Injury, Dignity, and the Literature of Rumination

About the event

Some of the most influential frameworks for understanding human thought—in psychology, in moral and political philosophy, and in cognitive science—have failed to recognize the quality, form, and significance of slow, persistent ruminative processes oriented toward experiences of moral shock or disturbance. Such experiences include but are not limited to profound loss, grief, regret, or injury, including those fundamental assaults on dignity we might designate as status-injury. Drawing on examples from the literary tradition and suggestive philosophical texts, I demonstrate that rumination is a productive moral process and not merely a psychological symptom of oversensitivity or trauma endured.

This public lecture is co-hosted by the UNSW Literary Provocations Hub and the Novel Network, University of Sydney.

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.