Words and Other Demons | A Talk by Len Gutkin

In this talk, Len Gutkin will suggest that the flip side of “cultural secularization”—the weakening of the magical or religious power of art and literature—has been a complementary re-enchantment of language in the political realm, a phenomenon most vividly captured by the widespread sense that certain kinds of offensive language has an almost magical power to demean. This sense has had a significant impact on classroom teaching in fields like literature. Meanwhile, it has inspired both passionate denunciations and defenses of pedagogical tools like “trigger warnings" and efforts at canonical revision. Arguments about such topics frequently turn on culture-warrish mainstays about student sensitivities and political correctness. While important to understanding this phenomenon, such disputes tend to obscure a deeper change in how the ritual powers of language are distributed and perceived. Gutkin's talk will elaborate some of the contours of this transformation.

Len Gutkin is a senior editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education. He received his BA from Bard in 2007 and his PhD from Yale in 2014, after which he was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. He is the author of Dandyism: Forming Fiction From Modernism to the Present, as well as essays in Liberties, The Point, the Yale Review, and many other venues.