The Loyola University Chicago Victorian Society Presents Its Second Annual Day Conference:

Aesthetics and Form in Victorian Art, Literature, and Culture

October 28, 2017, 8:30-5:30pm 

“It is not enough that it has the Form, if it have not also the power and life. It is not enough that it has the Power, if it have not the form. We must therefore inquire into each of these characters successively; and determine first, what is the Mental Expression, and secondly, what the Material Form.” John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic IV.183.

Symposium on Totality and Possibility in the Modern Novel

Saturday, July 29, 2017

The University of Tokyo (Komaba Campus, Bldg 18), Japan

The emergence of ‘world literature’ as a critical framework of reading in literary studies has not only recalibrated older methodologies of comparative and postcolonial literature but has also foregrounded the aspect of circulation and reception of literary works in a transnational context. The emphasis that this method of reading puts on the cross-cultural travels of a literary text is reinforced by the global technology of social media and web 2.0 which promises instant connectedness and conjures a virtual world which is self-contained, even though it reflects and engages with the actual world of the socio-political, outside itself.

In 2015, the University of Edinburgh Press launched a multivolume series of scholarly, refereed anthologies entitled ReFocus. Edited by Drs. Robert Singer (CUNY) Gary D. Rhodes (University of Central Florida), and Frances Smith (University of Sussex), each book focuses on a critically overlooked American film director who worked in the studio system, independent cinema, experimental filmmaking, or documentary tradition. Volumes published so far in this series include: Preston Sturges, Amy Heckerling, Delmer Daves, Kelly Reichardt, Elaine May, Spike Jonze, William Castle, Barbara Kopple, and Budd Boetticher.