Literary Studies and Liberalism with Amanda Anderson

About this episode

Amanda Anderson discusses the complex relationship between aesthetics and politics in literary studies and education.

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…

People in this episode

Host: Talia Sherman

Guest: Amanda Anderson

Topics covered

• aesthetic and political relationship
• literary studies education
• humanities and liberalism
• pluralism in education
• political engagement through art

Keywords

• aesthetic engagement
• political insight
• humanities education
• liberalism
• pluralism
• literary studies

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Humanities Theory, Bleak Liberalism

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