Category Archives: Miniseminars

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 through time
Alex Woloch (roundtable anchor)
Elaine Auyoung
Elisha Cohn
David Coombs
Jonathan Farina
Emily Steinlight
Megan Ward

11:15-12:45: Theorizing the Present
On the continuing significance of Nietzsche’s critique of nineteenth-century historicisms, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life”
Pearl Brilmyer (discussion facilitator)
Danielle Coriale
Eleanor Courtemanche
Devin Griffiths
Matthew Sussman
Danny Wright

2pm-4pm: The Way We Write Now
On questions of method and interpretation in the current work of V21 affiliates
Caroline Levine (roundtable anchor)
Carolyn Betensky
Ellis Hanson
Anna Kornbluh
David Kurnick
Jesse Rosenthal
Jesse Oak Taylor

4:30-6:30 Empire and Unfielding
On the disciplinary relationship between Victorian Studies and studies of empire, grounded in Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr’s Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Common
Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr (roundtable anchors)
Tanya Agathocleous
Nathan Hensley
Jos Lavery
Sebastian Lecourt
Nasser Mufti
Mary Mullen

7:00-10:00
Affiliates Dinner
Evening Salon, Maeve Adams and Molly Clark Hillard, facilitators

Saturday, October 10
9:30-11: Plenary, “Atrocity in the Novel, Atrocity in History” Bruce Robbins
Introduction, Rachel O’Connell
Response, Zach Samalin

11:30-12:30: Symposium wrap-up, moderated by Elaine Hadley

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This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Registration is now closed.

Made possible by the generous support of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Department of English Language and Literature, the Nicholson Center for British Studies, and the Center for International Studies.  Additional support provided by the Institute for the Humanities, University of Illinois at Chicago, the Department of English, UIC, and the Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory.

Sovereign aesthetics, aesthetics of sovereignty, the power of the image, the poverty of the image, the state of exception, the real exception to the image –Arne De Boever’s new work on art history’s contribution to the philosophy of sovereignty invigorates and severs the too easily assumed connections between Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag that organize contemporary discourses of image politics. Join us for a workshop with Professor De Boever Tuesday 17 March, 5pm, generously hosted by our collaborator Gallery 400. Reading circulated in advance; request it here.

Arne’s abstract:
This article deals with the afterlife of Walter Benjamin’s comments on the state of exception—specifically, his distinction between the state of exception and what he calls a “real” state of exception that would dismantle the former–in Susan Sontag and Hito Steyerl’s theories of the image. It argues, first, that Sontag’s theory of the image, while conceived in Benjamin’s wake, insists on the reality of an outside-image that always risks to create new states of exception. While Steyerl, also working after Benjamin, goes a long way towards dismantling this risk, she too recreates it in her casting of the unreal people in spam images as those who will do the dirty work of imaging for us so that we, the real people, can withdraw from representation. This logic of substitution, which does not change what Steyerl in her work diagnoses as the “exceptional” conditions of contemporary imaging, does not succeed in bringing about the real state of exception that Benjamin called for. For this, the logic of substitution would need to be abandoned. Benjamin himself suggested this in his discussion of strike in his essay “Critique of Violence”. After the strike, Benjamin argues, it is us—i.e., not someone else—who go back to work. But the work has been “wholly transformed”.

Be on the lookout for another Rancière session soon; as always, drop us a line to propose events; and for now, here’s what’s
on our calendar:
2 March, Atmospheres
3 March, Charles Palermo,Photography and Modernism
5 March, Adam Kotsko, Creepiness
5-8 March, Narrative theory conference in Chicago