Now Unfashionable: A Trowbridge Symposium

Posted on February 10, 2025 by aidanjw2@illinois.edu

7 March 2025 in the Lucy Ellis Lounge (FLB)
9:45AM-4:30PM

Presented by the Trowbridge Initiative in American Cultures

Now Unfashionable is a symposium that will be hosted in the Lucy Ellis Lounge on Friday, March 7. Invited panelists will address ostensibly outmoded methods of literary study in the field of American literary history. The event will be open to the public. Food and refreshments will be served.

Papers will include:

Michael Dango – “What Was Genre?”, 9:45AM

This essay compares a recent turn to genre in literary studies with that of the midcentury Chicago Critics, a onetime rival who ultimately lost to the New Critics. This is a shame because the skill of close reading we associate with the New Critics is logically incoherent without the Chicago Critics’ skill of taxonomy. Rather than understand close reading as a species of reading, we should better understand it as a subprotocol of taxonomy. Moreover, the Chicago Critics’ inductive interrogation of genre systems, including naming new genres, challenges genre criticism today. Especially in post-1945 studies, our focus on the genres of fiction named by publishers allows the market to organize our study for us.

Susan Gillman – “Always Always Historicize!”, 10:45AM

Updating Fredric Jameson’s influential 1981 imperative, my talk goes with and against the grain of our symposium’s interest in “now unfashionable methods.” Because they are shape-shifters, historicisms, dialectical, material, new and otherwise, are always always fashionable. A timeline of the major historicist moments since the first issue of ALH in 1989 chronicles the ever-changing text-context companions that emerge with each methodological development, including Jameson’s dialectical materialism and Jaws (1979) and utopian Science Fictions (2005); Stephen Greenblatt et al’s New Historicism and Renaissance literature, paired in the 1980s-90s; and C.L.R. James’s revolutionary cultural Marxism, especially his The Black Jacobins (1938). Each of these literary-historical milestones could conceivably be date-stamped, in a calendar cued to various historicisms, the different critical Marxist methods that have always always been (un)fashionable.

Jennifer Greiman – “The End of Dissensus; or, Aesthetics and Politics in an Age of Realism,” 1:45PM

The destituent paradigm, formlessness, paradox: critical methods of taking things apart have become decidedly unfashionable since the earliest interventions of postcritique nearly two decades ago. But whereas criticism in the early 2000s focused on methods of symptomatic reading allied with Fredric Jameson, scholars more recently have identified Jacques Rancière’s concept of “dissensus” as paradigmatic of a prevailing tendency, in Anna Kornbluh’s words, “to elevate disruption and unsettling above forming and building” and thus to privilege “a vision of politics as finally about disruption itself.” I will consider the now-unfashionable status of “dissensus” by examining, through critics like Kornbluh, Elizabeth Anker, David Lloyd, and Caroline Levine, its “ends” – both its conceptualization of the aesthetics of politics and its potential exhaustion as a critical concept – and by attending to the aesthetics of realism in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901).

Claudia Stokes – “Moralistic Criticism Revisited,” 2:45PM

The moral evaluation of texts is perhaps the oldest, most enduring form of literary criticism. Promoted by Aristotle and practiced by such influential critics as Samuel Johnson and Matthew Arnold, the New Critics suddenly rendered moral criticism obsolete by the New Critics by insisting it had no role to play in literary criticism. I reexamine the purview of moral criticism by showing its continued influence among both lay and professional readers. I further contend that, under the more respectable sign of critique, we continue to practice moral criticism, though it remains virtually invisible to us.

Kinohi Nishikawa – “A Self-Consuming Artifact: How Publication History Deepens Narrative Meaning,” 3:45PM

Originally published in 2001, Percival Everett’s Erasure is perhaps the single most written-about work of contemporary American fiction. The novel holds up a mirror to critics’ judgment and beliefs, anxieties and bad faith. We write about Erasure because Erasure is about us. Yet there has been no account of exactly whose Erasure is being read at any given moment. The work has gone through multiple editions in a short timeframe, and the way each edition is packaged adds a layer of paratextual irony to the narrative. Bibliographical analysis of recent works sometimes feels like a mismatch of method and object. But when applied to Erasure, this antiquarian method yields fresh insight into Everett’s satire of race, publishing, and the economy of prestige.

Speakers

**Michael Dango** is associate professor of English and core faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rice University. The Editor of *ASAP/Review*, Dango is the author of *Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair* (Stanford, 2021) and the 33 1/3 volume on Madonna’s *Erotica* (Bloomsbury, 2023), as well as essays in *PMLA, differences, New Literary History, Signs, Artforum,* and elsewhere. His current work taxonomizes the intersection of cultural and political categories, with a focus on sexual violence.

Susan Gillman is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She teaches and researches 19th-century US literature and culture from a hemispheric, transnational and translational perspective. She is the author of three University of Chicago Press books, Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America (1989), Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (2003), and American Mediterraneans: A Study in Geography, History, and Race (2022). She has worked collaboratively on several essay collections, including with co-editor Alys Eve Weinbaum, Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality and W. E. B. Du Bois (2007), with co-editor Russ Castronovo, States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies (2009), and, most recently, with co-editor Anna Brickhouse on the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to American Literature and Empire, 2025).

**Claudia Stokes** is Professor of English at Trinity University. She is the author of *Writers in Retrospect: The Rise of American Literary History, 1875-1910* and *The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion*. Her most recent book is *Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature*. With Michael A. Elliott, she co-edited *American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader*, and she co-edited, with Elizabeth Duquette, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s *The Gates Ajar* for Penguin Classics. She is currently completing her work editing two volumes of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s religious writings for the *Collected Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe*, under contract with Oxford University Press.

**Jennifer Greiman** is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Institute at Wake Forest University and the associate editor of *Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies*. She is the author of *Melville’s Democracy: Radical Figuration and Political Form* (Stanford UP, 2023) and *Democracy’s Spectacle: Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing* (Fordham UP, 2010), the co-editor, with Paul Stasi, of *The Last Western:* Deadwood and the End of American Empire (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), and the co-editor with Michael Jonik of *The Oxford Handbook of Herman Melville* (forthcoming from Oxford, 2025).

Kinohi Nishikawa is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground (2018), as well as a number of essays and book chapters on African American print and popular culture. His monograph-in-progress is Black Paratext, a study of book design and African American literature from the rise of the modern paperback to the contemporary book arts scene.

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