Please join us on Monday, March 4, 2013 at 12pm for our next Mellon workshop! We will be meeting at 12pm in the English department's Barker Room (70 Brown Street, Room 315). We are excited to host Professor Sean McCann, professor of English at Wesleyan University. He specializes
in post-Civil War American Literature, specifically in relation to
contemporaneous political developments and discourses. He is the author
of A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and
Presidential Government (Princeton UP, 2008) and Gumshoe
America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal
Liberalism (Duke UP, 2000), which received honorable
mention for the America Studies Association's John Hope Franklin Prize
for the best book in American Studies. His essays have appeared in
American Quarterly, The Common Review, ELH, Radical History Review,
Twentieth-Century Literature, Studies in American Fiction, the Yale
Journal of Criticism, as well as several edited volumes including Poetics/Politics: Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom (St. Martin's Press, 1999).
Professor McCann will be workshopping two pieces with the group, both of which are available on the google site, along with selections from his previous work (log-in required). Lunch will be provided. Please join us for our conversation!
On Friday, February 22, 2013, the Brown University Department of English will be sponsoring a symposium, "The Inevitability of Liberalism?" featuring Professors Amanda Anderson (Brown University), Catherine Gallagher (University of California Berkeley), Philip Gould (Brown University), and Deak Nabers (Brown University). The description and schedule is as follows.
The Department of English presents "The Inevitability of Liberalism?" Over the past half-century the fortunes of liberalism in critical thought have fluctuated wildly. As the central ideological element of philosophical modernity, liberalism is the basis of political and aesthetic judgment, of investment in technological and scientific progress, and of all politics driven by hope, equality and belief in community. This symposium will celebrate the recent arrival of Amanda Anderson on the Brown faculty by considering liberal thought as a darker concept, one alive to a negativity that runs through its brightest convictions. What have been the effects of the dominance of liberal thinking in British and American studies? How central to liberal thinking is the dialectic of hope and defeat? How do theories of narrative, or the history of the novel more broadly, expand or complicate liberalism as a political form? Is a non-complacent liberalism possible? And is there any future for critical thinking beyond liberalism?
Friday, February 22, 2013
2:00-5:00 pm
Alumnae Hall, Crystal Room (194 Meeting Street)
2:00 pm: Welcome and Opening Remarks - Philip Gould (Department of English, Brown University)
2:15 pm: "Cold War Aesthetics: The Case of Trilling and Adorno" - Amanda Anderson (Department of English, Brown University)
2:45 pm: "When 'Liberal Democracy' Was an Oxymoron" - Catherine Gallagher (Department of English, University of California Berkeley)
3:15 to 3:30 pm: Break
3:30 pm: Response - Philip Gould (Department of English, Brown University)
3:50 pm: Response - Deak Nabers (Department of English, Brown University)
4:10 pm: Audience Q & A
5:00 pm: Reception
This event is organized by Professors Timothy Bewes and Jacques Khalip and is made possible by the Department of English and the Wetmore Fund for Literature.
Our next meeting will be held on February 18, 2013 at 6pm (location forthcoming over email). Dinner will be provided from Kabob and Curry. Tim Syme will be workshopping two pieces, "Individuals, Social Justice and Political Action" and "How is X political?" Sara Pfaff will be workshopping a dissertation chapter entitled "'After the After': Timeless Bodies of Pluralism in John Henry Days and Aloft."
We will also, if time permits, look at several pieces on geography, public space, and democratic politics, including selections from Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and Edward Soja. All readings will be available on the google site (log-in required).
Please join us on Monday, March 4, 2013 at 12pm for our next Mellon workshop! We will be meeting at 12pm in the English department's Barker Room (70 Brown Street, Room 315). We are excited to host Professor Sean McCann, professor of English at Wesleyan University. He specializes
in post-Civil War American Literature, specifically in relation to
contemporaneous political developments and discourses. He is the author
of A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and
Presidential Government (Princeton UP, 2008) and Gumshoe
America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal
Liberalism (Duke UP, 2000), which received honorable
mention for the America Studies Association's John Hope Franklin Prize
for the best book in American Studies. His essays have appeared in
American Quarterly, The Common Review, ELH, Radical History Review,
Twentieth-Century Literature, Studies in American Fiction, the Yale
Journal of Criticism, as well as several edited volumes including Poetics/Politics: Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom (St. Martin's Press, 1999). 