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This talk is an attempt to clarify a longstanding controversy in the history of humanities scholarship in the university, namely its relation to political activism, and to the political in general. Guillory’s hypothesis is that the appropriate frame for understanding this relation is the autonomy of social spheres, as expressed in the historical tendency of different spheres to become depoliticized over time. The paradigm case for this tendency is the depoliticization of the religious sphere with the end of the wars of religion at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He argues that depoliticization enabled the development of autonomous social spheres, resulting in many social benefits, beginning with the condition of peace following the wars of religion. At the same time, autonomous social spheres are periodically subject to re-politicization for various reasons, a tendency manifest in university scholarship at the present moment. Guillory examines several recent arguments defending the identity of scholarship with political activism, attempting to grasp thereby the forces impelling politicization and depoliticization.John Guillory is an US-American scholar and literary critic best known for his books Cultural Capital (1993) and Professing Criticism. Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022). He is the Julius Silver Professor of English Emeritus at New York University. His research focuses on rhetoric, the sociology of criticism, the history of the humanities, and early media studies.
The lecture is part of the ZfL Annual Conference on ‘Activism and Academia‘.
An event of the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) in cooperation with the Dahlem Humanities Center (DHC) and the ICI Berlin
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Christinenstrasse 18-19, Haus 8, 10119 Berlin, Germany, Christinenstraße 18, 10119 Berlin, Deutschland,Berlin, Germany
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