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Historicism and Its Discontents Conference
Conference Description
 
Historicism, whether New, old, or newer, today remains the dominant method of literary criticism in both the US and the UK.  Perhaps no field has played a more important role in establishing historicism as an international critical orthodoxy than the field of early modern studies, which continues to furnish topics of inquiry that drive literary scholarship in the academy as a whole (cf. the history of the book, reading, authorship, and of copyright; the history of the body and of the senses; literature and material culture; literature and science;  literature and economic thought). At the same time, some of the most exciting recent work in early modern studies has begun to reexamine the methodological foundations of historicism and to propose new departures: toward problems of form, figure, and style; toward a renewed interest in "theory"; toward comparative literature; toward the deliberate anachronism of "presentism."  "Historicisms and Its Discontents" brings four leading critics to Rutgers and invites them to consider the virtues and limitations of historicism in early modern studies. What does historicism make possible, and what does it exclude? What is the place of theory and philosophy in a scholarly world that fetishizes the archive and the particular example? Are close readings really only relevant to those who produce them? As scholars of texts and objects that predate us by some four hundred years, is it possible not to be a historicist? 
     
     
   

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