Event: "The Inevitability of Liberalism?"

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.