Annual Undergraduate English Literature Conference
Returning to Form: Genre, Style and Structure in Literary Studies
Friday, April 25, 2025
9:30 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Muscarelle Hall, Rooms 109, 110 and 111
Seton Hall University
There has long been tension, if not outright hostility, between more formalist approaches to literary study and more historically or politically/ideologically attuned ones. Whereas older, more traditionalist scholars such as the New Critics insisted that literary interpretation should focus on nothing but the text itself, today most scholars would contend that paying attention to elements outside of the text (such as its author’s identity or the sociohistorical context in which it was written) is crucial to arriving at a fuller, more proper understanding of it.
Is this, however, a false dichotomy? Is it really the case that literary analysis that attends to the formal qualities and characteristics of the text is inherently “conservative” (as one influential critic has recently argued), apolitical, or ahistorical? Is it indeed true that historically informed or politically attuned literary criticism is necessarily neglectful of literature’s formal, aesthetic dimensions? What are some of the ways in which attending to formal elements of the text such as genre, style, and structure can enhance more historicist, ideological, and/or identitarian approaches to literary study? Conversely, how might bringing questions of identity, history, politics, and/or ideology to bear on the text advance or complement more formalist approaches to literary analysis?
These questions, and more, will be explored at the conference. There is no cost to attend, but advance registration is requested.
Register Here
About the Keynote Speaker
Anna Kornbluh, Professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago
Professor Anna Kornbluh's research and teaching interests center on the novel, film and cultural aesthetics in theoretical perspective, including formalist, marxist, and psychoanalytic approaches. She is the author of Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2023); The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (University of Chicago Press, 2019); Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (Bloomsbury, 2019); Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham University Press, 2014); and numerous essays in venues such as The Chronical of Higher Education, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Diacritics, Differences, Novel, Criticism, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Portable Gray.
Questions?
Should you have questions or require special accommodations to attend this event, please contact Russell Sbriglia at [email protected].