PCA/ACA

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 04:59:04 GMT

Hey,

I mentioned this conference tonight, and as per Bert's desperate need for us to use this site, decided to post it here as well. It's the 2008 Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association conference, March 19-22, 2008 in San Francisco. The proposal deadline has been extended to Nov. 30, so you can still send in proposals and present. I am definitely going, and it was a lot of fun last year and the year before so I hope I see at least some of you there!

Website: http://www.pcaaca.org/conference/national.php

American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions - Huntington Library - 25-26 October 2007

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 17:06:02 GMT

For anyone interested in the conversation regarding a return to formalism, check out this (free for graduate students if you register via email) conference at the Huntington Library this Friday and Saturday. The first conference in this series, held last May, was very impressive, and this lineup (copied below) promises more of the same. Hope people can attend. Use this forum to arrange carpooling as well.

Link to (limited) conference website:

http://www.huntington.org/ResearchDiv/EventsCal.html

AMERICAN LITERATURE’S AESTHETIC DIMENSIONS

Friday, October 26, 2007

8:30 - Registration & Coffee

9:30 - Welcome - Robert C. Ritchie (The Huntington)

Remarks - Christopher Looby (University of California, Los Angeles) and Cindy Weinstein (California Institute of Technology)

Session 1 - Aesthetic Objects/Political Subjects

Moderator: Samuel Otter (University of California, Berkeley)

Edward Cahill (Fordham University) - “Early National Aesthetic Theory and the Dialectic of Liberty”

Ivy Wilson (University of Notre Dame) - “The Writing’s on the Wall: Revolutionary Iconography and Interior Spaces”

12:00 - Lunch

1:00 - Session 2 - Aesthetics of Temporality

Moderator: Maria Karafilis (California State University, Los Angeles)

Cindy Weinstein - “Poe’s Pym, or Telling Time without a Chronometer”

Patricia Loughran (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) - “Reading in the Present Tense: The Time of Reading in the Age of Mass Production”

Session 3 - Expressing Freedom, Reimagining Form

Moderator: Catherine Jurca (California Institute of Technology)

Max Cavitch (University of Pennsylvania) - “Stephen Crane’s Refrain”

Julie Ellison (University of Michigan) - “Eloquence and Engagement After 9/11: The Making of Sekou Sundiata’s 51st (dream) state”

Saturday, October 27, 2007

9:00 - Registration & Coffee

9:30 - Session 4 - Aesthetic Returns and Social Forms

Moderator: Lisa Hills (University of California, Los Angeles)

Wendy Steiner (University of Pennsylvania) - “From ‘The Birthmark’ to Hairspray: American Anxieties about Beauty”

Christopher Castiglia (Penn State University) - “Romantic Aesthetics as Social Theory, or, Hawthorne Gone Wilde”

12:00 - Lunch

1:00 - Session 5 - James, Games, and Ethical Claims

Moderator: Elisa Tamarkin (University of California, Irvine)

Jonathan Freedman (University of Michigan) - “What Maggie Knew: Game Theory, The Golden Bowl, and the Possibilities of Aesthetic Knowledge”

Dorothy Hale (University of California, Berkeley) - “‘For Life, as it Were’: Henry James, New Ethical Theory, and the Conditionals of Literary Art”

Session 6 - Aesthetic Experience and Critical Judgment

Moderator: Nancy Ruttenburg (New York University)

Eric Lott (University of Virginia) - “Perfect is Dead: Theodor Adorno, Karen Carpenter, and the Radio”

Sianne Ngai (University of California, Los Angeles) - “Merely Interesting"

English Department : Activity

PCA/ACA

American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions - Huntington Library - 25-26 October 2007