Difference between revisions of "BAVS 2017 Notes"

Latest revision as of 12:01, 22 August 2017

• Opening RT
  • Edwina Ehrman, V&A
    • Corsets - materiality
      • never worn directly against the skin
      • symbol of tension btwn natural and fashion(ed) body
  • Francesco Marroni
    • "toward an epistemic maze: vic novel and its 'shattered limbs'"
    • look him up
    • 1916 Lukacs "concealed totality of life" (TN? Theory of the Novel?)
    • Karin Koehler: "Marroni: the aesthetic differences between Eliot and Hardy also signal a cultural difference. #BAVS2017"
    • look up Niyati Sharma (Oxford) - had lunch with her - late c19 popular fiction
  • Kate Hill - l/u
    • Museums had a constitutive role in producing a modernity that relies on categories and boundaries
    • Objects used to police boundaries among people as well as among growing intellectual disciplines in Victorian museums
    • In the Victorian museum, Objects and the power to create boundaries/hierarchies between disciplines and people.
    • Wd be fascinating to see where Hill’s museum history intersects with Victorian discourses abt library and information organization
    • l/u Russell-Cotes Museum in Bournemouth
    • "Victorian classification as a work in progress rather than fixed"
    • Museum Bodies book - l/u
      • Museum Trouble - murder suicide in Nat'l Portrait Gallery

• Session 1
  • Gordon Tait: working class poetry: Skipsey, R Spence Watson (northern educationalist), Yeats
    • "biographical silence"
    • learned poetry from reading Shakespeare - later Sh Birthplace custodian
      • ask: in mine libraries? Can we generalize from access to books in those collections to questions of form?
    • A Rich: "silence can be a plan / rigorously executed"
    • cultural memory matching oppression in lifetime
  • Emily Bell, Dickens Biofiction and Biography (York)
    • D and women in C20 biofiction and biography
    • questions of influence and later biofiction not crediting D with much imagination - he meets a real Dora Spenlow in a early C20 play
    • Interesting that modern biofiction seeks to downplay (explain?) imaginative power: Dickens meets a real Dora, Shakespeare in Love…
    • Forster: excesses in D's character(ization) explained by early experiences
    • Shifting away from Dickens to wider circles fictional and real in biofiction
  • Amber Regis, "The DNB Unbound"
    • DNB as animal or vegetable rather than mineral/monument: essentially amorphous and mobile, a "living organism"
      • he image of DNB "as animal" comes to be displaced by image of DNB "as mineral", a repository of monolithic truth.

• Session 2
  • Rosemary Mitchell, Vic historical comedy as radical alternative to history writing
    • "amusement and instruction" mixt (Gilbert A Becket): "destabilizing neoclassical muse of history [Clio]"
    • Thackeray shows ability to question reliability of historical narratives and sources through Miss Tickletoby in Punch
  • Helen Kingstone
    • how history and the novel both claim authority from mimetic ability
    • "narrative is linear, action is solid" (Carlyle) - relativity of the type of truth history and fiction offer
    • expectations of mimetic value of historical novel as a middle ground between the two. method: periodical reviews to map expectations
    • Helen Kingstone on the early Victorian blurring between history and historical fiction - sometimes expectations the same, all the more reason to take Rosemary Mitchell’s argument of taking seriously fictive texts as historiographical models
    • disciplinary definition of history leading to this boundary becoming less wobbly and permeable
    • history/particular truth, novel/general truth by end of period (does this match with realism discourses tho?)
  • Josh Poklad -- look up
    • advertising influencing history
    • interesting on the fragmentation of commodities satisfying different needs after the Great Exhibition: commodities and their spectacles
    • dialectic of images Benjamin commodity - l/u
      • "The dream time of consumption"
    • pseudo carnivalesque world of consumption: incorporating this energy into regulated capitalist consumption - spectacle reorienting history around the commodity
    • spectacle absorbing agency: scrapbooks of ads reasserting energy as when correcting ads
      • Poklad: Scrapbooking demonstrates to us Victn engagement with adverts and their personal recontextualisations of these msgs
    • spectacle as a form of discipline through incoherence and chaos, appropriating carnivalesque energy to capital

• Keynote: Mike Huggins, "Revising "Respectability""
  • existing historiography, why revise concept, how does it relate to class analysis
  • l/u The Victorian Studies Reader
  • "The middle class was obsessed with gentility respectability and decorum, it's what distinguished the middle class from the lower class: I don't believe that for a second."
  • his research into middle classes at horse-racing: they were much more involved than we like to think
  • why do certain areas of ill repute still stay on the margins of our study?
  • why are Victorianists so obsessed with respectability?
  • Victorian respectability - not moral: "a man's situation and success in life, not his character or conduct. The city merchant never loses his respectability until he becomes a bankrupt" article from 1850s. "A 'venerated' term but full of noise"
    • their understanding of it was inchoate, perhaps more so than ours
  • "there are faultlines that run through classes when it comes to respectability." they don't map precisely, not least cos there are other identities: respectability is multiple, situational, fluid
    • what about "respectable" servants and "dissolute" aristos?
  • financial stability is what is signaled by respectability
  • (dis)respectability in space: are pleasure and respectability orthogonal? Extends from different places to different countries, men going to Asia to get their sexual jollies
  • religious groups shaping respectability to the ethical demands of Christianity, or as they do now, as "ideologies of justification"? (i think that's the phrase he used)
  • was respectability more than an empty signifier? More impactful in public than in private
  • "It's a word used about other people" more than themselves
  • Moretti: Victorian adjectives in The Bourgeois -- benefitting from vagueness
  • Gambling - like the guy in The Way We Live Now
  • credit -- reputation and money -- is it more economic than anything else? Depends on context.