Exploring theory of the novel in comparative frames is a central vector for V21. Join us in Pittsburgh at the Society for Novel Studies, 13-14 May. We welcome all conference-goers and area friends and foes to help us kick things off with drinks Thursday evening, 12 May, 8pm-10pm at Fuel & Fuddle (basement room reserved). …read more
V21’s commitment to more comparative work leads us regularly to the American Comparative Literature Association. We welcome all conference-goers and Boston-area friends and foes to join us for our second annual ACLA Happy Hour, Saturday 19 March, 5pm-7pm, Alden & Harlow bar, 40 Brattle St. Seminars include: Marxism and Formalism Today Anthropocene Reading Hard Metaphors …read more
V21 is delighted to announce its plenary session at the upcoming Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies conference on Natural and Unnatural Histories, “Towards a Strategic Presentism”, 11:00am Friday 11 March. Friends, fans, and foes are invited to join affiliates for drinks at the V21 Moonlight Hour, Renaissance Hotel bar, 9:30pm Friday. “Towards a Strategic Presentism” Although …read more
The Collective cordially invites you to a V21 @ MLA Happy Hour, Thursday 7 January, 5pm-7pm, at Clive Bar. Below is a roster of MLA 2016 Sessions featuring the work of V21 Affiliates. Ink them on your dance card. 63. Lukács’s Theory of the Novel at One Hundred: Historicism, Realism, Critique Thursday, 7 January, 1:45–3:00 …read more
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