The Politics of Form: 2011 Graduate Student Conference
Columbia University Nineteenth-Century Colloquium
Friday, April 22th, 2011, 9:00 am – 6:45 pm
Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room
Keynote Speaker: Caroline Levine, “Politics as Form,” 5:15 pm
In recent years, Victorian studies have seen a resurgence of interest in literary form and formalist criticism. However, these renewed formal interests do not represent a simple swing of the critical pendulum. Rather than retreating from historicism, current critical models seek to amend and complicate New Historicist practices by combining them with examinations of genre, aesthetics, and other formal concerns. Recent work along these lines has been characterized by an attentiveness to form in the service of historically specific claims and an interest in the historical specificity of nineteenth-century literary forms and their cultural meaning. Correspondingly, the conscious significance of literary form and genre to the Victorians themselves is a topic ripe for further examination. This conference seeks to explore what is particularly at stake for Victorian literary studies in this turn towards form, and to consider the future of aesthetic and political intersections in our critical practice.
This event is free and open to the public.