ABSTRACT
Russell Jacoby’s “Bohemian narrative” has been widely studied in the field of American cultural criticism. In Jacoby’s understanding, the Sixties’ trope of “Bohemia” can be creatively and variously employed as time trope, spatial trope, and political trope. These tropes are used to tell the story of postwar American intellectual life. Jacoby is an important trope-maker who inherits and enriches the American tradition of “Bohemian narrative.” His special type of post-Sixties narrative—From Bohemian to Academy—engenders a particular structure of feeling among the American intellectual community, especially the intellectual left. Through textual analysis of Jacoby’s book The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academy, the author points out that Jacoby’s post-Sixties narrative of “From Bohemia to Academia” is both a reflection on postwar American society and a warning about the quality of contemporary American intellectual life.
