There was a moment in the 1970s when academics, with the best of intentions, made the humanities, and particularly the literature department, a ground for advancing political agendas. As “theory” achieved remarkable success within academia, it had the inevitable consequence of pushing the work of art further and further into the shadows, leaving the last fin de siècle with, a far cry from l’art pour l’art, theory for theory’s sake. While these modes of criticism had an untrammelled reign for more than two decades, serious schisms began to form within the humanities in the late 1990s as critics on all ends of the political spectrum began to resist. Legates of Adorno argued that historical and sociological analyses of art should only stand alongside, and perhaps even spring from, the work itself. The aesthetes that remained in the humanities lamented the replacement of aesthetic criteria with political ones, and the subsequent free fall in the social and intellectual standards of taste. Harold Bloom famously, and much to their chagrin, grouped all the “Theorists” with a capital ‘T’ into what he called the “School of Resentment,” asking them for a departmental divorce. As time passed and critique and theory have slowly lost their dominance, a strong successor is yet to be found, and they have only left, after a loud scream, an anarchic din. This conference will explore what lies ahead, and whether the work of art can gain once more the pre-eminence it once had, as the humanities try to find their voice.
Derek Attridge
is the author or editor of twenty-five books on poetic form, literary theory, South African literature, and the writing of James Joyce. Among his recent books are The Work of Literature (Oxford, 2015), The Craft of Poetry: Dialogues on Minimal Interpretation (with Henry Staten; Routledge, 2015), and Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (Oxford, 2013). His current work in progress is Poetry in Performance: Homer to Shakespeare. He is Emeritus Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature and a Fellow of the British Academy.
Benjamin Kohlmann
is assistant professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg. He has held fellowships and visiting positions at Columbia University, at the University of Cambridge, and at the University of East Anglia. His first monograph Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature was published by Oxford UP in 2014. His recent articles have been published in PMLA, Novel, and Textual Practice. He is currently co-editing A History of 1930s British Literature for Cambridge UP.
William Rasch
is Professor of German Studies and Director of the Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities at the Indiana University. He is the author of Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2000) and Sovereignty and Its Discontents (Birkbeck Law Press, 2004), editor of a collection of essays by Luhmann called Theories of Distinction (Stanford University Press, 2002) as well as editor or co-editor of numerous volumes and special issues on Luhmann, Carl Schmitt, German film and the bombing war during the Second World War. His current research centres on political and legal theory.
English Department
University of Freiburg
2017
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