Published on 30.04.2018

American literature: CUSO workshop + public conference

• Time and place: 9:30-10:30, Saal Güggi, Rue de Rome 6.
• Abstract: What is an archive, what do I do with it, and how does archival study intersect with my discipline? Much of what we present in a dissertation as "new knowledge" is based on classification and interpretation of material that very few people have ever seen. Letters, notes, manuscripts, holographs—these can be accessible as physical objects or in digitized form. How have recent electronic advances changed our view of archives? Do archives permit us to ask certain questions---and only those questions? Does an archive, or the arrangement of material, foreclose certain avenues of inquiry? 
  These questions are relevant to all humanities fields, but American literature has, specifically, seen an "archival turn" in the ways it has thought about its own discipline. On April 13, join us in Fribourg for a one-day workshop with Randy Fuller, Herman Melville Distinguished Professor of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and an expert in the field. Fuller's first book, Emerson's Ghosts (Oxford 2007), looked specifically at the ways in which Van Wyck Brooks, F.O. Matthiessen, Perry Miller, and Sacvan Bercovitch, each at their historical moment, re-conceptualized "American literature" as a field.  Fuller's second book, From Battlefields Rising (Oxford 2011), delineates how the Civil War changed the nation's thinking about its own literature.  And in his most recent book, The book that changed America (Viking 2017), Fuller looks at Darwin's Theory of Evolution and its far-reaching consequences for American consciousness.
• Randy Fueller, Herman Melville Distinguished Professor of American Literature, The University of Kansas.

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