Amanda Anderson, a new professor of English, will be speaking at the TEDxBrown event this October on the value of a liberal arts education. Anderson, a literary scholar who received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on research into liberal philosophy in America, served as the chair of the English department at John Hopkins University before coming to Brown. As part of a new series highlighting faculty members at the University, The Herald sat down with Anderson to discuss her plans to speak at TEDx, her transition to Brown and her area of research.
The Herald: You are set to speak at TEDxBrown this October. What do you plan to discuss at the talk?
Anderson: In process. No previews. I will say that I will address the topic of the conference, which is to talk about the value of a liberal arts education, and I will address it from the perspective of a humanities professor.
What drew you to Brown?
I would say the dynamism of the institution, the commitment and energy of the undergraduates and the dedication and quality of the faculty.
What are you looking forward to most at Brown?
I'm most looking forward to teaching such a famously committed group of undergraduates and to the intellectual culture, more generally. I think Brown has managed to combine research and teaching, graduate and undergraduate, in a really unusually balanced and energized way. And also the restaurants in Providence. That's a big draw.
How would you explain your research to those who aren't literary scholars?
The kind of literature I work on tends to be a pretty ambitious reflection on society, and it often aims to give as complete a portrayal as it can of society in its full complexity while at the same time trying to render vivid different kinds of individual characters. So in the period I work on, which is largely 19th century - also some 20th century - many novelists were, in very interesting ways, trying to combine different perspectives - sociological, moral, psychological, historical ... this was also the era when a number of social science disciplines were developing, so the novel is sort of borrowing from some of those ways of looking at the world and also competing with them - saying, "You know what, I can do this and I can one-up you, and show you the inside of peoples minds in this complex world."
For what work did you receive your Guggenheim Fellowship?
The Guggenheim Fellowship, which I held in 2009-2010, was for a project on the history of liberalism as a political philosophy and also as a body of ideas that various literary writers were engaging in interesting ways. The project works between political philosophy and literature. One of its main arguments is that liberals, and liberalism in general, are not as optimistic as it is taken to be. Many liberals were - frankly, they were very aspirational, they had ideals they wanted to enact, but they were also often clear-eyed and sober about all of the difficulties and challenges there would be trying to realize their ideals.
As a literary scholar and theorist who has written on 19th-century literature and culture, how do you explain the intersection of literature and politics? How is that relationship played out?
One of the things I'm most interested in exploring is the plurality of ways that writers engage the question of politics. ... Some writers are interested, very broadly, in power dynamics and how power inheres in every social interaction, and they're good at diagnosing that. One author who's really good at that is Charlotte Bronte - she's a very modern thinker when it comes to the ubiquity of power in interpersonal dynamics. Other authors are interested in political argument or debate or how ideas get worked through and fleshed out. Other authors are interested in politics as an institution. Someone like Anthony Trollope is interested in how people behave in parliament. So the key thing is to take a look at different writers and see 'now what do they think political life is?' First of all, if they have a conception of politics, what is it? What kinds of practices are they focusing on and then what are they saying about them? I think one of the more limiting ways of thinking about writers is to leap to conclusions about whether they're conservative or liberal or radical - to label them too quickly or see them as simply adhering to an ideology. Much more interesting is to think about how they think about political life.
In 2006, you published a book called "The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory." How would you say we argue now, and how has that changed over time?
That title, as you may know, is a play on an Anthony Trollope novel titled, "The Way We Live Now." So this is one of those instances where you elect to use a title that alludes to another title, and then you realize later that you're always going to be asked why you titled it that way.
It's coming back to haunt you now.
I will say this - one of the things that that book is trying to do is analyze the way arguments get played out in particularly academic culture ... One of the main reasons I chose that title is because you have the word "live" kind of hovering behind it, and "argue" is replacing that, and I'm very interested in that book and in general in all of my work in trying to analyze the ways in which different arguments or theories or philosophies express a way of life and are also projecting a style of being - even a kind of personality, character. That's something I'm very interested in exploring when I analyze arguments. It's not just, "What's the formal logic at play here?" - but what kind of stance toward life, way of being, style of enactment is being played out in this argument?
So it's almost like the argument gets a character of its own.
Exactly. And that's one of my primary areas of interest. So my work in the 19th century - particularly my second book called "Power of Distance" is about how important the value of character was for the Victorians in an era where traditional value systems, particularly religion, were losing their sway. One site that became highly invested was character. Character became a way of expressing value and grounding value. So I've been fascinated by character in all of my work. So I ended up in my argument book trying to think about the character of argument.
Are you writing a book right now?
The liberalism book. And just so you know the tentative title for that is "Bleak Liberalism."
What is the best book you've ever read?
Oh, that's easy. "Middlemarch," by George Eliot. George Eliot is possibly the smartest person in the whole world. She combines extraordinary linguistic fluency with psychological insight and a moral project that is at once aspirational but again, as I was describing liberalism, acutely aware of all of t
he impediments to actually living the moral life. Great story, great story.
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