ANTI-ELITIST CHALLENGES
ANTI-ELITIST CHALLENGES

Summary/Abstract: The present study takes into consideration issues raised by the elaboration of possible answers (both universal and local) to a series of questions such as: “What does elite still mean nowadays?”, “Is literary canon an expression of the elite or elitism?”, “How can anti-elitism and elitism be reconciled within the academic space?”, etc. A special case is that of the Romanian prestige groups that are seen as networks of values and social relations that provide identity as “intellectual class” influencing the whole society (Max Weber, Politik als Beruf). But, primarily, the masses access the intellectual debates indirectly, via the educational system, where we find a mixture of high culture and pop culture. Therefore, the high culture partisans must adjust to a referential system equivalent to “the civilisation of the image” (strongly based on mass-media and Internet). Today, it is possible to have a negotiation between high culture and popular culture.

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