Stefan Collini has written widely on 19th- and 20th-century intellectual history and literature; his books include Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850-1930; Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait; and Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Collini is also a frequent contributor to journals such as The Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society.

About the Lecture: How do cultural critics persuade their readers of the truth of their claims about contemporary society? In particular, what is involved in attempts by literary critics to bring their distinctive techniques of close verbal analysis to the discussion of larger social and cultural topics? Collini’s lecture explores the part played in this process by “the paradox of recognition” — the puzzling fact that we must already in some sense “know” or be able to recognize what is being brought to our attention. Drawing on both American and British examples, Professor Collini highlightes the ways in which this paradox has been used to underwrite claims about cultural and moral decline, and, through a close examination of Richard Hoggart’s classic work, The Uses of Literacy, he identifies some of the conditions of the success of such criticism and points to some of its intellectual and political limitations.