OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
This talk tries to get around our understandable cynicism about the permanent crisis of the humanities by arguing that this is a good time to revive the disciplines with a systemic, collaborative focus on literary knowledge. After limiting myself to one rude comment about the critical debates of the 2010s, and to one (or two) slides about the humanities’ political economy, I will argue that we masters of nuance and ambiguity will have a much healthier discipline if some of us shift to explicit articulations of the full range of the impacts of literary study—personal, affective, cognitive, discursive, cultural, and social, with a special emphasis on non-pecuniary effects. I will try to model sustainable abductive speech acts that aren’t speculative propaganda but interdisciplinary syntheses of existing research findings about the outcomes of literary reading. I will also suggest some possibilities for further scholarship.
