Call for Papers

"Trash: Bad Books"
Harvard University Department of English 
Fall Graduate Symposium | November 14–15, 2024

Please note the due date for abstracts has passed.

The Fall Graduate Symposium is an annual department event where graduate students and a visiting keynote speaker present work on a shared theme. It’s an opportunity for students and faculty to discuss research and pose questions across periods and specialties. We are now soliciting submissions for this year’s theme: “Trash: Bad Books.”

In the academy we have often been taught that we shouldn’t waste our time reading or analyzing “bad” literature. But what counts as “bad” art? When we say something is “bad,” what do we mean? Is it poorly written? Is it immoral? Is it useless? Who gets to decide what is good enough to be read and what is bad enough that it must be left aside? Now especially, in an era where the literary market is oversaturated and everything seems to be able to get published, many claim there has been a decrease in the overall quality of literature. Do we require a certain kind of quality policing in the academy to counteract this trend

On the other hand, the production and publication of literature has material and ethical implications for our environment. What is the literary field’s relation to literal, physical trash? Do we as critics have an especial responsibility to check the impact of literature on the environment?

Potential topics to be addressed may include:

  • “High” vs. “low brow” literature; what is and is not seen as culturally valuable
  • Canon building; literary exclusion and exclusivity
  • Ethics & censorship (e.g., should we throw away the art of “bad” people?)
  • The “trashy” – the cheap, the kitschy, the transgressive; genre fiction
  • The tastes of readers; literature geared to devalued readerships
  • The aesthetics, representation, and depiction of literal trash, junk, and waste
  • The archive (e.g., what gets trashed vs. what gets preserved)
  • Book history & material trash (e.g., the physical excesses and scraps of literary production)
  • Wastes of time & wastes of effort in literature, literary production, and literary criticism
  • Form & media (e.g., cinema vs. TikTok; the novel vs. the graphic novel; paperbacks vs. Kindle; the sonnet vs. the limerick)

Please send abstracts of 150–250 words to englishcoordinator@g.harvard.edu by Monday, October 7th, 2024. All submissions will be reviewed by the lead coordinator and a steering committee; we will inform you by Tuesday, October 15th whether your paper proposal has been accepted. Papers need not be polished pieces of work; works in progress are often a wonderful starting point. G1s and G2s in particular are strongly encouraged to apply, in addition to graduate students from later years!

Keynote Speaker: Caroline Levine, the David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities at Cornell, is the author of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, which has had a major impact on our field, and last year, The Active Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis, which marries the theoretical work of Forms with Professor Levine’s own climate activism. Professor Levine is also the author of The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts, as well as the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature. Some of Professor Levine’s most recent writing has been about literature and precarity, and the need to focus on institutions as sites of social change.