Reading After Trump: Conversations in Literature and Politics

Michael Benveniste explains how the experience of teaching Colson Whitehead's 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, after the election of Donald Trump, helped him appreciate its idiosyncratic formal engagement with America's legacies of slavery and white supremacy. Read more about this episode at http://web.stanford.edu/dept/english/cgi-bin/readingaftertrump.

Abigail, Juan, and Justin recount how the 2016 election spurred them to bridge the divide that often separates the academy from the communities which surround and support it—which they attempted in 2017, by hosting an interactive reading and discussion of George Orwell's 1984 with a local high school class, their parents, and Orwell scholar Alex Woloch. Read more about this episode at http://web.stanford.edu/dept/english/cgi-bin/readingaftertrump.

Paula Moya draws on Octavia Butler's 1993 science fiction novel The Parable of the Sower to articulate how literature allows us to examine the schemas through which we navigate society, and how this process can produce uncanny effects as it anticipates and interacts with its historical context. Read more about this episode at http://web.stanford.edu/dept/english/cgi-bin/readingaftertrump.

Photo credit: Julio Thompson.

Medievalist Elaine Treharne demonstrates how taking a deep view of literary history can clarify the ways in which language registers what changes and what doesn't about the human experience of political conflict. Read more about this episode at http://web.stanford.edu/dept/english/cgi-bin/readingaftertrump.

Solmaz Sharif illustrates how looking to James Baldwin's writings can deepen and complicate our relationship to America's history and to the narratives of that history which it maintains. Read more about this episode at http://web.stanford.edu/dept/english/cgi-bin/readingaftertrump.

Blakey Vermeule draws our attention to the double-edged effects, at once enchanting and bitterly satirical, on display in Jonathan Swift's 1726 fantasy Gulliver's Travels, and probes the ambivalent relation to politics these effects imply. Read more about this episode at http://web.stanford.edu/dept/english/cgi-bin/readingaftertrump.

Morgan Frank introduces us to to Nathanael West's 1934 novel A Cool Million, and argues that its cynically hapless tragicomedy resonates with the mood of our own moment's national self-image. Read more about this episode at http://web.stanford.edu/dept/english/cgi-bin/readingaftertrump.