(Rutgers University; New Brunswick, NJ, October 4-5)

War as memory. The fear of war. War as experience. How does culture mark its relationship to organized violent conflict? 

In 2018, Rutgers’ Nineteenth Century Workshop will address the long-lasting effects of war on nineteenth-century literature and culture. It is a topic we take to be both urgent and of particular scholarly interest to students of the era.

This year marks the anniversary of the end of the war to end all wars, an epochal struggle with relatively little presence in current popular memory. But this is just one instance where the preoccupation with a military conflict, like its neglect, is in itself a complex cultural matter. The recent and ongoing controversy over the fate of memorials dedicated to the losing side in the American Civil war, the paucity of discussion of the continuing military engagements involved in what has been called the war on terror, and the recent re-awakening of structures of thought and behavior reminiscent of the Cold War—all of these phenomena remind us that what we call victory, loss, and the commemoration of state violence are seldom settled matters.

The military struggles that define the nineteenth century as a period—the revolutionary violence in America, France, and the Caribbean in the late 18th century and the first global conflagration in the early 20th— are at once political events establishing new social arrangements, and cultural ones provoking reflection, memory, and debate.

And yet, the place of military conflict in the cultural imagination varies strikingly depending on specific national traditions. European wars look different from the vantage point of the far reaches of Empire, as does the struggle over New World territory from the perspective of the enslaved or the newly emancipated. The nationalisms that emerged all over the world in the period bore a complex relationship to both colonial expansion and domestic revolt. As none of England’s many nineteenth-century wars took place on its soil, the involvement of the general population was intermittent and highly mediated. By contrast, a civil war that caused the death of more Americans than any foreign struggle explicitly structures the study of nineteenth-century American literature and culture, installing a sharp break in the middle of the century and recasting narratives of national and regional belonging on either side of this divide.

We welcome papers from all humanistic disciplines that address how war has shaped our understanding of the nineteenth century and its legacy. Topics may include: the feelings of war; the role of knowledge, information, and ignorance in shaping the experience and memory of war; the ethics of violence; the language of conflict; the temporality of war; and the politics of remembrance. We are also interested in the role of military conflict in shaping the experience of peace, including questions of complicity and resistance.

Essays will be circulated in advance to all participants; the workshop format will permit the focused discussion of these essays across two days of convivial conversation. Workshop participants will include nineteenth-century scholars from various fields—history, art history, the history of philosophy, and a broad range of modern literatures—at Rutgers and in the greater NY/NJ area.  The workshop will cover the travel and housing expenses of those chosen to present their work.

Applications should be addressed to Jonah Siegel and sent to treesh@sas.rutgers.edu by Tuesday, May 1; please use the subject line “Nineteenth-Century Workshop 2018” to ensure your application arrives at the proper destination. Applications should include a description of the proposed paper (1-2 pages) and a brief cv (no more than 3 pages); they will be evaluated by an interdisciplinary group of scholars. Applicants will be notified by mid-May if they will be included in the program

Contact Info: 

Proposals to: treesh@sas.rutgers.edu.

For information: jsiegel@rci.rutgers.edu

Contact Email: treesh@sas.rutgers.edu

URL: http://britishstudies.rutgers.edu/