Politics, Ethics, and the New Formalisms: Conference Schedule

Politics, Ethics, and the New Formalisms

April 23-24, 2010

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

IPRH building, 805 W. Pennsylvania, Urbana, IL

Co-sponsored by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the departments of English, Philosophy, and Art History, and with support from the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.

Friday, April 23

6 pm. The Body and Brutality

Ben Bascom, UIUC, “Killing a Lobster/Killing a Man: Animality, Absurdity, and the Ethics of Form”
Paul Hartley, UIUC, “How the Discourse Over Death Metal Aesthetics Reveals a Link Between Consumption, the Development of Genres, and the Definition of Musical Affect”
Elaine Wood, UIUC, “Beckett’s Play of Adulterous Forms: ‘To what will love not stoop!’”
Joseph Valente, UIUC, Respondent

8 pm. Featured speaker

Marilyn Reizbaum, Bowdoin College, "Muriel Spark's Ridiculous Style"
Introduction: Joseph Valente, UIUC

Saturday, April 24

9:15 am. Coffee reception and introductions

9:30 am. Ethics and Didactic Form

Elizabeth Hoiem , UIUC, “ ‘Morals and Mechanics are here analogous’: Exemplarity in the Necessitarian Novels of Mary Hays and William Godwin”
Bryan Mangano, University of Iowa, “Epistolary Friendship and the Ethics of Form in Richardson's Clarissa"
Annie Murphy, Georgetown University, “Participation and Performativity: The Ethics of Form in Toni Morrison’s Fiction”
Ted Underwood, UIUC, Respondent

11:00 am. Coffee break

11:15 am Paranoid Politics

Carrie Dickison, UIUC, “‘A Domestic Drama’: The Greenwich Bombing and Conrad's Secret Agent”
Victor Lenthe, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Paranoid Politics and Narrative Form: The Case of Jack London”
James Liner, University of Florida, “The Multitude and the Politics of Form: Political Interpretation and the Dialectic of Form and Content”
Robert Dale Parker, UIUC, Respondent

12:45 pm. Lunch

2 pm. Keynote Address

Marjorie Levinson, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, "Of Being Numerous"
Introduction: Vicki Mahaffey, UIUC

3:30 pm. Coffee break

3:45 pm. Playing with Aesthetics

Patrick Fessenbecker, Johns Hopkins University, “Meta-Ethics and Meta-Aesthetics”
John Lee Moore, UIUC, “Restraining Form(s) / Ambivalent Judgment: Playing Chess with a Madman in Samuel Beckett's Murphy”
Seth Reno, Ohio State University, “New Formalisms, the Frankfurt School, and Percy Shelley”
Jim Hansen, UIUC, Respondent