ABSTRACT
My interest in this chapter is the public sphere, the polity. I am concerned to trace the decline of the public sphere to certain structural and cultural elements of literary political economy in late capitalismthe institutional ways in which writing and reading are organized. My argument is that writers no longer write sharp, imaginative, accessible prose for general readers because they are compelled by the profit and discipline requirements of mass culture and academia, respectively, to narrow their focus and domesticate their arguments. In this sense, I analyze the decline of discourse both in terms of economic and ideological factors, in this continuing the long tradition of western Marxism (e.g., Agger, 1979) that refuses to seperate these two dimensions of social reality (Horkheimer, 1972).
