Ben Mangrum
I'm an Associate Professor in the literature section at MIT. I previously taught at Davidson College, the University of Michigan, and the University of the South. My second book, "The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence," is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. My first book, "Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism," was published by Oxford University Press in 2019.
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To account for these changes in American liberal sentiment, Benjamin Mangrum looks to some of the most influential writers, critics, and intellectuals of the postwar decades--including Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt, Flannery O'Connor, and Saul Bellow, as well as the American reception of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, and many other European thinkers. By revising established accounts of this body of cultural work, Mangrum charts the legitimization of new political sensibilities within the nation's intellectual life. These sensibilities opposed a social democratic order and unleashed a new kind of liberalism, one which centered on ideas about authenticity, alienation, self-management, psychological templates for societal problems, and private judgments of value. This confluence of literary, intellectual, and political history gives us a window onto the basic assumptions and key conceptual terrain of liberal thought after 1945. Land of Tomorrow thus offers a provocative cultural prehistory of political thinking's forms that remain with us today.
The article may be accessed at http://muse.jhu.edu/article/707579.
To account for these changes in American liberal sentiment, Benjamin Mangrum looks to some of the most influential writers, critics, and intellectuals of the postwar decades--including Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt, Flannery O'Connor, and Saul Bellow, as well as the American reception of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, and many other European thinkers. By revising established accounts of this body of cultural work, Mangrum charts the legitimization of new political sensibilities within the nation's intellectual life. These sensibilities opposed a social democratic order and unleashed a new kind of liberalism, one which centered on ideas about authenticity, alienation, self-management, psychological templates for societal problems, and private judgments of value. This confluence of literary, intellectual, and political history gives us a window onto the basic assumptions and key conceptual terrain of liberal thought after 1945. Land of Tomorrow thus offers a provocative cultural prehistory of political thinking's forms that remain with us today.
The article may be accessed at http://muse.jhu.edu/article/707579.
One of the primary goals of the course is for students to master the use of scholarly ideas and terminology as techniques for becoming better readers. Some attention will be paid to how the so-called canon of modern American fiction has been constructed by reference to ideas of race and place. Students will also learn key terms for the study of twentieth-century American fiction, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies.
Yet we’ll discover in this course that the “world” is not a self-evident or uncomplicated concept. In fact, this course will interrogate notions of a single “world” or “world literature.” Literary techniques of depicting the “world as mystery” often ask readers to imagine networks of global or international connection that make “the world” an intelligible idea. But what does it mean to stitch the world together through narratives of intrigue and crime? How could the truth be discovered when narrative worlds are shrouded in mystery? And how can we determine that what we know is the truth?
By pursuing these questions about contemporary literary writing, students will examine the paradox of a “world literature” that depicts its constitutive term as a fundamental mystery. We will consider the literary form and philosophy of this paradox, alongside “systems theory” and other scholarly attempts to categorize contemporary world literature.
Attempts to answer these questions will come from Frantz Fanon, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, J. M. Coetzee, and many other thinkers from the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Assignments will include two exams, one paper, and a group video essay to be published to YouTube.
This diagnosis of anxiety, malaise, loneliness, and crisis was in sharp contrast with the political rhetoric of the mid-century decades. For example, the publicist Henry Luce called for the United States to exert its economic and political strength globally, thus inaugurating what he termed the “American Century.” President Harry Truman would similarly characterize the U.S. as “the most powerful nation, perhaps, in all history.” Middle-class white America enjoyed unprecedented rates of high wages, home ownership, and for the first time had access to amenities like television sets and affordable sedans. So why was there so much anxiety? What assumptions were implicit in the diagnostic term “malaise”? What was occluded or overlooked in this diagnosis? And how might the postwar decades help us better understand the intellectual vocabulary and political culture of our present moment?
This course approaches these questions in American cultural history by looking to novels by Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Gwendolyn Brooks, Shirley Jackson, John Okada, and Patricia Highsmith, among others. The course lectures will also discuss thinkers who were influential in the postwar period, including Freud, Sartre, King, and Hannah Arendt.