Form / Function / Finitude
Third Annual Postgraduate Student Workshop
Department of Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong 26-28 October 2023
Call for Abstracts: due 25 September 2023
PhD students from around the world are invited to apply for participation for a small-group workshop on Form / Function / Finitude
What types of criticism are appropriate for a world defined by impending environmental catastrophe, widespread economic precarity, and ongoing global violence? Some critics have turned to formalist critique in order to account for literary structure as well as to foreground the pleasures of beauty and aesthetics. Other critics have argued that critique should concern itself with its political use. Other critics still have suggested that criticism itself has ‘run out of steam’ and hope to imagine ‘post-critique’ as the necessary orientation for our humanistic inquiry. We need not think of these critical attitudes as necessarily opposed to one another; rather, the urgency of our time requires us to locate our critical imagination at the nexus of these traditions. What are the legacies of modes of criticism and critique? What are the methods and commitments of criticism? How can we read criticism under the rubrics of its own method? This workshop welcomes papers that engage with these questions – especially when questions of critical method interact with the objects they purport to illuminate.
The faculty members for the Form/Function/Finitude 2023 Workshop are:
Robert Hariman
Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship (with John Louis Lucaites; University of Chicago Press, 2016); No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, (with John Louis Lucaites; University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Political Style: The Artistry of Power (University of Chicago, 1995).
Caroline Levine
David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Levine is the author of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton University Press, 2023); Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton University Press, 2015); The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003) and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007). She is the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature.
Jean Ma
Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. She is the author of At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators (University of California Press, 2022); Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema (Duke University Press, 2015); and Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema (University of Hong Kong Press, 2010). She is the coeditor of “Music, Sound, and Media,” a book series at the University of California Press.
Potential topics include (but are not limited to)
formalism, aestheticism, functionalism, Marxist dialectics, historical materialism, cultural studies, queer and feminist approaches, eco-criticism, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, entanglements, poetics
empire, war, violence, economic crisis, environmental catastrophe and climate change literary studies, art history, film studies, media studies, architecture, intellectual/institutional history
The Department of Comparative Literature and the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and its Cultures at the University of Hong Kong invite graduate students whose work intersects or engages with these concerns. We hope to bring together PhD students from across the humanities, including but not limited to: literary studies, film studies, media studies, history, art history, and political theory.
The workshop allows PhD students to workshop a work-in-progress – usually a dissertation chapter or a potential journal article – in a small and supportive setting, and with colleagues from around the world. The workshop is led by three faculty members who offer feedback and guide conversation over the course of the three days.
Application and Timeline
Please submit your abstract (up to 250 words) with a working title, and your CV to conf.complit.hku@gmail.com by 25 September 2023. Selected participants will be notified of their acceptance by 29 September and should submit the full paper by 13 October. There are no fees to attend the workshop.
The graduate workshop will be held on Zoom 26-28 October 2023. Papers will be circulated in advance among all the participants. Attendees are expected to read the papers of their panel before the workshop and give feedback during the panels.
If you have any questions, please email Dr J Daniel Elam: jdelam@hku.hk