Thinking about potential changes in next year’s syllabi. Skimming some options. Then remembering Bruce Robbins in this piece on critical correctedness:
The sudden pervasiveness of this depoliticizing impulse came to me while teaching a graduate seminar last term on intellectuals. Two of the books I asked the students to buy, without having first done more than skim them myself (I know, I know), were David Scott’s Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity (Duke University Press) and Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (University of Chicago Press), both from 2017. Both enacted some version of “the new modesty.” And both, it turned out, depoliticized intellectuals whom I considered political heroes.