"Since Sartre’s essay ‘What is Literature’ there has been less theoretical debate about committed and autonomous literature. Nevertheless, the controversy over commitment remains urgent, so far as anything that merely concerns the life of the mind can be today, as opposed to sheer human survival. Sartre was moved to issue his manifesto because he saw - and he was certainly not the first to do so - works of art displayed side by side in a pantheon of optical edification , decaying into cultural commodities. In such coexistence, they desecrate each other. If a work, without it’s author necessarily handling it, aims at supreme effect, it cannot really tolerate a neighbor beside it. This salutary intolerance holds not only for individual works but also for aesthetic genres or attitudes such as those once symbolized in the now half-forgotten controversy over commitment."