Bad Art (vol.2) SAMLA 96 - Jacksonville
After the encouraging success of last year’s panel, we want to continue our discussion on “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 often, and importantly, still being read and revered outside the academy).