (p. 70). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2647

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes contemporary debates about personal voice in scholarship and the ‘anecdotal’ versus ‘rigorous’ divide — connects to work on standpoint theory and epistemic authority.