Biography, Autobiography and Pseudobiography in the Long Eighteenth Century

Hemlow Prize in Burney Studies

The Burney Society invites submissions for the Hemlow Prize in Burney Studies,
named in honour of the late Joyce Hemlow, Greenshields Professor of English at
McGill University, whose biography of Frances Burney and edition of her
journals and letters are among the foundational works of eighteenth-century
literary scholarship.

The Hemlow Prize will be awarded to the best essay written by a graduate
student on any aspect of the life or writings of Frances Burney. The essay,
which can be up to 6,000 words, should make a substantial contribution to
Burney scholarship. The judges will take into consideration the essay’s
originality, coherence, use of source material, awareness of other work in the
field, and documentation. The winning essay will be published in the Burney
Journal and the recipient will receive an award of US $250, as well as a
year’s membership in the Burney Society.

The Hemlow Prize will be awarded in October 2007. Essays should be sent,
by email attachment, to the Chair of the Prize Committee, Audrey Bilger, Associate Professor of Literature, Claremont McKenna College, abilger@cmc.edu. Submissions must be received by June 1, 2007.

I wanted to pass along the call for one of my favorite conferences. If people would like to organize some 18th century panels for this, please let me know…

THE SOCIETY FOR UTOPIAN STUDIES
2007 CALL FOR PAPERS

32nd Annual Meeting
Toronto Marriott Bloor Yorkville Hotel
Toronto, Canada
Oct. 4-7, 2007

The Society for Utopian Studies (www.utoronto.ca/utopia) invites you to
submit abstracts for any of the following:

. a paper (between 15-20 minutes)
. a panel (usually of 3 papers)
. an informal panel on a topic (e.g., 3 presenters, or a presenter and 2 or
3 respondents)
. a presentation or performance of creative work on any topic related to
utopian studies.

Scholars and artists from all disciplines are encouraged to present on any
aspect of the utopian tradition-from the earliest utopian visions to the
utopian speculations and yearnings of the 21st century, including art,
architecture, urban and rural planning, literary utopias, dystopian
writings, utopian political activism, theorizing utopian spaces and
ontologies, music, new media, or intentional communities.

Please send a 100-250 word abstract by July 6, 2007 to:

Phillip Wegner
Department of English
P.O. Box 117310
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611-7310

Or by email: pwegner@english.ufl.edu

As you submit your abstract, please indicate if you have
A. any scheduling restrictions;
B. audiovisual needs (overhead projector; DVD/VHS player);
C. A need for a written letter of acceptance of your proposal, or whether
an e-mail acceptance will suffice.
Changes in the time and date of your panel will not be possible after
panels are scheduled; requests for AV will not be honored unless you submit
them with your original abstract.

For inquiries on the program email Phil at pwegner@english.ufl.edu.

For information about registration, travel and accommodations, please
contact the Conference Coordinator, Peter Fitting at the following address:

Peter Fitting
73 Delaware Ave.
Toronto M6H 2S9
p.fitting@utoronto.ca
416-531-8593 (telephone)

The Hotel reservation link is:
https://marriott.com/reservation/availability.mi?propertyCode=yyzmc&groupCod
e=socsoca (Our group code–socsoca-is already in the link.)

Please be aware that non-Canadian citizens now require a passport to enter Canada.

Join the CUNY Graduate Center Interdisciplinary Eighteenth-Century Group this Friday, May 11th. We are pleased to present:

“‘The more I write, the more I shall have to write:’
The Many Beginnings of Tristram Shandy”

Professor Tita Chico

University of Maryland
Editor, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation

Our meeting will be held from 2:00 – 4:00 in the Eighteenth-Century Reading Room (concourse level of the Mina Rees Library at The Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave). Please respond by email in advance ( mwilliams.j@gmail.com); off-campus guests will need to have their names left with security. Port wine and snacks will be served.

If you wish to unsubscribe from the ENGDEPT-L List, please send an E-mail to: “listserv@gc.listserv.cuny.edu”. Within the body of the text, only write the following: “SIGNOFF ENGDEPT-L.

See you then!

I was really impressed by this account of a group reading of Boswell and Johnson, written by Ellen Moody:

http://www.jimandellen.org/J&BForever.html

Carrie

ESA Conference 2007: Wide Open Spaces
March 30, 2007
Brooks Hefner and Neil Meyer, co-chairs

Conference Schedule

8:00 – 9:00 Breakfast (Room 4406)

9:00 – 10:15 Session 1
1. Ed Dorn and American Culture (Room 9204)
Moderator: Louis Bury
“Gunslinger’s Impact on American Poetry”
Melissa Goodrum, Brooklyn College

“Ed Dorn and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka: A Correspondence”
Claudia Pisano, CUNY Graduate Center

“Reading The Shoshoneans as an Activist Text”
Lindsey Freer, CUNY Graduate Center

2. Science Fiction Spaces (Room 9205)
Moderator: Chris Leslie
“Not Safe if Used as Directed: Philip K. Dick’s Ubik and Advertising”
Seamus O’Malley, CUNY Graduate Center

“Traversing the Boundaries of Space as a Social Construct in Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness”
Yu-Lin Liao, National Chao-Tung University, Taiwan

“The Self As Alien in Sun Ra and Gurdieff”
Erin Martin, University of Alabama

3. Romantic Spaces (Room 9206)
Moderator: Carrie Shanafelt
“Ruptured Boundaries: Wordsworth’s Psychological Project (1798)”
Emily B. Stanback, CUNY Graduate Center

“Women in the Dark: Females Finding Freedom in the Labyrinth”
Sarah L. Mandl, University of Nebraska – Omaha

Natural Civics: Analogy and Mimesis in “Prometheus Unbound”
Nancy Derbyshire, CUNY Graduate Center

4. Film Panel [title needed] (Room 9207)
Moderator: Laurel Harris(?)
“The Megalomaniac vs. The Landscape: The Critique of Western Imperialist Politics in Films of the 1960s and 70s”
David Melbye, School of Cinema/Television, University of Southern California

“Silence and the Sublime: The Open Spaces of van Sant’s Gerry”
Erika Halstead, CUNY Graduate Center

“Questioning the Value of the Romanticist Frame in Preserving Wilderness for Future Generations in the Documentary Film American Values, American Wilderness (2005)”
Kerry-Ann Brown, Florida Atlantic University

10:30 – 11:45 Session 2
5. Westerns I (Room 9204)
Moderator: Brooks E. Hefner
“Vanishing: Indians in the Landscapes of John Ermine of the Yellowstone and The Vanishing American:
Erica Olsen, Western Washington University

“‘Closed in by walls, the pistol sounded big’: Tragedy, Inevitability, and the
Closing of the Frontier in A.B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky”
Ann Mary Olson, Harvard University

“Landscape and Territory in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers”
Thomas Dikant, The Free University Berlin

6. Spaces of the Body (Room 9205)
Moderator: Justin Rogers-Cooper
“In the Flesh- Motherhood as Political Occupation”
Heather Brown, CUNY Graduate Center

“An Opening in the Mirror: Cosmetic Surgery and the Openness of the Body.”
Andrew H. S. Mazzaschi, Rutgers University

“The Abjection of Open: Rethinking the Relationship of Fister to Fistee in Scott Heim’s Mysterious Skin”
Jason Schneiderman, CUNY Graduate Center

7. Early Modern Spaces (Room 9206)
Moderator: Balaka Basu
“The Possibilities of Maritime Law in The Merchant of Venice“
Ameer Sohrawardy, Rutgers University

“The Nothing that is Not There and the Nothing that Is: The Evolving concept of Nothing in Shakespeare’s Later Plays”
Emily Moore, GUNY Graduate Center

“The Figure of Death as the Mortal’s Guide Across Liminal Space: John Lydgate’s ‘Danse Macabre’”
Linda Stein, CUNY Graduate Center

“‘Fancy’s Spring and Sorrow’s Fall’: Pastoral in Sidney and Stoppard”
Dan Venning, CUNY Graduate Center

8. Reshaping the Spaces of Racial Identity (Room 9207)
Moderator: Robina Josephine Khalid
“Gerald Vizenor’s Postindian Army: Dead Voices as a Text of Survivance”
Kelly S. Edge, Appalachian State University

“Ambiguous Redemption: Liberatory Landscapes and Liberal Subjectivity in a Southern African Memoir”
Ann Pandjiris, The Art Institute of Chicago

“Citizenship and Suffering: Olaudah Equiano’s National Narrative”
Gillian Houghton, CUNY Graduate Center

“Janie’s Journey to the Horizon: An Ecocritical Perspective of Their Were Watching God”
Jennifer James O’Grady, California State University – Fullerton

12:00 – 1:30 Lunch Break

1:30 – 2:45 Session 3
9. Fin de Siècle (Room 9204)
Moderator: Robert Azzarello
“Riding the Wave: Kate Chopin’s Quest for a New American Frontier”
Sari Altschuler, CUNY Graduate Center

“Opening Up the Spaces of Modern Sexual Freedom: Psychiatry and Sexology around the Turn of the Twentieth Century”
Howard Hsueh-Hao Chiang, Princeton University
[projector]

“In Need of ‘a Substantial and Dignified Milieu’: Women Writers’ Clubs and the Quest for Professional Parity in Fin de Siècle England”
Susan Waterman, Rugers University

10. Poetics (Room 9205)
Moderator: Jason Schneiderman
“The Room of the Lyric: Describing a Space”
John Harkey, CUNY Graduate Center

“Politics of Poetic Spaces”
Laurence Jackson, The New School for Social Research

“Clowns of Creation: Misfits in a Literal/Littoral Zone”
Derek Barker, University of South Africa, Pretoria

11. Westerns II (Room 9206)
Moderator: Brooks E. Hefner
“Pointing to the Ineffable: The Documentary Aesthetic of Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor”
Louis Bury, CUNY Graduate Center

“The Early Film Western as ‘Middle Landscape’“
Diane Wei Lewis, University of Chicago

“‘All we got now is Brokeback Mountain’: Object Relations and the Space(s) of Queer Pulps in Brokeback Mountain”
Matthew Rohweder, Simon Fraser University

12. Film [title needed] (Room 9207)
Moderator: Amanda Springs
“Gay Therapy: Bette Davis, Margo Channing, All About Eve”
Rob Faunce, CUNY Graduate Center

“Echo of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha”
Jeehey Kim, CUNY Graduate Center

Session 4 – 3:00 – 4:15
13. Utopias/Dystopias (Room 9204)
Moderator: Rebekah Sheldon?
“Fictional Realities: The Construction of Verisimilitude in Thomas More’s Utopia”
Balaka Basu. Graduate Center, CUNY

“Expanse and Enclosure: Deconstructing the Dystopian Landscape”
Jill Belli, CUNY Graduate Center

“The Quick and the Dead: Deleuze, Guattari and the coming of the worldwide war machine”
Simon Glezos, Johns Hopkins University

14. Communities (Room 9205)
Moderator: Nikhil Bilwakesh
“Weeksville, Brooklyn as site for Cultural and Identity Construction”
Aiesha Turman, SUNY Empire State

“Stop Kvetching, You’re in America!: Literacy, Assimilation, and the Old World in the Making of American Jews on the Lower East Side.”
Debby Katz, CUNY Graduate Center
[projector needed]

“Community as Text, Text as Community in Toni Morrison’s Paradise”
Justin Kiczek, Hunter College

15. Domestic Spaces (Room 9206)
Moderator: Neil Meyer
“Cultural encounters of the Varda kind: Ethnographic space in The Gleaners and I”
Nathalie Fouyer, CUNY Graduate Center

“Domesticity’s Significance and Trajectory in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man”
Diana Joy Colbert, CUNY Graduate Center

“Wasteland of the free: Dennis Cooper’s and Douglas Coupland’s suburban frontiers”
Martin Dines, Kingston University, UK

16. British Spaces (Room 9207)
Moderator: Bridget McGovern
“‘We let people make up their own minds’: Rock history as interpretive space in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People”
Kelley C. Kawano, CUNY Graduate Center

“Panic on the Streets of London: Empty City Space and Moral Panics in 28 Days Later and Seven Days till noon”
Paul Booth, Manchester Metropolitan University

“The Sites of Void in Contemporary British Novel”
Nikolina Knezevic, CUNY Graduate Center

4:30 – 5:30 Keynote Address by Miles Orvell, Professor of English and American Studies at Temple University

5:30 – 6:30 Reception

http://www.tristramshandyweb.it/home.htm

I’m looking forward to talking about Charlotte Charke on Friday!

For those of you interested in teaching 18th-century courses at the Undergrad. level, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies has an innovative course design award for members of the Society–and they publish the winning syllabi and course descriptions on their website each year:

http://asecs.press.jhu.edu/tchgpmpt.html

From: asecs
Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2007 07:42:08 -0500
To:
Subject: [Asecs] CFP 2007 MLA

Dear Colleagues in Eighteenth-Century Studies,

I would like to call your attention to the following calls for papers
for the 2007 MLA in Chicago. We are currently accepting abstracts for
the following sessions in Comparative Studies in 18th-Century Literature:

“The Portability of the Enlightenment,” abstracts by March 15 to Lydia
Liu (LL2410@columbia.edu) and Lynn Festa (festa@wisc.edu)

“The Other in the Enlightenment,” abstracts by March 15 to Lisa Moore,
(llmoore@mail.utexas.edu)

“The Humanities as Enlightenment Science,” abstracts by March 15 to Tom
DiPiero, (thomas.dipiero@rochester.edu)

What I found particularly odd about Wild’s character was his passion for women, like Laetitia Snap, Book I chapter 9, and Mrs. Heartfree, Book II chapter X, which is described as “violent.” While I read Jonathan’s character as one who is greedy to the point where he robs the memebers of his gang for the share which they receive for doing the dirty work, I can’t quite get a handle on why Fielding would attribute to Wild the quality of an overtly eager lover. Is it to reiterate Wild’s insatiable greed or to further the analogy between Wild the Great and historical figures such as Alexander, suggestign that great man are irresitable and take what they want?
While in “An essay on the knowledge of the character of man” Fielding refuses to discuss women as he considers such to be a scientific endeavor, the female characters in Jonathan Wild are depicted as far more cunning and successful in the art of theft than the hero himself. The first example is Wild’s mother who while carrying him in her womb had the craving to possess “every thing she saw; nor could be satified with her Wish unless she injoyed it clandestinely”(Book I, chapter III). By including this detail, isn’t Fielding passing a judgement on women as preoccupied with the acquisition of goods for the sake of satifing a whim, as well as, in Mrs. Wild’s case, women as mothers setting an example and/or passing on thievery to their children?
The two other women, Laetitia and Mrs. Heartfree are quite the apt thieves of me’s hearts or minds. While the former skillfully juggles three men at a time, the latter possess the ability to talk heself out of compromising situations or simply drink her admirers under the table. Maybe Fielding’s wit went over the top of my head, but it seemed as if the author was suggesting, throught the depiction of the female characters, that women, all women, be they virtuous or not, possess an inborn propensity for deception and thievery.