Stealing Fire: Teaching Romantic Print Culture as Public Humanities

This essay takes its cue from Judith Butler’s question about “what forms of education are necessary for democracy to work” in the face of the “double bind” created when “the neoliberal matrix of valuation combines with the anti-intellectual conservatism” of our day, especially in the context of the more extreme threat to democracy epitomized by the 6 January insurrection. It focuses, in particular, on the ways that a seminar on Romantic print culture that I have taught in slightly different ways for the past several years is animated by these issues and has provided an important historical context for working through questions about the ways that the humanities can contribute to the project of renewing a broader commitment both to critical thinking, which reasserts the authority of rational argument based on evidence, scientific or otherwise, and to the power of the imagination, which can envision the kinds of community that may be our best defence against this all-on assault on democracy.