SAMLA 2023: Bad Art
Scholarship on the politics of literature has, in recent decades, increasingly come to focus on
whether texts from the past conform to the values of the present. Some texts are praised for
modeling, even anticipating, our own progressive values, while others are subject to critique for
the way they ignore, license, or justify forms of inequity, injustice, and subordination. This
disciplinary impulse has come to seem not only justified, but natural. Yet it has also resulted in a
growing corpus of books being dismissed or maligned within the academy, books that are
crucially still being read and revered outside the academy. We call this “bad art” because we