For almost seven decades The English Institute has been a major resource for developments in criticism, theory, and scholarship, while honoring traditional fields of interest and modes of literary analysis.
The 2009 conference, our 68th meeting, continues the Institute’s renewed focus on the building blocks of the profession and craft: periodization, genre, authorship, reading, the critic's voice, and other issues of key concern to students, teachers, scholars, and theorists of literature.
The topic for this year's conference is genre. The conference will take place on September 11-13, 2009
at Harvard University's Barker Center.
At least since Aristotle, categories of genre have organized the analysis and
evaluation of literature. While it is impossible to imagine a literary
criticism that does not use generic categories, we no longer have a shared
understanding of “genre.” How do genres come into being, and what
distinguishes one from another? What do considerations of genre occlude, as
well as reveal? What kinds of generic categories might be useful for critical
analysis today? This conference will explore the ways in which genres
currently do and do not work in practice and in theory.
For more information, please contact
Tracy Blanchard, the Conference Coordinator, at
englinst@fas.harvard.edu. |
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