In recent years, literary scholars, political theorists, and cultural critics have all devoted growing attention to liberalism and its contested legacies. Although it was long conventional to treat liberalism merely as a foil for recovering political positions imagined to be more radical or dynamic, recent scholarship has begun to unpack the complexities of the liberal tradition as it emerged and developed in the Anglophone world. This work reaches across continents and centuries, linking Victorianist scholars like Amanda Anderson and Elaine Hadley to Americanists like Ross Posnock and John McGowan. Their efforts, furthered by many others, have helped call attention to a far richer interplay between liberal culture and literary history than previously imagined. This panel's three papers have all been chosen for the way they reflect this turn towards a new "liberal studies," which treats the intersection of "Literature and Liberalism" as a overlay demanding an interdisciplinary methodology, requiring us to read at once as literary historians and as critical theorists, interested in the politics of aesthetics and the rhetorical structure of political life. Neither simply condemning nor championing liberal politics, each paper grapples with the way that literary history has been shaped by the contradictions of liberal thought, and how liberal thought has in turn been driven forward through history by the creativity and antagonism of literary culture.

Benjamin Mangrum's paper, "I Am Not Your Public: James Baldwin, Little Rock, and the Liberal Imagination," begins our panel by exploring Baldwin's response to Little Rock and desegregation. Showing how claims upon the “public” and public sphere had substantial contemporary currency in work by Hannah Arendt, Lionel Trilling, and C. Wright Mills, Mangrum contrasts these with Baldwin's emphasis upon more local scales of collectivity (e.g., villages, countercultural associations), which link him during this period with a longer tradition of civic republicanism. Building upon prior scholarship on Baldwin, Magrum argues that his essays represent a richly dialectical engagement with liberal political thought, working at once within and without its conceptual boundaries. This notion of a productive antagonism provides a point of departure for our next paper, co-presented by David Rosen and Aaron Santesso. In "Liberalism and the Anti-Liberal Canon," Rosen and Santesso upon their work in The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood. They examine how liberal ideals of toleration, compromise, and especially the contractual promise have structured literary-critical practice since the rise of the New Critics. Stepping beyond shopworn debates about the canon (rooted in the identity and values of authors) Rosen and Santesso argue that a liberal ethics at work in literary historical scholarship has produced an "anti-canon" that liberal criticism must nonetheless try to interpret through its liberal ideals. Ian Afflerbach's paper then completes our panel by taking two opposed readings of John Keats as a basis for disambiguating liberalism from neoliberalism. Juxtaposing John Dewey's claims about Keats and modern art against Milton Friedman's invocation of the poet and his famous final lines on a "Grecian Urn," Afflerbach argues that their readings evince competing aesthetic theories which, despite teleological claims about neoliberalism's rise from modern liberal thought, illustrate the profoundly divergent values between these two traditions.

This panel requires an audio-visual setup, including a projector, but no other special requirements. Our three papers will be limited to the standard 15-20 minute range, allowing for 15-25 minutes of discussion afterwards.