A five-day symposium convened by Mama Multimedia Institute and the Centre for Expanded Poetics in Dubrovnik, Croatia

SPEAKERS
Pearl Brilmyer ● Nathan Brown ● Emily Ruth Capper ● Ronjaunee Chatterjee ● David Cunningham ● Greg Ellermann ● Michael Gallope ● Amanda Holmes ● Ante Jeric ● Alexi Kukuljevic ● Naomi Levine ● Jamila M.H. Mascat ● Petar Milat ● Julie Beth Napolin ● Marty Rayburn

FORM

The discrepant concepts to which form has been opposed — appearance, matter, content, history — suggest both the encompassing generality and peculiar malleability of this major category. Castigated as idealized abstraction or appealed to in the name of concrete determinacy, “form” traverses debates in philosophy, politics, and literary or art criticism with slippery familiarity. Although these fields could scarcely do without it, the term is deployed more frequently than it is defined or theorized. While “structure” was the site of direct theoretical elaboration in the twentieth century, “form” has not been the beneficiary of such rigorous attention, despite continual claims on its conceptual resources. Today this poses a particular problem in methodological debates between “formalism” and “historicism,” wherein sides often seem to be taken without a clear delineation of the conceptual stakes of this opposition or its proposed resolution. Moreover, to refer to form without a theoretical elaboration of what form is may obscure the thorny question of what form is not: what shadow concepts and categorial fringes encroach upon and extend from its uneven boundaries.

This five-day symposium will be devoted to querying the concept of form itself, to practicing its theoretical elaboration, and to critically applying its resources in ways that will hopefully clarify the contemporary extension and implications of the term.

SCHEDULE

MONDAY
9:30 - 10:00
Welcome & Introduction
10:00 - 11:45
David Cunningham, Form and Formlessness: Realism, Fiction and the Theory of the Novel
12:00 - 13:45
Greg Ellermann, Poetry, Plasticity, and the End of Art: Malabou, Hegel, Keats
18:00 - 19:45
Jamila M. H. Mascat, Forms of Partisanship: Totality and Universality

TUESDAY
10:00 - 11:45
Nathan Brown, Baudelaire’s Shadow: Toward a Theory of Poetic Determination
12:00 - 13:45
Naomi Levine, Fleshly Formalism: William Morris and the Content of Rhyme
18:00 - 19:45
Michael Gallope, Music’s Negative Grammar

WEDNESDAY
10:00 - 11:45
Amanda Holmes, Anxiety and the Spineless Organ
12:00 - 13:45
Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Lewis Carroll's Alice Books and the Ones and Twos of Femininity
18:00 - 19:45
Alexi Kukuljevic, Richard Pryor, the Conedian

THURSDAY
10:00 - 11:45
Marty Rayburn, Toward a Theory of the Novelistic Will
12:00 - 13:45
Ante Jeric, Chronotopic Decay: The Theory-Fiction of Luka Bekavac
18:00 - 19:45
Julie Beth Napolin, Sinister Resonance: Coloniality Hears Itself in the Novel

FRIDAY
10:00 - 11:45
S. Pearl Brilmyer & Fillipo Trentin, Inessential Forms: Ruskin, Warburg, Focillon
12:00 - 13:45
Emily Ruth Capper, The Formalism of the Happening c. 1959
18:00 - 19:45
Petar Milat, Form and Former: The Art of Anachronism