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The Future of Literary Knowledge in the Authoritarian West
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.
Date:
8 May 2025, 16:45
Venue:
Rothermere American Institute, 1A South Parks Road OX1 3UB
Venue Details:
Downstairs Seminar Room
Speaker:
Christopher Newfield (Independent Social Research Foundation)
Organising department:
Faculty of English Language and Literature
Organisers:
Professor Nicholas Gaskill (University of Oxford),
Professor Nicole King (University of Oxford)
Part of:
American Literature Research Seminar
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editors:
Katy Terry,
Hope Lukonyomoi-Otunnu
