Please join us for a public lecture by Lloyd Pratt (Oxford)

Abstract: Emerson’s writing has been divided, remixed, and reimagined in a variety of contexts. Through the story of one early twentieth-century woman reader, this talk takes up the question of how these reformulations of Emerson emerged, as well as how they found themselves subject to new forms of reading. Those new forms of reading developed out of the progressive school reform movements of the first half of the twentieth century, which had roots in the radical educational theories of nineteenth-century New England and Romantic-era Europe. Located at the level of primary and secondary education in the United States, both then and now, these new forms of reading, including free reading, came to establish the conditions of possibility for the forms of reading—critical, close, surface, etc. —that now dominate the humanities in the twentieth-century US research university.

Lloyd Pratt is Drue Heinz Professor of American Literature at the University of Oxford. He is the author of The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Literature (2015) and Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (2010).