The 2002 meeting of the English Institute will explore new work under four headings, continuing our format (topic, genre, author, text) but with a few twists to allow for more resonance between the four panels. It has been our recent practice to have a panel on an individual author, selecting the individual on the basis of wide significance, influence, and popularity. This year, instead of choosing an individual author, we are devoting a panel to the topic of Author-Love, allowing a more general theoretical consideration of the sort of interest behind such choices of a particular author. The phenomenon of Author-Love could in fact be an example of the broad set of practices to be explored in the panel on Uncritical Reading. While our most basic disciplinary formation might be our belief in “Critical Reading,” this panel will question the limitations of that view by considering the value of other reading practices, in other contexts, for other aims. Continuing with our interest in the varieties of passionate response, we have chosen for our genre panel to look at Polemic. Considering diverse polemical sites and discourses, we hope to garner a critical sense of how polemic functions as genre. With all our varied focus on passion versus criticism, we have selected Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” as this year’s text for discussion. Over the past few years, we have ended English Institute with these group discussions of short key theoretical essays, affording us the unusual opportunity to work together on a text. This year we have decided to move further back in time to examine a fundamental text for our modernity.
We are pleased to announce online registration for the 2002 Conference. You can now register online. If a fee is owed, we offer credit card processing including Visa, Mastercard, American Express or Discover, or you may print out the completed registration form to be mailed in with a check or money order. Our registration form is secure and your credit card transaction is protected by SSL, the internet standard for encryption. Click here to register online.
I. Author-Love
Directed by Claudia L. Johnson, Princeton University
Saturday, 2:00 p.m.
Helen Deutsch, University of California, Los Angeles
Johnsonian Romance
Saturday, 3:30 p.m.
Sharon Marcus, University of California, Berkeley
Author Love/Hate: Contemporary Novels, Victorian Subjects
Sunday, 9:30 a.m.
Ann Pellegrini, University of California, Irvine
Authorial Accessorizing
II. Polemic
Directed by Jonathan Crewe, Dartmouth College
Friday, 9:30 a.m.
Amanda Anderson, The John Hopkins University
Argument and Ethos
Friday, 11:00 a.m.
Louis Menand, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
What Was All That About? Kael’s Attack on Sarris
Saturday, 11:00 a.m.
James Young, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Polemic as Process in the Sites of Memory
III. Uncritical Reading
Directed by Michael Warner, Rutgers University
Friday, 2:00 p.m.
Amy M. Hollywood, Dartmouth College
Reading as Self-Annihilation
Friday, 3:30 p.m.
Lawrence Scanlon, Rutgers University
Submissive Reading: Early Medieval Penitentials and the Body of Belief
Saturday, 9:30 a.m.
Vincent Crapanzano, CUNY Graduate School
Reading and Rereading Otherwise
IV. Kant
Led by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University
Sunday, 11:00 a.m.
Roundtable on Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”
(readings will be available online shortly)
Coffee, Muffins, and Registration
9:00 a.m. each morning of the conference
Lunch
12:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday
(on our own)
Reception
A festive reception will be held on Friday at 5 p.m.
For more information and registration materials, contact:
Mary Elizabeth Wilkes, Conference Coordinator
12 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
617.496.1006
englinst@fas.harvard.edu