Author Meets Critics: On Nolan Bennett’s “The Claims of Experience”

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This “author-meets-critics” panel brings together a group of scholars to discuss Nolan Bennett’s “The Claims of Experience: Autobiography and American Democracy” (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Bennett’s book studies how five American thinkers—Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Henry Adams, Emma Goldman, and Whittaker Chambers—made what Bennett calls a “claim of experience.” By proclaiming their life stories, these authors took back authority over their experiences from prevailing political powers, and called to new community among their audiences. Their claims, he argues, sought to restore to readers the power to remake and make meaning of their own lives.

Discussing the book are literary scholars, historians of political thought, and specialists of American thought and history. Together, they can debate the book’s ramifications for discussions in democratic theory, politics and literature, and American studies.

Sub Unit

• Division 56: American Political Thought

Chair

• Kevin Duong University of Virginia

Presenters

• Laura Grattan Wellesley College

• Nicholas R. Buccola Linfield College

• Nick Bromell University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Lisa Gilson Bates College

• Nolan Bennett University of Wisconsin - Green Bay