After the encouraging success of last year’s panel, we want to continue our discussion on “bad art.”  We are not interested in "bad" as a judgment of quality or technique, but rather "bad" as a judgment of ethics or politics.

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). We call this “bad art” because we recognize it to be, among other things, extremist, prejudiced, ignorant, monstrous, distasteful, or uncomfortable. It is an archive that stretches from Ayn Rand’s best-selling and self-serious libertarian epics to H.P. Lovecraft’s hysterically xenophobic weird fiction, to the once-canonical and now-controversial work of figures like Joseph Conrad.

With this panel, we to return to such “bad art,” not to chastise these books for failing to meet our own standards, and certainly not to praise them, but rather to understand them, to unpack their rhetorical appeal and historical significance, and to think about their potential utility for the present. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said explained “that Heart of Darkness works so effectively because its politics and aesthetics are, so to speak, imperialist”—that it captures the horrors of colonialism from the inside. We take this notion—a politics of literature that seeks not to praise or condemn, but to understand bad art and its bad politics—as our guiding principle.

 To this end, we encourage submissions that explore 1) the sociological or historical import of “bad” texts (i.e. Rand’s lasting role on “libertarian” thinking) 2) whatever else might emerge from the study of “bad” texts (i.e. what Lovecraft might reveal about fragile white masculinity). Please send an abstract (200-400 words) and a cv to ian.afflerbach@ung.edu by July 31st, 2024.