Saturday 4 February 2017

Prelude - David Bromwich on Trump's First Two Weeks

Only lately have I become aware of the work of David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English at Yale.  But he's a veteran scholar of Romanticism, with a very fine intellectual biography of Edmund Burke in progress (first volume of two published in 2015, second on the way), a critique of teaching and theory in the university, and a collection of political essays now due out in paper, Moral Imagination.  That  title, derived from Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, should make it clear that Bromwich is not remotely in hock to the poststructuralist or more broadly 'theoretical' wave of the last four decades in the Anglophone academy.   But this has not made him any less formidable a critic; rather the contrary, as he has turned himself into a blisteringly powerful opponent of the Obama Administration - chiefly in the pages of the London Review of Books - and is now entering the lists to face the Trump Administration.  The term 'moral imagination' seems in just two words to sum up a great deal of what was lacking in Trump personally hitherto, and is now absent from his government.   Here is Bromwich's opening salvo, from the current LRB:

Act One, Scene One



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