Literary Studies and Liberalism with Amanda Anderson

Across Amanda Anderson’s scholarship, she notes a mutually beneficial and complex relationship between the aesthetic and the political. There’s a “political potency” to art that arises, one might guess, from the fact that “the humanities use the aesthetic to express political commitment, rather than to run from it.” Far from weakening our understanding of the political, an aesthetic engagement can be an "intensification" of political insight. Nevertheless, not every aesthetic project must be political or vice versa. Not every political insight would benefit from aesthetic engagement. The relationship between the aesthetic and the political needn’t be a co-constitutive one, but rather a mutually beneficial bond. That is, we can leverage our aesthetic engagement with the political to more precisely illuminate the relationship between the systemic and the lived, between the collective and the individual, between how power is felt and how it’s institutionalized. This episode will move through several of Amanda’s scholarly projects—Humanities Theory, Bleak Liberalism, and debates over the importance of an education in literary studies. What should we teach in English classrooms and why? Are humanities classrooms bastions of pluralism and liberal ideals—or do they merely purport to value ideological heterogeneity? Must we commit (and why) to liberalism rather than progressivism or neoliberalism? Amanda addresses these questions and more with striking precision and a plethora of sources. Amanda Anderson is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University. From 2015 - 2026 she is the Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.⁠Amanda Anderson research profile ⁠⁠Meeting Street ⁠⁠Humanities Theory ⁠Cruel Optimism Slow Violence Saidiya Hartman (critical fabulation) Bleak LiberalismPsyche and Ethos ⁠Music by Blue Dot Sessions ⁠(https://www.sessions.blue/)