Co-Editors: Dan Bivona, Arizona State University, and Helena Gurfinkel, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
500-word abstracts and 1-paragraph bios to dbivona@asu.edu and hgurfin@siue.edu by August 1st, 2012.
This collection explores a possible relationship between the fin in the fin de siècle (the turn of the nineteenth century) and pedagogy. We welcome essays about fin de siècleliterature and culture that theorize
*teaching the end/decline, or teaching at the end
*the pedagogical/didactic, implications of catastrophic thinking
*teaching as inaugurating, offering (or not) a new beginning after the end.
Geographically and theoretically, this volume it is not limited to Britain, the US, and Continental Europe. We encourage submissions that leave the precincts of the “West.”
We invite contributions focusing on
- the reinventions of Foucault’s systems of power and knowledge as pedagogical strategies
- fin-de-siècle anxieties surrounding physical, moral, and intellectual decline
- didactic representations of a pending catastrophe and attempts to teach how to avoid it.
Examples include but are not limited to
- Max Nordau’s Degeneration
- Thomas Hardy, the Education Reform Act of 1870, and the dangers of literacy
- George Gissing and concerns about declining literary standards
- The didactics of social Darwinism
- Scientia sexualisas a teaching/didactic tool against perversion and degeneration Eugenics, colonialist education, and protecting the “healthy” national/racial body from decline
- The end of traditional womanhood and the fear of the New Woman.
- Fin-de-siècleapproaches to paideia
- Religion, pedagogy, and eschatology at the fin-de-siècle.