Thinking Stupidity: Literature, Philosophy, and Critical Theory

This seminar explores the problem of stupidity, ignorance, and idiocy in literature, philosophy, and critical theory.

From Flaubert's bêtise, through Musil's account of the dangerous proximity of intelligence and stupidity, to Deleuze's attempt to make stupidity "the object of a properly transcendental question"—"How is stupidity possible?"—writers and philosophers have repeatedly suggested that stupidity is more than the simple absence of knowledge. Rather than treating stupidity, ignorance, idiocy, and non-knowledge chiefly as satirical targets or empirical deficiencies, this seminar approaches them as formal, ethical, political, and philosophical problems. These questions have resurfaced across several literary and philosophical traditions, from nineteenth-century realism and modernism to contemporary debates about coloniality, expertise, artificial intelligence, and the politics of knowledge.

What literary and philosophical possibilities emerge when stupidity, ignorance, and non-knowledge are understood not merely as deficiencies to be overcome but as conditions internal to thought, judgment, and representation? Can literature disclose forms of ignorance that philosophy, politics, or criticism tend to misrecognise? Conversely, how might philosophical accounts of non-knowledge reshape our understanding of literary form?

Possible topics include:

• stupidity, idiocy, folly, and ignorance in literature, film, or visual culture, including literary traditions of unreason and non-knowledge from Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Musil to Woolf, Beckett, Bataille, and Coetzee;
• bêtise, cliché, doxa, bourgeois opinion, and encyclopaedic knowledge;
• philosophical and theoretical accounts of stupidity, doxa, idiocy, and non-knowing in Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Bataille, Barthes, Deleuze, Badiou, Rancière, Cavell, Cora Diamond, Avital Ronell, and others;
• ignorance and the production of non-knowledge in the work of Robert N. Proctor, Nancy Tuana, Londa Schiebinger, Charles Mills, José Medina, Miranda Fricker, and others;
• stupidity and ignorance in relation to politics, bureaucracy, expertise, pedagogy, artificial intelligence, anti-intellectualism, and public reason;
• race, gender, disability, empire, and colonial epistemologies;
• comedy, animality, ethical attention, and the limits of critique.

We welcome papers on any period, language, region, or literary tradition, and particularly encourage comparative, interdisciplinary, and theoretically ambitious work.

ACLA 2027 Seminar

This is a proposed seminar for the 2027 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), to be held in person at the University of Houston, 20–23 May 2027. ACLA seminars are designed as sustained discussions across multiple sessions rather than conventional panels, with relatively short papers allowing substantial time for collective discussion.

Proposal deadline: 22 September 2026.

Paper proposals should be submitted through the ACLA online portal. The full seminar description and submission page can be found here:

https://www.acla.org/seminar/f2cd113d-e51d-4096-8d82-481e69706ef4

Seminar organizers: John Bolin (University of Exeter) and Patrick Hayes (St John's College, Oxford).