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