V21 is delighted to announce our fourth (!) annual Summer Reading Group series. This year’s topics are Work, Blackness, and Sex. As is traditional for our summer syllabi, each cluster mixes primary Victorian, secondary critical, and theoretical/philosophical texts. The Chicago area group will meet June 21, July 20, and August 21, 3pm-5pm at the DePaul Library …read more
The V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Alex Bove, Racheal Fest and Nathan Hensley in conversation about Bruce Robbins’s most recent publication The Beneficiary (Duke, 2017). Robbins’s The Beneficiary offers a history of humanitarianism that encompasses a wide range of writers, artists and pundits from the nineteenth century forward, concluding that “whatever our political principles, we …read more
The American Society for 18th Century Studies annual meeting this week features a roundtable on ASECS and V21, concerning the special dix-huitièmiste relationship to historicism, presentism, formalism, theory, and manifestos, as well as infrastructures like Collations and Summer Reading Groups. V21 is grateful for these chances to reflect on long durée inquiry, comparativism, conceptually-driven scholarship, …read more
V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Daniel Kasper, Rithika Ramamurthy, and David Womble in conversation about Emily Steinlight’s splendid new book Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life (Cornell, 2018). Steinlight deftly surveys the literary forms wherein writers responded to exponential population growth by “radically rearticulat[ing] what it means to belong to …read more
How do we teach race in Victorian literature? Revisiting and last year’s pedagogical series, “Victorian Teaching Now,” the present collection (inspired by “The Charlottesville Syllabus” developed by the UVA Graduate Student Coalition) collects reflections, anecdotes, and proposals that describe how we connect the teaching of Victorian literature to modern crises of race, ethnic nationalism, and white supremacy. …read more
V21 welcomes Will Glovinksy (Columbia), Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb (Williams College), and Bruce Robbins (Columbia) in conversation about Nasser Mufti’s Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture (Northwestern, 2018). In exploring the modern understanding of “civil war,” Mufti’s boldly challenges dominant conceptions of civilization, civility, modernization, and nationalism. He offers a persuasive …read more
If anything is to survive the 21st century, collective agency will be paramount. Come practice togetherness at the 3rd annual V21 MLA happy hour! Thursday 4 January, 5pm-7pm, at Faces And Names, 159 W 54th St, just neighboring the Sheraton. We’ll be raising a special glass to Bruce Robbins, in celebration of his new book …read more
Collations: Book Forum welcomes Thomas Albrecht (Tulane), Daniel Pollack-Pelzner (Linfield College), and Katherine Voyles (U of Washington, Bothell) in discussing Jesse Rosenthal’s Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel. In his insightful new work, Rosenthal masterfully weaves together philosophy and fiction to contemplate the “moral conceptualizations of narrative form” (5) for Victorian writers …read more
The V21 Collective’s Collations: Book Forum welcomes Elisha Cohn (Cornell University), Kate Flint (University of Southern California) and Travis Lau (UPenn) in discussing Benjamin Morgan’s The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (Chicago, 2017). Morgan’s exciting, interdisciplinary new work explores Victorian aesthetic thought, situating it “at the intersection of multiple discourses and …read more
NOVEL THEORY –the biannual conference of The Society for Novel Studies— in conjunction with V21 Collective May 31-June 2, 2018 at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY What is the theory of the novel for the 21st century? How do novels theorize? CFP and details at http://blogs.cornell.edu/sns2018/ Deadline for paper and panel proposals: December 1 Keynote …read more