The Lionel Trilling Seminar: Amanda Anderson

October 20, 2022 Lionel Trilling (1905-75), one of Columbia’s most celebrated faculty members, was among the great humanist scholars and public intellectuals of the 20th century. In his memory, The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities sponsors a series of intellectual conversations known as the Lionel Trilling Seminars. This fall, esteemed literary scholar and theorist Amanda Anderson will deliver a lecture entitled “Political Psychology, Literary Studies, and the Question of Method.“ Despite extensive interest over the past few decades in the question of method, the literary field’s informing psychological frameworks are often not subject to much scrutiny, particularly its tendency to privilege psychoanalytic categories drawn from the tradition of Freud, Klein, and Lacan. Taking John Guillory’s Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation as a case in point, she will explore the ways in which the encounter with the psychological unconscious o