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Dickens, Victorian Culture, Uneasy Pleasures

An International Conference sponsored by the University of California Dickens Project and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, June 2009 (most likely during the third week).

In Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? Anthony Nuttall provocatively asks whether we may derive pleasure from being distressed, and if so, why. The question may also arise with respect to the experience of entering the world of a novel, a world that promises not only entertainment or gift-wrapped consumer pleasure but, as Bernard Harrison shows in Inconvenient Fictions, also dangerous knowledge, the kind from which we may emerge changed in unpredictable ways.

Dickens’s readers, ranging from his immediate audience to twenty-first century interpretive communities, have responded both to the pleasures of reading — to the aesthetic appeal of his work — and to his critical responses to contemporary social structures and mores. Tensions between the aesthetic appeal and consciousness-raising effect of Victorian fiction may bring these constituents of the reading experience to support each other, like the segments of an arch, or pit them against each other in a tug-of-war.

The Jerusalem conference will be devoted to the possible array of relationships between, on the one hand, features of aesthetic experience provided by Victorian novels in general and Dickens’s novels in particular, and, on the other hand, a critique of contemporary realities which confront the reader. We welcome paper proposals responding to the following questions:

• Does Victorian social critique give rise to pleasures of its own, pleasures whose aesthetic aspect is veiled?
  
• To what extent is the aesthetic pleasure of Victorian fiction a matter of direct response to the language, style, humor, and imagery of the texts; to what extent is it a matter of enjoying the coherence of intellectual constructs that we ourselves produce in response to the text?
  
• What were the limits of the realistic representation of contemporary Victorian life? What factors -- aesthetic, self-censoring, or other -- can be held accountable for these limits?
  
• What factors are reflected by the new forms taken by traditional topoi in Victorian fiction?
  
• What was the fate, aesthetic or ideological, of Victorian topoi in subsequent periods?
  
• In what ways do the uneasy pleasures yielded by Victorian literature anticipate or differ from the troubled hesitations that have become part of modern and post-modernist aesthetic response? 
  
• Need our aesthetic pleasure remain uneasy?

Members of the academic committee (Murray Baumgarten, H. M. Daleski, Michael Hollington, Regenia Gagnier, Bernard Harrison, John Jordan, Sally Ledger, Richard Stein, and Leona Toker) will organize papers in panels; we expect each paper to be 20 minutes in length.

Please send 250—300 word abstracts to toker [at] mscc [dot] huji [dot] ac [dot] il by August 15, 2008.

A selection of the conference papers, possibly in expanded versions, will be published in a special issue of Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas. Information about the journal is available at <http://partialanswers.huji.ac.il/>http://partialanswers.huji.ac.il .

The Jerusalem organizing committee will include Galia Benziman, Ruben Borg, Daniel Chertoff, David Hadar, Galia Ofek, and Naomi Shmueli.