Skepticism and Credulity

deadline for submissions: 
September 6, 2017
full name / name of organization: 
C19 The Society for Nineteenth-Century Americanists 2018
contact email: 

 

If the nineteenth century witnessed expanded interest in science and facts, it also nurtured a fascination with deceit. From the minstrel stage to P.T. Barnum’s humbugs, questions of authenticity captured the public’s imagination—and paychecks. This panel invites papers that explore nineteenth-century attitudes surrounding truth and belief, with a particular interest in the structures of knowledge and affect that organized popular understandings of credibility, authority, and legitimacy within the cultural landscape.

 

Questions to consider might include: How do authors perform and market authenticity in personal narratives and other texts? What cultural genres eschew the taint of falsity, and which ones wallow in it? How do discourses of reason, sentiment, law, and fiction intersect? What are legitimate and illegitimate ways of knowing? Which objects, phenomena, and people magnetized skepticism? What are the perils and pay-offs of credulity? What constitutes proof and what are its limits? What affective positions are extolled or condemned under a regime of skepticism? When and how do epistemologies of the marketplace intersect with those of science and faith? How do race and gender organize ways of knowing, and inflect the interpretive encounter between reader and text?

Please email an abstract of no more than 250 words with a short CV to Eva Latterner (eml3p@virginia.edu) and Madeline Zehnder (mlz3tr@virginia.edu) by September 6.