Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. The two-week OxTalks freeze period starts on Monday 2nd March. During this time, there will be no facility to publish or edit events. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period. Once Oxford Events launches, you will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
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.
