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Lauren Goodlad (UIUC), "Genre and the Longue Durée"

Literary scholarship tends to be oriented toward periods such as medieval, early-American, Modernist or postcolonial. More recently, the work of Giovanni Arrighi has helped to inspire a turn toward long centuries. But for the Annales school historian Fernand Braudel, the rewards of a turn to the longue durée are qualitative, not quantitative. According to Wai Chee Dimock, Braudel’s longue durée is economistic: her “deep time” instead looks at genre through insights borrowed from fractal geometry. In this lecture, Lauren Goodlad describes the strength and limitations of any approach to historicizing genre which ignores the material conditions of temporality. Braudel’s “dialectic of temporalities” complicates Arrighi’s cycles and Moretti’s graphs even as it grounds the rarefactions of deep time. Bridging a new project on genre with insights drawn from The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic (2015), Goodlad syncs nineteenth-century serial media to our own burgeoning material culture in order to demonstrate the benefits of thinking about genre across the longue durée.

Lauren M. E. Goodlad is professor of English and was interim director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory in 2008-9 before becoming director in August 2009. She has a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University, a Masters in English from NYU, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. A specialist in Victorian literature and culture, Goodlad also has research and teaching interests in gothic genres; critical, feminist, postcolonial and political theory; cultural studies; and literature in relation to contemporary understandings of liberalism, globalization, internationalism, and development. Goodlad is the author of The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty and Transnational Experience (Oxford, forthcoming 2015) and numerous books and articles.

Following the talk, join the Culture | Law | Capital research cluster for a discussion of Goodlad's article "Goodlad Coda" available by download here.