Forum on the Humanities and the Public World

Stefan Collini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature, University of Cambridge
“Recognition and Persuasion: The Literary Critic as Cultural Critic”

Tuesday, October 16, 2007
5pm  |  Townsend Center, 220 Stephens Hall

How do cultural critics persuade their readers of the truth of their claims about contemporary society? In particular, what is involved in attempts by literary critics to bring their distinctive techniques of close verbal analysis to the discussion of larger social and cultural topics? This lecture explores the part played in this process by “the paradox of recognition” — the puzzling fact that we must already in some sense “know” or be able to recognise what is being brought to our attention. Drawing on both American and British examples, Professor Collini will highlight the ways in which this paradox has been used to underwrite claims about cultural and moral decline, and, through a close examination of Richard Hoggart’s classic work, The Uses of Literacy, he will both identify some of the conditions of the success of such criticism and point to some of its intellectual and political limitations.

Stefan Collini was educated at the universities of Cambridge and Yale, he has held visiting appointments in Canberra, Caracas, Paris, and Princeton, and he has taught at Sussex and Cambridge, where he is currently Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature in the Faculty of English. He has written widely on 19th- and 20th-century intellectual history and literature; his books include Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850-1930 (1991), Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait (1994), English Pasts: Essays on History and Culture (1999), and Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (2006).  He is also a frequent contributor to journals such as The Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books.  He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society.

Links

Oxford University Press book review.
Reviews in London Review of Books.
Guardian interview.
Book review.