Matthew Anderson delivers invited talk at Vanderbilt University
Matthew Anderson, Ph.D., professor in the Department of English, recently gave an invited talk at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.
The talk, titled "Law & Literature: Past, Presents & Futures," offered a report on the state of the field of law and literature and, more broadly, on emerging directions in humanistic approaches to law.
Anderson proposed that one of the more promising avenues of current research situates an understanding of law against the backdrop of the emergence of secularity: What happens to the relationship between law and literature in a secular age? What can we learn from forms of literature about structures of feeling and their resonances in legal consciousness鈥攆or example, about what it means, and feels like, to be free or, more commonly, to be caged, trapped or confined? How can this help us better understand the world around us and the roles we might play in it, particularly with respect to questions of inequality and punishment? In the U.S. context, how does a sense of the sacred, the divine, or the transcendent figure in the way we imagine ourselves as legal subjects, that is, as people who live under the rule of law?
Anderson suggested that the latest "crisis" with respect to defining the values鈥攁nd value鈥攐f liberal learning presents an opportunity for teachers who feel a vocational commitment to the traditions of the humanities to foreground, through their course offerings, some of the core values and enduring themes of liberal education: freedom, justice and the common good.