Department of English

• Tuesday, October 21, 2025 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm

Fisher-Bennett Hall room 401

The Future of Literary knowledge as a University Institution  

Institutionalist accounts of literary criticism have tended to neglect the social demands placed on universities that are also demands for knowledge placed on literary criticism. In this talk I pay special attention to these social demands, arguing that the future of literary criticism will be much better if the discipline can achieve three things: (1) integrated narratives about the knowledge it has successfully produced; (2) sustained confrontation with its own resource poverty; (3) answers to public questions that literary criticism can indeed supply. I’ll argue that criticism is a missing link between professional expertise and everyday thinking, and needs to be central to cultures to come.