Feb 5
William Warner, "The American Narrative"
Wed, February 5, 2020
• 5:00pm
- 6:00pm (1h) • Gould Library Athenaeum
Join the English department in welcoming William B. Warner, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, UC-Santa Barbara, for the winter 2020 Schuster Lecture
'The American Narrative: Nation, Politics, and the Freedom of Speech'
In an epoch when American political communication seems diseased and freedom of speech has fallen into ill repute, it is the appropriate time to remember how earlier generations of American conceived, developed and repeatedly revised the American narrative. This lecture will focus upon two generative episodes of that narrative. How did the founding generation use a general human rights claim to “liberty” and “equality” to make revolution against Britain and then to translate those cardinal values into the Constitution of a new federal republic? How, 60 years later, did Black Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass “call out” Americans who accepted the institution of chattel slavery as legal, not by rejecting the founder’s claims to “liberty” and “equality,” but by radicalizing them?
Event Contact: mclapp