Before everyone scatters for the holidays, we’d like to invite you to join
us for our quarterly reading group on Wed. 12/6 at 3:30 in the English
Dept Grad Lounge (Padelford B-11).
This time around, we’ll use John Bowen’s 2009 essay “Time for Victorian
Studies?” as an anchor for thinking about historicist scholarly practices.
Despite the title and literary focus, I think his argument will resonate
for people thinking about other periods and other types of cultural objects
— that is to say, come one, come all.
We will supplement Bowen with two intertexts for his essay: Walter
Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and the opening paragraph of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. We’ve also chosen some visual art to read alongside the texts: Luke Fildes’s “Applications for Admission to a Casual Ward” (1874) and his engraving “Houseless and Hungry” (1869), as well as (naturally) Klee’s “Angelus Novus” (1920). The texts and links to the images can be accessed in this Google Drive folder.
As always, read as much or as little as you can, and come join us
for camaraderie and coffee.