Center for the Study of the Novel

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Overview

Samuel Richardson famously called the novel "writing to the moment"; to what degree can this claim make sense of our present set of moments? How does the novel, long considered a pioneering form of modernity, engage the conditions that shape literature and art being produced and consumed today, Jan. 12, 2007, and into the future? What relationship might narrative practices have to a contemporary moment whose extremity is often located around visual regimes and instantaneity, organized by new technology and global communications? Are new media and digital technologies more prepared to find adequate forms for current conditions; does—and should—writing to this moment remain as a possibility?

Schedule

Morning 10 am -11:30 am
Alan Liu, “Burning the Book: ‘Agrippa: A Book of the Dead’ in the Age of Networked Reproduction”
Katie Salen, “Instruction Sets for Game Engines: What Happens When the Squirrel Can’t Speak?”
Bill Luoma, “Electronic Arts: Problems with the Peace Server and Other Technologies”
11:30 am -11:45 am Coffee Break
11:45 am - 1 pm Discussion

Afternoon
2 pm - 3:30 pm
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “A University Without Intellectuals—What Exactly Is Coming to an End and Why?”
Svetlana Boym, “Off-Modern Ruins: Contemporary Reflections on the Avant-garde”
Joshua Clover, “Stock Footage, or the Representability of World Systems”
3:30 pm - 3:45 pm Coffee Break
3:45 pm - 5 pm Discussion

Conference discussants: Celeste Langan, Tyrus Miller, Sianne Ngai, Anne Wagner

Speakers

Svetlana Boym is the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures and an associate of Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is writer, theorist and media artist. Her books include The Future of Nostalgia (2001); Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (1994); Kosmos: A Portrait of the Russian Space Age (with Adam Bartos, 2002) ); Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (1991);and the novel Ninochka (2003 Her current project "The Other Freedom" spans from Greek tragedy to contemporary art scandals, and explores cross-cultural conceptions of freedom and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. She has written on literature and culture, conspiracy theories and the space of freedom, as well as on conceptual art and architectural reconstructions for Harper's Magazine, Representations, Public Culture, Slavic Review, Poetics Today and Critical Inquiry as well as Artforum, Artefact and Artmargins.

Joshua Clover is the author of two books of poems, The Totality for Kids (University of California Press, 2006), and Madonna anno domini (1997), which received the 1996 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. He is also a widely published critic and journalist, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. His contribution to the Modern Classics series for the British Film Institute, The Matrix, was published in 2005. He is an associate professor of English literature at the University of California, Davis. His paper for this conference is part of a larger project on contemporary poetics; he'll present another portion at the Vanderbilt Conference on Politics, Criticism, and the Arts in April 2007.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford University. Among his books on literary theory and literary and cultural history are Eine Geschichte der spanischen Literatur (1990; Spanish translation forthcoming); Making Sense in Life and Literature (Minnesota University Press, 1992); In 1926--Living at the Edge of Time (Harvard University Press, 1998); Corpo e forma (Italy / Mimesis, 2001); Vom Leben und Sterben der großen Romanisten (Germany/Hanser, 2002); The Powers of Philology (University of Illinois Press, 2003); and Production of Presence (Stanford University Press, 2004), and In Praise of Athletic Beauty (Harvard Press, 2006).

Alan Liu is Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford Univ. Press, 1989); The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004); and Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (forthcoming, Univ. of Chicago Press). His online projects include Voice of the Shuttle and (as general editor) The Agrippa Files. Liu is principal investigator of the NEH-funded Teaching with Technology project at UC Santa Barbara entitled Transcriptions: Literature and the Culture of Information, and co-director of his English Department's undergraduate specialization on Literature and the Culture of Information. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). Most recently, he has started the University of California Multi-campus Research Group, Transliteracies: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading, for which he is principal investigator.

Bill Luoma was born in San Francisco in 1960. He attended De Anza Jr. College and earned an associate degree in chemistry, which he put to use performing quality assurance tests on the components of trident nuclear missiles at Lockheed. He has a BA from UC San Diego, where he studied writing and classics and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Hawaii. He is a member of the subpress collective through which he recently edited and published Scott Bentley's The Occasional Tables and is currently preparing Jennifer Moxley's autobiography The Middle Room for publication. Luoma has worked as a technical writer and software engineer in the computer industry since 1988. Currently he is writing code for cell phones to use GPS technology. He lives in Berkeley, CA. He is the author of My Trip to New York City (The Figures, 1994); Swoon Rocket (The Figures, 1996); Western Love (Situations, 1996); Ode (BoogLit, 1996); Works & Days (Hard Press, 1998); Dear Dad (Tinfish, 2000); New Mannerist Tricycle with Lisa Jarnot & Rod Smith (Beautiful Swimmer Press, 2000); and The PeaceServer: A random media server developed for the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities ( University of Virginia, 2002).

Katie Salen is an Associate Professor in the Design and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design and co-author of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, as well as The Game Design Reader, both from MIT Press. Interested in games as both aesthetic and cultural forms, she has developed a critical practice that includes designing games of many different types, from big games, to downloadable games, to conference games and game-hybrids that take gaming as a point of departure. She spends much of her time playing games on trains and planes in lieu of single serving meals.

Discussants

Celeste Langan
Tyrus Miller
Sianne Ngai
Anne Wagner

Organized with the support of the UC Davis Humanities Institute.

Center for the Study of the Novel, Stanford University
Margaret Cohen, Director
http://novel.stanford.edu

For further details please contact:
Miruna Stanica, mstanica@stanford.edu
Sarah Allison, sdalliso@stanford.edu