Event: Post45 Graduate Symposium
The Ninth Annual Post45 Graduate Symposium is being jointly hosted by McGill and Concordia 22-23 March. The host committee warmly invites you two public events taking place as part of the Symposium. These are a keynote presentation by Prof. Alexander Manshel and a roundtable discussion on the future of the post45 field that brings together faculty from both universities. Details below!
Post45 Graduate Symposium
Post45 is a collective of scholars working on American literature and culture since 1945. The Post45 Graduate Symposium meets annually to discuss graduate student works-in-progress. The chosen theme for the 2024 symposium is “futurity” (e.g. future of the field(s), alternative futures, dystopia, utopia, gender abolitionism, afro-futurism, anxieties of the future, queer futures, digital futures, climate crisis, altered states of consciousness).
Keynote Presentation: “High School English: A History of American Reading”
13:00-14:00 - Saturday 23 March
Location: Concordia University, H-561
Speaker: Alexander Manshel (McGill)
The American secondary school classroom is now—and, for the last century, has been—among the most important and most overlooked venues for reading in the United States. While researchers in the field of education have written an enormous amount on the methodologies of high school English, in the field of literary studies, the high school English classroom—the place where more people read and discuss and write about more literature than anywhere else—is nearly invisible. High school English is the place where many lifelong readers are made, and where many who never read literature again read it for the last time. It is also where the American literary canon and its relation to Americanness writ large have proven most durable and most contentious. This talk examines several key institutions of secondary school education since World War II—from Advanced Placement curricula to online study guide sites—in order to document both the "high school canon" and the dominant interpretive strategies employed in reading it.
Roundtable: “The State of the Field”
17:00-18:00 - Saturday 23 March
Location: Concordia University, LB-322
Panelists: Mary Esteve (Concordia), Alexander Manshel (McGill), Alex Blue (McGill), and Aaron Bartels-Swindells (McGill)
It hardly needs restating that the humanities faces challenges on multiple different fronts. With funding cuts, a shrinking job market, large language models changing the way we read and write, and increased cynicism about the real-world impacts of the environmental humanities, doom-mongering abounds. Yet, recent studies such as John Guillory’s Professing Criticism and Caroline Levine’s Activist Humanist reassert the continued or indeed increased value of humanist scholarship too often, as Guillory asserts, “relegated in both past and present controversies to an ineffable expression of taste or the intuitive cultivation of sensibility rather than a disciplined set of procedures for the production and transmission of knowledge.” How should we, as young scholars working on post45, best equip ourselves to navigate these challenges and be effective participants in calls for renewal?
Panelists will each give opening remarks in response to these questions before an extended discussion with the audience. This review by Sarah Brouillette of Professing Criticism is recommended pre-reading.