The British Modernities Blog

New Virtual Home for the BMG

2010-07-19T08:40:00.001-07:00

The British Modernities Group homepage and blog will both be migrating over to one consolidated site on Wordpress.

The new BMG website is located at http://modernities.wordpress.com.

Please be sure to update your bookmarks, feeds, and subscriptions. Thanks!

Politics, Ethics, and the New Formalisms: Conference Schedule

2010-04-14T13:02:00.000-07:00

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

Roundtable with Laura Heffernan and Rachel Buurma (Mar 18)

2010-03-14T12:31:00.000-07:00

Our next meeting is this Thursday, March 18th, at 8 pm. The meeting will be in the form of a roundtable with Prof. Laura Heffernan of Tulane and Prof. Rachel Buurma of Swarthmore. Their presentation of a short paper, "The Rift in Reading and the Mid-Century Classroom: A Reparative Disciplinary History" will be followed by a response by Prof. Jim Hansen and a large group discussion. The essay can be found in the BMG folder in EB 211.

Discussion with Caroline Levine (Feb 18)

2010-02-11T12:23:00.000-08:00

Our first meeting of the semester is a special one: Prof. Caroline Levine of Wisconsin-Madison will be joining us and sharing some of her most recent work. The meeting will be held on Thursday, Feb. 18, starting at 8 pm. We will be discussing the following readings (available on e-reserves, attached to this email, or in the folder in EB 211).

Caroline Levine, work in progress, "Reassembling the Formal"
Levine, “Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies”

Recommended:

In addition to the readings, we will also be discussing our upcoming April grad conference.

CFP: Politics, Ethics, and the New Formalisms

2010-01-24T10:01:00.000-08:00

Call for Papers

Politics, Ethics, and the New Formalisms

April 23-24, 2010

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The British Modernities Group, in conjunction with 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, invites submissions from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and methodological orientations for our annual graduate student conference, this year themed “Politics, Ethics, and the New Formalisms.”

The conference will open with a keynote address by Marjorie Levinson, professor at University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, who specializes in the areas of critical theory, and in poetry and poetics. She not only theorizes the rise of the “New Formalist” movement, but enacts these tensions in her own scholarship, including a contribution to a collection of essays entitled Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History in 1989, and a recent publication in Studies in Romanticism entitled “A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza.”

New Formalism is a recent trend—a “movement,” according to Marjorie Levinson’s 2007 essay “What is New Formalism?” in the PMLA—in critical theory, cultural studies, and literary scholarship that challenges some of academia’s established methods and critical approaches.

The term “New Formalism” seemingly implies a “return” to formal qualities such as genre or aesthetics in approaching literary and cultural studies. New Formalism itself is hardly a unitary concept, hence the plural reference in our title to New Formalisms; the term itself is open to debate and definition. The graduate conference will engage this critical trend by exploring the ways in which New Formalism reflects attentiveness to political and ethical issues. What does a turn or ‘return’ to formalism in the first decade of the twenty-first century mean? How does New Formalism impact disciplinary, pedagogical, or theoretical positions or methodologies? How can form be political? How can form be ethical?

Possible topics for consideration include but are not limited to:

Genre, narrative, structure
Seriality
Poetics
Aesthetics and beauty
Cognition and embodiment
Affect and feeling
Ethics and justice
Politics of figurative and narrative form
Formalism after New Criticism and New Historicism

This plenary-style conference is designed to facilitate dialogue between panels, participants, and attendees. To that end, panelists are strongly encouraged to attend the full conference, scheduled late Friday and all day Saturday. Presenters will be expected to submit their papers to their panel’s faculty respondent by April 9.

Please send 300-word abstracts for individual 15-minute papers to modernities@gmail.com. The deadline for abstract submissions is March 10, 2010. Accepted applicants will be notified by March 17. In the body of the e-mail, please include the following information: name, university and departmental affiliation(s), level of graduate study, and title of paper.

What I've Been Reading: This Thursday (11/12)

2009-11-09T11:29:00.000-08:00

Our next meeting is this Thursday, November 12th, at 8:00 pm. We'll have a relaxed "What I've been reading" discussion.

Liz Hoeim will tell us about "The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property and the Law: Critiquing the Contract" by Nancy Johnson. Tania Lown-Hecht will discuss Galt-Harpham’s “Shadow of Ethics,” and Cecily Garber will talk about Scarry’s “On Beauty and Being Just.”

Select extracts from these works will be available in the BMG folder in room 211 and on e-reserves within the next few days.
If you're reading anything interesting, feel free to share or circulate books at the meeting.

Please email the organizers for directions.

pic by MorBCN

New Formalism: October Discussion

2009-10-06T08:40:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder that our next meeting will be this Thursday, October 8, at 8 PM. We will be discussing the following readings, available online, on e-reserves, and in our folder in room 211.

If you have not already received the location and directions by email, please contact us.

Also, please remember to send us any suggestions you may have for keynote speakers for the spring conference (thanks for those we've received); we'll discuss these at the meeting.

New Formalism: September Discussion

2009-09-09T11:55:00.000-07:00

Our next event will take place on Thursday, Sept. 17, at 8pm, location to follow by email.

We will discuss the following readings:

Marjorie Levinson's “What is New Formalism,” in PMLA 122.2 (2007). Levinson's original article with appendices remains available online.
Garrett Stewart's “The Foreign Offices of British Fiction,” in MLQ 61.1 (2000), an issue devoted to formalism.

Readings will be available on e-reserve soon and copies are in the BMG folder near the copier in room 211.

We hope to see you next week!

Brownbag Seminar with David Wayne Thomas

2009-08-27T06:26:00.000-07:00

Welcome back! The BMG kicks off the fall semester with a brown bag seminar with Prof. David Wayne Thomas on Wednesday, September 2, from 12 – 1:30 in the Senate room of the English Building.

Prof. Thomas is Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and the author of Cultivating Victorians. His current research is focused on themes of law, legal administration, and liberal reformism in imperial settings, especially in British India. For the brownbag we will read Prof. Thomas’s essay “Liberal Legitimation and Communicative Action in British India: Reading Flora Annie Steel's On the Face of the Waters.” In Prof. Thomas’s words, the essay engages a wide variety of critical touchstones in mainstream theory and Victorian studies and offers his reflection on how a Habermasian literary reading might operate.

Please let us know if you are interested in attending the brownbag, and we will send you a .pdf of the reading. A copy of the reading will also be in a folder near the copier in 211.

If you would like to receive our emails regularly, or if you have any questions, please email us or check out our website .

We hope to see you at the brownbag and at future BMG events.

photo by sir watkyn

2009-2010 Topic: "Politics, Ethics, and the New Formalisms"

2009-06-08T13:14:00.000-07:00

In spring of 2000, Modern Language Quarterly devoted its entire issue to the topic of New Formalism. New Formalism is a recent trend—a “movement,” according to Marjorie Levinson’s 2007 essay “What is New Formalism?”—in critical theory, cultural studies, and literary scholarship that challenges some of academia’s established methods and critical approaches. Although New Formalism first drew attention as a trend in contemporary American poetry, its genealogy can be traced back to the Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism of the early and mid- 20th century, or even earlier, to German philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Immanuel Kant. The New Critics argued that a work of art should be studied on the basis of its formal qualities alone, without resorting to contextual details of authorial biography or historical period. Likewise, the Russian Formalists argued that “literary language” was distinct from everyday language and produced a "scientific" system of analysis that they used to distinguish between the two. Central to this system of analysis was attention to form. For example, in one of his early works Victor Shklovsky compared “literary language” to dance. Just as the form of a dance makes one conscious of the way steps are put together, he claimed, so the form of poetic language makes one aware of the way that words are put together. The rise of New Historicism in the 1980s worked to reverse that methodology, arguing instead that the recognition of a work’s historical and cultural context is central to any act of interpretation. New Historicist scholarship criticized New Criticism for its tendency to disregard its own conservative or reactionary ideologies, for unreflexively privileging cultural elitism and intellectual isolationism, and for ignoring the dangers of universalizing or totalizing principles of form and aesthetics.

The term “New Formalism” seemingly implies a “return” to formal qualities such as genre or aesthetics in approaching literary studies, despite the entrenchment of New Historicism in many college literary departments. Yet one crucial question that our reading group hopes to study is the degree to which such a “return” to formalism implies a corresponding political and/or ethical judgment. As the title of our topic indicates, we wish to explore how New Formalism reflects an attentiveness to political and ethical issues that the New Criticism tended to neglect.

New Formalism itself is hardly a unitary concept, hence the plural reference in our title. According to Levinson, it can be divided into at least two different (but not mutually exclusive) strands: Scholars of the first strand, such as Elaine Scarry, George Levine, and Charles Altieri, call attention to the aestheticism of works of art, particularly as it pertains to the processes of cognition and embodiment as well as emotional and sensory experiences. On the other hand, scholars such as Richard Strier and Susan Wolfson investigate more closely the interrelatedness of formalism and New Historicism, seeking not only to re-discover the formalist elements of New Historicism (and vice versa) in the work of earlier theorists like Frederic Jameson, but also to ask, as Jim Hansen does in “Formalism and Its Malcontents,” why such a division was felt to be necessary. This latter strand also suggests that the increasing prominence of New Formalism forces scholars to re-think the relationship of deconstruction and postmodernism to both New Historicism and New Formalism.

“Politics, Ethics, and the New Formalisms,” our Reading Group for the 2009-2010 academic year, will allow scholars from diverse backgrounds to explore the consequences of this movement in a variety of contexts: political, ethical, disciplinary, and even pedagogical. The New Formalism movement crosses the boundaries of various disciplines, including English and Comparative Literature as well as historiography, political science, philosophy, and art history. In “New Formalisms,” the group will examine both primary and secondary readings in British Studies. We will begin with fundamental questions, such as defining “form” and “formalism,” and the different uses of those words across disciplinary boundaries. We will encounter the theories of writers such as Kant, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, who engage issues of form in their work. Likewise, we will look at how recent scholars have turned to new formalism as a means of intervening in British studies. Essays such as J. Paul Hunter’s “Formalism and History: Binarism and the Anglophone Couplet” (2000) and Robert Kaufman’s “Everybody Hates Kant: Blakean Formalism and the Symmetries of Laura Moriarty” (2000) imagine new ways of reading British authors in two different historical periods. One of the main goals of the reading group will also be to understand the differences and the commonalities between the various strands of New Formalism, and to consider the political implications of each. Finally, this movement also forces us to confront the pedagogy of literary studies, asking us to reflect on how—and why—we teach literature to beginning and advanced students.

pic by myxi

Religion, Secularism, and Nationhood (Conference)

2009-03-30T15:48:00.000-07:00

The Fourth Annual British Modernities Group Conference

Religion, Secularism, and Nationhood

April 3 - 4, 2009
IPRH Lecture Hall
805 West Pennsylvania Avenue
Urbana, Illinois

Friday, April 3 - IPRH Lecture Hall

7:30-9:00 pm: Plenary Panel, Catholic Studies:
J. Barton Scott (Duke), “Anticlerical Modernities in Dayanand Saraswati's Satyarth Prakash”
James Chappel (Columbia), “A Machine for Making Catholics: The Constitution of the ‘Catholic Intellectual’ in Edwardian Britain”
Ewa Krynski (Trent University-Peterborough, Ontario), “‘The Truth of the Matter’: Faith, Knowledge and Fiction in Muriel Spark’s The Comforters”
Eleanor Courtemanche (English), Respondent

Saturday, April 4 - IPRH Lecture Hall

9:00 am: Morning Reception / Welcome

9:15 am: National and Global Ethics:
Tony Russell (Purdue), “Idolatry and Infinity in Chris Cleave’s Incendiary”
Emily Madsen (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Cromwell is no Hero of Mine”: Unitarianism and the Industrial Movement in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South”
Olivia Bustion (University of Michigan), “The Theological Ethics of Democracy in W. H. Auden’s ‘New Year Letter’”
Bruce Rosenstock (Religious Studies), Respondent

11:00 am: Sin, Space, and Cities
Joseph Stubenrauch (Indiana), “Evangelicalism and Public Spaces: Crowds, Social Networks, and Anonymity in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain”
Barry Hudek (Eastern Illinois), “Tracing Virag: Jewish Migration and the Construction of James Joyce’s Ulysses”
Michael Verderame (UIUC), “‘Portentous, Unexampl’d, Unexplain’d’: Cowper’s The Task and the Summer Fog of 1783”
Kelly Innes (English), Respondent

12:30 pm: Lunch

1:45 pm: Keynote
Gauri Viswanathan (Columbia), “Crypto-Conversion and the Secret of History”

3:30 pm: National Bodies: Marriage, Martyrs, and Sexual Expression
Shannon Sears (Michigan State), “Corrupted British Bodies: The Catholic Threat to Eugenics in The Heavenly Twins”
Tania Lown-Hecht (UIUC), “The Martyr as a Figure of Sexual Liberation in the Fin de Siècle Novel”
Filiz Barin (Illinois State), “Caught Between Two Worlds: Receptiveness and Resistance to the Westernization of Turkey in Halide Edib Adivar’s The Clown and His Daughter”
Vicki Mahaffey (English), Respondent

This event is sponsored by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and the Department of Religious Studies.

The conference is free and open to the public.

Meeting: February 12

2009-02-08T09:36:00.000-08:00

On Thursday, February 12, at 8 PM, we'll meet to discuss the following readings. These selected chapters are available in hard copy in EB 211, in the folder "BMG" by the door, and in electronic format, under "IPRH 2008 - Elizabeth Hoiem" on e-reserve. For your convenience, here are the direct links:

Pecora, Vincent P.. "Ch. 4: Arnoldian Ethnology: nation between religion and race." Secularization and cultural criticism : religion, nation, & modernity. University of Chicago Press, 2006. 131-156.

Taylor, Charles. "Ch. 11: Nineteenth-century trajectories." Secular age. Harvard UP, 2007. 377-419,813-815.

Last fall's readings were background on our year's topic, "Religion, Secularization, and British Nationhood," while these two spring readings address literature more directly.

Directions to the meeting have been distributed by email. If you would like to join the BMG listserv, please contact our webmaster.

pic by true2source

CFP: Religion, Secularism and Nationhood

2009-01-31T09:44:00.000-08:00

Call for Papers

Religion, Secularism and Nationhood

April 3-4, 2009

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The British Modernities Group, in conjunction with the University of Illinois Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, invites submissions from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and methodological orientations for our annual graduate student conference, this year themed “Religion, Secularism and Nationhood.” The conference will open with a keynote address by Gauri Viswanathan of Columbia University.

In response to the changing articulations of religious subjectivity and religious communities in the so-called post-secular world, it is crucial to heed the double aspect of religion as a “scrupulous observance,” in Jean-Luc Nancy’s words, and as the means of social cohesion. As a wide range of scholars have suggested, this “religious turn” also calls for critical interventions in narratives of secularization and nationhood. Edward Said’s deployment of “secularism” as an epistemological category to critique nationalism and Benedict Anderson’s comparison of national ceremonies and religious rituals emphasize ties between religion, secularism and nationhood. This graduate conference will engage this critical trend by focusing on how religious controversies circumscribe national identity in "Greater Britain" (including transnational and international formations) in textual cultural production from the eighteenth century to the present moment. It will also investigate religion’s central role in colonial expansion and in establishing and questioning cultural difference.

Possible topics for consideration include but are not limited to:

secularization, progress and modernity
religion, nationalism and community
pluralism and tolerance
knowledge and faith
empire and the unassimilable “Other”
political theology and public religions
alternative religious histories
conversion, historicity and secrecy

Please send 300-word abstracts for individual 15-minute papers to modernities@gmail.com. The deadline for abstract submissions is February 15, 2009. Accepted applicants will be notified by February 20, 2009. In the body of the e-mail, please include the following information: name, university and departmental affiliation(s), level of graduate study, and title of paper.

pic by fabbio

Next Meeting Postponed to October 9

2008-09-30T10:26:00.000-07:00

Since the Vice-Presidential Debate will be broadcast this Thursday evening, we have decided to postpone the BMG meeting to next Thursday, October 9, 8-10pm.

October 2 Meeting

2008-09-25T06:06:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, October 2, at 8 PM, we'll meet to discuss the following texts. These articles are available in hard copy in EB 211, in the folder "BMG" by the door, and in electronic format, under "IPRH 2008 - Elizabeth Hoiem" on e-reserves. For your convenience, we enclose direct links below:

Viswanathan, Gauri. "Secularism in the framework of heterodoxy." PMLA 123.2 (Mar 2008): 466-476. (.pdf)

Kumar, Krishan. "Ch. 2: Nations and nationalism: civic, ethnic and imperial." The making of English national identity. Cambridge UP, 2008. 18-38,276-279. (.pdf)

A third, optional reading, offers a solid overview of this year's theme: Casanova, Jose. "Ch. 1: Secularization, enlightenment, and modern religion." Public Religions in the Modern World. University of Chicago Press, 1994. 11-39, 235-247. (.pdf)

Directions to the meeting will follow by email. If you would like to join the BMG listserv, please contact our webmaster.

cc photo by Dr John2005

2008 - 2009 Theme: Religion, Secularism, and British Nationhood

2008-08-12T12:54:00.000-07:00

The religious turn is not only one of the most recent theoretical trends in the humanities and social sciences, it also builds directly off contemporary material reality. The problem and discourse of religion has been a continuous thread in the fields of theology, political science, legal theory, philosophy, history, literature, anthropology and sociology from their inception in Antiquity to our present moment. Religion has been at the center of the latest work by such diverse thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, William Connolly, Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Charles Taylor, Ernesto Laclau, Claude Lefort, Peter van der Veer.

As an overarching conceptual cluster, religion encompasses issues that require interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and cooperation: knowledge and faith, the sacred and the profane, the absolute, infinity and totality, the unassimilable Other, political theology, the state of exception, event, the sublime, pluralism and tolerance, secularism and progress, and community. In response to the changing articulations of religious subjectivity and religious communities in the so-called post-secular world, it is emphatically important to heed the double aspect of religion, as a “scrupulous observance” in Jean-Luc Nancy’s words, or reading over again, and as “establishing a bond”, or the means of social cohesion. Our "Religion in British Studies" reading group should be of particular interest to English and Comparative Literature scholars, but we hope that it will also attract graduate students and faculty in history, anthropology, religious and gender studies.

Edward Said’s deployment of “secularism” as an epistemological category to critique nationalism, or Benedict Anderson’s connections between national ceremonies and religious practices are emblematic of a long-standing investigation of ties between religion and nationhood. England emerged out of the Early Modern period as a unified nation-state and in the course of the 18^th and the 19^th centuries continued to develop as a multi-ethnic and multi-racial empire. This transnational state used the various discourses of religion, ethnicity, race and culture in order to shape definitions of nationality and control citizenship rights. Great Britain, and then the United Kingdom, inherited a legacy of religious conflict, including the Reformation and the Civil War, anti-Catholic legislation and papacy terror, the expulsion and re-admission of the Jews, suppression of Protestant Dissenter groups, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, conversion missions in the colonies, and the current "war" on Islamic fundamentalism. This year, we'll investigate how religious controversies function to circumscribe British national identity through identification and resistance to key, nationally-coded texts, such as The Book of Common Prayer and the 39 articles to creeds and confessions. Religion was a crucial domain for debating the balance between liberalism and unified national identity, extending into political and cultural contests over “sacred” secular practices, from the development of the canon and a modern notion of culture to the most recent debate over requiring British school students to recite a “pledge of allegiance” to the Queen. We will also focus on religion’s key role in colonial expansion, in establishing and questioning cultural difference, which has attracted interdisciplinary work in history, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies.

--Liz Hoiem and Zia Gluhbegovic

Pic by gnasheruk

New BMG Website

2008-08-10T13:54:00.001-07:00

The British Modernities Group homepage has moved to a new web address. It's also been completely re-designed. Under "themes," you can find information on our past conferences. The "schedule" section features a calendar for upcoming events and announcements from this blog. Let Brandon (jernigan@illinois.edu) know if you have any problems or suggestions for the website. And don't forget to update your bookmarks.