BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//wp-events-plugin.com//7.4.3//EN TZID:America/Los_Angeles X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/Los_Angeles BEGIN:VEVENT UID:371@1718.ucla.edu DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220311T083000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220312T103000 DTSTAMP:20220315T234525Z URL:https://1718.ucla.edu/events/core-nightmares-resurrections/ SUMMARY:Victorian Apocalypse: The siècle at its fin\, Conference 2: Nightm ares and Resurrections: The Temporalities and Endings of the fin de siècl e DESCRIPTION:–Organized by Joseph Bristow (University of California\, Lo s Angeles)\, Neil Hultgren (California State University\, Long Beach) and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (University of California\, Davis) \n\nOnline E vent via Zoom meeting. Please register in advance:\nhttps://ucla.zoom.us/m eeting/register/tJ0lcu2upjkoGNVul39O1wqWHApU_Mun2auN\n\nDuring the 2021 –22 academic year\, the UCLA Center for 17th- &\; 18th-Century St udies and William Andrews Clark Memorial Library will host the Core Pr ogram entitled “Victorian Apocalypse: The  siècle  at its  fin. ” This program of lectures and presentations aims to reassess the wa ys in which the 1890s as an era has strong associations with theories of decadence\, degeneration\, and disease. “Victorian Apocalypse” wi ll draw attention to the significance of UCLA’s unrivaled collecti ons relating to the 1890s\, especially the life and work of Oscar Wilde\,  which are held in the Clark Library collections.\n\nOn April 6\, 1895\ , the day after Oscar Wilde was arrested for committing acts of gross inde cency with other men\, the National Observer thanked the Marquess of Queen sberry for destroying “the High Priest of the Decadents.” Wilde’s im prisonment marked not only one of the most prominent episodes that brought the supposed immorality of fashionable Decadence to public attention\; hi s case was also surrounded by emergent discourses of degeneration\, ones t hat viewed his homosexuality as a pathology that was a clear symptom that Western culture was caught in a sexual and racial downward spiral.\n\nConf erence 2:\n\nLiterary critics\, historians\, and art historians have long noted the distinctiveness of the Victorian fin de siècle as a period of s elf-conscious conclusions\, in which an aging monarch\, a fragile empire\, and wistful literary attempts to gauge progress or decline over the cours e of the nineteenth century culminated in a sense of loss and anxiety. The narrator of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1899) ends his story b y emphasizing death or artificial life\, as he imagines that the “busy m ultitudes” of London are no more than “phantasms in a dead city\, the mockery of life in a galvanised body” after the Martian attack. Yet the last years of the nineteenth century are not only distinctive because of t heir historical singularities or even their doomsday zeitgeist. In part\, scholarship on the fin de siècle has thrived in light of fears and anxiet ies about the late twentieth century\, with the 1890s receiving attention because of potential parallels with the 1990s. Scholars of fin-de-siècle writing have since the 1990s\, however\, attempted to imagine an approach between historicism and presentism\, or what Sally Ledger and Scott McCrac ken described in 1995 as “a sophisticated historical criticism which is capable of standing back not only from the period but also from our own ti me\, and then examining the dialectical relationship between the two.”\n \nTaking its cue from Ledger and McCracken\, this conference focuses on th e fin de siècle’s ability to provoke critical examination of the concep ts of temporality and eschatology\, as well as the proliferation of tempor alities allowed by historical\, scientific\, and cultural developments of the late nineteenth century. The Victorian fin de siècle provokes questio ns about the boundaries of literary\, artistic\, and historical periodicit y and invites critics and scholars to explore previously ignored temporali ties related to science\, religion\, and nation. What is the relationship between\, for instance\, the fin de siècle and the temporalities of terri tories and cultures outside of England\, in light of the adoption of Green wich Mean Time in 1884? How do late-Victorian discoveries in Egyptology\, geology\, and archaeology shape the understanding of the fin de siècle by scholars of the period? How does the period’s fascination with spiritua lism\, the occult\, psychical research inform Victorians’ understandings of time and endings\, or\, alternatively allow them to imagine new forms of continuity beyond death or the extinction of humanity? What are we to m ake of the fin de siècle emergence of science fiction in the scientific r omances of H. G. Wells and M. P. Shiel\, or the prominence of apocalyptic destruction in late-Victorian Gothic writing by Arthur Machen or Marie Cor elli? How does our understanding of the Victorian fin de siècle shift whe n we consider Einstein’s subsequent discoveries about time\, gravity\, a nd velocity beginning in 1905 or\, alternatively\, developments in early t wenty-first century physics that dismiss time as an obsolete scientific co ncept?\n\nProgram\n\nFriday\, March 11\, 2022 \n\n8:30 a.m.\nBronwen Wils on\, University of California\, Los Angeles\nWelcome \n\nNeil Hultgren\, California State University\, Long Beach\, Joseph Bristow\, University of California\, Los Angeles\, and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller\, University of Ca lifornia\, Davis\nIntroductory Remarks \n\n8:45 a.m.\nSession I: Occult T emporalities\nModerator: Neil Hultgren\, California State University\, Lon g Beach                        \n\nGauri Viswanatha n\, Columbia University\nBlavatsky’s Monsters: Evolution\, Memory\, and Imagination\n\n9:10 a.m.\nEleanor Dobson\, University of Birmingham\n‘Th e sphinx will speak at last’: Creative Egyptologies of the Occult Reviva l\n\n9:35 a.m.\nDennis Denisoff\, University of Tulsa\nThe Big Reveal: Que er Transmissions\, Occult Ecologies\n\n10:00 a.m.\nDiscussion\nModerators: Zach Fruit and Lindsay Wells\, Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellows\n\n10: 30 a.m.\nSession adjourns\n\nSaturday\, March 12\, 2022\n\n8:30 a.m.\nSess ion II: Scientific Exhilaration\, Apocalypse\, and Print Culture\nModerato r: Neil Hultgren\, California State University\, Long Beach\nIntroductory Remarks\n\n8:35 am\nStephen Arata\, University of Virginia\nThe High Alche my of Style: Arthur Machen and Apocalyptic Science \n\n9:00 a.m.          \nJessica Straley\, University of Utah\nEarth’s Ends: Prehistoric Horror and Polar Fantasy at the Fin-de-Siècle\n\n9:25 a.m.\nWill Tatters dill\, University of Birmingham\nH.G. Wells's Periodical Projections of Fu ture Disasters\n\n9:50 a.m.\nDiscussion\nModerators: Zach Fruit and Lindsa y Wells\, Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellows\n\n10:30 a.m.\nConference co ncludes\n\n\n\nImage: Arthur Machen\, front board\, The House of Souls (Lo ndon: E. G. Richards\, 1906). Artist unknown. Reproduced by kind permissio n of Library Special Collections\, Young Research Library\, University of California. ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://1718.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/08 /Victorian-Apocalypse_Publicity-Image-_website.jpg CATEGORIES:Conferences,Core Program END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Los_Angeles X-LIC-LOCATION:America/Los_Angeles BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20211107T010000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 TZNAME:PST END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR