The Program in Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas is pleased to announce a talk by Dr. Jonathan Williams entitled “Shibboleth Pedagogy: Keats’s Lamia.”
Date: Thursday, December 11th
Time: 12:30-13:20
Location: G-160
Abstract:
In the chaotic final pages of his 1820 poem Lamia, John Keats expounds a lengthy and explicitly philosophical variation on the shibboleth test. No longer simply linguistic (a test of whether one knows how to pronounce the word “shibboleth”), it is, in Keats’s hands, more overtly a test of perception. It unfolds as follows: a serpentine figure named Lamia assumes human form and seduces a philosophy student named Lycius; when Lycius fails to identify Lamia as a serpent, his teacher, Apollonius, steps in to call her what she (supposedly) is. Having failed the test, Lycius is killed. In Keats’s hands, a shibboleth pedagogy is the most insidious form of pedagogy imaginable, for it uses the rhetoric of intellectual rigor as license to kill. From here, it is not hard to see that Keats’s ultimate concern will have less to do with pedagogy alone than the ways in which the rhetoric of pedagogy can be so easily brought to bear on questions of social organization.
Bio:
Jonathan C. Williams is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Bilkent University and the author of Melancholic Life: Literary Expression and the Experience of History from Burton to Keats (Bloomsbury, 2025).