In his seminal history The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, Mark McGurl argues that one aspect of the proliferation of graduate creative writing programs in the twentieth century, now the most significant literary patronage system in the U.S., was a pressure on the programs and their participants to “[rationalize] their presence in a scholarly environment by asserting their own disciplinary rigor.” Historically, this has manifested itself in a strong emphasis on “craft,” influenced heavily by the modernist movement and the theories of the New Critics.

In light of expanding literary theories contributing to a better understanding of emotions and affects in literary texts, this panel will provide participants with an opportunity to discuss various new and important perspectives on the representation of emotions in Italian literature and art.

Proposals that analyze early modern through contemporary Italian literary production are welcome. We seek papers exploring the manner in which writers convey emotions to their readers, to the literary community of their day and, to their society at large.

In our current climate of fake news from seemingly authoritative sources, and high journalistic integrity from formerly discounted sources, it is clear that our criteria for evaluating the reliability of sources is shifting. I propose that a lack of news literacy is part of a larger literacy problem: readers need to understand tone from context and form. For as long as we have been assigning our composition or literature classes to read "A Modest Proposal" or anything else with an unreliable narrator, and as long as we have been explaining to potential book banners that a book with blatantly racist characters is not inherently racist, we language and literature instructors have been developing strategies to teach tone.

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2017 VICTORIANS INSTITUTE CONFERENCE

VICTORIAN RECOVERY

OCTOBER 13-14, 2017

FURMAN UNIVERSITY

GREENVILLE, SC

“The reaction of joy was as passionate as his grief had been, and he hugged his recovered gems to his bosom.” The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet”

“…Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.” Great Expectations

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Bodies/Borders in Jewish Women’s Comics 

Edited by: Heike Bauer, Andrea Greenbaum, and Sarah Lightman

Scholarship and publications on Jewish women and comics have grown considerably over the last five years. Studies such as the Eisner Award-winning Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews (Lightman 2014), How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses? (Oksman 2016) and our own special issue on  “Contemporary Comics by Jewish Women” (Bauer, Greenbaum, Lightman, Studies in Comics 7:2 2015 ) have shown that Jewish women make a significant and varied contribution to contemporary comics.