In the early 1950s, Lionel Trilling claimed that in the United States, "liberalism is not only the dominant, but even the sole intellectual tradition." He implied that there is a close connection between cultivating a pluralistic "liberal imagination" through the teaching of the humanities and the goal of maintaining a politically mature democratic citizenry. More recently, however, this vision of liberal culture has been challenged by conservatives, who see culture as a heritage of stable values, and by advocates of cultural studies, who believe liberal culture represses minority cultures and their legitimate demands for recognition.
The degree to which these different positions offer irreconcilable visions of culture and the humanities will be explored in a conference titled "The Broken Middle: Cultural Studies and the Liberal Imagination," which will be hosted by the Whitney Humanities Center on Friday and Saturday, Sept. 25 and 26.
Participants include Yale faculty members Jean-Christophe Agnew, David Apter, David Bromwich, Robert W. Gordon, Annabel Patterson, Alan Trachtenberg and Ruth Yeazell. Other participants will include Nancy Armstrong of Brown University, Michael Awkward of the University of Pennsylvania, Seyla Benhabib of Harvard University, Patrick Brantlinger of Indiana University, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese of Emory University, John Frow of the University of Queensland, T. Jackson Lears of Rutgers University and Marjorie Perloff of Stanford University.
All conference activities will take place in the auditorium of the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St. For more information, contact Tyrus Miller, assistant professor of comparative literature and English, via email at tyrus.miller@yale.edu.