CALL FOR PAPERS FOR ASECS, PHILADELPHIA, 12-16 APRIL 2000:
Improving Opinion into Knowledge:
Literary Criticism in the Eighteenth Century
"No statue has ever been erected to a critic," said Jean
Sibelius. But many of the most important works of the eighteenth
century are themselves monuments to the great critics of the age,
when countless major poets, philosophers, antiquarians,
statesmen, and even scientists produced widely read and lastingly
influential works of theoretical and practical criticism. And
critics were more visible in the culture than ever before: it was
the age of Dick Minim and the Dunces, but also of Addison and
Johnson, Hume and Blair, Boileau and Stael, Lessing and Schiller.
The panel title comes from Johnson's _Rambler_ 92: "It is . . .
the task of criticism to establish principles; to improve
opinion into knowledge; and to distinguish those means of
pleasing which depend upon known causes and rational deduction,
from the nameless and inexplicable elegancies which appeal wholly
to the fancy, from which we feel delight, but know not how they
produce it, and which may well be termed the enchantresses of the
soul. Criticism reduces those regions of literature under the
dominion of science, which have hitherto known only the anarchy
of ignorance, the caprices of fancy, and the tyranny of
prescription."
Papers on various aspects of literary criticism from Britain,
Europe, and America are welcome.
Please send queries and abstracts of fifteen-to-twenty-minute
papers to
Jack Lynch
Department of English
Rutgers University
360 M. L. King Blvd.
Newark, NJ 07102
E-mail is also welcome at jlynch@andromeda.rutgers.edu.
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