PRESENTISM, FORM, AND THE FUTURE OF HISTORY a series of collaborative, experimental roundtables featuring affiliates of the V21 collective October 9th and 10th, 2015 University of Chicago | Saieh Hall 021 (5757 S University Ave) Friday, October 9 9:00am: Opening Remarks: Benjamin Morgan 9:15-11am: Bleak House Today On how the form of Dickens’s novel resonates …read more
A dreaded sunny day, so let’s go where we’re wanted, and I meet you at Piazza San Marco, by the vaporetto stop. You teach me the word “Risorgimento.” I smile, which changed my whole look from the severe and resolved expression of a man ready to do and dare everything, to the keen honest …read more
The V21 manifesto charges Victorian Studies with having fallen prey to positivist historicism, a critical malady whose primary symptom is the aim to exhaustively describe the past.[i] On my own reading, positivist historicism is what remains after New Historicism runs out of steam. The New Historicism electrified criticism with the touch of the real by …read more
V21 is very pleased to announce its inaugural symposium, “Presentism, Form, and the Future of History,” at the University of Chicago, October 9-10, 2015. Designed as a series of roundtables, the symposium is free and welcomes public participation. Chicago-region participants are invited to a pre-symposium reading group this summer and fall. Friday, October 9 9:00am: …read more
Bodies would seem to be the most temporally bounded of objects. They have a clear beginning and end, moved on by a relentless teleological thrust that, at the end, cycles back on itself: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The movement of one’s body must be, we think, “inescapably narrative,” using Eve Sedgwick’s terms. Though …read more
The first thesis of the V21 Collective’s manifesto identifies a positivist historicism in Victorian studies, pointing out that its “primary affective mode is the amused chuckle.” Whatever else we may think of the claim for a predominant historicism within nineteenth-century literary study, what interests me is the claim for a representative affect, that a scholarly …read more
While Benjamin Noy’s evocative “Fog, Mud, and Dust” examined how we are still Victorian, I’d like to think about how the Victorians were the future. Much of the discussion in the wake of the V21 manifesto has taken place within the confines of a too-familiar argument of history vs. theory, without taking up the manifesto’s …read more
Despite the robust and productive debates taking place in our field about the length, breadth, and depth of the Victorian period, when it comes to the ways that we frame the era for our teaching—and our undergraduate teaching, most especially—the boundaries are often much more fixed and limited. Even though we teach across a wide …read more
Like others in the V21 Collective, I was drawn to the group by a sense that Victorian studies could use a boost of conceptual energy at the moment. Yet I hesitate to claim that our problem is an over-reliance upon historicism. Instead, I tend to agree with David Kurnick (in his response to the …read more
Fog, Mud, and Dust[1] The V21 Manifesto, which characterizes the mode of Victorian studies as ‘positivist historicism’ (thesis 1), also suggests ‘we are Victorian’ (thesis 8).[2] I want to add a speculative and polemical suggestion that ‘we are Victorian’ because this ‘positivist historicism’ is a signature sign of Victorian thought (a certain dominant form of …read more