This year's colloquia will be held in February and March.

The first will take place on February 11th in the Berkeley English Department lounge, Room 330 in Wheeler Hall at 4pm. The speakers will be John Lurz and Natalie Phillips. John Lurz will be speaking about "The Memory of the Book: The Bodies of Daniel Deronda" and Natalie Phillips will be speaking about "Mind Wandering: Distraction in the Eighteenth-Century Essay."

The second colloquium will take place on March 11th, at 4pm in The Terrace Room in the Margaret Jacks building at Stanford. The speakers will be Batya Ungar-Sargon and Brianne Bilsky.

Please see below for details about the talks.

Colloquium II - Moderated by Andrea Lunsford (Stanford) - Wednesday, 11 March

Batya Ungar-Sargon (Berkeley)

Title: "Ontological Materialism and the Novel"

Abstract: In this paper I open with a discussion of fiction's first theorists, those early novelists who first made fiction an explicit discourse. I use the prefaces to the first novels-- Crusoe, Pamela, Gulliver, etc. as a way of questioning how the early novelists thought about the ontological status of their endeavors, even as they claimed that their stories were true. I show how the current debate about fiction in analytic philosophy misses what the inventors of fiction in its eighteenth-century incarnation thought was the crucial point about it, and then I give a different reading of the prefaces and what kind of "truth" was at stake. My goal is to make compelling a reexamination of the signified and its home in the imagination as a way of explaining how the prefaces conceived of plot, desire and time as functions of the ontological status of fiction, which I will do via an analysis of the difference between Fielding and Richardson. I end by historicizing this new approach to ontology and the fictional, and suggest that fictional value and aesthetic value work upon the same logic of fantasy that actually precluded, rather than operated as symptomatic of, the imaginary capture of commodity fetishism and bourgeois subjectivity.

Bio: Batya Ungar-Sargon is a PhD Candidate at Berkeley's English Department. Her interests include Restoration Drama, the early novel, Plot and Desire, and claiming vociferously that the 18th Century didn't recognize a political without an aesthetic and vice-versa. By the ontological status of fiction I mean fiction's being but also its ability to question/shed light on ours.

Brianne Bilsky (Stanford)

Title: "From Page to (Computer) Screen: The Media Ecology of Maus"

Abstract: In 1994, Voyager released a CD-ROM version of Maus, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel (Volume 1: “My Father Bleeds History”, 1986; Volume 2: “And Here My Troubles Began”, 1991). Entitled The Complete Maus, the CD-ROM includes, in multimedia form, the original Maus books as well as a sampling of the various materials central to the creation of Spiegelman’s project: audio excerpts from the interviews Art conducted with his father; notes and sketches from Spiegelman’s journals; photographs; excerpts of videos taken during a research trip to Poland and Germany; maps and diagrams of Auschwitz/Birkenau; and artwork from concentration camp prisoners. How does the availability of such material affect our reading of Spiegelman’s project? What kind of historical thinking do these materials provoke or prevent? In this paper, I interrogate the ways in which media forms interact in the printed Maus books and the CD-ROM version, specifically focusing on what these interactions contribute to a discussion of authenticity.

Bio: Brianne Bilsky is a fourth-year graduate student at Stanford. She completed her B.A. in English at Washington and Jefferson College and her M.A. in English at Stanford. Brianne specializes in contemporary American literature. Her major fields of interest include postmodernism, literature and science, visual rhetoric and media theory.

Colloquium I - Moderated by Dr. Kent Puckett (Berkeley) - Wednesday, 11 February

Natalie Phillips (Stanford)

Title: "Mind Wandering: Distraction in the Eighteenth-Century Essay."

Abstract: This paper traces the literary history of what cognitive scientists now call “mind wandering," or moments when the mind loses focus and drifts off to other thoughts. Here, my focus is on the eighteenth-century essay. As early as 1580, Montaigne had claimed the essay was the perfect narrative form for mind-wandering: "a field…wherein so long as there is either Inke or Paper…I may uncessantly wander and fly without encombrance.” In his Dictionary of 1755, Samuel Johnson defined the essay as a “loose sally of the mind.” In this piece, I analyze the crafting of a distracted persona in the essay tradition, suggesting that, in the eighteenth century, the wandering attention of the essayist increasingly becomes a double for modern readers. I reveal eighteenth-century writers to be experimenting with the brief form of the periodical essay to manage the short attention spans of their imagined readers. Taking Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler and The Idler as my main case studies, I suggest that changing theories of distraction inspired the construction of a new kind of essay persona, one with a rambling, wandering mind. Such a persona, I argue, both modeled and mocked readers’ quick-shifting focus with the intention not only to capture but also to reform their habits of concentration.

Bio: Natalie Philips is a PhD candidate in the Department of English. She is presenting new work on Samuel Johnson, taken from her dissertation project Distraction: Problems of Attention in 18th Century Literature, 1747-1816. Her dissertation offers a literary history of the mental state we now call distraction, looking specifically at eighteenth-century literature between 1747 and 1818. As she explores the friction among Enlightenment theories of concentration and investigates the formal changes distraction wrought in eighteenth-century fiction, she blends the tools of narrative theory, literary history, and applied cognitive science to model a new method for analyzing literature in terms of attention—both that of characters and that of readers.

John Lurz (Berkeley)

Title: "The Memory of the Book: The Bodies of Daniel Deronda."

Abstract: My paper is a preliminary attempt to develop the role which the physical materiality of the book plays in the transmission of its narrative. To do so, I elaborate a specific strain of "book history" by proposing the alternative concept of "book memory" as a way to think less about the materialist modes of production of books than about a specific book's material, its status as a physical object as a well as a written text.

I develop this concept by examining the role that both physical and textual embodiment play in the transmission of Daniel Deronda. I detail how the encounter with the Jewish mystic Mordecai alters the relationship which the novel's eponymous hero has to the materiality of written texts. As Mordecai unwittingly focuses on the body's own mortal physicality in the explanation of his philosophy of transmission, he helps Daniel transform his general disregard for the materiality of a text into a sensitive awareness of it. The explicit parallels drawn between the time-bound body and written documents ultimately assert the importance of attending to the way a physical book also exists in – and subtly records the passing of – time.

By drawing out the resonances between the novel's thematic and narrative emphasis on temporality and its own serial publication history, I situate this concept of "book memory," with its overtones of the personal, within the more general field of "book history." That is, the novel's serial publication manifests this very temporality in its format (if not its form). In the end, however, I return to the personal and the individual and suggest that Daniel Deronda outlines the relationship a reader has to a singularly specific material embodiment of a text; indeed, it shows the way a book's material mutability is an inescapable if all-too-overlooked part of the reader's experience of it.

Bio: John Lurz is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. His interests revolve around the 19th and 20th century novel, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, phenomenology and media theory. His dissertation, provisionally entitled "The Senses of the Letter: Mediation, Materiality and the Limits of Literary Modernism," considers the complex relationship between the high-modernist novel and sense perception as it tries to develop the role that the material book plays in the reading experience. Less (or perhaps more) importantly, he has recently grown a mustache.