Returning to Form: Genre, Style, and Structure in Literary Studies
The Annual Undergraduate English Literature Conference at Seton Hall University
Friday, April 25th, 2025
Keynote Address by Anna Kornbluh (University of Illinois Chicago)

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?

We invite undergraduate papers that address these and related questions. Possible topics and areas of focus include: new approaches to traditional literary genres (e.g., medieval romance, revenge drama, gothic novel, slave narrative, travel narrative, lyric poem, etc.); new and emergent literary forms and genres (e.g., graphic novel, found poetry, microfiction, digital literatures, etc.); the relation between literary form (style, structure, etc.) and textual content; the relation between literary formalism and historicism, feminism, Marxism, postcolonialism, etc.; and many more.

Our keynote will be delivered by Anna Kornbluh, Professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she teaches courses centered on the novel, film, and cultural aesthetics from a 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.

Please submit an abstract of 300 words, including your name, school affiliation, and contact information, to Russell Sbriglia at russell.sbriglia@shu.edu by March 7th for consideration. Please contact Dr. Sbriglia with any questions or concerns.
For more about the Seton Hall English department, please visit our https://www.shu.edu/english/. Attendance will be in-person only. Seton Hall University is located in South Orange, New Jersey, close to New York City and easily accessible by train, car, and bus.