INCS 2018 Supernumerary Conference | June 13-15, 2018 | Rome, Italy
Scroll down to consult the call for papers for the 2019 “Monuments and Memory” conference.
MEASURE AND EXCESS in the long nineteenth century. From Aristotle’s famous attack on excess in the Nichomachean Ethics to twenty-first century denunciations of the dissipations of financial capitalism, the margins of excess have been redrawn throughout the ages. Although the nineteenth century is often associated with ideas of restraint and moderation, manifestations of excess appear everywhere in social, cultural, economic, literary, and political realms. The myth of the artist as an outcast who exceeds moral, sexual, and aesthetic rules is a nineteenth-century construction; so too is the positivistic notion of the “measurability” of all things, human and non-human, and the consequent project of containing and repressing the potentially subversive “excesses” of the non-rational.
How did nineteenth-century writers, artists, philosophers, intellectuals, economists, scientists and politicians articulate the dialectics of measure and excess? In William Blake’s famous formulation, “the road to excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom.” For Charles Dickens, on the other hand, “Vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!”, while Oscar Wilde would opine that “moderation is a fatal thing.” How were moderation and extravagance conceptualized in relation to aesthetic ideals, legal principles, ethical norms and political doctrines? How did the discourses of science contribute to redefining ideas of measure? In what was considered by many as the “Money Age,” prudence and financial excess co-existed in the theory and practice of the credit economy. What hierarchies of value presided over the regulation of profligacy, extravagance, and wastefulness, whether economic or moral? What emotional tastes and fashions emerged as a response to both? The arrangements that structured everyday experience in the “Serious Century” hinged on notions of regularity. Yet the irregular was an object of intense fascination in the discourses of science as well as in poetry and fiction. What were the uses of irregularity and excess?
Call for Papers: INCS 2019 Conference | March 21-24 | Dallas, TX
Ongoing public debate over politically charged public monuments reminds us how much is at stake in the shaping of cultural memory, whether through durable physical structures, portable or reproducible aesthetic works, or discursive representations. How were monumentality and the preservation of the past conceived in the nineteenth century? How might we reconceive our own ways of remembering the nineteenth century? We invite proposals for papers and panels that explore monuments in the broadest sense of the word—those from as well as those about the nineteenth century. We also welcome papers that consider the concepts of monumentality and/or memory as they pertain to humanistic disciplines and engage with nineteenth-century studies. Papers might nominate “monuments” (including scholarly ones) that are overvalued, under-appreciated, or ripe for dismantling; explore works, genres, or forms that encourage remembering; analyze nineteenth-century representations of or discourses about memory or monuments; consider the value of ephemera or the contested return to big ideas via digital means that outstrip human memory and cognition. Other topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Public monuments
- Antiques, relics, and ruins
- Monumental texts, paintings, musical compositions
- Monuments of conquest and empire
- Museums and museum studies
- Archives, records and record-keeping
- Monuments, mass production and mass consumption
- Countermonumentality and antimonumentality
- Post-historicist and presentist approaches to the past
- Canons and countercanons
- Crafting a national history
- Crafting global histories
- Grands récits and the longue durée
- (Monumentally) big ideas
- Gaps, silences, and the historical record
- Amnesia and repression
- Trauma, memory, and forgetting
- History painting and the formation of identities
- Commemorative music
- Pageants, anniversary celebrations, and local histories
- People, places, and things remembered and forgotten
- Ephemera
- Postcards, celebrity photography, and souvenirs
- Personal mementos (souvenirs, gift books)
- Memory and 19th-century mourning traditions
- Nostalgia and cultural myth making
- The invention of tradition
- Folk art, folk tales, and folk lore
- Bodily mementos (tattoos, hair jewelry)
- Monuments, gender, and/or sexuality
- Memory and aesthetic form
- Historical novels
- The pastoral
- Elegies, tributes, encomiums
- Ekphrasis
- Victorian medievalism, Victorian neo-classicism
- Neo-Victorianism/steampunk as cultural memory
- Pre-Raphaelitism
- Tableaux vivants
- Memorization and repetition
Deadline: October 27, 2018. For individual papers, send 250-word proposals; for panels, send individual proposals plus a 250-word panel description. Please include a one-page CV with your name, affiliation, and email address. Proposals that are interdisciplinary in method or panels that involve multiple disciplines are especially welcome. Upload to web page portal (currently under construction). Send inquiries to INCS2019@smu.edu.
Future Conferences
- 2020 | Los Angeles, CA
- 2121 | Salt Lake City, UT