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"