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:372@1718.ucla.edu DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220422T083000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220423T103000 DTSTAMP:20220329T175755Z URL:https://1718.ucla.edu/events/exhaustion-entropy-extraction/ SUMMARY:Victorian Apocalypse: The siècle at its fin\, Conference 3: Exhau stion/Entropy/Extraction 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/tJwqdeCprTIsGNE5W9uvMDMAJVR55hkSSH38\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 3:\n\nCritics of fin-de-siècle literature and culture have long as sociated this period with devolution and decline\, and with a newly pessim istic vision of the future that starkly opposed the Victorian doctrine of progress. While the origins of this philosophical turn are various and hav e economic\, religious\, and geopolitical dimensions\, recent critics of t he fin de siècle have begun to connect the era’s melancholy atmosphere with the environmental changes wrought by the nineteenth-century Industria l Revolution–changes that emerged by the end of the period as both irrev ersible and profound.\n\nThe British Empire in the nineteenth century\, ne wly powered by steam\, engaged in a global terraforming project on an unpr ecedented scale. Mines\, railways\, factory pollution\, and the extractive industries of global empire left marks on the earth that told a story of extreme social and environmental change over the course of mere decades. M any thinkers at the time understood how these social and environmental cha nges were intertwined\, and how the decline of nature also portended the d ecline of the human. John Ruskin’s The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Cen tury (1884)\, for example\, diagnosed the gloomy skies of industrial Engla nd as a consequence of “poisonous smoke” rising from “furnace chimne ys\,” but also an ominous sign of human finitude: “dead men’s souls. ” In the early decades of the nineteenth century\, Britain was the first nation to transition to a coal-fired economy\, which accelerated producti on and fast-tracked the imperial project\, but by the end of the century\, economic and political woes intermingled with new fears about the finitud e of Earth’s resources\, voiced by political economics such as William S tanley Jevons in The Coal Question (1865). The fin de siècle thus foretol d not only the decline of British Empire\, but ultimately the decline of h uman civilization.\n\n\n\nProgram\n\nFriday\, April 22\, 2022\n\n8:30 a.m. \nBronwen Wilson\, University of California\, Los Angeles\nWelcome \n\nNe il Hultgren\, California State University\, Long Beach\, Joseph Bristow\, University of California\, Los Angeles\, and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller\, Un iversity of California\, Davis\nIntroductory Remarks\n\n8:45 a.m.\nSession I\nModerator: Elizabeth Carolyn Miller\, University of California\, Davis \n\nFredrik Albritton Jonsson\, University of Chicago\nThe Great Coal Pani c and the Invention of Modern Scarcity\n\n9:10 a.m.\nSukanya Banerjee\, Un iversity of California\, Berkeley\nThe Nairs of Malabar at the fin de siè cle: Land\, Law\, and Polygamous Futures\n\n9:35 a.m.\nJesse Oak Taylor\, University of Washington\, Seattle\nConrad’s Catastrophism\n\n10:00 a.m. \nDiscussion\nModerators: Zach Fruit and Lindsay Wells\, Ahmanson-Getty Po stdoctoral Fellows\n\n10:30 a.m.\nSession adjourns\n\nSaturday\, April 23\ , 2022\n\n8:30 a.m.\nSession II\nModerator: Elizabeth Carolyn Miller\, Uni versity of California\, Davis\nIntroductory Remarks\n\n8:35 a.m.\nAllen Ma cDuffie\, University of Texas at Austin\nHenry James's Narratives of Exhau stion \n\n9:00 a.m.\nDeanna K. Kreisel\, University of Mississippi\nExhau sting Utopia\n\n9:25 a.m.\nBenjamin Morgan\, University of Chicago\nPracti ces of Scaling in Late-Victorian Ecoutopia and Ecoapocalypse\n\n9:50 a.m.\ nDiscussion\nModerators: Zach Fruit and Lindsay Wells\, Ahmanson-Getty Pos tdoctoral Fellows\n\n10:30 a.m.\nConference concludes\n\n\n\nImage: Arthur Machen\, front board\, The House of Souls (London: E. G. Richards\, 1906) . Artist unknown. Reproduced by kind permission of Library Special Collect ions\, 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:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20220313T030000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 TZNAME:PDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR