EVENT DETAILS

Histories of Genre | Day 1

This conference will ask how we might explain and also counter the tendency to keep generic categories stable, even in critical accounts that otherwise acknowledge the historicity of cultural forms.  Why is tragedy, for instance, still very often invoked as a stable genre from the Greeks to the present?  What investments lead to the privileging of generic categories as transhistorical?  How might conjoined theoretical and historical accounts of specific genres -- poetic, theatrical, cinematic, mass cultural -- at once illuminate particular works and particular historical moments?  We hope to focus discussion on modes other than the novel (since these questions have been posed about the novel especially, but less often about other genres).

The conference is organized by Virginia Jackson and Martin Harries, UC Irvine. 

FRIDAY, MAY 12TH, 2017

1:00    Introduction: Virginia Jackson (UCI)

1:30    Frances Ferguson (U of Chicago), “The Memoir, Historically Considered: Telemachus Enters,” introduced by Rei Terada (UCI)

3:15    Sarah Mesle (USC), "Petty Little Dystopias,” introduced by Catherine Liu (UCI)

5:00    Aamir Mufti (UCLA), "The Genres of Fascism," introduced by R. Radhakrishnan (UCI)
6:30    Reception

SATURDAY, MAY 13TH, 2017

9:30    Coffee

10:00     Ted Martin (UCI), “The Detective Exits: Crime and Genre in the 1950s,” introduced by Oren Izenberg (UCI)

11:45    Michael Warner (Yale), “Conversion,” introduced by Jerome Christensen (UCI)

1:15    Lunch

2:30    Nicholas Ridout (Queen Mary, UCL), “Time, Theatre, Genre: on 'the performance situation' and 'uneven development,’” introduced by Martin Harries (UCI)

4:15    Carolyn Williams (Rutgers), “Histories of Melodramatic Form,” introduced by Virginia Jackson  (UCI)

5:45    Roundtable of All Speakers, moderated by Martin Harries  (UCI)

6:30    Reception

No registration required.  Free and open to the public.