Amanda S. Anderson Masterclass

About the event

In clinical psychological literature and therapeutic contexts, rumination is typically pathologised and regarded as something that should be minimised, stopped, or medicated. Amanda S. Anderson  argues for a more complex and positive understanding of this habit of thought, which has been captured with notable force and variation throughout the history of the novel. This masterclass will approach the theme of rumination through an interpretive analysis of Anna Burns’s 2018 novel Milkman, which concerns the era of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Milkman addresses a range of psychological, moral, and political questions in a distinctively ruminative style, richly layered through the use of retrospective narration. This retrospective dimension illuminates the distance between, on the one hand, the unsettling and unnameable experiences undergone by the narrator and, on the other, the psychological and political categories available at the time of writing but not yet known, or not yet in wide cultural circulation, at the time of the events being narrated.

The inchoate forms of trauma and the moral reactions they prompt within the narrated story world, together with the retrospective awareness informed by psychological analysis and political critique, propel an ongoing, dual-focused rumination throughout the narrative.

Readings

• Milkman, Anna Burns
• Anderson, “Stuck Inside ,” The Berlin Journal
• Anderson, “Thinking with Character,” in Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi, Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 127–70.

Bio

Amanda S. Anderson is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University. Her research focuses on broad questions of intellectual history, disciplinary formation, and the relations among literature, moral life, and politics. She served as host of the podcast Meeting Street from 2020-2023. Her books include Humanities Theory (with Simon During, Oxford, 2025), Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Study (with Rita Felski and Toril Moi, Chicago, 2019), Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life After Psychology (Clarendon Lectures in English Literature) (Oxford, 2018), Bleak Liberalism (Chicago, 2016), The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, 2006), The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, 2001), and Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Cornell, 1993).  She is co-editor of George Eliot: A Companion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (Princeton, 2002). From 2008-2014, she served as the director of the School of Criticism and Theory, an interdisciplinary summer institute hosted by Cornell University. She serves on the boards of the School of Criticism and Theory (as a Honorary Senior Fellow) and the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes.