Professor John Marx at the Russell House

Come to Professor John Marx‘s lecture “World Literature After Liberalism” at Russell House this afternoon!

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Edward Said argues, fiction takes an administrative turn as writers substitute “art and its creations for the once-possible synthesis of the world empires.” That novels offer pointed critiques of various governments for failing to live up to their own ideals is well established. That novels also formulate new strategies and tactics for governing is less well documented. Over the course of the twentieth century, John Marx argues, literature contributed to debate about how societies should run even as it lost interest in the self-governing citizens who figured so prominently in older genres from Bildungsroman to domestic romance. In asking what literature contributes to discussions of governance, Professor Marx’s project belongs to the growing body of scholarship that explores how professional oversight subordinated the ideal of an autonomous individual citizen as put forward by liberal political economists from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill.

Date: Oct. 4
Time: 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Place: Russell House
Cost: free!